PUTTING SALT ON THE ICE
by TOL
Transitions Online, Czech Republic
Oct 10 2005
Now that the era of grand hopes for the West’s relationship with
Russia is over, it is time to turn attention on Russia’s role in
Kosovo and frozen post-Soviet conflicts.
For all the grandiloquent phrases of Britain’s Tony Blair and the
grand but wooden words of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, there was an
inescapable sense of hollowness about the Russia-EU summit on 4
October. That hollowness is understandable, because at the heart of
Russia’s relationship with the West there may now be a real void.
Many of the key issues of recent years have been put to the test
and answers found – about Putin’s commitment to democracy, Russia’s
position in the war on terror, the limits of his relationship with the
West, his foreign-policy orientation, and the Kremlin’s relationship
with Big Business. If there is a hidden democrat in Putin, it is clear
he will not appear in a Russian president’s normal two terms; Putin’s
post-9/11 embrace of the West was soon chilled by anti-Americanism
at home and, now, by the fear of “color revolutions”; Russia’s
“war on terror” ends on the borders of Iraq and Iran; Russia is now
re-exploring its potential as a Eurasian power; and the Yukos affair
and its aftermath suggest the commanding heights of the economy
are being renationalized. There seems little chance of change or
rapprochement on these fronts.
There may be more chance of the relationship worsening. Moscow’s
particular bete noire now is democracy promotion, but, like many
betes noires, its importance may be more psychological than real.
International solidarity and support is undoubtedly vitally important
symbolically to democratic groups, and any practical help goes a long
way for opposition movements with few means of fighting a regime such
as that of Belarus’ Alyaksandr Lukashenka. But the West’s capacity
to bring about change is exaggerated. For one, the West is still
struggling towards a policy on Belarus, let alone Russia. And,
more importantly, Washington, Brussels, and Moscow may test their
influence in Belarus, the answer will be the same as in Ukraine:
changes in Belarus will come about primarily thanks to Belarusians’
efforts rather than to Western advice on how to detect election fraud
or to Russian attempts to find a replacement for Lukashenka. The
same applies in Russia: the West can invest in promoting democracy in
Russia, but cannot prompt change. In such circumstances, the primary
service that such clashes over democracy promotion may perhaps serve
in the near future is to highlight the Russian elite’s own relationship
to democracy.
On other issues, many of them practical, the questions are now
largely about delivery. The map of oil and gas pipelines is filling
up; in some places (such as the Caspian and Black seas), there are
competing pipelines, and in others direct pipelines between the West
and Russia (such as the planned pipe between Germany and Russia and
Russia’s and Turkey’s trans-Black Sea gas pipeline). In other words,
the West’s relationship with Russia is, understandably, ambiguous. As
for Russia’s drive for membership of the World Trade Organization
(WTO), the United States and Europe have already indicated that they
support Russia’s bid; it is now up to Russia to complete the job.
Distraction may also account for some of the hollowness at the
summit. Domestic politics is forcing itself to the top of the
agenda for many of the key leaders of this relationship. Putin’s
administration has a plateful of reforms. The half-acknowledged death
of the European Constitution leaves the EU with its own concerns.
Bush’s second term is caught in the mud and much of Blair’s third
term may be spent in search of successes at home. Germany’s Gerhard
Schroeder seems definitively on his way out; his replacement will have
a weaker hand than once expected. And, meanwhile, France’s Jacques
Chirac seems laid out by illness, partly his own but mainly France’s.
With some of the key limits of possible relationships with Russia
now clearer and with so much to do at home, Western leaders may
let the relationship with Russia drift for a while. But drift would
be dangerous, partly because, grand hopes dashed, the relationship
may simply follow the path of least resistance to simple matters of
mutual convenience – and partly because relations with Russia affect
many smaller, but still important issues.
In a sense, the West and Russia need some new issues on which to
focus. Now that the age of grand hopes seems over, it may be time
for some nitty-gritty work to remove unnecessary grit from the
relationship. Obvious bits of grit include the “frozen conflicts”
dotted around the Black Sea – in Transdniester, South Ossetia,
Abkhazia, and Nagorno-Karabakh – but also Russia’s role in the
Contact Group that will lead discussions about the final status of
Kosovo. (Chechnya too should be on the agenda, but the challenge
there is to make sure it becomes grit in the relationship; with the
West’s leaders gradually being replaced, there just may be a chance
of making Chechnya the type of problem that it should be for the West.)
WHAT TO DO ABOUT KARABAKH?
In Transdniester and Georgia’s breakaway republics, the real issue
is, as we have argued before, to tell Russia that the miserable bit
of local leverage it gets from manipulating these frozen conflicts
is far less than the wider respect and authority that it forfeits by
doing so. There has been some movement by Russia – Moscow is pulling
out troops from Georgia’s undisputed territory – and there has been
some movement by others, with Ukraine, for instance, tightening up
its borders with Transdniester. These will tidy up some of the mess
around these conflicts, but in all instances there has been little
movement on the key issues: the final status of these regions. The
challenge remains the same – to show Russia that it gains little and
loses more by continuing to put sand in the oil.
In Kosovo, the situation is a variation on the same theme. When talks
on the province’s final status begin, the current evidence suggests
Russia may quite possibly lock itself into a pro-Serbian position,
a danger made all the greater by the historical baggage of the war
in Kosovo and the great powers’ role then as protectors of local
actors, with the United States siding with the Kosovo Albanians and
the Russians playing the role of a Serbian advocate (albeit somewhat
erratic since both Russia’s then president, Boris Yeltsin, and foreign
minister, Igor Ivanov, despised Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic). But
if Moscow re-runs old battles and complicates any emerging solution,
it will lose some of the respect it could earn by helping to broker
a deal.
Those are tractable problems; Karabakh may be less tractable, even
though a deal was almost struck in 2001. Pogroms against Armenians
in Azerbaijan, then a war over disputed territory and the occupation
of undisputed Azeri territory to link Karabakh to Armenia, and the
displacement of huge numbers of refugees, particularly Azeris: all
this makes Karabakh something like the Palestine of the South Caucasus.
Here, there is perhaps little that Russia can do to make peace. But
there may now be more opportunity for the West and Russia, already
partners in the Minsk Group that is trying to mediate an agreement
(the West represented by the United States and France), to work
together to try to turn the Karabakh debate into what it really is:
a bilateral issue.
For that to happen, Turkey needs to change its position.
Unfortunately, Turkey has hardwired itself into the problem by,
in effect, allowing Baku to dictate its foreign policy: when, for
instance, there seemed a possibility last year that Turkey might make
moves to ease, possibly even lift its blockade on Armenia, Baku put
its foot down. Ankara stepped back; the blockade remains in place.
The latest talks in August produced no significant movement. On
the ground, tensions are if anything increasing, with the number of
breaches of the ceasefire rising for several years. With elections
in Azerbaijan just a month away, the rhetoric is fiery.
It is hard to say how much Turkey’s Siamese-twin approach to Karabakh
is complicating the effort to achieve what must be the international
community’s two key goals: to prevent the frozen conflict from thawing
into open war, and to find a long-term solution. But there is certainly
no obvious way in which it is helping. Armenia (population: three
million), already instinctively hostile to Turkey because of the 1915
massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and a follower of the
“iron ladle” principle (that you can never win the respect of other
nations without fighting for freedom), is unlikely to concede much
if it feels that Azerbaijan (eight million) will make no concessions
because it can wholly rely on the support of Turkey (70 million).
As Armenia’s greatest supporter, Russia is itself not a neutral player,
of course. But its position and policies are less constrained than
Turkey’s. The West’s and Russia’s aim should not be the impossible –
to make Ankara adopt an independent position – but to try to make it
more independent.
And Russia, like the West, does have growing influence over Turkey.
With the possibility of EU accession now a real prospect, Turkey now
has more to gain from listening to the EU’s requests that it normalize
its relationship with Armenia. It also has less to lose by making its
relationship with Azerbaijan more flexible: thanks to an energy-based
relationship with Russia that has blossomed in the past few years,
Turkey now has more alternatives to the current and expected inflow
of Azeri gas and oil. It may even be willing to listen to Russia more
(in July Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, told the world
after meeting Putin that “our views totally coincide with regard to
the situation in the region as well as to the issues concerning the
preservation of stability in the world”). It also seems to see the
value in a more stable Black Sea, since it is apparently interested
in a role in resolving the conflict in Abkhazia.
It would be hard for Turkey to distance itself from the Karabakh issue,
as that implies some distance from Baku. But Ankara now seems trapped
by Baku in a zero-sum game that does little, if anything to forward
Turkey’s own interests.
To argue for more flexibility is not to accept Armenia’s position
on Karabakh: the principles involved in discussions are complicated,
much more so than in discussions about the final status of Kosovo. To
argue for a change in Turkey’s position is not to expect Turkey to
make major changes: a country that will on 16 December put on trial a
potential Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk, for suggesting that Turkey
did commit genocide against Armenians in 1915 is unlikely to normalize
relations with Armenia swiftly or easily.
To argue for more flexibility is simply to say that Azerbaijan’s
and Armenia’s relationship may be frozen, but the politics of the
world around cannot be allowed to freeze. What effect any movement
by Turkey might have is unpredictable, but it seems reasonable to
predict it would not increase the danger of war, the bare-minimum
goal for the international community.
Asking Russia to exert pressure on Turkey would, in effect, be asking
Russia to tell Turkey what the West should be telling Russia about
Transdniester, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia: that it gains little and
loses significantly by keeping to its current policy. It would also
be asking Turkey to do something that Russia may itself do in talks
over Kosovo – automatically take the same line as historical friends.
That makes it less likely that Russia will use its growing influence
over Turkey. Expecting significant shifts in the ice on any of these
issues would be overly optimistic. But now is as good a time as any to
test the ice. Better, certainly, than letting a key relationship drift.