The summer of eastern Europe’s discontent

The EU needs to better marshal its soft power in the eastern neighbourhood


This piece was first published in the Wall Street Journal Europe on 14 July 2009. 

Crisis in Eastern Europe has disrupted the
last three holiday seasons. War in Georgia in August 2008 caught most
European diplomats on the beaches. The gas crisis in Ukraine came during a very cold New
Year. And the Moldovan parliament burned during Easter. The EU should be
gearing up for another eventful summer.

New elections are due in Moldova
on July 29, after the deadlocked parliament twice failed to elect a new
president. Another gas row between Ukraine
and Russia could erupt in
July or August, as Gazprom struggles for revenue to boost its plummeting
cash-flow and Ukraine
struggles to pay.

Amid this flurry of activity, the EU is taking its ability to influence
events in Eastern Europe for granted. That’s a
mistake. The EU expansions in 2004 and 2007 have actually managed to push the
farther Eastern region further away. On a practical level, for instance, visas
are now needed to travel from the region to new EU members like Poland or Hungary.

EU expansion has also created less tangible problems for the EU. People in
corrupt and divided Ukraine,
which sees the offer of EU membership recede over the horizon, ask how their
country is so different from corrupt and divided Romania, which has been welcomed
into the EU fold. Recent polls in Ukraine,
the “linchpin” state in the region, show 42% of the population in
favor of integration with Russia,
as opposed to 34% with the EU. The local states are weak and are either unable
or unwilling to adopt the EU’s massive rule-book, which is necessary even to be
considered for EU membership. Only in tiny Moldova is opinion solidly in favor
of the EU.

The picture is not all bad. The practical benefits of the common market are
pulling new member states closer to the West economically. As for the
nonmembers in the region, five of the six — Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia
and Azerbaijan — now trade more with the EU than they do with Russia; Belarus,
the sixth, is the exception. But the EU is failing to transform its economic
role into political influence. Russia
marshals its resources more carefully, and has learned the power of incentives.
It has offered neighborhood states concrete benefits, such as open labor
markets, cheap energy and hard cash (loans and trade concessions) during the
present economic crisis. As the war in Georgia
showed, Russia
also uses hard power — not just with military force, but also with economic
coercion. Russia
has now had trade conflicts with all its neighbors, each one coinciding with a
political row.

The EU isn’t keeping pace with Russia in this regard. It doesn’t
really do hard power. Its occasional use of smart sanctions — travel bans and
asset freezes against the leadership of Belarus over faked elections and the
rebel “Transnistrian Republic” in Moldova — have not borne much
fruit. Its soft power is also too often ineffective, particularly on the
people-to-people level. Its restrictive visa policy means that the fragile
middle class of the eastern neighborhood is excluded from the European
mainstream. Education exchanges are minimal, and the EU has no real mass media
presence in Eastern European markets that are increasingly monopolized by
Russian media and increasingly centralized local governments.

The inability of the EU to transform the region, and the tendency of weak
states to play Russia
against the West, make the problems so frequent. The crises are not only
serious, but multiple and reinforcing. Some result from weak statehood, such as
lack of territorial control and state capture by corrupt special interests.
Some stem from Russia’s
attempts to build a sphere of influence (Russia seeks to control the gas
energy infrastructure and maintains a military presence in all six states).
These problems were exacerbated by the economic crisis, which hit the region
particularly hard.

The EU’s policy toward the region should not be based on the remote prospect
of accession, nor on “enlargement-lite” policies that are effectively
trying to export the EU’s rulebook and promote EU interests without offering
accession or substantial financial assistance in exchange. Instead, the EU
should develop country-specific solidarity strategies to deal with underlying
weaknesses, such as building on the March 2009 agreement with Ukraine to
upgrade its gas pipeline system. Visa regimes for citizens of the neighborhood
countries urgently need to be liberalized to boost the EU’s waning soft power
and promote travel for bona fide citizens of the neighborhood countries back
and forth from the EU, rather than the current de facto reality of permanent
illegal migration.

The EU also needs to start putting Eastern Europe
back on the diplomatic map. The “Eastern Partnership” launched in May
is a good start. It aims to re-energize EU policy in the East by offering the
region a new set of association agreements, discussion on visa-facilitation,
and regular summits. But it started in exactly the wrong way, when Angela
Merkel was the only leader from the big EU states to attend the Prague summit. What is
needed is an “EU listening tour” of the region, in which leaders from
EU states start taking into account the political and security concerns of the
region and incorporate them in the emerging discussion between the U.S.,
Russia, and the EU on the new European security architecture. These discussions
currently exclude the neighborhood countries.

While the region is beset by short-term crises, the EU’s policies are too
long-term. As the U.S. is
discovering with its Mexican and Caribbean
backyards, problems of poverty, corruption and weak statehood do not stop at
the border. The EU is understandably preoccupied with its own internal
problems, but these will only get worse if the EU is surrounded by a collapsing
neighborhood.

Messrs. Wilson and Popescu are policy fellows at the European
Council on Foreign Relations where they co-authored the recent report:
“The Limits of Enlargement-lite: European and Russian Power in the
Troubled Neighbourhood.”

 

 

The European Council on Foreign Relations does not take collective positions. ECFR publications only represent the views of their individual authors.

Authors

ECFR Alumni · Director, Wider Europe programme
Senior Policy Fellow

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