Russia, Poland and the USA. Exercising Structural Power within the Field of Energy Policy

Seminar paper from the year 2019 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Miscellaneous, , language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the question if the concept of structural power explain the tripartite relationship between Russia, Poland and the USA within the gas supply sector and what is the impact on Poland's dependency on Russian gas.In order to answer these questions, this paper is divided into six sections. The first section presents Andrej Pustovitovskij's approach of structural power, which serves as the theoretical framework for this paper. Secondly, the method and data used in this paper will be discussed. The analysis, forming the fourth section, aims at answering the research question. It firstly examines the relation between Russia and Poland in the field of gas supply and assesses whether the USA represents a credible Outside Option. The second part of the analysis evaluates the impact of current developments within the tripartite relationship on Poland's dependence on Russian gas. Within the fifth section the results are summarized and discussed. The last section briefly considers potential future perspectives of the Polish and European gas supply sector and points out the limitations of this paper.