The Two Faces and Two Models for Eastern Partnership

Like the European Union as a whole, the Eastern Partnership programme has still many positive aspects and closer cooperation between the EU structures and individual EU member-states, on the one hand, and their Eastern European neighbours, on the other, could have significant benefits, especially for the latter.

The Summit of the Eastern Partnership, i.e. of the 28 EU member-states plus 6 EU’s Eastern European neighbours (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) recently took place in the Latvian capital Riga. This was the fourth Summit of the programme launched on the initiative of Poland and Sweden in 2009 with the aim of bringing these six countries closer to the European Union. This has been an ambitious programme, especially for these six states aspiring for the EU membership.

However, notwithstanding monies spent and some progress made in terms of reforms in some of the EU’s eastern neighbours, as well as optimism expressed in the Joint Declaration of the Riga Summit, it is difficult to consider the programme as a success story. And it is not only that in Riga some top European politicians were more interested in Greek’s debt, British referendum on the question of the EU membership or Italian (and also European) migration problems. It is also that the success may take sometimes quite bizarre forms as testified, for example, a France 2 TV programme of 1 June 2015 ‘Corjeuti and its love for France’. The programme started with the words: ‘You have to see it, to believe it’.

After the 26 Schengen zone countries cancelled in 2014 the visa requirements for the Moldovan citizens with biometric passports, a small town Corjeuti in the North of Moldova has lost 3000 of its 8000 inhabitants to France. Yes, there is an Eiffel tower and restaurant called Paris in Corjeuti, built by monies sent by those who have migrated to France and have been lucky enough to find jobs there, but the town has become empty of people and those who have stayed behind are mostly jobless, living on remittances coming from relatives in France.

Although this anecdotal example of Moldovan problems pales in comparison with other migrations flows out of this small and poor country (more than half a million Moldovans work in Russia), this small step forward for Moldova in the frame of the Eastern Partnership is not especially encouraging.

Therefore, it is not difficult to agree with Matthew Dal Santo when he observes that ‘since Brussels launched its 'Eastern Neighborhood Policy' (ENP) in 2009, public support has steadily fallen. Local EU activists lament that only 36% of Moldovans favor EU integration; 42-44% are pro-Russian. Brussels nonetheless signed an Association Agreement with Moldova last June.

Owing to a recent banking scandal involving the theft of €1 billion (some 15% of GDP) and a shady businessman with links to the Europe-leaning government, for many Moldovans the EU has itself become synonymous with corruption. …. To promote Moldova's 'European future', pro-Brussels NGOs have launched an information campaign. It's being funded by the U.S. Embassy’.[1]

Of course, these comments are anecdotal and concern only one of the EU’s Eastern European partners. Not everything is as bleak and bizarre, though some developments in other partner states are even more worrisome and this is so not always notwithstanding of but sometimes due to the Partnership programme.

In some of its rather significant aspects the Eastern Partnership looks like a twenty first century’s replay of the mission ‘civilisatrice’ (or white man’s burden) of the nineteenth century with both of its positive and negative aspects, with its soft and hard faces, with its cooperation and confrontation, with its missionaries and warriors. Like more than a century ago there is a competition for influence where economic and security interests intermingle with and are underpinned by ideology. Emphasis on the purity of one’s own motives and demonization of the opponent has reached the heights of technical sophistication and substantive primitiveness.

Although, differently from the nineteenth century European colonialism, it is also much more organized and coordinated process. It is not like the ‘ramble for Africa’, where different European powers competed with and against each other. Today’s European neighborhood policies are well structured and coordinated, which however does not mean that they are always well thought through and therefore doomed to succeed. They are not only for something but sometimes rather more against someone, for the expansion of one’s own zone of influence at the expense of that of the rival.

Very much like the Great Game between the British and Russian Empires in Central Asia at the end of the nineteenth century. Although the Eastern Partnership is a programme of the European Union (its ownership, as it is today fashionable to say, that it shares with its Eastern partners), in fact there are three pillars that in a way correspond to the three different international regional organizations – two wholly of European as to their composition (the EU and the Council of Europe) and one having so-called Euro-Atlantic dimension (NATO).

If the first two represent and reflect mostly, though not exclusively, the soft and unifying face of the Eastern Partnership, the third one is meant to perform a very different – purely military – function. And what is of interest in the context of the Eastern Partnership, is that if there are some so-called old EU member-states that do not belong to the Western military alliance (Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, Finland and Sweden,) all new EU members have become also NATO members and most of them well before they became considered ready for the EU membership.

Therefore, Robert Sakwa correctly emphasizes that: ‘Since 1989 all new members of the EU have also become members of NATO. The Treaty of Lisbon (the “Reform Treaty”) of 13 December 2007, which came into effect in 2009, made this explicit. Accession countries are now required to align their defense and security policies with those of NATO’.[2] Sakwa calls this the ‘militarization of the EU; in the sense that enlargement has become a part of the broader process of the expansion of the Euro-Atlantic community, in which security, good governance and economic reforms go hand in hand’.[3] 

The continuation of the very existence of NATO and especially its continuous enlargement after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, declared termination of the Cold War and the end of the bi-polar world – the developments that should have meant also that the raison d’être of NATO had correspondingly ceased to exist, have led some commentators to conclude that today NATO is dealing with problems created by its very existence and enlargement.[4]

And due to the linkage between NATO and the EU one may also justifiably believe that ‘the Eastern Partnership helped precipitate the Ukraine conflict and now serves as a durable tool with which the European Union can counter Russia's projection of power’[5], i.e. the Eastern Partnership programme also is concerned with problems, if not of its own creation, then at least to the magnification of which it has contributed. Helping to precipitate the Ukrainian conflict, including the affiliation of the Crimea and the projection of the Russian power into the Eastern Ukraine, the Eastern Partnership programme is today to a great extent addressing worries and concerns of its own creation.

However, like the European Union as a whole, the Eastern Partnership programme has still many positive aspects and closer cooperation between the EU structures and individual EU member-states, on the one hand, and their Eastern European neighbours, on the other, could have significant benefits, especially for the latter. It is sometimes difficult to tell what profits the EU or its member-states could draw from ever closer and closer relations with some of its eastern neighbours. Europe and the European Union, notwithstanding all the problems it faces and the crises – economic, financial and even political – it is going through, is nevertheless the most successful assemblage of nations, though clearly in need of serious reforms. The facts that notwithstanding the crises in the EU, the refugees move en masse to Europe (and not from it) and its neighbouring countries still aspire for the membership in the Union (though not all as unconditionally and enthusiastically as some time ago), testify to its continuous attractiveness.

In a way, EU’s crises are conditioned by the fact that today’s European politicians have become, on the one hand, alienated from the European peoples (expressed by the hubris of the leaders and democracy deficit of EU institutions), most of whom do not so enthusiastically welcome ‘the ever closer union’ where important decisions are made not by national parliaments but by Brussels bureaucrats; while, on the other hand, they lack the vision and backbone of previous generations of European political leaders such as Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, François Mitterrand or Helmut Kohl. There is clearly also a leadership crisis in Europe, whose roots go far beyond the confines of this article (only to mention the crisis of liberal democracy with its short-termism and populism and financial capitalism with runaway inequality). What visionary leaders with backbone should do (naturally among many other things) would be the transformation of the Eastern Partnership from a programme of confrontation and struggle for influence with Russia (already the fact that the programme was initialed by Poland and Sweden and not, say, by France, Germany or Spain reveals its hidden, and not even very well, anti-Russian inclination) into a programme where the elements of ‘for’ prevail over, or even better, eliminate completely the elements of ‘against’.

Such a task, though necessary and even inevitable, if we want to have a durable peace and sustainable development in Europe, has today become almost a mission impossible. The rise of anti-Western, especially anti-American sentiments and propaganda in the Russian media is not only matched but exceeded, both quantitatively and qualitatively by the rise of anti-Russian propaganda and hysteria in the West. The Swiss journalist, one of the voices of reason who however rarely find their voice heard in the Western mainstream media, Guy Mettan even writes: ‘In fact, Russophobia, in contradistinction to French Anglophobia or Germanophobia, is a phenomenon that is somewhat similar to anti-Semitism. Like the latter, it is not a transitional phenomenon related to concrete historical events; it resides in the brain of the person having such phobia independent from the behaviour of the victim’.6 His book well reveals the current expressions of the Russophobia in the Western media and among the political elites (everything related to Ukraine, the Sochi Olympics or the war of 2008 between Georgia and Russia) as well as their roots in history.

Although it seems to me that the comparison of Russophobia with anti-Semitism is an over-statement and inaccurate since in many important respects these phenomena are not comparable, nevertheless in some other respects it is not as weird or far-fetched as we may intuitively think. Some ten years ago I attended a conference of so-called GUAM (not an island in Micronesia but an organization comprising of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova, i.e. those who today belong to the EU’s Eastern Partnership programme) in Baku as a British expert (at that time I was a professor at King’s College, London). When most of the participants had already left, I had an interesting discussion with another expert, who had for long worked in Munich radio-stations that during the days of the Cold War competed with the Soviet propaganda machine. He, like myself, had his flight only the following morning. Our heated intellectual debate was accompanied by delicious Burgundy, which we both equally enjoyed. In the center of our debate was the foreign policy of Russia, as this had been the topic of the conference. When I had put forward some facts that not only in my opinion but also in the eyes of my counterpart seemed to disprove some of his arguments, he, being not only an intelligent person but also disliking to fall in the eyes of his drinking mate by continuing to defend what was simply indefensible, declared: ‘You know, I simply hate them’. For too many, in the West, this is indeed visceral, a gut feeling that does not need to be justified by reasonable arguments. Especially, as Russia, like most great powers, has often indeed behaved like a great bully.

However, even for many reasonable and knowledgeable people in the West, especially in the United States, there is indeed a reason to be apprehensive about Russia, to fear it. Although this reason, in my opinion, is not as reasonable as they believe. Nevertheless, for those we want and hope that the American dominance in the world lasts if not forever, then at least continue into the foreseeable future, hostility towards Russia may be quite rational, though this is a rationality of those who have not learned the lessons of history. Notwithstanding its relative (and in the 1990s also absolute) decline, Russia is a country with great potential and militarily it is still the second most powerful state in the world, who in extreme circumstances may bring down, though obviously with the price of self-destruction, even the number one nation of the world. This is what international relations (IR) theorists call potential in geopolitics. Russia has a potential to counter, to counterbalance if need be or if corned. And if during the 1990s under President Yeltsin, and especially when at the head of the Foreign Ministry was Andrei Kozyrev, Russia practiced bandwagoning (i.e. followed the lead of Washington), now Russia having more independent and multi-vector foreign policy, i.e. Russia bases its foreign policy, like great powers do (though differently) on the protection and promotions of its own national interests, including security interests. It is understandable that such potential combined with such intentions is not to the liking of the United States. Therefore, being one of the obstacles for the continuation and enlargement in time and space of a unipolar world, Russia is indeed a danger for those who have world-wide hegemonic ambitions.

However, such a vision of the world, notwithstanding its short, or even medium-term, rationality, is irrational if we take a longer-term approach to historical processes. Firstly, no domination has been forever. The continuous acceleration of social processes means that old imperial dominations that lasted for centuries are all in the past. The balance of powers today changes much quicker than yesteryears. Moreover, earlier imperial overstretches took place in limited geographical spaces. There has never been a worldwide empire. Even the Brits had to leave the room for others and the Soviets and the Americans during the Cold War had their geographical division of labour. In today’s globalized world, Washington has zones of ‘vital interest’ practically all over the world. Trying to contain and push back Russia in Europe and facing China in the South China Sea while at the same time also being preoccupied with the turmoil and chaos in the Middle East and North Africa, may well shorten the pre-eminence of American power. Especially, as differently from Moscow or Beijing, Washington projects its power far from its mainland and one of the rules of the power projection is that the power, like sound, diminishes in strength and becomes costlier the further it projects itself. And though Washington tries more and more to rely on its allies (leading from behind) in faraway places, such allies are not always reliable and often propping them up may be prohibitively costly and even counterproductive.

And the problem is that Washington in its hubris does not stand and like real allies who may sometimes say ‘no’, as for example France and Germany, and also Russia, did in February 14 of 2003 when the UN Security Council discussed and had to decide whether to go to war against Iraq or not. For me, Dominique de Villepin’s memorable speech of that day was genuinely more pro-American than, say, a letter signed by the leaders of ten Eastern and Central European states in support of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq (later it became known that the letter was drafted in the State Department and sent to presidents and prime-ministers only for the signature [7]). Shortly before that I had attended a conference in the US Naval War College in Newport (RI) devoted to the same question. There Professor Adam Roberts of Oxford (now the President of the British Academy), cautioning against the invasion, implored: listen to those who wish you well. At the end of the day, Adam Robert’s stand on the issue was genuinely much more pro-American than Tony Blair’s blind support of President Bush for which he became known as ‘Blair’s poodle’.

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This phrase, attributed to Lord Acton, is true also in international relations. Concentration of power is dangerous also for those who concentrate it in their hands. Democracies, including the United States, have found in their domestic political arrangements an antidote for the corruption of power (though not always effective enough) first of all in the principle of separation of powers. Power should not be concentrated in one center. In international relations such a role can be and has historically been played by the often vilified phenomenon called the balance of powers. Balance of powers has been also a basis, I would even say, the condition sine qua non (necessary condition) for the very existence of international law, in contradistinction to the utopian projects of a world law. The Eastern Partnership, to an extent and in the forms that it is meant to contain Russia, is counterproductive for all, especially for the partner-countries. It is obvious that Moscow does everything to fail policies that go against its vital interests, as the Russian leadership and political elites see and define them, notwithstanding what Western politicians or experts say about Russia’s genuine interests. Russia is a big and powerful country and it pays as much (or as little) attention to the views of such experts as the White House pays attention to my views or even to those of Adam Roberts, though American hubris still greatly exceeds the Russian one.

International law, especially in its most sensitive and politically loaded areas, doesn't work well in a world with unipolar tendencies since in such a world international law (a result of barging and compromises) and its interpretation is dictated from a unipolar center. Until the beginning of the 1990s international law had evolved as a balance of power normative system, though the bipolar system was not the best of the balance of power systems and neither the best environment for international law.

The following unipolar moment led also to the attempts to transform the existing law into a unipolar normative system controlled from the single center where there shouldn’t be any room for counter-balancing. For a while, it seemed that international law may indeed evolve in that direction. However, starting from the beginning of the twenty first century not only ‘usual suspects’ in the Western eyes – China and Russia, but other emerging powers started counter-balancing and multipolar elements in the system began to emerge. The normative effect of these developments has been that while in most sensitive areas the existing norms have become undermined, new ones couldn’t crystallize. Hence, today we live in the atmosphere of increased normative uncertainty.

The world is not, if it ever will be (I doubt), ready for such an international system and consequently also for a world law. The world is simply too big, complex and diverse for that. Its rich tapestry cannot be flattened into a carpet where only one pattern, be it of a Judeo-Christian, Anglo-Saxon, Confucian, Muslim or even secular liberal-democratic pattern dominates. Therefore, the international law of coexistence, with its principles of non-use of force and non-interference in internal affairs, has to cautiously tame the Hobbesian world, helping it to move closer to a Lockean (or maybe Confucian, who knows) one.

As to the future of the eastern partnership, I like the more unifying, less confrontational and mush more visionary approach indicated by Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of the Russia in Global Affairs, who writes of partnership extending from the West of Europe through the current Eastern Partnership countries and Russia to China. Beijing’s idea of the new Silk Road, instead of economically pointless struggle over the post-Soviet periphery between the European Union and Russia, should become the real eastern partnership. [8]

1 M. Dal Santo, ‘Where America, the EU and Russia All Compete for Influence’, The National Interest, 26 May, 2015.
2 R. Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis In the Borderlands, I. B. Taurus, 2015, loc. 808.
3 Ibid.
4 See, e.g., Mehdi Hasan’s Head to Head on Al Jazeera with the former NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen ‘NATO: Guardian for peace or bellicose bully?’ of 16 April 2015.
5 The Rising Importance of Europe's Eastern Partnership, Stratfor, 26 May, 2015.
6 G. Mettan, Russie-Occident – Une Guerre de Mille Ans : La Russophobie de Charlemagne à la Crise Ukrainienne, Editions des Syrtes, 2015, p. 20.
7 See, e.g. an article by the Estonian journalist and diplomat Harri Tiido (former Ambassador to NATO and Afghanistan) in Postimees 22 March 2013 ’The letter where Estonia supported the war in Iraq was written in Washington’.
8 F. Lukyanov, ‘The Real Eastern Partnership’, Russia in Global Affairs, 22 May 2015 (in Russian).

Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.