Archive for category Europe (un)divided

Moldova defies post-Soviet traditions

Posted by Nicu Popescu in Europe (un)divided, Moldova on August 8, 2009

Revolutions, staged successions and consolidated authoritarianism replaced “elections” in practically all the post-Soviet countries. Against such a background the best news from Moldova’s recent elections is the lack of any other event but the election results. In the last decade, in CIS there have been only two changes of power through elections only (where the governing party goes into opposition after the counting of the votes, not street protests) and both of them were in Moldova: in 2001 when the Communists came to power, and in 2009 when they lost it. These last years Moldova’s political system was highly centralized (and less pluralistic than Ukraine’s). And still Moldova is the only CIS country with an uninterrupted cycle of legal and constitutional transfers of power through elections since its independence in 1991. The pendulum of power is swinging with great difficulties but without interruption, while in all other post-Soviet states the pendulum has either stopped for now, or has been terribly dysfunctional. This is an almost surprising achievement for a state that is rural, semi-depopulated, has a separatist conflict and the lowest GDP per capita in Europe (yes, lower than Albania’s).

Selections vs elections

For the last decade, post-Soviet states have developed three types of managing transitions of power. None of these included “elections”:

  • The first is the model of not transfering power at all. This is the case of Belarus, Azerbaijan and the Central Asian “stans” (with the partial exception of Kyrgyzstan);
  • the second model is “project successor”, where an incumbent president passes power to a chosen successor who is then confirmed through popular “selections” (as opposed to “elections”). Read the rest of this entry »

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The limits of EU’s transformative power

Posted by Nicu Popescu in Eastern partnership, EU, Europe (un)divided on July 23, 2009

For almost two decades the driving force of EU foreign policy was the idea of the EU as a transformative power. “Transformation” was achieved by enlarging the union and exporting its acquis, values and prosperity. The EU managed to successfully transform Central and Eastern Europe (though the business is still unfinished) and push the Balkans in the right direction. Then the EU tried to transform the Eastern neighbourhood through a similar policy mix of dialogue, economic assistance and exporting the acquis, though all in reduced doses.

But after 7 years the European neighbourhood policy the EU discovers that its policies are failing to even prevent the drastic deterioration of the situation in the Eastern neighbourhood. Even the fact that the EU tries to relaunch its neighbourhood policy on an almost annual basis (ENP Plus, New Ostpolitik, Black Sea Synergy and now the Eastern Partnership) is proof of a lingering dissatisfaction of how things stand. In the last years every single eastern neighbourhood country went through a series of major political, economic or security crises: Georgia cracked down on demonstrators in November 2007 and ran into a war with Russia in august 2008; post-electoral violence in March 2008 in Armenia left at least 10 persons dead; Moldova recent post-electoral protests lead to riots, the burning down of the parliament, and then a crackdown against the protesters Read the rest of this entry »

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A Swedish-led listening tour of the East

Posted by Nicu Popescu in Eastern partnership, EU, Europe (un)divided, Moldova, Russia, South Caucasus on June 22, 2009

The Swedish EU presidency, which starts on 1 July 2009, is getting a lot of advice on what to do during its presidency. But here is one idea more idea for the Swedish EU presidency (contained in our recent ECFR report on the Eastern neighbourhood). The Swedish Presidency should convene a “listening tour” of the Eastern neighbourhood – a Troika visit by the Swedish foreign minister, Javier Solana, the Commissioner for External Relations, and the future Spanish EU presidency to each of the six Eastern neighbours of the EU: Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia). Here is why such a tour is needed and why the Swedish presidency is the best actor to initiate it.

To begin with, the Eastern Partnership summit in Prague, judged by its attendance list, was a near-failure. If the objective of the Eastern partnership was to relaunch the neighbourhood policy and raise its political profile, its start was not impressive. The Swedish presidency-led “listening tour” would help relaunch politically the neighbourhood policy in the East. It would repair some of the political damage done by the unimpressive Eastern partnership summit in May 2009. But the purpose of such a tour should not only be symbolic. Read the rest of this entry »

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The foreign-policy solidarity gap

Posted by Nicu Popescu in Eastern partnership, Europe (un)divided on May 29, 2009

Complaints about an imbalance in the levels of EU engagement in the Southern neighbourhood compared to the Eastern neighbourhood are wide-spread. The new EU member states like to point to the  fact that EU funding for the Mediterranean neighbours is much bigger than for the Eastern neighbours; and EU diplomatic engagement in the Middle Eastern conflicts (be it the Israeli-Palestine conflict or Lebanon) has been much less shy than in the post-Soviet space.

But Southern EU member states also have their grudges. The Portuguese EU presidency in 2007 gave a sense of it. Many in Portugal think (and here) that the EU has spent almost twenty years cajoling and baby-sitting the Eastern neighbours of the day (beginning with Central Europe which is already in the EU, and then the Balkans), and now it is time to turn to the South where a “new” generation of threats such as terrorism, migration and conflicts are threatening Europe.

Two recent EU summits with their neighbours provide a good snapshot of the balance of priorities and the foreign policy solidarity gap: the July 2008 summit of the Union of Mediteranean in Paris and the May 2009 summit of the Eastern Partnership in Prague. Read the rest of this entry »

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The quiet EU-Russia summit

Posted by Nicu Popescu in Europe (un)divided, Russia on May 21, 2009

For years all observers of EU-Russia relations got used to waiting with angst the next EU-Russia summit (which happens twice a year under each presidency). All recent EU-Russia summits had some spice to them. In May 2007, under the German presidency, Angela Merkel took a principled stance on democracy and played tough with Putin. A few days after that summit, Jose Socrates, the Portuguese PM (and the next EU presidency) was offered the best diplomatic treatment in Moscow – the Kremlin was closed to visitors so that Jose Socrates could jog in the inner sanctum of the Russian state. After that, many expected the EU-Russia summit under the Portuguese presidency to step back from Merkel’s principled stance on Russia. Then there was the first EU-Russia summit with president Medvedev in June 2008 when many hoped it would be the beginning of a post-Putin era; and then the first summit after the Georgia war under the French presidency in November 2008.

But there is little spice in the EU-Russia summit taking place in Khabarovsk on 21/22 May. It seems like a very quiet event. There is not angst, no media hype, no nerves and little hope around it. Why? Read the rest of this entry »

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EU’s Borders and Neighbours

Posted by Nicu Popescu in EU, Europe (un)divided, Moldova, South Caucasus, Ukraine on May 4, 2009

Jan Zielonka argued in his book “Europe as Empire” that Europe is becoming a neo-medieval empire with ‘overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, diversified institutional arrangements, and multiple identities’ with ‘fuzzy cultural, economic and political borders between the enlarged Union and its new neighbours further east and south east’. Indeed, the medieval parallel is useful in thinking about Europe’s borders, but a more accurate comparison is probably to think about medieval fortresses, not borders.

Exporting border controls

A fortress has multiple lines of defence – a dungeon as the hard nucleus and defensive walls, but also external fortifications such as ditches or earthworks (see a formidable fortress, left). The EU has been developing a similarly multilayered system of border management and protection with elements of outside fortifications. With the Schengen area as the dungeon, non-Schengen EU member states such as Romania and Bulgaria (and the other new EU states until December 2007) already separated from the outside world by a strong visa wall, the EU has started to build outside fortifications. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Return of “Eastern Europe”

Posted by Nicu Popescu in economic crisis, Europe (un)divided on March 5, 2009

The global economic crisis led to a sudden, forceful, even brutal return of the term “Eastern Europe” applied indiscriminately to all of non-Western Europe. It has always been difficult to brand the bunch of very diverse former socialist countries. Terms such as Central and East Europe (CEE) or South East Europe (SEE) have been used for a while. But they were never too clearly defined (and analytically useful), nor very satisfactory for the countries included in these categories. The “Central Europoean “ Hungary did not really want to be part of “Eastern Europe” together with Ukraine. Romania or Slovenia also did not really like to be South East European together with Albania or Serbia. The more countries diverged in their reform trajectories – the less meaningful the terms CEE and SEE became. More to the east – the term “post-soviet” was not particularly precise either, since technically it would include Estonia or Lithuania which were light years ahead in reforms and democratization from central Asia or Belarus, which are really post-Soviet. Such terminology has never been very meaningful. They were crude Western simplifications of a complex set of “non-western” small states. Read the rest of this entry »

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Is the EU a mistake of history?

Posted by Nicu Popescu in Europe (un)divided, Russia on February 16, 2009

The EU likes to think of itself as post-modern. The superior embodiment of soft-power and post-national politics, where interdependence and the pooling of sovereignty makes it possible to move beyond decades and centuries of animosities, conflicts, and narrow state interests. The EU clearly achieved that. But the bigger question is whether the EU as an experiment is indeed a qualitative change of international politics that will affect the course of history, or just a temporary experiment.

Many Russians I spoke to think the EU is only a temporary phenomenon. L’exception qui fait la règle. When this experiment will fail, everything  will return to “normal”: power politics, “concert of europe”-style diplomacy, inequality of states, spheres of influence, and interests, not values, as the  driving forces behind international politics. Their relations with many EU member states only reinforce this belief.

I also assume that such scepticism is quite wide-spread throughout the world. The EU as a project has to unconfirm history. I am sure the EU, as such, is a temporary phenomenon. It will dissapear – in 50 or 300 years. The bigger question is whether the “EU way of doing things”, its “post-modernity” as a successful experiment will survive, be exported to other regions and change international politics as we knew it. Will EU’s post-modernity survive beyond the EU, a bit like ancient greek philosophy, or roman law survived ancient greece and the roman empire. No one knows whether the EU will change the course of history and the way international politics will be done in the future, but we better realise it is an uphill struggle.

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Interdependent neighbours

Posted by Nicu Popescu in Europe (un)divided on February 16, 2009

In many ways, the EU and its neighbours are deeply interdependent. What is happening in the neighbourhood affects a quite a few core aspects of the European project: from vague things such as EU solidarity and mutual (dis)trust between EU member  states, to more palpable things such as EU’s energy security, the single market, climate change goals, and needless to say, the EU-Russia partnership. Many aspects of intra-EU politics such as Lithuanian-German relations, Polish attitudes to climate change goals, Finnish foreign policy or the fact that Cyprus is a huge source of foreign investments cannot be understood without understanding the eastern neighbourhood. Therefore, this will be a blog about the EU as a project, as much as about its neighbours.

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