The Russian aggression on Ukraine in February 2022 came as a surprise to many EU member states. But there have been also those in the Union, who were much less surprised and rather frustrated as their voices and warnings had fallen on deaf ears. In fact, many countries from Central Eastern Europe had been trying for decades to warn their counterparts about the nature of Russia’s imperial policies in what Moscow perceives as its neighbourhood. As the President of the European Commission, Ursula Van Der Layen, recently admitted: ‘[w]e should have listened to the voices inside our Union – in Poland, in the Baltics, and all across Central and Eastern Europe. While one should not read too much into these statements, unfortunately, prior to Europe’s “Ukraine” moment, the CEE voices were often silenced, ignored or even stigmatized. Labeled as “Westsplaining,” academics and diplomats from the region have been expressing their frustration with the persistence of patronizing attitudes expressed towards them by their Western counterparts, who would insist on providing them with an explanation of how the Central Eastern Europe worked.

In this panel we are going to analyse the strive for recognition from the CEEs in foreign and security policy in the EU and beyond. Nearly, two decades since the “big bang” enlargement of the EU are the CEE members treated as decision-making “peers”? Have they been able to shape the policy and generate any (ideational) leadership within the Union? In order to unpack the dynamics between the Western and Eatern European states, we focus on concepts like agency, dominance, status-seeking or stereotypes. We also offer a comparative angle between EU and NATO as we seek to uncover whether there are any differences in the status of the countries from the CEE's in both organisations.

The CEE actors traditionally tend to perceive international relations from the realist-informed perspective in categories of power, national interest and geopolitics. It is due to historical processes, such as partitions, occupations and wars, that many countries in the region and Poland in particular have experienced. The long-awaited integration with Western structures (NATO and the EU), even if from a very asymmetrical position – was for many an ultimate answer and a solution to these problems. Scholars employed the hypothesis that voluntary submission that characterized the process of EU enlargement was accepted in the CEE because it promised at the end of the road to the EU full membership and full subjectivity in world and European politics.

However, 20 years after the EU enlargement and 25 years after joining NATO – the perception of the Polish position within these two organizations significantly differs. On the one hand, NATO with its intergovernmental structure and clear American hegemony is less seen as dominating than the EU with its federalized structure and mitigated by institutional setting crude power. To this end, theoretically, the paper relies on dominance perceptions as a mean to untangle the power structures within institutions (Czerska-Shaw et al 2023). Based on empirical data from Polish Sejm and interviews with stakeholders we will compare and contrast the way Polish position is perceived by domestic political actors in both institutions.

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, several Western leaders expressed regret for not having listened to the warnings of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries about the threat of Russian aggression. In the past, CEE governments who rang the alarm about Russia were dismissed as Russophobic and not taken seriously in foreign policy circles. Borrowing from social psychology, this paper proposes a new angle to study perceptions about CEE in European Union (EU) foreign policy by focusing on the concept of regional stereotypes. In this context, stereotypes are cognitive shortcuts that automatically link the behaviour of governments in the region to specific traits, such as hating Russia owing to their historical experiences. The goal is to examine the extent to which such stereotypes still play a role today among foreign policy officials working in the Council of the European Union. Using a new mixed method known as qualitative vignette experiments, the study explores how national officials respond to hypothetical decision-making scenarios that vary the inclusion of stereotypes about CEEs. The analysis is based on 20 interviews with officials from Member States in Western Europe and address potential policy follow-ups to the Ukraine war. The use of interviews ensures a crucial interpretive component meant to explore respondents’ understanding of decision-making scenarios and the extent to which they themselves attribute their answers to regional stereotypes about CEE or to other explanations.

Critical scholarship on European integration has long acknowledged that Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries have been trapped in a teacher-student relationship vis-à-vis Western European members of the European Union (EU), particularly France and Germany. Paternalistic and Western-centric attitudes were visible after the fall of the Soviet Union and throughout the accession process: when CEEs back the US position on Iraq in 2003, Jacques Chiraq famously retorted that they had ‘missed the good opportunity to keep their mouths shut’. In this paper, we will argue that these paternalistic attitudes did not wane after enlargement. The disregard for CEEs’ voices is particularly glaring when it comes to the EU’s policy towards Russia and the Eastern Neighborhood. Despite these matters being closest to CEEs’ own lived experience and even though CEE member states possess the greatest expertise on the region, they have long been considered as biased against Russia, not to mention emotional or, at times, even unreliable partners. Based on Pouliot's work on social hierarchies and 'pecking orders' in the IO's and on insights from sociological institutionalism, this paper will analyse the responses to the CEE's competence claims in the EU and in NATO.