Mistakes were made? The EU's relations with Russia and Turkey in the 1990s

On 3 March 2026, the European Studies Centre hosted a Dahrendorf Seminar on the European Union's relations with Russia and Turkey during the 1990s. Chaired by Dimitar Bechev of St Antony's College, Oxford, the seminar featured Ayşe Zarakol, Professor of International Relations at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, with commentary from Roy Allison, Professor of Russian and Eurasian International Relations at St Antony's College. Framed around Zarakol's chapter in Rethinking the 1990s: Liberal World Order-Building in the Aftermath of the Cold War, the discussion asked what went wrong in the West's engagement with two semi-peripheral states that sought recognition within the post-Cold War liberal order but were never fully incorporated into it.

Zarakol began by arguing that the tensions shaping Russia's and Turkey's relationships with the West cannot be understood solely through the events of the 1990s. Both countries carried much longer histories of perceived exclusion, stretching back to the nineteenth century, when they were repeatedly treated as partial or aspiring members of a European-centred international order. The significance of the post-Cold War decade, she suggested, lay in its revival of these older status anxieties within a new institutional framework. Russia emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union seeking recognition within the new European security order, while Turkey had already spent decades pursuing closer integration with European institutions. Despite these different starting points, both ultimately occupied what Zarakol described as an uncomfortable halfway position: neither fully inside nor clearly outside the emerging liberal order.The contrast between the two cases formed the core of her argument. Russia received forms of symbolic recognition through institutions such as the Council of Europe and the G7/G8 even as concerns persisted about its domestic politics and regional behaviour. Turkey, by contrast, had been associated with the European Economic Community since the 1960s and formally applied for membership in 1987, yet found itself overtaken by the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe following the Luxembourg European Council. Although candidate status was finally granted in 1999 and accession negotiations began in 2005, much of the political momentum had already dissipated. In both cases, Zarakol argued, expectations were raised only to be disappointed, or fulfilled only after the strategic moment had passed.

Crucially, she argued that these outcomes did not result primarily from deliberate exclusion or hostility. Rather, they reflected a combination of hierarchical assumptions, paternalism and the optimism characteristic of the immediate post-Cold War period. Many Western policymakers assumed that democratisation and Westernisation would proceed almost naturally over time. This optimism, however, produced poor political timing. Reformist and pro-Western constituencies in both Russia and Turkey received hesitant or conditional support when they were politically strongest, while Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were initially met with a degree of confidence that later appeared misplaced. The consequence, Zarakol suggested, was damaging not only for Russia and Turkey but also for the liberal international order itself. Both countries became sufficiently integrated to benefit from Western institutions and to criticise them from within, yet never sufficiently included to feel recognised as equal participants.

In his response, Roy Allison accepted the importance of reassessing the post-Cold War settlement but offered a more cautious interpretation of Russia's trajectory. He argued that by the time Boris Yeltsin assumed power, the universalist aspirations associated with Soviet "new thinking" had already faded, replaced by a more pragmatic and nationally defined conception of Russia's interests. Liberal Westernism, he suggested, remained shallowly rooted, while nationalist and great-power perspectives quickly regained influence. From this perspective, Western hesitation reflected not only failures of recognition but also genuine concerns about Russia's persistent expectation of privileged influence within the post-Soviet space and its desire to be treated differently from other European states. Allison also emphasised that, for Central and Eastern European countries, integration into NATO and the European Union represented not an undeserved reward but a fundamental guarantee of both security and democratic transformation.

The discussion that followed tested Zarakol's argument from several directions. Participants asked whether partial integration might in fact have encouraged reform rather than generated resentment, particularly in Turkey, where the prospect of EU membership coincided with an important period of political and constitutional reform. Zarakol responded that the difficulty lay less in partial inclusion itself than in inconsistent and selective inclusion, which strengthened perceptions of double standards. Other interventions explored whether civilisational narratives made deeper integration politically impossible, whether Turkey's membership prospects were ultimately undermined by the post-9/11 security environment, migration politics and growing opposition within Europe, and whether European policymakers consistently underestimated both Turkey's strategic importance and its domestic political complexity.

The discussion also widened to later developments, including NATO's 2008 Bucharest Summit, Ukraine and Georgia, and the evolving relationship between Russia and Turkey under Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Participants reflected on the coexistence of personal diplomacy, strategic rivalry and pragmatic cooperation in areas such as energy and regional security, illustrating how relationships initially shaped by questions of status and recognition have evolved into more complex patterns of competition and transactional engagement.

The seminar ultimately presented the 1990s not simply as a story of missed enlargement opportunities but as a broader problem of recognition, hierarchy and political timing. First, it demonstrated that institutional openness is never merely a legal question but also a powerful political signal capable of generating expectations that, if disappointed, may endure for decades. Second, it highlighted Europe's continuing difficulty in distinguishing between principled conditionality and status-based exclusion, particularly when engaging states regarded as culturally or politically "partly European". Finally, the discussion suggested that these historical experiences continue to shape contemporary debates about Ukraine, the future of European security and the wider international order. The seminar therefore offered a measured but important conclusion: ambiguity, delayed recognition and partial commitments can leave enduring political legacies when filtered through older historical grievances and changing distributions of power.

By Yangyang Zhao (ESC Events Assistant)