Belarus, Ukraine and Russia: East or West? Stephen White, Ian McAllister and Valentina Feklyunina Belarus and Ukraine are ‘lands in between’, pulled by their language, religion and history towards the west but also towards the former Soviet republics in the east with which they were for so long associated. The evidence of national representative surveys between 2000 and 2010 suggests that feelings of ‘Europeanness’ have been declining, as is also the case in Russia; so has the wish to join the European Union (although it remains a popular option) or NATO. ‘Soviet nostalgia’ has been declining in parallel, more so in Belarus and Ukraine than in Russia; but there is a strong wish in all three countries to associate more closely within the Commonwealth of Independent States. Cross-tabulating, the evidence suggests that Ukraine is the most sharply polarised between these two foreign policy orientations, and the one in which popular attitudes are most likely to constrain the actions of its governing authorities; more generally, it suggests that a constructivist analysis is particularly appropriate in cases in which rival national security complexes are rooted in domestic cultural divisions and expressed through competing political elites. Keywords: Belarus; Ukraine; Russia; integration The cold war defined two rival spheres of influence. No less important, it defined two sets of identities. Whether or not they shared its objectives, citizens of the communist-ruled countries to the east were part of a larger system of values, alliances and institutions. They defined themselves as a ‘socialist community’ in which a distinctive way of life—collectivist and materialist—had supposedly been consolidated. Their economies and political systems were interconnected; they shared the same external borders, and defended them through the same military alliance. If they went on a foreign holiday, it would be the Black Sea rather than the Mediterranean; if they drank wine, it was likely to be Bulgarian or Hungarian; if they read a book or magazine, it would have no drugs, sex or religion. Nor were these impressions misleading. More than two thirds of the USSR’s foreign trade in the late 1980s was with other communist-ruled countries; foreign radio broadcasts were still being jammed; and although tourism was increasing, more than 90 per cent of the Soviet citizens who went abroad at this time visited other members of the bloc (fewer than 7 per cent visited any of the developed capitalist countries; Narodnoe khozyaistvo 1988, 602, 683). With the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, all these distinctions began to lose their earlier significance. Across the region, countries divided—the USSR, Czechoslova- kia, Yugoslavia—or reunited (the two Germanys). And they began to exercise their newly acquired sovereignty to form different patterns of association. Some of them joined the European Union, or even NATO. Others joined the Commonwealth of Independent States, established at the end of 1991 as the USSR itself collapsed, and doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2010.00410.x BJPIR: 2010 VOL 12, 344–367 © 2010 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association