The European Union: Russia's Enabler?

Has the EU allowed Russia to get away with breaching international law?

After The Georgian Crisis, The Breaking Of Europe
The European Union is in danger of becoming the greatest long-term casualty of the Russian-Georgian conflict.

The EU's foreign policy apparatus has been exposed as ineffectual, its minor diplomatic victories as nothing more than window-dressing covering up major strategic reverses. The bloc's vision of peaceful integration through democratic and economic reforms, which enabled it to transform the eastern half of the continent over the past decade, now has a serious question mark hanging over it. August 8 -- the day Russian troops entered Georgia -- was in a sense Europe's 9/11, regardless of parallel claims for Russia made by President Dmitry Medvedev.

Alternatively, as Timothy Garton Ash predicts in "The Guardian" of September 11, 8/8 may become shorthand for a very low point in the history of the "liberal international order." Garton Ash's liberal world order has, of course, been inextricably intertwined with the rise of the EU as a global actor. Little changed in Russia itself on 8/8, but for Europe, "reality changed," as French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner put it on September 6 after crisis talks in Avignon with his EU counterparts.

In the wake of 8/8, the EU's illusions of emancipation have been rudely shattered and the bloc's capabilities found desperately wanting. U.S. security guarantees remain a "vital national interest" for all European countries, one of the EU's preeminent foreign-policy strategists, Robert Cooper, concluded in a recent interview with RFE/RL.

Quite plainly, the EU lacks adequate mechanisms for coping with this kind of crisis. In its efforts to be taken seriously by Russia, it has failed to come up with a realistic strategy to counter Moscow's aggression.

The EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy has turned out to be a institutional fiction. Instead, the EU has had to resort to emergency meetings and ad hoc diplomacy. There was no place, for example, for the bloc's foreign-policy chief, Javier Solana, at the side of French President Nicolas Sarkozy when the latter traveled to Moscow on August 12 as the head of the country that currently holds the EU's rotating presidency.

Worse, the EU is nearly paralyzed by a fragmentation of the will, a condition which was in ample evidence at the EU-Ukraine summit in Paris on September 9. On that occasion, in a feat of extreme verbal contortionism, the EU promised Ukraine everything but a guaranteed prospect of membership. Most EU member states fear Ukraine may already face a real threat from Russia, yet the bloc's strategic interests were nowhere in sight at the ambassadorial meetings in Brussels preceding the summit, where the Netherlands and other member states [Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg blocked any suggestions of future EU expansion into post-Soviet territory. Ed.] skeptical of enlargement argued that giving Ukraine a binding pledge of membership would be too unpopular back home.

Of course it would be unpopular. The defense of strategic interests would require increasing the percentage of GDP to their respective defense budgets. And that might have to come at the expense of the ever-precious social benefits.

Neither has the EU done anything to match the U.S. diplomatic "surge" in which top State Department officials have visited Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, not to mention Georgia. Again, the bloc's 27 member states have conspicuously failed to marshal the requisite collective resolve.

True, the EU has had some success in mediating an end to the conflict itself. On September 8, Sarkozy returned from a second foray to Moscow with a promise of a phased withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia following the deployment of 200 EU civilian monitors.

The EU has, in fact, been the only outside mediator. Its successes, however, remain questionable. Thus, it is arguable that the EU has in effect allowed Russia to get away with a gross breach of international law and cement its de facto annexation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

The price of Russian withdrawal for Georgia has been the increasing Russian entrenchment in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. EU officials admit privately that Russia is using its checkpoints in Georgia as a disposable bargaining chip in exchange for more permanent gains in the breakaway provinces.

The EU has also allowed itself to become entangled in seemingly endless disputes with Russia over the small print in the terms it has managed to extract, enabling Moscow to play for time and sow confusion. In the latest installment, Russia now says it never promised to pull its troops out of "independent" South Ossetia or Abkhazia, or to allow EU observers into those provinces.

Nicolas Sarkozy went on record on September 8 as saying all Russian troops must withdraw by October 15 to where they were stationed prior to August 8. As this is unlikely to happen, the EU has simply prepared the ground for another standoff next month -- something for which Russia appears to have an insatiable appetite.

And to which the EU will respond with a demand . . . for more dialogue.

Meanwhile, South Ossetia's and Abkhazia's secession has become a fait accompli and a dangerous precedent for Russia's other neighbors, some of them EU member states who take that threat very seriously. Even though Finland has traditionally been difficult to alarm, its president, Tarja Halonen, went on record as telling the French daily "Le Monde" of September 11 that "we cannot rule out a military conflict in our region." She also pointedly observed to "Helsingin Sanomat" on August 27 that "Finland is one of the few countries in Europe capable of defending itself militarily."

The scheduled talks in Geneva on October 15 on security and stability in South Ossetia and Abkhazia are likely to become a further bone of contention. Moscow insists that representatives from both republics should attend those talks as equal participants, while the EU has said that cannot be allowed.

The EU is quite simply out of its depth in this crisis and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. There can be little better demonstration of this than the fact -- as an EU diplomat told RFE/RL -- that the delegation led by Sarkozy felt compelled to ask Medvedev on September 8 whether Russia is planning to unilaterally redraw the borders of any other neighboring countries. The Russian response was to deny any such intention and to affirm that "Russia is not the Soviet Union."

Édouard Daladier was unavailable for comment.

Via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Frenchman Weighs In On Putie

Kouchner breaks ranks to criticize 'prime minister' Putin
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner expressed concern Tuesday at Russian President Vladimir Putin's plans to take the post of prime minister, although the EU said it was an "internal" matter.

Kouchner, one of the few senior international politicians to publicly express misgivings, told Europe 1 radio that there were not enough counterweights to the power of the Kremlin in Russia.

He said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been right to express reservations in a newspaper interview about the political situation in Russia.

"Condi Rice was absolutely right to highlight that this is an 'unprecedented procedure'," he said.

Asked about the absence of counterveiling powers to the Kremlin, Kouchner -- who paid an official visit to Russia last month -- said: "Unfortunately, there is not enough.

"The opposition is not taken sufficiently seriously, the country has lots of difficulties and the whole world knows it."

[...]

According to Michael Emerson of the Centre for European Political Studies in Brussels, Monday's move by the president should not have come as such a political earthquake.

"Everybody should have been expecting some twist to enable Putin to stay in power virtually indefinitely," he said.

"He is not quite president for life -- but he's not doing that badly. It's obviously a perversion of the intentions of the Russian constitution but he will get a mandate to become PM, and then president for another two terms."

"That gives us another 10 or 12 years [of Putin]," he said.

Emerson added: "They [the West] are not saying anything because they are not enthusiastic at this latest demonstration of Russia's non-democracy, but there's nothing much they can do about it."

Open & transparent elections advocates Maxine Waters, Jimmy Carter and al-Gore were unavailable for comment.


From June 9, 2007: Will Putie be setting up a caretaker government?

Perfecting the Art of Surrender

This is too rich.

France ready to apologise to Iraq

Last week Mr Kouchner said the Iraqi government was "not functioning" and was quoted saying he had told the US that there was strong support in Iraq for Mr Maliki to resign and he "has got to be replaced".

In an interview with RTL radio on Monday, Mr Kouchner said: "I think that he [Mr Maliki] misunderstood, or that I was not clear enough that I was referring to comments I heard from Iraqis I talked to."

"If the prime minister wants me to apologise for having interfered so directly in Iraqi affairs, I'll do it willingly," he said.

My gosh, this is a good example of why many people see France as a bunch of wishy-washy surrender-monkeys. Express an opinion or don't, but don't be blaming others for the opinion you expressed. Stand up and be a man about it for once.

You can bet the left will see this as great foreign policy management by France.