The European Union and its Eastern Neighbourhood: Challenges and Prospects

• In a recent European Commission on the Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2008, it is stated that the ENP is “a growing partnership based on mutual interdependence.” This is evermore necessary since 2008 has been a year of crises that have led to gridlock both in the South and the East. The August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, the Israeli intervention in Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 and the Russia-Ukraine gas crisis of January 2009 coupled with the growing negative impact on growth, trade, and investment of the global financial and economic crisis are all indicative on the frailty of the EU’s neighbourhoods. 

 

• On 7 May 2009, the Prague Eastern Partnership Summit took place amidst great expectations from its promoters in an effort to further solidify/strengthen the bonds between the European Union and its member states and their Eastern European Partners (hereinafter ENP East partners – Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus). Though the Eastern Partnership (EaP) was conceived to bring the ENP East countries that so desire closer to the EU, to date it has fallen short of expectations because states like Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova have been hit by domestic dissent, spats with their neighbours and stalled modernisation processes. The fact that EU member states like Poland and the Czech Republic have so warmly sponsored the initiative may suggest ulterior motives in their approach toward their Eastern neighbourhood is very much in evidence.

 

• The Russia factor is one that will not go away anytime soon as the parameters and content of future EU-Russia relations are currently being deliberated since June 2008 in the form of a new EU-Russia agreement replacing the Partnership and Co-operation Agreement concluded in 1994 and into force since 1 December 1997. At that time Russia was weaker and less self-confident than it is today. Albeit the Russian Federation’s adventurism in Georgia in August 2008 and its systematic attempts to prevent the further trespass of the European Union (and NATO) on its neighbourhood or near abroad, Russia’s economic ties with the EU and its role in energy security cannot be discounted.

 

• When the European Neighbourhood Policy was first promoted in 2003, it attempted to address a number of emerging concerns for the European Union. The first had to do with the limits of enlargement given that big bang enlargement was about to become a reality in 2004. As such the ENP was conceived as a policy aimed at curbing further membership – an “anything but membership” policy where it made sense to group southern and eastern neighbour states together. As such bilateral action plans were promoted allowing southern and eastern partners to enhance their relations with the EU at their own pace. The second concern stemmed from the repercussions of the post-Cold War world with the emergence of new forms of global terrorism and ethno-nationalist secessionist movements becoming the fad in the wider post-Communist space (former Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union) with McMafia type transnational crime, weak state institutions and rule of law in abundance.

 

• The European Security Strategy of December 2003 very much reflected these concerns. It stated explicitly, the EU has the strategic objective to ‘make a particular contribution to stability and good governance in our immediate neighbourhood [and] to promote a ring of well governed countries to the East of the European Union and on the borders of the Mediterranean with whom we can enjoy close and cooperative relations.’ Furthermore, the European Union has acknowledged the shared common neighbourhood with Russia as a space where the ‘EU and Russia need to work together, as neighbours, on common concerns.’

 

• The last point being that the non-polarising concept of a common neighbourhood where it is both in the interest of Russia and the EU to assure the neighbourhood’s stability, security and prosperity lest it become even more infested with the diseases the post-Cold War Pandora’s box had unleashed. In other words, the European Union as a postmodern soft power entity saw itself as promoting a concept which was non-threatening to its eastern neighbours.

 

• For Russia, though, the notion of neighbourhood (its ‘CIS space’) has been based on preserving its ‘historical and spiritual heritage’ which was encroached upon by the West in the early 1990s when as the key successor state of the Soviet Union it went through dire political and economic upheaval. According to Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov,

 

‘Not only Russia has privileged interests, first and foremost, in relations with our closest neighbors; they also have the same privileged interests in Russia. Failing to understand it and trying to destroy what rests on our combined objective history and on the interdependence and intertwining of our economies, infrastructures, cultures and humanitarian spheres of life means to go against history.’

 

• As a consequence, for Russia, the EU’s neighbourhood policy and the Eastern Partnership among others are revisionist policies which strive to remove from Russian influence the post-Soviet space thereby the ‘voluntary or involuntary aim of such method is to preserve the dividing line in Europe and move it ever closer to the Russian border.’
• The Black Sea region is a telling example of the challenges in EU-Russian relations since all ENP East partners except Belarus are considered by the EU to be part of it. For Russia, the wider Black Sea area is an important part of its foreign policy given that is constitutes part of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ and its relevance as an energy transit region. More specifically, Russia seeks to remain as one of the main stakeholders in the region “given the emergence of new strong regional (Turkey) and external actors (the US/NATO)”; it wants to counter and curb extremism, separatism and terrorism in the region; it wants to secure continuous energy, trade, civil and military communications “within and throughout the Black Sea and the [Bosporus] Straits”; and it seeks to prevent new dividing lines in the region including “the expansion of military coalitions which exclude Russia as a full member.”
• At the same time, Russia is not convinced that the EU’s European Neighbourhood Policy could successfully contribute to making the shared neighbourhood more stable (an objective shared by Russia) as it does not effectively bar the road to further future EU enlargement. The analysis by Arkady Moshes is indicative:

 

‘Brussels cannot ignore a consolidated push of EU new member states to be more active on the eastern periphery. As long as it denies membership perspective for its neighbours, the policy of Wider Europe that it pursues, (however palliative it may look) nevertheless stimulates their search for alternatives to staying within the same geopolitical and geo-economic space as Russia. Moscow, in this situation, starts viewing the EU not so much as a partner, but rather as a systematic rival to its foreign policy goals in the Western NIS and the Caucasus; a revisionist power; and is instinctively inclined to get involved in a ‘zero-sum game’ type of relationship with the EU.’

 

• Thus the notion of neighbourhood and how it is perceived by key stakeholders is a major conundrum. Does it enhance further cooperation or further division/competition? As the limits of the ENP became evident over time and the EU began to uncouple its neighbourhood policy with the evolution of the Union for the Mediterranean in the South and the Black Sea Synergy (BSS) policy in the East in 2007/2008, further dividing lines emerged. The BSS epitomises the concept of regional cooperation. It put the Black Sea region on the radar screen of the EU as a single distinct policy area (the accession of Bulgaria and Romania, both Black Sea states, on 1 January 2007 effectively contributed to this process). The BSS promoted the concept of regional cooperation between the EU and the region as well as between the states of the region. It also sought to work with regional institutions such as the BSEC (Organisation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation) which had been in place since 1992 without EU direct involvement but with the participation of all regional stakeholders (including Russia and Turkey) thereby promoting a sense of regional and local ownership (something ENP South partners and Western Balkan states have strived for as well) of the process. Through its emphasis on sectoral cooperation (such as transport, environment, energy, trade inter alia), it also promoted the need for solid institutions, good governance principles, rule of law and accountability – in other words, it allowed in a non threatening manner concepts of Europeanisation to the region.

 

• Yet hardly a year having past before the BSS was introduced to the world, the EU launched the Eastern Partnership (EaP), which paradoxically the EU-27 have committed to just as much as they did for the BSS, which seeks ever closer relations with the ENP East partners testing the limits of Russian discomfort and EU unity  while duplicating many of the priorities of the BSS.

 

• As such today, the EU beset by its own institutional inabilities to move beyond the restrictions of the Nice Treaty, awaiting (some would say praying for) the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and its implementation, amidst a full-blown global financial crisis (which can only imply a hardening of mental and economic borders) finds itself sending contradictory signals to its ENP East partners and strategic political and economic partner Russia because its member states have found it convenient to exploit the lack of leadership and direction by transforming their national prerogatives and priorities into European ones (much of the same it could be argued is in evidence in the Mediterranean). In fact, the new EU member states have increasingly divergent perspectives regarding further enlargement to the East.

 

• Nevertheless, the reality that the EU has to have some sort of neighbourhood policy (however many adaptations it undergoes) and the symbiotic/interdependent nature of the relationship between Russia and the Union at least in the economic front coupled with the devastating impact of the global financial crisis is having on both neighbours implies that over the mid- to long-term there is much more that unites rather than divides the two sides. It is worth keeping in mind that the Union is Russia’s main trading partner accounting for over 52% of Russia’s main trade turnover and the main investor in Russia while 50% of Russian oil exports and 63% of its natural gas exports go to the EU. The challenge is to convert or at least spill over the economic interdependency into the political realm.

 

• In order to advance though, the need for relevance and less policy confusion, more flexibility and pragmatism coupled with policy harmonisation, the avoidance of policy duplication and greater co-ownership is paramount. Otherwise, the strain on human and financial resources and objectives will only to greater policy disarray within the EU as well as fewer incentives and tools to effectively assure that the notion of a common neighbourhood is effectively promoted.

Bibliography

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European Commission, Communication from the Commission to the Parliament and the Council on the Implementation of the European Neighbourhood Policy in 2008, COM (2009) 188/3, Brussels, 23 April 2009.

General Secretariat of the Council of the EU, Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy Providing Security in a Changing World, Brussels, 11 December 2008.

---------. A Secure Europe in a Better World – The European Security Strategy, Brussels, 12 December 2003.

Geoana, Mircea. “Why we mustn’t look at Eastern Europe as a single bloc,” Europe’s World, Spring 2009.

Glenny, Misha. 2008. McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld. New York: Knopf.

Lavrov, Sergei. 2008. “Russian Foreign Policy and a New Quality of the Geopolitical Situation” in Diplomatic Yearbook 2008 (Moscow). http://www.ln.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/e78a48070f128a7b43256999005bcbb3/19e7b14202191e4ac3257525003e5de7?OpenDocument

Moshes, Arkady. 2006. “Prospects For EU-Russia Foreign and Security Policy Cooperation”. The EU-Russia Review, No. 2: 22-27.

Tsantoulis, Tannis. “Black Sea Synergy and Eastern Partnership: Different Centres of Gravity, Complementarity or Confusing Signals?”. ICBSS Policy Brief no. 12, Athens, March 2009.

Wallace, Helen. 2009. “The European Union and its Neighbourhood: Time for a Rethink”. ELIAMEP Thesis, 4/2009, Athens, May 2009.

Yannis, Alexandros. “The European Union and the Black Sea Region: The New Eastern Frontiers and Europeanisation”. ICBSS Policy Brief no. 7, Athens, May 2008