Seven reasons why Europe gets the Russia-Ukraine crisis wrong.

Europe’s Seven Deadly Sins 

by Andrew Wilson 


These remarks were delivered as part of the annual Vaclav Havel European Dialogues on 29 May in Prague.

The recent Riga Summit was a typical product of a method born in the EU’s internal politics, where doing nothing – or seeking compromise and making marginal adjustments in the hope of changing policy next time – is often the only way to proceed. The summit also showed the characteristic EU tendency toward politics as textual improvement: more effort went into negotiating the final declaration that getting the over-arching politics right. But given the scale of the current crisis, neither approach is adequate. Our panel looks at the EU from the perspective of the eastern partners, where I can find at least seven underlying reasons why Europe has gotten the Russia-Ukraine crisis so wrong.

1. BUREAUCRATISM: THE EUROPE OF RULES ...

2. THE EUROPE OF VALUES, AND THE EUROPE OF VARIABLE GEOGRAPHY....

3. MERCANTILISM ....

4. POST-MODERNISM ....

5. (NOT) THINKING ABOUT RUSSIA ....

6. POST-ORIENTALIST THINKING ABOUT UKRAINE ....

7. THE EASTERN PARTNERSHIP IS AN INADEQUATE RESPONSE TO RUSSIA’S PUSH FOR A YALTA II ....


CONCLUSIONS

The Eastern Partnership is at least three gear shifts out of date. It would still have had trouble working in a world in which only the EU existed. It is expansion on the cheap, free-riding on the assumption that the neighbors are prepared to march toward Brussels and do all the hard work themselves. In which case, the policy’s labeling was self-defeating – “neighborhood policy” is existentially offensive.

The Eastern Partnership also mistakenly copies the EU’s traditional Schuman Method – start with economic transformation and political transformation will follow – but in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus “it’s the politics, stupid.” Transformation needs to start at the top, with corrupt elites and inefficient and/or predatory states.

Second, the world has changed radically since 2008, when the Eastern Partnership was conceived. The EU is much weaker. The United States is more withdrawn. Russia is not necessarily stronger, but it is more competitive. In fact, to be exact, Russian overreach at a time of growing Russian domestic weakness is the precise nature of the problem. But Russian ambition has more impact and more resonance in an increasingly multipolar world in which the EU’s famously post-modern foreign policy project is not only one of many poles of influence, but is increasingly clearly unique.

Third, the Eastern Partnership doesn’t address our own inadequacies. “Partnership” should be about both sides. But the Eastern Partnership is designed as a technocratic policy to isolate Eastern Europe from national politics in EU nation states where immigration has become one of the key issues since 2008. It is not just that our increasingly inward focus prevents us from designing a proper policy for the East – the Eastern Partnership is designed to protect that inward focus. There was actually a sense of pan-European solidarity in 1989 that has now been lost. “Solidarity” is increasingly an internal issue, not an asset for revenue-sharing and burden-sharing with potential new members.

But the difference between Ukraine today and Afghanistan in 2001 or Syria since 2011 or Bangladesh in 1971 is obviously only one word long: Europe. We are not in Ukraine to be the world's policeman or because of a post-imperial reflex or as a blundering and ineffective mega-NGO. We are in Ukraine to decide the future of Europe. Ukraine is at war. But our policy is far from being based on these basic facts. “Neighborhood policy,” in other words, is not based on strategic thinking, but it has strategic consequences that too often remain unrecognized. But we continue to act like a giant EU-NGO.

The current crisis is not just about Ukraine. It’s also not just about “losing” Eastern Europe; it’s about Europe losing itself. Plenty of EU countries are rediscovering their inner nativism. Ukraine, you may be surprised to hear, is in some ways an island of multiethnic tolerance compared with the toxic nationalisms on either side, in Russia and in European states like Hungary and France. But choice depends on circumstance. If Ukraine fails, because Putin’s Russia is so desperate for it to fail, then we will see a much more dangerous downward spiral across borders, with nationalisms and protectionisms feeding off one another, west and east.

Andrew Wilson is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a reader in Ukrainian Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. 

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