This “Foreign Policy Speech” by Stefanie Kürth can be accessed here.

It was originally written for the ATHENA Jean Monnet Chair MSc Course “The EU and the Post-Soviet Space” taught by Dr. Olga Burlyuk. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books.

Context

Policy Statement by Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel before the Eastern Partnership Summit of 2015 in Riga in front of the German Bundestag, 21.05.2015

In the frame of the current ongoing brutal aggression war by Russia in Ukraine, the inspiration for my foreign policy speech came from the careful deliberation, if the war in Ukraine as it happens today, could have been prevented (not in a Mearsheimerian way). And if so, when this point in time to change the course of history would have been.

After some research, I believe this moment to have been in 2015, a little over a year after Euromaidan and the subsequent annexation of Crimea, when demands from Ukraine were growing for a European perspective, analogously to the then on-hold project of North Stream 2, an expansion of the North Stream 1 natural gas pipeline system between Russia and Germany through the Baltic Sea. In 2015 then, the former German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel held a policy statement in front of the German Bundestag on May 21^st in preparation for her participation in the 4^th Eastern Partnership (EaP) Summit, a joint initiative between the European Union and its Eastern European neighbors of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, which intends to provide a forum for discussions regarding economic issues, but also shared values of democracy, prosperity, stability and joint ownership between the EU and its Eastern European partners. With the EaP Summit in 2015 being the first one to happen after the Crimea’s annexation, the expectations and the attention were high to see the outline of the next steps of EU-Ukraine bilateral relations, in particular with Germany as one of its leading forces and as Russia’s contract partner for the planned project of North Stream 2.

In her speech before the EaP summit in front of the Bundestag then, Merkel dampened prevalent expectations and declared that the EaP was “not an instrument of enlargement policy,” and that Georgia’s and Ukraine’s efforts in achieving the goals for EU candidacy status were not sufficient yet. Nonetheless, she posited the G8-summit happening the same year to only consist of the G7, excluding Russia as a reaction to the start of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Following this, I believe, that under the same-year’s G7-summit banner “Think Ahead, Act Together,” Germany and the EU could have made bold statements before and at the EaP summit in demarcation to the breach of national sovereignty from Russian forces and should have declared:

a) European candidacy status for Ukraine, which could have led to EU membership by 2022, including the EU’s mutual defense clause, which provides all EU member states with a military assistance obligation in case of armed aggression on its territory – thus, having the power of a deterrence policy, which could have led to Russian forces not fully invading Ukraine in 2022.

b) an end of North Stream 2 in order to avoid possible dependencies in the future by seeing and calling it by what it really is: a geopolitical project by Russia.

My foreign policy speech by Merkel, thus, takes place in the same time and circumstances as it did, but imagines it to portray a different message, heavily influenced by imagery used by e.g. Josep Borell, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, with his EU garden metaphor and other speeches by Merkel drawing on her Eastern German heritage and upbringing.

This “Foreign Policy Speech” by Lorenzo Greco can be accessed here.

It was originally written for the ATHENA Jean Monnet Chair MSc Course “The EU and the Post-Soviet Space” taught by Dr. Olga Burlyuk. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books.

Context

Imaginary situation where the current Russian Foreign Affairs Minister, Sergej Lavrov, dies under mysterious circumstances during the most recent G20 meeting, on the 14^th of November 2022. The doctors who conducted his autopsy say that he perished due to natural causes, because he was old and apparently sick. President Vladimir Putin does not believe this was the case: in his view, the fact that it occurred during a G20 meeting where several Western leaders were present was not a coincidence: Lavrov was poisoned. In his view, this amounts to a declaration of war from the West, and in this speech he delivers a powerful message to his people in the colossal Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow (and through a live-stream video transmitted on all Russian national broadcasters), saying that an “all-out” war against the West is now unavoidable.

This “Foreign Policy Speech” by Jeroen de Jong can be accessed here.

It was originally written for the ATHENA Jean Monnet Chair MSc Course “The EU and the Post-Soviet Space” taught by Dr. Olga Burlyuk. It is published as part of our mission to showcase peer-leading papers written by students during their studies. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books.

Context

This speech enacts Ivan Aleksandrovich Alekseyev more commonly known as the Russian musician/rapper Noize MC. Noize MC has released various study albums in Russia and is seen as an opposition musician. After the 2022 war he fled Russia and is now living in Lithuania with his wife and children. He has held various benefit concerts raising over 300.000 euros. He continues to oppose the stances of his government. This speech is given by invitation of the European Parliament to talk about his experiences on the war and is held in the here and now.