Western common homes and Russian national identities: How far East can the EU and NATO go, and where does that leave Russia?

This article examines the dual problem of Russia's international identity and its integration with the West, looking at it from first the Eastern then the Western side. It argues that a Westernist state identity would be sustainable for Russia only if accompanied by integration with the Euro‐Atlantic institutions, and that in some respects the prospects for this are not as bad as usually thought: Russia is in fact in the process of entering most of the minor institutions of the Atlantic system. However, NATO and the EU are the decisive institutions, and here Russia has fared poorly. Neither side conceptualizes NATO in a way that would lead to Russian entry. NATO affirms that Russia is eligible to join when it meets the conditions, but few people on either side believe it: the conditions were conceptualized for including only small countries, not Russia. The inertia of mutual counter‐position remains strong. Many in NATO circles have raised a series of objections to ever including Russia, ranging from a visceral belief that NATO needs to have Russia as its external enemy to a more specific fear of a Russian veto power; and NATO has yet to undertake to make its decision‐making arrangements more flexible, as would be necessary in order to address the fear of vetoes. In theory the obstacles could be overcome in the present period; in practice this does not seem likely. Presently Russia is instead speaking mainly of uniting with the EU, yet this has even fewer prospects: the EU is too small to take in a large Russia. The failure to find a substantial Western institutional home for Russia has meant, and is likely to continue to mean, undermining the viability of the recurrent attempts at a Westernist identity for Russia.