One of the challenges to EU’s Eastern Partnership (EaP) policy relates to
structuring cooperation with countries that have opted for membership in the
Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), such as Belarus and Armenia, while avoiding
the problems faced in the Ukraine crisis of 2013-2014. Acting on its revised
European Neighbourhood Policy, the EU has sought to develop differentiated and
flexible tools of engagement with the EaP countries, including a new type of
agreement with Armenia, the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement
(CEPA). Delivering on this agenda, however, requires clarity on the
constraints and limits imposed by membership in the EAEU. The EU has tended to
establish such limits by reliance on the technocratic analysis of current
obligations contained in formal legal agreements. Yet, as revealed by the
Ukraine crisis, this approach has not necessarily reflected the geopolitical
realities in the region and Russia’s view of integration and its compatibility
with EU’s policies, in particular. This paper argues that establishing the
limits imposed by EAEU membership requires an assessment of the range of legal
as well as non-legal levers at play in individual member states in relation to
Russia’s integration projects. What matters is how Russia as well as its
Eurasian partners play the ‘integration game’, and the degree to which
political elites in Belarus and Armenia can manoeuvre a space for independent
engagement with the EU. This is necessary because of the particular nature of
the EAEU, defined by a mixture between current and future commitments,
problematic institutional boundaries between delegated powers and members’
commitments, and the prevalence of power relations within a highly asymmetric
hub-and-spoke context. In this context, Russia has a continued ability to
interpret the nature of the commitments undertaken and their compatibility
with overlapping international agreements, and enforce it using critical
interdependencies of the members. We examine how the ‘compatibility space’ is
negotiated by elites in Belarus and Armenia, and elaborate on the case of CEPA
as the most recent test to complementarity of integration engagements in the
region