Invisible but not indivisible: Russia, the European Union, and the importance of “Hidden Governance”

Despite the frostiness at what I will call the macro-level, in the past decade, individual EU states and the Kremlin have signed a handful of IGAs for joint pipeline development. Even more importantly, EU companies have concluded a number of important deals with Gazprom: pipelines have been built together, asset swaps concluded, and joint ventures implemented. All this has occurred against the background of increasingly tense relations at the macro level. Therefore, the biggest dilemma when looking into the black box of the EU-Russia gas relationship is how we might make sense of such a vast, multi-faceted, and yet deeply fraught relationship, occurring at so many different levels with varying actors. This article considers a number of political explanations for gas policy and shows that it is usually the economic interests of big energy firms that frequently take precedence, although these are often ignored and hidden as factors.