Thomas Barrett Defends Dissertation on Post-Soviet States Between EU and Russia

“With Neighbours Like These: Navigating Dependency between Russia and the EU 2000–2022” is the title of Thomas Barrett’s dissertation, which he successfully defended at the University of Cologne in mid-June this year. His study examines how countries that are the focus of competing EU and Russian Federation integration projects respond to their dependent position in relation to these two neighbors. Barrett distinguishes between two strategies. The dominant strategy in the 1990s and 2000s was strategic hedging, by way of which the countries cooperated with the EU as well as Russia, even though their governments publicly proclaimed to have closer ties with the one or the other. A competing strategy emerged from the mid-2000s in the shape of a single-vector policy, which describes having a declared goal of close integration with one neighbor while turning away from the other. The post-Soviet states Barrett investigates in his study are Armenia, Georgia, Moldavia, and Ukraine. He asks why some of them abandon strategic hedging while others remain committed to it, and why they choose alignment with the EU. The study focuses on domestic transformation, which Barrett analyzes using the concept of social blocs: heterogeneous constellations of economic sectors, oligarchs, parties, workers, and voters who share certain economic policy preferences. He shows that the structural transformation of the economy since 2000 empowered new social blocs, and these were crucial to whether the countries stuck with strategic hedging or opted for a single-vector policy. The dissertation was supervised by André Kaiser at the University of Cologne. Thomas Barrett was a doctoral researcher at the International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy (IMPRS-SPCE), the MPIfG’s graduate school, from 2021 to 2025.