Our paper aims at highlighting elements of continuity and discontinuity in how the EU-Russia relations have been narrated and framed by the official political discourses, especially considering the period 2014-2023. Since the launch of Russia’s full-scale military operation in the Ukrainian territory, new security vocabularies have been created or re-contextualized by all the actors involved, such as hybrid war ; in some cases specific words have been appropriated, translated and weaponized, i.e. regime change, peace keeping, genocide. In parallel, the mythology of the “return of geopolitics” to Europe has been further consolidated – through, for example, the prioritization of stabilization over normative commitments in the EU’s foreign and security policy, the inauguration of a “geopolitical Commission”, the “garden vs. jungle” speech and the debate it spurred. This has been complemented by the increasingly pervasive uses of Cold-War metaphors of essentialized and binary understanding of power politics and Realpolitik. Premising on the assumption that language both reflects and constitutes the social reality, including international politics, we aim at carrying out a discursive and visual inquiry on the above mentioned phenomena, mapping the actors promoting / channeling these narratives and frames. Through our analysis, we intend to expose how this discursive revival may legitimise and normalise certain ideologies, strategies and course of actions in the context of the war in Ukraine.

This paper explores how the 1980s crisis of Yugoslavia and the EU’s polycrisis starting with the 2008 Eurozone crisis eroded citizen's emotional attachment to these supranational polities. The lack of vision and unity of purpose of the leading political elites to deal with the ongoing challenges consecutively delegitimated the core of supranational Yugoslavism and Europeanism that conceptualized supranational polities as the ones to bring peace and prosperity to each and every national constituency. Since both identities lacked the (ethno)cultural attachment of citizens – the lack of which also made the notion of solidarity adjacent – the crisis opened a space for the effective exploitation of nationalist tones on ‘who takes advantage of whom’. This presented each (national) constituency as a victim of the existing supranational governance. In response, the leading political elites employed the ideological narrative that the existing models of self–management socialism and the respective model of the (neo)liberal EU to had and to have ‘no alternative’ except the disintegration of the supranational polities, which would eventually end up in some form of conflict and violence. However, this ‘no alternative’ narrative only subsequently boosted the appeal of the opposing extreme nationalist discourses that ultimately exploited the ‘return of history’ narrative that both polities claimed to resolve once and for all. At the same time, the liberal and left alternatives to mainstream politics in both cases have promoted the introduction of supranational popular participation – where people could articulate different political projects at the supranational level – as an omnipotent cure for the crisis. They overlooked the fact that the fundamental question ‘who are we and why are we together’ cannot be fully answered without forging the notion of identity necessary to unleash an emotional attachment to the community. Only the rare left-liberal intellectuals have advocated for the implementation of a kind of ethno-cultural concept of supranational identity from the perspective of ‘multi-identification’ that would make people feel as ‘national’ and Yugoslav/ European on equal footing. Finally, in the case of the EU, the most recent crises, the Covid-19 crisis and the war in Ukraine, have provided impetus to deeper integration through the Next Generation funds or the Act in Support of Ammunition Production. However, it has not led to a strengthening of European identity, as the political developments constrained the search for a common identity.

The literature studying the competition between the European Union (EU) and Russia over their shared neighbourhood has tended to treat the so-called in-between countries, such as Ukraine, as mere objects in the rivalry between the two regional powers. The concept of liminality allows us to shift the focus on the margins by putting them at the centre and to turn them into subjects and investigate their agency through their own identity and subjectivity. By using the concept of liminality in combination with the concept of ontological security, this paper shows how Ukraine as a liminar on the East-West spatial-ideological axis has successfully claimed agency from the EU and Russia in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion. In this regard, the latter has acted as a critical juncture for Ukraine, to the point that critical agency has emerged from a state of ontological anxiety. Provoking the need to fight for the survival of the Self, Russia’s invasion has consolidated Ukraine’s transformation from hybrid liminality into marginal liminality that had started in 2014, thereby unleashing an unprecedented agency vis-à-vis its significant Others, i.e. Russia and the EU. We argue that the threat of losing its sovereignty generated existential anxiety in Ukraine, which prompted it to reassert its statehood and identity by definitively uniting the country around a pro-European liberal democratic path and rejecting the Russian identity narrative once and for all. Indeed, by presenting itself to the EU as the liberal barrier (or outpost) fulfilling a protective function against illiberal Russia as the dangerous Other, Ukraine has started to move beyond its hitherto liminal position of ‘little Self’ that is denied agency. From the EU’s side, Ukraine is now considered as ‘almost one of us’, having been embraced within the European family by receiving candidate status. From Russia’s side, Ukraine’s successful application for EU candidate status has consolidated Ukraine’s departure from Russia’s perceived sphere of influence. Along with the nationwide resistance against the Russian invasion, this further destabilises the identity discourse that the Kremlin has projected around the Slavic brotherhood and the concept of the ‘Russian world’.