EU TEAMS UP WITH EX-COMMUNIST STATES
By Tony Barber in Prague
FT
May 8 2009 10:04
A European Union initiative to establish closer relations with six
ex-Soviet states was overshadowed on Thursday by the absence of many
leaders from the summit that launched the project.
Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s
prime minister, José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero, Spain’s premier,
and Gordon Brown, the UK prime minister, each stayed away from the
Prague summit, as did Alexander Lukashenko and Vladimir Voronin,
presidents of Belarus and Moldova respectively.
A senior Georgian official warmly welcomed the initiative, saying it
offered the six states the prospect of association agreements with the
EU, free trade accords, easier visa requirements for their citizens
and close political co-operation.
"This project has great potential to bring the countries in the region
closer to Europe," Eka Tkeshelashvili, secretary of Georgia’s national
security council, told the Financial Times. "It will bring Georgia
home to the family where we see ourselves as belonging."
She said the Eastern Partnership was "wisely designed" because, instead
of treating all six countries as a bloc, it accepted that each state
was likely to develop its relationship with the EU at its own pace.
Nevertheless, the absence of some of the EU’s most important national
lead ers from Prague highlighted a potential weakness of the project,
which was conceived in 2007 by Poland and Sweden partly in response
to a French-led initiative for the EU’s southern neighbours known as
the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM).
Whereas France and other EU states with a Mediterranean shoreline have
been most involved in the UfM, the Eastern Partnership is of interest
mainly to the ex-communist EU countries of central and eastern Europe,
together with Finland, Sweden and to some extent Germany. The 27-nation
EU as a whole appears not fully engaged in either project.
Moreover, the German government, backed by other western European
states, is wary of making promises about visa-free travel to the EU
for citizens of the six ex-Soviet states, a reservation made clear
in a draft version of the Prague summit’s final communiqué.
The draft statement, obtained by the FT, spoke of "gradual steps
towards full visa liberalisation as a long-term goal for individual
partner countries on a case-by-case basis, provided that conditions
for well-managed and secure mobility are in place".
The statement also described the ex-Soviet states as "eastern
European", a statement that some western European government
officials regard as stretching a geographical point in the case of
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, but which nevertheless represented
a concession by the Czech hosts, who wanted the plain adje ctive
"European" applied to the six.
Russia, meanwhile, has warned the EU not to use the Eastern Partnership
as an instrument for encroaching into what it regards as Moscow’s
natural "sphere of influence".
But diplomats said the Kremlin would view the involvement in the
region of Nato, the western military alliance which began military
exercises in Georgia this week, as a far more serious matter than
the Eastern Partnership.
Moreover, Russia understood that the EU’s new initiative might
involve more talk than action, they said. Georgia’s president Mikheil
Saakashvili on Tuesday accused Russia of backing an attempted coup
against his government in a bid to mar the Partnership meeting,
while his defence minister said it was timed to coincide with the
launch in Georgia of Nato military exercises.