Can the Eastern Partnership Work?

Introduction

Eastern Europe is one part of the world where the EU's values and interests rarely collide. It is in the EU's interest to transform the region into a zone of prosperity and democracy because it will give EU Member States more opportunities to trade (and prosper) and reduce the chance of conflict. The best way of securing its interests lies in exporting its values–-democracy and a market economy–-eastwards. The EU does this primarily by building and deepening business links, creating new trading opportunities and assisting with political reforms. Its main vehicle for encouraging change in the former Soviet republics is the Eastern Partnership, which includes Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

Thus far, things have not worked to the EU's liking: Eastern Europe is not flourishing, and parts of it may be sliding back towards authoritarianism. The reason is not that the EU has got the balance of values and interests wrong. Eastern Europe languishes partly because of failures in the execution of EU policies and, far more importantly, because Eastern Europe shows too little interest in the values that the EU offers. This article looks into the nature of this failure and suggests ways to strengthen the EU's leverage.

EU's interests and values: one and the same

To promote its values and interests in its Eastern neighbourhood, the EU has used a panoply of instruments, starting from political engagement and financial support for those states willing to align their norms and standards with those of the EU and ending with sanctions, visa bans and asset freezes on countries that ignore basic values, such as Belarus. Often the EU is accused of applying double standards in the region: it has ostracised Minsk, but responded to similarly grave human rights violations in Azerbaijan with a slap on the wrist (Azerbaijan holds more political prisoners than Belarus, yet has seen no EU sanctions). Voices from the region have been increasingly calling on the EU to drop the talk of values and focus solely on its interests: to forget about full political liberalisation and focus on trading with countries in the East, irrespective of their human rights record. President Alyaksandr Lukashenka of Belarus has repeatedly urged the EU to focus on common interests such as securing the transit of Russian gas to the EU or managing migration into the EU. Similarly, officials in Kyiv complain that the EU has put a new trade agreement on hold to protest Ukraine's persecution of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko; the government there has repeatedly argued that the EU is punishing the whole country for the fate of one individual. Neither Minsk nor Kyiv miss a chance to remind the EU that they can always seek closer economic and political integration with Russia. What they are really telling the EU is to drop values-based conditions for engagement and work with Belarus and Ukraine without worrying too much about political rights, media freedoms or the rule of law. As one senior EU official has privately complained, ‘[O]ur partners still believe that there is a difference between our values and our interests and that they can eventually persuade us to drop the former and focus solely on the latter’.

But the Eastern European capitals offer a false choice. The EU's values-based approach remains the best way to secure its interests, for several reasons. Acceding to the demands from Kyiv and Minsk for unfettered trade without political conditions risks cementing the Eastern European neighbours’ broken judicial and governance models in place. Administrations in both countries go after their political opponents’ assets and livelihood; in Ukraine, the productive sectors of the economy face ever greater red tape and harassment from bribe-hungry officials. The EU is right to insist on change. Western businesses and investments also stand to suffer when courts are corrupt and officials capricious. IKEA, for example, has been planning to invest in Ukraine for a number of years, but has no stores in the country precisely because it holds little faith in the country's laws and courts.

The same applies to Belarus: President Lukashenka seems to expect the EU to do business with his government while he expels EU ambassadors at will. He argues that every time the EU hums and haws about its diplomats, it misses out on important trade opportunities. But that is a phantom promise: EU businesses will want to know that they have a full diplomatic representation in place, in case they need its help. Moreover, if Minsk behaves badly to EU diplomats, why would it be any nicer to EU business people? The EU's emphasis on observance of laws and diplomatic conventions is simply also a good business strategy.

The same self-interest applies to the visa liberalisation process: for Eastern partners to qualify for a visa waiver, they not only need to adopt a raft of laws and substantially upgrade their border management systems but also implement what amounts to an overhaul of their interior sectors. To what extent do these conditions reflect the advantages that come with an effective and transparent border management, and to what extent are they linked to the EU's interest in making sure its neighbours do not have porous borders that allow migrants to enter the EU illegally?

The EU has itself partly to blame for giving Ukraine and Belarus reasons to believe that the EU can be talked into abandoning its values. After the Russo-Georgian war, Brussels re-started relations with Minsk despite the regime's lack of any systemic steps towards liberalisation, sending a signal to Belarus and other countries that geopolitics matters more than values. The EU states erred again in 2012, when Warsaw called on other Member States not to boycott President Viktor Yanukovich during the European football championship, for fear that ‘Ukraine would fall into Russia's embrace’ (Rettman 2012). Words and deeds such as these destroy the EU's leverage to encourage reforms: they encourage neighbours to think of themselves as so important to the EU that it will stop insisting on changes, lest Eastern Europe lapse into Russia's orbit. Nor have the EU's compromises yielded results: neither the brief thaw with Minsk nor Poland's refusal to pressure Kyiv has changed the governments’ behaviour for the better, proving yet again that sacrificing values in pursuit of interests in Eastern Europe is poor policy.

A long way to go

This is not to argue that the EU's (most of the time) virtuous approach has worked well. None of the six Eastern European and South Caucasus countries are robust democracies. To different degrees, they remain marred by corruption and dysfunctional judicial systems (or, as in the case of Belarus, courts that carry out the president's orders rather than justice). Money corrodes politics in the region: most key politicians are directly financed by oligarchs, or oligarchs sit in the government and Parliament. In 2012, four of the six Eastern Partnership countries have held or will hold parliamentary elections. It is illustrative of the region's broader problems with democracy that out of these four popular votes, only Georgia's was relatively free and democratic. Armenia held competitive and largely peaceful elections in May, but the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe warned that the shortcomings undermined confidence in the process (OSCE 2012). Closer to the EU, Belarus stuck to the tried-and-tested script of President Lukashenka on election day on 23 September. Just as in 2008, the election campaign was highly controlled, voting was manipulated and the few opposition candidates that were allowed to run were left outside Parliament's doors. Here, the regime's strength is compounded by the opposition's weaknesses: opposition parties remain disunited in tactics and united in lack of strategy. And although Lukashenka's rating has been falling since 2010, the opposition has not yet succeeded in attracting the sympathies of disaffected voters.

The situation is only slightly better in Ukraine, the most important country in the region due to its size and economic potential. The main opposition figure, former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, remains in jail on charges that the EU considers politically motivated and is thus disqualified from running in the parliamentary elections on 28 October. Many fear the vote will be used by President Yanukovich to consolidate his grip on power. If the voting is blatantly rigged, the prospects of the EU signing and ratifying the far-reaching Association Agreement with Kyiv are dim, leaving the EU's relations with Ukraine semi-frozen. The situation looks brighter in Moldova, which held competitive elections in 2010 in a democratic manner. But in another Eastern Partnership country, Azerbaijan, the most recent voting in 2010 was much closer to the ‘Belarusian standard’ than elsewhere in the region. The country's presidential elections scheduled for 2013 already have an unofficial winner: the incumbent head of state, Ilham Aliyev. The fact that most of the politicians the EU deals with in the Eastern Partnership have not been elected in a democratic process is just one of the many problems the EU faces in the region, pessimists add. Challenges related to the post-Soviet legacy–-such as citizens’ passivity, a lack of interest in public affairs and an underdeveloped civil society–-are also undermining the EU's efforts to support its neighbours’ transition. Thus, the pessimists conclude, evolution of these states into full-fledged democracies and market economies will take several decades at best; at worst, it will not happen in our lifetime.

On the right track

Optimists would beg to differ. They suggest that the EU is on the right track, despite the difficult starting point and challenges that were far greater than those in Central and Eastern European post-Communist states. Slowly and gradually, the EU and its Eastern neighbours are coming closer to each other. Examples abound: five of the six countries trade more with the EU than with anyone else; to deepen these ties, Brussels has offered the region the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). This would eventually grant the six states full access to EU markets. Negotiations with Ukraine have already been concluded (ratification has been delayed by the Tymoshenko case); talks with Georgia, Moldova and possibly Armenia might conclude towards the end of next year. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the opening of the EU market to its neighbours is proceeding despite the current eurozone crisis: fears that the EU would turn more protectionist in reaction to the economic downturn have thus far proved unfounded. People-to-people contacts are also expanding despite fears that the economic crisis would provide a fertile ground for xenophobic politicians and make the European public much less willing to ease visa regimes with its neighbours. Moldova and Ukraine have already agreed to detailed road maps towards visa liberalisation with the EU. If Chisinau and Kyiv meet all of the conditions, their citizens will be able to travel to the EU without visas, an achievement that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Conclusion

So are the pessimists proven wrong, or are the optimists simply too naive? As always, the truth is somewhere in between: on the one hand, the EU has been relatively successful in assisting countries such as Moldova and Georgia, which are now the front-runners of the Eastern Partnership. On the other hand, the EU is struggling to repair relations with Ukraine and halt the country's democratic backsliding. If there is any lesson the EU can draw after almost a decade of its neighbourhood policy and three years since it launched the Eastern Partnership initiative, it is that its influence is limited. Time and again, developments in the region–-both positive and negative–-have emphasised that the EU needs more friends and partners inside these countries to be able to support or deliver change. The presence of a strong pro-EU constituency was the key recipe for success in states like Moldova and Georgia; its absence in places like Ukraine and Belarus is one of the main reasons for the failure. No matter how much the EU trades with Ukraine or Belarus, if the regional elites have an interest in falsifying elections, they will do so despite opposition from Brussels or the Member States. The best deterrent is a strong pro-European constituency inside the country, whose interests lie in closer integration with the EU and that can put pressure on their government to stop jeopardising EU accession. The best policy that the EU can adopt is therefore active cultivation of such partners, whether they are within or outside the government, from officials and bureaucrats at lower levels of the state apparatus to civil society, business associations or those active at the grass-roots level. The bigger these ‘circles of friends’, the greater the pressure on the country's leadership to pursue closer integration with the EU.

Building friendships and partnerships takes longer than disbursing money from EU funds. But as the last 10 years of the EU's neighbourhood policy show, the EU can achieve very little without partners that want to do business with Brussels and understand that, for a partnership to be successful, the two sides have to agree on more than just the transaction costs. Both the EU and its Eastern neighbours have to internalise this; otherwise, the Eastern Partnership policy will not be worthy of its name.