Anton Berezutskii

The outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 significantly disrupted the decades-long energy relationship between Europe and Russia. The critical dependence on Russian gas reignited the debate on the energy security of EU member states, with Germany at the center of these debates. To this date, little or no research has been done on the exact composition of the political actors who argued for and against the proliferation of Russian gas in Germany and on the continent. Focusing on the case of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and building on the argumentative turn in public policy, this research project seeks to answer the question of which political parties acted as advocates of Russian gas and how their interests were framed in the overall context of German foreign and energy policy. By applying discourse network analysis to the original dataset of Bundestag records from 2015-2022, this research maps party networks, their change in relation to external events and the corresponding argumentation.