nguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=321&N rSection=4&NrArticle580&ST1=ad&ST_T1=j ob&ST_AS1=1&ST2=body&ST_T2=letter& ST_AS2=1&ST3=text&ST_T3=aatol&ST_AS3=1 &ST_max=3
Hard to Love, Impossible to Ignore
by Lubos Palata
15 May 2009
Weighed down with provisos and limitations, a coalition of the EU’s
eastern neighbors just barely gets off the ground.
PRAGUE | The sea water that washes up on the shores of Baku is not the
cleanest. The globs of oil on the surface of the Caspian Sea serve as
an unmistakable sign that the drilling rigs on the horizon are still
working. But even as the sea is suffering due to this re-discovery of
oil wealth, the city of Baku on the coast is changing at an incredible
pace, transforming itself from a post-Soviet metropolis into a
Western-style capital.
Iran is just a couple of dozen kilometers away, and the city’s
population consists almost entirely of Muslims and a Russian minority
(following the expulsion and flight of the Armenians who used to live
here). However, you will not find any women wearing burkhas or hijab,
the mosques are hidden in the middle of housing developments, and beer
is sold everywhere (and tastes at least as good if not better than
what you could get in Poland or Ukraine).
Even the summer residence of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliev is not
an Asian-style domicile. Although the 10-meter crystal chandelier in
the middle of the entrance hallway looks grandiose, the edifice is
otherwise a proportionately elegant residence and there is very little
to criticize in terms of architectural design. And so, despite the
fact that this city is on the same longitude as Tehran and Basra, you
get the feeling that this place, on the banks of the Caspian Sea, is
still part of Europe.
The enthusiasm over Baku, however, tends to get dampened by voices
such as that of one participant in a recent seminar on the region for
journalists held at the Thalia Hotel in Prague: `Why does everyone
always talk about (Belarusian President) Alyaksandr Lukashenka and
call him the last dictator in Europe, and no one ever talks about
Ilham Aliev, about his falsified election, or about that fact that
journalists are imprisoned in Azerbaijan?’
Aliev
Jiri Schneider of the Prague Institute for Security Studies offers a
fair response, saying, `The reason Lukashenka is seen as a dictator
and Aliev is not is oil. If oil were discovered in Belarus, Lukashenka
would be in good favor with the West just like Aliev.’
The seminar for journalists was just one of the events planned for
what was conceived as a grand summit in Prague on 6 May to launch the
European Union’s Eastern Partnership. The summit was supposed to have
been the high point of the Czech Republic’s six-month presidency of
the EU.
All of that changed when Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek’s government
failed to survive a vote of confidence at the end of March, after
euroskeptic President Vaclav Klaus and the jealous opposition refused
to allow it to stay in power until the end of the country’s EU
presidency in June. Topolanek managed to hold on just long enough to
chair the Eastern Partnership summit. He was removed from power only
hours afterward when Klaus named a new caretaker cabinet headed by Jan
Fischer, the chairman of the Czech Statistical Office.
The political capital that Topolanek had built up for himself at the
head of the EU was seriously damaged by the collapse of his
government. Fischer, however, has no political capital to speak of in
terms of the EU, thanks to his position as a nonpartisan prime
minister at the head of a caretaker cabinet that has the sole purpose
of shepherding the country to elections expected in October. In that
sense, Fischer had little authority with which to lead the summit. The
same goes for Klaus, who, as an unrepentant opponent of the Lisbon
Agreement, is completely isolated in the EU.
While the Eastern Partnership was conceived by the Poles and Swedes
rather than the Czechs, the government in Prague quickly adopted the
project as its own, as did the EU’s other new members. There is a
certain logic to that – all the new members from the post-communist
region, except the Czech Republic, share borders with the eastern
countries included in the partnership. And if the EU will not be
enlarging farther eastward over the next few years (since such a move
is being blocked both by large member states such as France and Italy,
as well as by the fact that the institutional reforms symbolized by
the Lisbon Agreement have not been completed), then the EU’s
easternmost members would like at least to have a stable region along
their eastern borders.
LOOKING SOUTH, LOOKING EAST
Polish and Czech diplomats agree that, had the EU’s Mediterranean
Union project not been launched last summer by French President
Nicolas Sarkozy at a summit in Paris, the Eastern Partnership most
likely would never have seen the light of day. The Mediterranean Union
gave the supporters of an eastern dimension for the EU many arguments
in favor of their vision. Just as there are millions of Tunisian,
Algerian, Moroccan, Syrian, and Lebanese people living and working in
France, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians live in Poland and the
Czech Republic, hundreds of thousands of Moldovans have Romanian
passports, and a visitor to Krakow will find more Georgian restaurants
than McDonald’s or KFC outlets. And just as many people in the
Mediterranean region can communicate in French, the people of the new
EU members can still communicate with one another in Russian.
In that sense, of course, the question arises as to why Russia is not
a participant in the Eastern Partnership. Russia has its own agreement
with the EU known as the `strategic partnership.’ Until the
establishment of the Eastern Partnership, Russia was considered to be
the privileged partner of the post-Soviet world (and in the eyes of a
large number of EU members, particularly the `old’ members, it still
is). Today, Moscow’s dominant position, which is based on Russia’s
importance to the EU as a commercial partner and energy exporter, has
been undermined by the Eastern Partnership.
Naturally, Russia has been aware of this from the beginning and it has
tried to prevent the creation of an EU partnership involving the
countries that lie between it and the EU. These efforts by Russian
diplomats were stymied by their country’s invasion of Georgia last
year and the subsequent occupation and annexation of the breakaway
regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This was a rude awakening for
the EU, particularly for its `pro-Russian’ member states, France and
Germany. A sobering-up followed as it became evident that Russia was
not going to fulfill the peace agreements concluded under the
patronage of the EU and had instead basically added Abkhazia and South
Ossetia to its own territory, stationed an extensive military force in
both territories, and continued in its efforts to undermine Georgia
and subvert Tbilisi’s pro-Western president, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Such policies have robbed Moscow of any moral right to have a say in
the creation of the Eastern Partnership. The EU’s chief external
affairs representative, Javier Solana, simply told Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov that the `project is not aimed against Russia.’
In any case, Russia actually turned out to be less of a problem for
the project than its expected participants from among the `European’
countries of the post-Soviet region. These countries are, to a great
extent, economically weak, unstable, and not really democratic. In
many cases, they have border disputes with one another or other
countries, marked occasionally by fragile cease-fires or even full-on
states of war.
If we leave out Georgia and its problems with Russia, we can look at
Armenia and Azerbaijan. Since its military victory over Azerbaijan in
the early 1990s, Armenia has occupied about one-quarter of its
neighbor’s territory.
We can move on to examine Moldova, where for 20 years the breakaway
Republic of Transnistria has existed on the eastern edge of the
country with the financial support of Russia and under the control of
former Soviet generals and KGB officers who are mostly ethnically
Russian.
Ukraine is not affected by such problems for the moment, but most
observers agree that they could arise at any time on the country’s
Crimean peninsula, where Russia’s Black Sea fleet is stationed and
where Russia has been distributing passports to the ethnic Russian
population, just as it has done in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
The situation is just as problematic when it comes to democracy and
human rights. Most of the countries in the Eastern Partnership could
be viewed as, at best, partial or illiberal democracies, with the
possible exceptions of Ukraine and Georgia after their `color
revolutions.’
Lukashenka
The EU’s attention was, somewhat unfairly, focused on `last dictator’
Lukashenka and on whether to invite him to the foundational summit of
the partnership in May. While Lukashenka did make some conciliatory
gestures by releasing some of the opposition activists he held as
political prisoners, his regime continued to violate basic human
rights in many ways. Nevertheless, he did receive an invitation to
attend the summit in Prague, although Czech diplomats continued to
insist that it was an invitation for Belarus rather than for
Lukahenska. In the end, though, Lukashenka did not come to Prague, an
outcome that was agreed to in advance, according to diplomatic
sources.
Another no-show at the Prague summit was Moldovan President Vladimir
Voronin, who a few weeks before the meeting had cracked down on
opposition demonstrators in Chisinau following what were likely
manipulated parliamentary elections. Nor did Ukrainian Prime Minister
Yulia Tymoshenko show up, due to her protracted dispute with President
Viktor Yushchenko.
Two relatively controversial leaders did, however, show up. While
Lukashenka’s potential participation was the subject of many debates,
no one questioned the participation of Armenian President Serzh
Sargsyan, who was responsible for a violent crackdown on opposition
demonstrations last year, or Azerbaijan’s Aliev, who staged a
referendum essentially to confirm a lifetime term as president.
`Yes it’s a crisis region. Of course, we could wait for the ideal
situation, but that might never happen,’ said Hungarian Foreign
Minister Peter Balazs, whose country was also a big supporter of the
partnership.
`Only with a firm political will and commitment on both sides will the
Eastern Partnership attain its goals, which are political association
and economic integration. More investment into mutual stability and
prosperity is needed. This will bring quick returns in the form of
political and economic advantages and it will lead to greater
stability and security for both the EU and our eastern partners,’ said
European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso in a statement five
months before the summit.
There is one more argument. `How much worse are the Northern African
regimes, where elections amount to just playing at democracy, than the
Caucasus or Moldova? In what way is the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh,
an enclave wholly within Azerbaijan but occupied by ethnic Armenians,
worse than that between Israel and Syria?’ asked one Czech diplomat,
comparing the countries of the Mediterranean Union to those of the
Eastern Partnership.
TRUNCATED SUMMIT
The fact remains that while Sarkozy’s summit in Paris last year did
not feature the complete EU, this year’s Prague summit was attended by
only a fraction of the key EU members, and some countries did attend
in a less than dignified manner. Sarkozy did not show up, nor did
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi or Spanish Prime Minister
Jose Luis Zapatero. That was to be expected. The Czech organizers were
most irked by the absence of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown,
since London was viewed as a key ally of the new members in terms of
the eastern strategy.
An entirely scandalous approach was taken by Austria, whose
chancellor, Werner Faymann, excused himself from the meeting because
of a cold, and the country was represented at the ambassadorial level.
`It’s sad that they didn’t understand the importance of this project,’
said Aleksandr Vondra, former deputy prime minister for European
Affairs in Topolanek’s government.
Czech commentators attributed the poor attendance at the summit to the
Czech government crisis. Other EU events held in the Czech Republic
since the collapse of the Topolanek government have also been skipped
by the important EU leaders. But the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza
recently offered a more rational explanation. The newspaper argued
that the `fashionable fascination with the East is coming to an end’
and that the recognition that the EU should be engaged with the East
following the Georgian war was a `temporary affair.’
The main result of the summit, then, is that it even took place and
that the Eastern Partnership program, for which 600 million euros were
found in the Brussels budget, got off to a start. Nevertheless, the
concluding declaration -which contained words about common values and
support for those values but which also, at the insistence of the
`old’ EU members, did not contain even the faintest hint that the
countries to the east might one day become EU members or that travel
visas would be lifted – is more of a disappointment. That is, it is
more of a disappointment for the supporters of the Eastern Partnership
within the EU. `The Georgians, for instance, take a pragmatic view of
the whole thing. The program has been launched, the money allotted,
and it’s a great opportunity, mainly for the nonprofit sector and
pro-democracy activists – an opportunity that might be the last one
for a long time,’ added one highly placed Czech diplomat.
Lubos Palata is a journalist for the Czech daily Lidove noviny.
Translated by Victor Gomez.