The European Council on Foreign Relations

Of Eastern and Southern neighbours

Date: 14th February 2011  |  Author: Nicu Popescu,

Categories: Wider Europe,
Tags: egypt, georgia, tunisia, ukraine, moldova

Just when the southern neighbourhood of the EU is shaken by a wave of revolutionary situations that toppled consolidated dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, the eastern neighbourhood seems to be in the middle of a trend towards authoritarian consolidation. So the paradox is that whereas the Southern neighbours look like those in the East in the revolutionary years of 2003-2005, but in fast forward mode, the Eastern neighbourhood seems to look increasingly like the south a few years ago – a collection of states with increasingly close economic relations with Europe, but with centralised, non-competitive politics, which routinely afford to ignore the EU on many political and security questions. Today, every country in the Eastern neighbourhood except Moldova is less pluralistic than it was 5 years ago (though Belarus arguably could not become worse).

Seen from Ukraine, Moldova or most of the new EU member states one of the most irritating aspects of the European neighbourhood policy is that it dumps together the Southern and the Eastern neighbours of the EU. The Eastern neighbours tend to be rather arrogant about the Mediterannean neighbours of the EU. The argument goes that you cannot approach ‘European’ neighbours of the EU and ‘neighbours of Europe’ like Morocco or Syria through the same policy lenses; the East is culturally European and some would like to join the EU (Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia), whereas the South is civilisationally different and has no aspirations of EU membership etc.

Overall, I agree with the argument for differentiation. I do believe EU’s neighbourhood policy can only be effective if it approaches each of its neighbours individually, and that there can be no similar policy prescriptions to Moldova, Tunisia, Georgia, Egypt and Ukraine. This being sad, however, the debates on East vs South debates in the ENP miss two big points.

First, the negative effects of having a single policy framework, called ENP, for Morocco and Ukraine are overblown. In real life there is little Ukraine or Georgia did not get, because Morocco or Lebanon are also part of the ENP. I cannot remember a single issue where the EU would say: ‘Hang on, we cannot give this to Ukraine because Lebanon is also part of the ENP.’ And there have been dozens of times when the EU or its member states said: ‘Hang on, we cannot give this to the Eastern partner X or Y because they are not implementing the necessary reforms’ or ‘because we do not want further enlargement’ or because ‘this would create problems with Russia’. None of these reasons had anything to do with the Southern neighbours. To put it in other words, Ukraine did not get an offer of EU membership or a visa free regime with the EU not because Morocco is also part of the ENP but for entirely different reasons – Ukraine’s political mess and non-reformism, coupled with EU’s enlargement fatigue and the series of institutional crises in the EU.

Actually the real problem with differentiation lies not in the Eastern vs Southern dimension, but among the Eastern neighbours themselves (and this includes Russia). Very often if the EU is in theory ready to give something to country X, but then there is huge pressure to give it to countries Y and Z as well, and the EU ends up not giving anything to anybody, in order not to create precedents. I have personally heard the leader of an EU member state who is generally sceptical of enlargement saying that ‘If it was only for Moldova, the EU would give Moldova an EU accession perspective tomorrow [Moldova is too small to matter and easy to swallow -n.a.], but there is Ukraine… and we cannot give this to Ukraine, nor can we threat the two differently’. There are also plenty of cases where insufficient differentiation among the Eastern neighbours is much more of an issue than insufficient differentiation between the Southern and Eastern neighbours.

Second, the arrogance of the Eastern neighbours is also less justified than a few years ago. Most of the Eastern neighbours have already consolidated or are rapidly consolidating centralised political regimes, coupled with oligarchic and pretty corrupt economic systems. In real life Morocco is often more reformist (though not more democratic) and Lebanon is more pluralist than many of EU’s eastern neighbours. And this was even before decision-makers in the EU start to stake their hopes on successful consolidation of political pluralism in Tunisia.

The zeal with which the argument for delinking the Southern and Eastern neighbourhoods is perhaps understandable, but largely misses the point.

This first appeared on Nicu's blog at EUObserver.com

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