CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch. Issue 42

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CEPS European Neighbourhood Watch. Issue 42
www.ceps.eu/files/NW/NWatch42.pdf

Editorial by Michael Emerson: «Two Overlapping Crises»

The Georgia-Russia war of August 2008 has been a seismic political event. Viewed by some as the ‘return of power politics', an alternative would be to see it as a renewed outbreak of uncivilized behaviour at the outer edge of Europe. The financial crash, which for its part could be viewed as the culmination of uncivilized behaviour in Wall Street over a decade, initially hit US and European banks hardest. But now it becomes an economic seismic event with the onset of global recession, and with the fragile transition economies of Eastern Europe hit hard. Together with the energy security and climate change agendas, these are the factors that should be at the heart of the forthcoming revision of the European Security Strategy.

In this situation the EU needs to upgrade its policies across the whole of the wider Europe, from the Balkans to Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia. The peoples of Europe have a good essential understanding of what ‘civilized Europe' means: peace, absence of the use or threat of coercive force between states, the rule of law, human rights, democracy, reasonable honesty in international discourse, moderation of old nationalisms. According to opinion polls European public opinion looks to the EU to pursue these objectives with a more effective foreign and security policy.

But Russia's leadership currently follows a different track, of power politics indeed. The more Russia indulges in coercive or threatening behaviour towards its neighbours, the more it antagonizes them, and deepens the split between Russia and the rest of Europe that abhors such behaviour. The task at hand for the EU is to not to join in a primeval struggle of power politics with this unruly Russia, for which it is in any case not equipped.. The EU should instead engage in a different rapport de forces, in which the EU deepens and widens the Europe of ‘civilized' normative behaviour, until Russia and Russians draw their own conclusions who and what they want to be and where their true long-term interests really lie.

EU strategy has to build up the credibility of its actions to boost its model for the wider Europe. The norms are attractive in themselves, but they still have to be buttressed by institutions, laws and political and economic investments (as detailed elsewhere*1).

President Medvedev says that Russia wants a new pan-European security order, with some details now given in his speech in Evian on 8 October (see below). On close reading he is advocating norms already enshrined in the Helsinki charter of 1975, while Russia was breaching some of these in the August war. He is also advancing some pseudo-norms that seem to be expressing in indirect language Russia's well known objections to NATO's enlargement and the US missile defence plans. While his proposals will therefore encounter some objections, to say the least, it is also surely the case that the Europeans should respond to the general call for a civilized European security order with their own ideas. President Sarkozy has proposed a summit meeting of OSCE in early 2009 with this in mind.

It remains to be seen what position the next President of the United States is going to take on these issues. While McCain has adopted a willingly confrontational approach, this looks like becoming irrelevant in just a few days time. Obama for his part shares several obvious qualities with President Medvedev: they both belong to a new generation, and both seem to approach their responsibilities with careful intelligence. Is there a prospect here from a renewed trans-Atlantic alliance between EU and US to be more successful in persuading Moscow to become a genuinely cooperative partner in international affairs?

A realistic Russia will recognize that it does not hold all the cards, with serious weaknesses in its economy, demography and international political reputation. The EU has to find the political will and unity to craft a strategic understanding with Russia, which would see a convergence on civilized norms for the wider Europe. Every decade or so the EU is confronted with strategic challenges for which its traditional structures prove obsolete, and which therefore require systemic change. Such were the stories of completing the internal market and the monetary union in the 1980s and 1990s. Today it is confronted simultaneously with the double challenges of the global financial crisis and a revanchist Russia.

*1 M. Emerson, "The Struggle for a Civilised Wider European Order – Elements for European Security Strategy", CEPS Working Document No. 307, October 2008.

№11(27), 2008