PUTIN’S GRAND DESIGN TO DESTROY THE EU’S EASTERN PARTNERSHIP AND REPLACE IT WITH A DISASTROUS NEIGHBOURHOOD POLICY OF HIS OWN
12:05, September 18, 2013
Michael Emerson and Hrant Kostanyan
17 September 2013
In a surprising volte face at his meeting in Moscow with President
Putin on September 3rd, President Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia agreed to
join the Russian-dominated customs union with Kazakhstan and Belarus.
Thus, in one short meeting, he scrapped the draft Association Agreement
with the EU, which included a ‘Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade
Agreement’ (DCFTA), whose negotiation over the past three years had
advanced to the point that its initialling was firmly scheduled for
the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius in November. And, at the
same time, the Armenian President chose to deprive his country of the
possibility to enter into free trade area agreements with other states,
which any economy is free to do unless it is part of a customs union,
in which case it becomes bound to a common external tariff.
This latter deprivation is particularly serious in Armenia’s case,
since Russia’s external tariff is on average rather highly protective.
In the process, Sargsyan has also precluded Armenia from pursuing
the only plausible strategy to become an open, highly-skilled, small
economy, following for example the model of Israel, with which it
shares several features in common. More broadly, it is worth noting
that most of the world’s top-ten economies by GDP per capita, from
Luxembourg to Singapore, are small but completely open countries. The
economic case against joining the Russian customs union is all the
greater because nothing in the DCFTA with the EU would have prevented
Armenia from entering into a ‘high-quality’, free trade agreement1
with the Russian-led customs union.
Armenia is already party to the matrix of CIS free trade agreements,
but many of these do not function well. Rather than join the Belarus,
Kazakhstan and Russia customs union, why should Armenia not simply
negotiate a high-quality free trade agreement with it? President
Sargsyan has offered two main explanations for his baffling behaviour:
Armenia depends on Russia to guarantee its security and its large
diaspora in Russia make it natural for the two countries to have a
close economic relationship. One might challenge the first explanation
by noting that no other collective security arrangement, e.g. NATO,
requires its member states to join a customs union led by the
principal nation.
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Michael Emerson is Associate Senior Research Fellow at CEPS. Hrant
Kostanyan is an Associate Research Fellow at CEPS and a BOF (Special
Research Fund) Research Fellow at the Centre for EU Studies (CEUS)
in the Department of Political Science at Ghent University.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
