Abstract
EU-Russia gas interdependency is today one of the most endurable and largest energy partnerships in contemporary geopolitics of energy. It consistently affects different commodity markets and the stability of bilateral economies, embodying the last bridge standing of the bilateral political dialogue. However, the energy crisis started in 2021 and the fallouts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine threaten the overall stability of this relationship. So far, the geopolitics of the EU-Russia gas trade has extensively influenced the evolution of the energy security and energy geopolitics literatures. At the same time, these continue to be focused on the structural divergences of the two gas institutional models, but refrained from systematically approaching the power dynamics within them. So, the chapter reviews the existing literature of the geopolitics of the EU-Russia gas trade within the framework of the evolving academic studies of energy geopolitics. Against this background, the analysis offers a new methodological and theoretical approach to the study of power in energy and specifically gas trade, outside the classical dichotomy between energy producers and consumers. This is the result of a critical revision of the current approaches to power in international politics employing Baldwin’s conceptualization of power as a relational concept. The results offer a new research agenda for scholars interested in the EU-Russia gas interdependency issue area and, more generally, in energy interdependencies. Also, the analysis outcomes are relevant for both researchers and policy makers as they advocate for upending and rethinking many assumptions on the nexus between power politics, great powers, and international energy markets.
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Notes
- 1.
Europe here stands for the EU-27, the UK, and non-EU Balkans states. Data do not account for storage injection and withdrawals of natural gas.
- 2.
A central focus of Baldwin’s remarking studies is the interchangeability between the terms “power” and “influence,” which distinguishes his approach compared to other scholars.
- 3.
Power has at least eight dimensions, namely: scope, domain, weight, base, means, costs, time, and place. These are precisely defined by Baldwin. At the same time, almost anything can be a power resource in some context or another. But what functions as a power asset in one situation may be a liability or irrelevant in another one.
- 4.
Baldwin highlights Keohane’s and Nye’s innovations compared to realism about the insulation of different issue areas for power fungibility and the antagonism to zero-sum game. Also, he explicates his support to the neoliberal, challenging the conventional wisdom in terms of multiplicity of goals, complex hierarchical priorities against military force, and maximization of power related to foreign policy goals.
- 5.
The four phases of the energy weapon model presented by Smith Stegen to transform the energy resources in one country into political leverage are: (1) State consolidation of resources, (2) State control over transit routes, (3) Implementation of threats, price hikes, and disruptions, and (4) Target state acquiescence and concessions.
- 6.
In the literature, this is another way of defining the Post-Soviet space, especially when Russia is considered pivotal in the analysis.
- 7.
As a matter of fact, Högselius concentrates his efforts on the Soviet era and rather than the Russian one.
- 8.
The Third Liberalization Package is a set of legal and technocratic instruments introducing greater competition into the energy business. Through this package, approved in 2009, the European authorities have transformed the environment in which Russian companies, and Gazprom in particular, had to operate in the EU. In particular, the provisions impose the unbundling of vertically integrated energy companies into upstream/midstream/downstream entities. At the same time, the package has been prompted in order to bolster the development of a network of energy infrastructure, including pipelines, within the EU borders.
- 9.
The authors have developed a largely influencing literature over the power dynamics within the EU-Russia gas trade relations. Mostly, these works focus on the EU capacity to drive the relation through regulatory and legal frames, a market approach to steer Russia away from self-interested behaviors in the gas market. Other than the articles directly quoted in the chapter, some other of these works had an important influence over the geopolitics of the EU-Russia gas trade literature: Goldthau A., Sitter N. (2014) A Liberal Actor in a Realist World? The Commission and the External Dimension of the Single Market for Energy, Journal of European Public Policy 21(10):1452–1472. doi:10.1080/13501763.2014.912251; Goldthau A., Sitter N. (2015) A Liberal Actor in a Realist World. The European Union Regulatory State and the Global Political Economy of Energy. Oxford University Press, Oxford; Goldthau A., Sitter N. (2015) Soft Power with a Hard Edge: EU Policy Tools and Energy Security, Review of International Political Economy 22(5):941–965. doi:10.1080/09692290.2015.1008547; Andersen A., Goldthau A., Sitter N. (eds.) (2017) Energy Union: Europe’s New Liberal Mercantilism? Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
- 10.
For Nye, hard power consists in the use of threats or inducements (means) within the economic, regulatory, or political sphere, to make an actor pursue/not pursue a certain course of action.
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Sassi, F. (2023). The Geopolitics of the EU-Russia Gas Trade: Reviewing Power in International Gas Markets. In: Taghizadeh-Hesary, F., Zhang, D. (eds) The Handbook of Energy Policy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6778-8_2
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