Analysts or commentators? The EU think tanks on sanctioning Russia

Abstract

The current world politics has gained an unprecedented speed during the last decades. This makes a cautious non-partisan expertise extremely important, as well as strategic plans and political and economic forecasts. EU-Russian political crisis over Ukraine which resulted in the «sanctions war» was impossible to deal with without close consideration of a number of interdependent factors. This study aims to evaluate the EU think tanks' actions under such extraordinary circumstances and to find out whether their position matters when political decisions are taken. The article considers the major theoretical approaches to the think tanks phenomenon and to their effectiveness and influence evaluation. The ways for think tanks to have an impact on political life are analyzed and evaluated by a number of characteristics. The author makes a review of the EU think tanks' types and missions. It is stressed that more than a half of the institutes under consideration include political influence in the list of their missions. To check their achievements the author analyzes publications of 20 think tanks from 10 EU member states on the “sanctions war” issue. Each think tank’s publications were resumed which allowed to distinguish the main features in all the materials analyzed. It helped at the same time not to lose the specialties of each publication and for think tank and to classify them. The main factor of difference turned out to be a country of origin, not funding source or political orientation. It is concluded that the EU think tanks are not able to fully mobilize their intellectual potential under extraordinary circumstances in order to suggest unconventional problem solution and give at least short-term forecast. Their judgments normally coincide with the EU countries’ official positions and have almost no impact on political decision-making.