Looking to Each Other: Russian-European Relations among Hostility and Fear

The article deals about the historical relation between Tsarist Russia/USSR and Western Europe/Integrated Europe. Since the beginning of the European construction process, by focusing on the ideological prophecies of capitalist contradictions, communist authorities did not understand the potential significance of the efforts of people like Jean Monnet, directed at economic, financial, and cultural integration. Although the Soviet bloc economy needed economic relations with Western Europe, its political rulers rejected the idea of any European federation or confederation on the old continent. Even before the birth of the Soviet Union, Europe and Russia had always looked to each other with diffidence or fear. Specifically, the geographical and identity location of Russia has always suffered because of the ambiguity of being a border between East and West, between Asia and Europe. Nevertheless, it would be misleading to measure the Russian swing between East and West by the yardstick of its greater or lesser Europeanization: this view would presuppose an implicit hierarchical relationship between Europe and Russia, of which historians should “estimate” progress or involution taking “Russia’s Europeanisation” as a single unit of measure. On the contrary, the relationship between Europe – understood in different historical moments as a geographical reality and/or as European Community/Union – and Russia has from time to time been expressed by the Russians in a complex reception of European or non-European models. Moreover, Russia looks at this relationship with the ambition to be an autonomous driving force because of belief to identify itself as the center of the world and not as a periphery. So it is important to analyzes how Western Europe and Russia, being located within a common geographical area, have historically created a web of relationships characterized by attraction and repulsion, conditioned for centuries by ideology and power logic and often degenerated into contradictions and incompatibility.