The Concept of Russia

How can we best define Russia's long-term national interests in the field of political sovereignty, sustainable economic development and military security? How will Russia view its federal state structure, as it finds itself confronted with a centuries-old tension between national and regional identity? Does Russia have to make a choice between East and West? All these questions relate to the centuries-old debate on the "Russian Idea". This book is a collection of the contributions to the lecture series "The Concept of Russia: Patterns for Political Development in the Russian Federation", which was organized in the spring of 2003 by the Chair Interbrew-Baillet Latour at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven). Throughout this series of lectures, the Chair sought to study the quest for Russian identity, approaching this multi-layered and diffuse problem from a historical, political, cultural and economic perspective. In the context of the Chair Interbrew-Baillet-Latour on the relations between Russia and the European Union, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Universit Catholique de Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL) jointly organise research on the nature of Euro-Russian relations, with a view to monitoring the evolving relationship and placing it in a theoretical framework.