EU PREPARES TO LAUNCH A LOW-FLYING EASTERN PARTNERSHIP
FT
February 17, 2009 11:03am
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,
conceptua l 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 don0t 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.