Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

The European Union, with its institutional hub in Brussels now taking precedence over member-state governments, began to play a more active role in post-Soviet Eurasia after the Georgia war. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, then holder of the rotating EU presidency, was the chief negotiator of the ceasefire agreement that helped end the conflict. The EU fielded a monitoring mission in Georgia to keep the peace, which has remained in place ever since. Along with the UN and the OSCE, the EU was appointed a co-chair of the Geneva International Discussions, the negotiating format for Georgia’s conflicts.

But the instruments for an enlarged EU role were more geo-ideational and geo-economic than geopolitical. The EU first formalised a policy toward the region in 2004. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) provided a framework for the Union’s efforts in its southern and eastern adjacencies with the objective of establishing a stable, prosperous, secure and democratic ‘ring of friends’. It set about realising this objective through policy instruments that were ‘rule-oriented, non-militarized, and technocratic’, claiming the mantle of a ‘normative power’, not a great power.[52] The ENP strategy paper proposed a straightforward trade to the EU’s neighbours: ‘In return for concrete progress demonstrating shared values and effective implementation of political, economic, and institutional reforms, including in aligning legislation with the acquis, the EU’s neighbourhood should benefit from the prospect of closer economic integration with the EU.’[53] This outwardly innocuous approach belied both the emerging zero-sum intentions of some member states and the zero-sum impact of the EU’s normative instruments – an exercise par excellence in geo-ideational politics with geo-economic consequences.

Although, as noted above, Russia’s regulatory- and trade-policy convergence efforts with Brussels were still more advanced than those of its neighbours in 2005, that balance shifted briskly as its relationship with the EU deteriorated. Solana recalls ‘holes’ emerging in the Four Common Spaces programme ‘very soon’ after its adoption, and notes that within two years relations were at an impasse.[54] At the same time, the EU’s relations with some of the In-Betweens, particularly Ukraine, grew closer. The 2004 big-bang enlargement, adding ten new member states with 80m citizens, was a factor. Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine (particularly after Romania’s EU accession in 2007) now bordered EU members to the west. This subjected them to the ‘shadow effect’, as Tom Casier calls it, that the EU has on its neighbours: both through the externalisation of internal policies (e.g., product standards imposed on imported goods) and through the ‘gravitational pull’ of its prosperity and good governance, the EU unintentionally has a bearing on proximate states ‘because of its mere existence’.[55] The EU had also just launched the ENP, and was intentionally acting to influence the political economy of its neighbours. As was the case with NATO, the new East Central European members altered the balance within the Union’s bureaucracy and political bodies in favour of more interaction with the neighbours and more distance from Russia.

The geo-economic form of EU engagement with the In-Betweens set the stage for a clash with Russia. After the PCAs of the 1990s expired (most had a lifespan of ten years), Brussels settled on Association Agreements (AAs) as the framework for drawing in those states in the region that aspired to integrate with the EU. The AAs feature Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area agreements (DCFTAs) at their core. The AA was explicitly an alternative to full EU membership, but it was nonetheless based on the core bargain of the accession process. The EU opens itself to aspirant countries (via visa-free travel, lowered trade barriers, access to internal preferences for everything from education to government procurement) in return for their conformity to the three Copenhagen Criteria (named for the city where they were agreed in 1993): consolidation of democratic institutions and protection of human rights, a market economy, and adoption of the acquis, the body of EU laws and regulations. In practice, the emphasis has always been on the third of these.

It should be stressed that fully fledged accession has never been an option for the In-Betweens. But the geo-economic distinction between full membership and the AA/DCFTA model is less ironclad on closer inspection. The AA obliges aspirant countries to change a vast array of standards, regulations and laws to conform with those enshrined in the EU acquis. It further prescribes that their future legislation be compatible with the acquis; future EU decisions regarding issues covered by the AA must be enforced by the aspirant country. Over time, the AAs would, if implemented, fold these countries into the EU’s geo-economic space.