Linking Regional Economic Integration and the Emergence of Military Conflict

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - Region: Eastern Europe, grade: 1,0, University of Passau (Philosophische Fakultat), course: Global Governance, language: English, abstract: When discussing peace and regionalism, often only the peace creating dimension of regional integration is covered. In this paper, a more critical understanding of regional integration will be presented by including possible negative side effects that could influence the emergence of military conflict at the periphery of regional organizations. To analyse whether this theoretical foundation is sufficient to explain the Ukrainian war, the pa-per will first draw a wider picture of European and Russian regionalism strategies to highlight the competitive dimension of regional economic integration. Afterwards this state of competition will be illustrated in detail by analysing the complex foreign policy and trade situation between the Ukraine, Russia and EU after the end of the Cold War until the beginning of the conflict. At the end, the results of the analysis will be summarized and discussed. Based on that, possible implications for regional eco-nomic integration in general will be deduced. The discussion of possible reasons for the outbreak of the Ukrainian war is of undeniable relevance, as a theoretical understanding might help to prevent similar events.