Russia and the EU - Political Relations

The thesis aspires to convey a comprehensive and methodologically well-grounded image of the ideological dimension of political interaction between the EU and Russia. The research is based on the linguistic analysis of four key foreign policy documents, conceived as a continuous dialogue between the EU and Russia, and covering the period between 1994 and 2007. A model comprising several methods used in the study of international relations is applied to the aforementioned documents. The methods in question focus on discourse analysis. The methodological basis of the thesis incorporates the theoretical concepts of social constructivism, speech acts theory and dialogic analysis. Emphasis is placed on understanding the expectations and objectives of actors, the analysis of explicit and implicit messages in the dialogue, the definition of the actors' understanding of self, other and the third party. The thesis also tries to describe and explain the actors' changes in behavior towards each other