Apart from all their summits on the recession and financial crisis, European Union leaders are planning to get together in Prague on May 7 to launch something called the “Eastern Partnership”. This is an initiative designed to draw six post-Soviet states – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – closer to the EU, without holding out an explicit promise of membership at some future date.
Let’s hope that fate treats the Eastern Partnership more kindly than it has done the EU’s Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), a similar initiative for the bloc’s southern neighbours. This project, the brainchild of French President NIcolas Sarkozy, was launched in Paris to great fanfare in July. Then it nose-dived in January when the Gaza war broke out.
Libya, never an enthusiastic supporter of the UfM in the first place, said scathingly that the project was “a motionless corpse” and “the time-wasting, play-acting and ridiculous spectacles must end”. Of course, Libya doesn’t speak for everyone in north Africa and the Middle East. But there can be no doubt that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a curse on the UfM.
As for the Eastern Partnership, it seems another example of how the EU often has its heart in the right place, while lacking the power, conceptual vision and unity of purpose to do what it aspires to do. If the partnership had been in place a year ago, it wouldn’t have done much to affect the course of last August’s Russian-Georgian war, or January’s Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis, or Ukraine’s present economic meltdown.
All six states covered by the Eastern Partnership exist in the shadow of Russia, some more comfortably than others. The EU’s offer of free trade deals, visa facilitation arrangements and seminars to improve understanding of EU laws simply does not match the military, political and economic influence that Russia can wield in the region. After all, one of the favoured six – Georgia – was in effect partitioned by Russia a mere six months ago, in spite of all the EU’s protests, after Moscow’s recognition of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
That doesn’t mean the EU should remain inactive. But the Eastern Partnership’s credibility isn’t helped by the open secret that Poland and Sweden proposed the initiative last year largely to counter-balance Sarkozy’s UfM.
However, perhaps the most glaring weakness of the UfM and the Eastern Partnership is that the EU, at the insistence of its budget-conscious governments, is committing only limited funds to both projects. This hasn’t gone unnoticed in the places where it matters. “They have one common problem – they don’t have dedicated finances and support. Whatever isn’t supported by a line in the budget usually doesn’t fly very high,” one interested observer said serenely last week.
Who was he? Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s ambassador to the EU in Brussels.
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