The real decision-making timetable is different. Relations have been off track ever since ex-Prime
Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was sent to prison in 2011 on an abuse-of-office
conviction.The EU Foreign Affairs Council made some progress
towards better defining its conditionality towards Ukraine last December, when
it listed three key areas:
“progress in addressing the issue of
selective justice;”fairer
elections; and“implementation of reforms defined in
the jointly agreed association agenda.”
The EU’s
Neighbourhood Commissioner Stefan Fuele and others have recently tried to firm
up the idea of an ultimate deadline this coming November – either Ukraine
finally gets the Association Agreement at the Eastern Partnership summit in
Vilnius, Lithuania, or it will be kicked into the long grass for several years.
Opinions may already begin to harden when the European Commission publishes its
annual report on integration progress in May. So any rabbits pulled out of the
hat before or during next week’s summit seem likely to be pretty small.
Ukraine has a new foreign minister in Leonid
Kozhara, who is now being closely monitored for signs of progress within such a
tight timetable. But whatever signals he is intent on sending out, such as a
new approach on discrimination legislation, are undermined by Ukraine’s crass
habit of taking its biggest steps backward on the eve of important meetings –
in this case with the allegations connecting Tymoshenko to the murder of Yevhen
Shcherban back in 1996. It’s almost as if someone didn’t want the relationship
back on track.
Ukraine’s only rational calculation must be that the
beleaguered EU needs a success story for the European Partnership summit, and
that the other options are disappearing fast. Armenia has just held its least competitive
election ever. Opinions are cooling on Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili’s
Georgia. It seems premature to talk of “Ukrainianization” in Tbilisi – meaning the
persecution of political opponents in President Mikheil Saakashvili’s camp. But
the fact that people use the term makes the problem clear. The uncertain future
of Georgia’s economic model – its ultra-liberal deregulation policy, its
anti-corruption and public sector reforms – ironically also highlights the fact
that Moldova may have been a little over-praised in recent years. It hasn’t
done as much to overhaul how its basic economy works, and there is a growing
sense that reform is blocked by business interests. Even tiny Moldova has
oligarchs.
So why not give something to Ukraine? The
question answers itself. Undermining conditionality would not rescue the
Eastern Partnership project but destroy it. As it currently operates, the
Eastern Partnership was designed to square a series of difficult circles: it is
not in itself the promise of membership in the EU, but doesn’t close off the
possibility of the eventual promise of membership; it does not promise harmonization
through the full adoption of the EU’s rule book, the acquis communautaire; but “convergence” by adopting a good part of
it.
There are two alternatives. One would be to forget
about the acquis and use the Eastern Partnership as a soft holding area for its
six states. Proposals to integrate with Russia’s Customs
Union or Eurasian Union could then be more easily rebuffed, because the six
could say they were doing something really important with the EU. But they
would effectively be on the substitution players’ bench until real regime
change finally transformed them internally after however many years.
Or the Eastern Partnership could be a tool of
realpolitik. At various times and in varying degrees, most of the Eastern
Partnership six have sought to play a “neo-Titoist” balancing game between
Russia and the West. So the EU could help them. Again, the underlying premise
would be that it was worth preserving the statehood of the likes of Ukraine and
Belarus until such a time as they were finally willing to do the hard work of
internal reform.
But Josip Tito (1892-1980) of Yugoslavia was
worth supporting, because “non-alignment” changed the dynamics of the Cold War.
The reality of modern neo-Titoism would just mean that the EU was constantly
getting stiffed by the likes of Ukraine. Contemporary foreign policy “balancing”
has a completely different modus operandi. Ukraine’s policy of “balance” under President
Viktor Yanukovych is not aimed at the survival and eventual strengthening of
the state, as it arguably was under former President Leonid Kuchma, but at
leveraging resources from either side, at increasing the flow of rent for the
elite, and at preserving a space where hard choices can be indefinitely avoided,
as it also was too often under Kuchma.
So engaging in a game of balance would only make
things worse. And it’s not how the EU works, anyway. Yanukovych may assume that
the EU’s talk of conditionality and human rights is just sugar-coating for
realpolitik, and that all politics is ultimately realpolitik. But it isn’t. The
EU has no alternative to conditionality and continuing the dialogue of the deaf
in the hope of small improvements. If it did anything else, it wouldn’t work. So
don’t expect too much from the Feb. 25 summit.
Andrew
Wilson is a reader in Ukrainian Studies at University
College in London and a senior policy fellow at the European Council on
Foreign Relations.
