News.Kyiv.Me.

Germany’s
Eastern policies have to adapt to the novel political challenges in the
post-Soviet space

In the light of today’s
constellation of forces and interests in Eastern Europe, Germany needs to adopt
a “new Eastern policy.” A future German approach should combine high level of
attention to Russia with more care for, what has sometimes been called, “intermediate
Europe” (Zwischeneuropa) — first of
all, for Ukraine. The previous heavy emphasis on German-Russian relations has
become dated, and needs to be replaced with a more balanced approach to the
entire region across the EU’s eastern border.

Berlin has long been rife with
such calls, to be sure. They had become topical already years ago when Vladimir
Putin’s creeping centralization of power in Russia started to amount to a fundamental
political rollback. The changing mood, in Berlin, has been expressed in an
increasing number of self-critical German political and analytical
publications. Calls for a reorientation of Germany’s Ostpolitik have sometimes even been voiced by relevant politicians
themselves.

For example, in February 2012
an inter-party group of parliamentarians interested in Eastern Europe presented
a joint statement on Germany’s engagement within the EU’s Eastern Partnership
program, at the offices of the German Society for Foreign Policy. The
memorandum points out that Brussels’s Eastern Partnership initiative has not
only a humanitarian, but also a geostrategic dimension and is important to
basic German interests. The inter-party statement suggested that “the Federal Government
should appoint a Special Representative for the Eastern Partnership who will coordinate
strategic considerations at the national level.” The politicians also demanded
that the partnership countries should be given the prospect of EU membership as
an instrument complementing Brussels’s neighborhood policy, and that the EU
conclude association agreements with such countries as Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia
(DGAPstandpunkt, no.1, 2012).

As long ago as in January
2005, i.e. shortly after the Ukrainian electoral uprising known as the Orange
Revolution, the influential German politician Wolfgang Schäuble, then Bundestag
CDU/CSU deputy faction leader and today Federal Minister of Finance, took a
surprisingly explicit stance. Schäuble complained in a newspaper article that
“in its statements on Ukraine’s European prospects, the EU has so far confined
itself to the principle of equidistance.” He furthermore asserted: “Now the EU
has no right to leave this country on its own and must be prepared to include
it into the EU structures one day — provided that democracy, the rule of law
and a market economy have been established” (FAZ, January 27^th,
2005). However, these and similar ideas voiced by politicians of various EU countries
and political camps during and after the Orange Revolution had, at that time,
little effect on either Berlin’s or Brussels’s policies towards Ukraine.

Instead, in February 2005,
Kyiv and Brussels adopted a so-called Action Plan which the EU had drawn up and
approved of already in the previous year, i.e. before the successful
accomplishment of the Orange Revolution in late December 2004. The very name of
this document — “Action Plan” — symbolizes the eyewash on the part of the
Western politicians and diplomats then involved in tackling the problem of
Ukraine’s European integration. Following the Orange Revolution, they adopted a
document drawn up in the period of Leonid Kuchma’s semi-authoritarian
presidency as a reaction to the Ukrainian democratic uprising. The fact that
the 2005 Action Plan was presented as Brussels’s response to one of the largest
mass actions of civil disobedience in post-war Europe illustrated the inability
of the EU to adequately respond to big historic events.

Belatedly, the EU did react to
the November-December 2004 events in Kyiv when it started drawing up together
with Ukraine, in 2007, a large Association Agreement that includes provisions
for an especially deep and comprehensive free trade area. Initialed in 2012,
the agreement implies both, a close political association with, and a far-reaching
economic integration of Ukraine into, the EU. If signed and ratified, it would
be not only Ukraine’s, by far, largest international agreement so far, but also
the biggest treaty that the European Union has ever concluded, with a
non-member state.

Moreover, over the last three
years, the respected Czech EU Commissioner on Enlargement and European
Neighborhood Policy -tefan Füle has repeatedly indicated that, in principle,
Ukraine — like other European non-EU countries — has a “European perspective,”
i.e. the chance to apply one day for accession to the Union. However, there
still is no officially announced prospect for a possible future membership of
Ukraine in the EU — neither in the text of the Association Agreement nor in the
European or EU Council’s statements of the past few years. Thus, Brussels has
been unable to fully employ the conditionality mechanism that had proven so
effective during the transformation of the post-communist states in the 1990s. And
Germany bears a part of the responsibility for this fateful omission.

Brussels’s strategic failure regarding
Kyiv has to do not only with the sluggishness of the EU’s political
bureaucracy, but also with the skeptical attitude that parts of Europe’s elite display
towards the idea of Ukraine’s future accession to the EU. Apparently, certain psychological
factors are in play too — which is partly understandable in view of the
numerous oddities in Ukrainian domestic policies as well as the more and more
clumsy behavior of the Ukrainian leadership on the international arena, during
the last three years.

The results of scholarly research
on EU enlargement have, however, shown time and again that a conditional, yet
plausible offer of future EU membership was an important factor in the
successful transitions to democracy of the East-Central European countries.
Besides, when Turkey was recently granted the status of an EU candidate with
unclear future, this created an important precedent: It effectively cancelled the
hitherto functioning automatism of an EU accession prospect and even official
candidacy leading necessarily to an entry into the Union. The Turkish case
provides an example of a country that had, for a long time (since 1963), a membership
perspective and acceded to candidacy status, but may never enter the Union.

Against this background, it is
unlikely that a deliberate collective decision in Germany’s corridors of power
is the main cause of the relative passivity of the German foreign policy
establishment towards Ukraine’s European prospects. Rather, the crucial factor
may be a plain lack of attention to Ukraine and failure of Germany’s political
elite to understand Ukraine’s geopolitical significance. This naivety is, in
turn, connected to the continuing domination of Russia in Germany’s overall
vision of Eastern Europe, and its repercussions on the behavior of Berlin’s
political decision-makers. In spite of the above-quoted statements of Schaeuble
and a number of similar comments from Germany’s other political camps, there
have been few, if any, substantive changes in the basic priorities of the
German Eastern policy and its fixation on Moscow after the breakup of the
Soviet Union. That is in spite of the facts that both, the geo- and the domestic
political situation in Eastern Europe today is different from the one in 1991,
and that German public opinion has become increasingly skeptical about Russia.

In collaboration with its
European partners, in the future, Germany should take a stronger interest than
before in the consolidation of Ukraine’s young statehood. At the same time, it
should try not to irk the Kremlin too much with this, and is hence obliged to
continue cooperating with Moscow. To be sure, it may be impossible to follow
such an “equilibristic” approach always harmonically. This may result in a
greater or lesser alienation between Berlin and Moscow – and this would be a
matter of regret.

Yet it is, after all, the
current leadership of Russia that bears the main responsibility for these
complications. If, in view of its serious domestic problems, Russia dropped its
dubious great power claims and senseless rivalry with the West for the former
Soviet republics, the EU and Russia would not be at loggerheads about Ukraine
as well as liberated from various other confrontations. A EU-oriented Ukraine
would not be a thorn in the side of a pro-European Russia, but, on the
contrary, a bridge to her Western ally. Moreover, the Ukrainian elite would be
much less anti-Russian and, maybe, even interested in closer cooperation with
Moscow, if the latter were to take a more friendly attitude towards Brussels
and Washington. Not only Kyiv, but also Moscow could be striving to sign with
Brussels treaty on political association and comprehensive free trade similar
to the various Association Agreements the EU is now negotiating with several
Eastern Partnership countries (including Azerbaijan!). In that case most of the
disputable issues in the relations between the two Eastern Slavic brother
nations and the related conflicts in the relations between Moscow and Germany
and other Western states would simply disappear.

In the past 20 years, the
different Ukrainian governments have prevented, for a number of reasons,
Germany and the West as a whole from taking a more clear-cut attitude to, and
actively cooperating with, Ukraine. President Kuchma practiced a so-called
multi-vectored foreign policy which left open the question of where exactly
Ukraine was heading. In 2005-2010, the infamous quarrels between Ukraine’s
President and Prime-Ministers were an obstacle to more effective cooperation
between Ukraine and all of her foreign partners, including Germany. Since President
Yanukovych took office in February 2010, the main problem in the relations
between Ukraine and the West has been the increasing subversion of already weak
democratic institutions and rule of law Ukraine. The latest political regress
has been paralyzing for several months now political and economic relations
between Ukraine and the West and is hindering the signing of the initialed
EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

In spite of these and many
other problems, Germany and the West as a whole ought to take a more favorable
attitude to Ukraine. First, the current authoritarian tendencies in Ukraine are
still weaker than in most of the other post-Soviet states. Second, Ukrainian
politics during the past 20 years has been relatively varied if compared, for
example, to the recent histories of Russia or Belarus. Particularly, Ukrainian
democracy has seen several waves of upsurges and rollbacks. This allows one to
presume that the pendulum will soon be swinging again in the other direction,
i.e. towards a new democratization. A destabilization of the semi-authoritarian
Yanukovych regime seems to be merely a matter of time. But will this also lead
to substantive change in the relations between Brussels and Berlin, on the one
side, and Kyiv, on the other? Taking into account Ukraine’s continuing marginal
status on the mind map of the West European — including German — elites, this
question remains open.

First published, in this edition, in the Foreign Policy Journal . An unauthorized, shorter version of this article, containing some
imprecisions, was — as a poor translation from Russian — first published at
Kyiv, in the Ukrainian newspaper The Day.
An abridged version was published by the EUobserver
at Brussels.