Ideological cleavages or East-West divide in the European Parliament? Explaining MEPs’ positions on EU's response to the invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea

What explains MEPs’ positions on the foreign policy of the European Union? We compare how MEPs debate the EU’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Considering that these events have alarmed East Europeans who perceive these events as existential threat to their national security, we juxtapose national and party characteristics using an original dataset of hand-coded speeches of MEPs in the EP debates. We use role theory as a framework for analysis and explore how MEPs conceive of the EU’s international role. We first identified what roles scholars assign to the EU in the literature and divided them into two categories: roles driven by values, e.g., normative, transformative, or ethical powers; and roles driven by material capabilities, e.g., military, or civilian powers. We then coded 12 EP debates and inductively identified a third role – inert power Europe, which is prevalent among radical right and left MEPs and is based on the idea that the EU should not intervene in other states’ bilateral relations. We measure and explain role salience and role preference. Role salience is an outcome variable describing the percentage of coded segments falling under each of the three roles for an individual MEP, while role preference is a single role that has the highest share of coded segments in each MEP’s speeches. We use OLS regression and multinomial regression to analyze the two variables respectively. We find that EP party group is a significant predictor for both outcome variables, while characteristics of MEPs’ countries and national parties do not matter. Furthermore, in 2022, MEPs reflect not only on how to help Ukraine but also on what reforms the EU needs to undertake to become a stronger international actor in the "new world" that the Russian invasion has created.