A bearish outlook

The EU's relations with Russia are bad and may get worse

FOR most of the past 500 years, the idea of “Europe” has served to define a shifting huddle of western countries seeking to distinguish themselves from two great Eurasian powers in the east: the Turks and the Russians. Now both Turkey and Russia think that they should be seen as part of Europe too. And Europe, as represented by the European Union, more or less agrees. The idea is pleasing, but the implications are perplexing.

Turkey wants to become a full member of the Union (for its chances of getting in, see next article). Russia does not seriously want to join the Union, mainly because, like America and China, it sees itself as a country too great to accept constraints on its sovereignty. But at the same time Russia hates the thought of being excluded from anything. Ideally, it would like a special relationship giving it visa-free travel in EU countries; generous access to the single market through what it calls the “Common European Economic Space”, a loosely defined agenda of trade and market policies; and a voice but not a vote in EU policymaking, of the kind it already has in NATO affairs.

Those hopes are ambitious but not absurd. They could all be realised within the space of five years if Russia now possessed, or was moving confidently towards, a liberal and democratic political model. But for the moment, to judge from the way President Vladimir Putin's second term has gone so far, Russia is moving in the opposite direction, towards increased authoritarianism. As one liberal Russian politician, Grigory Yavlinsky, summarised the trend in a talk last year: “

There are six major features of Russia which must be taken into account today. First, today Russia has no independent judicial system...Secondly...Russia has no elements of [an] independent parliament. Third, Russia has no public or parliamentary control on secret services and law-enforcement structures. Fourth, Russia has no [powerful] independent media. Fifth, elections in Russia are [subject to] very substantial pressure from the authorities...Last, but very important, Russia has an economic system which is in fact a 100% merger between business and authorities...Every single important bureaucrat in Russian government or Russian administration is at the same time deeply involved in businesses or represents their interests.”

Very roughly speaking, and ignoring the rest of the former Soviet Union, Russia today is arguably where it might have been if it had avoided perestroika and the collapse of communism, choosing instead a Chinese path of strictly limited freedom. Under Mr Putin it has moved close to China's model of a one-party state, in which the ruling party (which in Russia is more of a clan), though a monopoly, cultivates real popularity as a source of stability and legitimacy.

The EU would be foolish to institutionalise closer ties while there is any risk that Russia will go on moving in this direction. Even if the EU feels comfortable with Russia now, that may change. Cutting new ties would be far more awkward, and far more insulting to Russia, than avoiding them in the first place.

EU members differ widely in their attitudes towards Russia. To the Balts and the Poles, Russia is a clear and present danger. It invaded them, unprovoked, within living memory. France sees Russia as a great diplomatic ally, another counterweight to America. Germany sees it as a vital economic partner, an indispensable supplier of gas. Britain is somewhere in the middle, shifting from optimism about Russia towards scepticism. The result is an absence of common policy, and in place of it a competition for Russia's friendship between France and Germany, which Britain used to join but rarely does now.

Relations could probably carry on that way, save that America's policy towards Russia and its neighbours has been changing, with and since the “orange revolution” in Ukraine. It is forcing choices on Europe.

To most west Europeans, the orange revolution was an inconvenience, something that would trouble relations with Russia and bring Ukraine to the EU's door as an unwanted candidate. Americans saw it differently, as the most inspiring event in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the revolt of the Baltic states. They were pleasantly surprised by the scale and the relative ease of Viktor Yushchenko's triumph over a Russian-backed challenger, and by what it revealed about the weakness or incompetence of Russia under Mr Putin. A stronger or cleverer Russia would have found a way to keep control. Russia also damaged itself in American eyes by renationalising the Yukos oil company. That has depressed potential investment and output across the Russian oil industry, just when America would have forgiven Russia almost anything in exchange for more and cheaper oil.

Perceptions of Mr Putin's weakness and drift, revealed and increased by the loss of Ukraine, appear to have become a new driver of American policy. America calls openly for the ousting of Alexander Lukashenka, the pro-Russian dictator of Belarus, implying another revolution there. In May George Bush visited Tbilisi to give public support to Mikhail Saakashvili, the pro-western president of Georgia, who is trying to close down Russian military bases on his soil - Russia says it will leave by 2008 - and regain control over Russian-backed separatist enclaves. Only a year ago, America, although sympathetic to Georgia, was far more reticent.

This American assertiveness leaves the EU struggling to decide how to react. So far Europe's record has not been good. When Ukraine's orange revolution was gathering pace, west European governments were conspicuous by their hesitation. Luckily for Europe's self-respect, Poland sized up the situation and, helped by Lithuania, joined America in pushing for a fair election and an orderly transfer of power. More recently, the EU has spurned Georgia's plea for a mission to monitor its border with Russia.

Few doubt that durable democracy-building in Ukraine will be much easier if Ukraine has a clear prospect of EU membership within a meaningful time-frame. Ten years might be manageable, so long as other institutional ties came much sooner, giving Ukraine the sense of having joined, irreversibly, the European “family”. NATO is sending the right signals: it started an “intensified dialogue” with Ukraine in April that is widely seen as a prelude to membership.

Nothing of that sort is currently in prospect on the EU side, however. The EU has nudged Ukraine not to press publicly for early membership, in exchange for which the EU maintains a studied ambiguity about Ukraine's hopes of ever joining. Ukraine has done its best to obey that gagging order, but its hard-pressed new government is starting to hunger for some more constructive arrangement. Mr Yushchenko has proposed opening the question of Ukraine's candidacy if and when Ukraine successfully completes an “action plan” of economic and political reforms already agreed on with the EU, which should take about three years.

That sounds a good compromise, the sort of thing the EU should endorse. But the view in most western European capitals is that it will be at least ten years before the EU is ready to start talks about talks with Ukraine, and then only if it has more or less finished negotiations with Turkey. One or two EU governments may even be temporising deliberately as a way to reassure Russia, a more important goal in their eyes than reassuring Ukraine.

None of this is to say that bringing Ukraine into the EU would ever be an easy job. Ukraine is a big and very poor country, with a strongly russified east. The Yushchenko government has yet to inspire complete confidence. It has spent most of this year “fighting fires” instead of sticking to the intended agenda, says one adviser. Rivalries between ministers have made things worse. Anders Aslund, head of the Carnegie Endowment's Russian and Eurasian programme, says Mr Yushchenko's prime minister, Yulia Timoshenko, has been pursuing “socialist and populist” policies by raising state wages sharply, weakening property rights and increasing the tax burden. That contributed, Mr Aslund says, to a fall in the rate of economic growth from 12% last year to 5% in the first four months of this year.

In one sense, that might seem to hold some comfort for the EU. If the Yushchenko government does badly, there is even less pressure on the EU to take Ukraine seriously as a candidate. But that analysis is dangerously short-sighted. Ukraine has to come right, for its own sake and for Russia's. Russia is too big and too obstinate (and too tired of bad foreign advice) to take any notice of the EU's preaching on democracy and political reform. It might possibly be influenced, on the other hand, by the spectacle of a flourishing European-style market democracy in Ukraine, a country which Russians still feel to be an extension of their own.

Leading by example

This is a long shot. If a more authoritarian Russian regime is well entrenched and the economy is doing fine, a democratic Ukraine might well make very little impact at all. But if Ukraine's orange revolution does collapse, it is certain to extinguish any last support for liberal democracy which may have gone on flickering in Russia under Mr Putin. If Ukraine fails, with it goes any hope of changing Russia for the better in this generation, and with it any hope of a Russia that can rub along with Europe in genuine friendship.

The stakes are lower when dealing with the two other countries caught between Russia and the EU. But they are still worth playing for. One of them, Belarus, is a poor, sad place, isolated from the West since Mr Lukashenka took power 11 years ago. In that time he has descended from crude paternalism to outright dictatorship, supported by Russia. Popular revolution will be much harder in Belarus than it was in Ukraine or Georgia, because Mr Lukashenka has left no room for dissent to mobilise. He has bankrupted local NGOs and driven out foreign ones. His government controls all broadcast media and most print media too. Sparse private business survives only with the state's blessing. Political challengers risk being kidnapped or killed.

The other post-Soviet state, Moldova, is crippled by a Russian-sponsored separatist regime in its eastern province of Transdniestria. Russian troops helped local Russian settlers win a brief but bloody war of secession there after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, amid spurious claims that Moldova might be swallowed by Romania. The Transdniestrian enclave now floods the rest of Moldova with untaxed spirits and consumer goods smuggled in through Ukraine. It exports steel and small arms through Ukraine by day, and much nastier things by night. Transdniestria is, in effect, a big criminal racket with a small piece of land attached. Partition has paralysed and disoriented Moldova, making it the poorest country in Europe and the only post-communist country to have re-elected an unreformed communist party. But even Moldova's communists have switched their allegiance from Russia to the West, unable to stomach Russia's continued support for Transdniestria.

It beggars belief that Russia can claim international respectability while at the same time propping up Transdniestria and two other separatist enclaves in Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which are just as far outside the law. And Mr Lukashenka's dictatorship in Belarus would have trouble surviving three months without Russian support. “The Kremlin does not like Lukashenka, but it likes the orange revolution even less,” explains Anatoly Lebedko, one of Mr Lukashenka's brave opponents.

Straight talking

Here lies one way forward for Europe, and everyone else, in relations with Russia: brutal honesty. Whatever else Russia craves, it always craves respect. If western leaders challenge Mr Putin publicly about the smuggling and criminality in Transdniestria and South Ossetia each time they meet him, and if they press him publicly to condemn the dictatorship in Belarus, they will make these adventures much more expensive for Russia politically, at no great cost to themselves.

That will probably not spell the end for Mr Lukashenka, at least until Russia finds someone tamer who can still keep Belarus a no-go area for the West. But Transdniestria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are another matter. Their continued existence serves the interests of crooks and nationalists and generals inside Russia, not the Russian government or state. Russia might let these enclaves go if they were doing serious damage to its standing in the world.

At the moment, however, most European leaders prefer to flatter Mr Putin. Even if they see his faults, they fear that whatever comes next will be worse. This may be so. But the answer, surely, is to do something to reverse that trend.

Europe has a better political and economic model to offer, but it has to make the virtues of that model clear to everyone. That means criticising Mr Putin's government for its undemocratic behaviour at home and its anti-democratic behaviour abroad. It means giving support to countries around Russia that want to do things differently. The aim of all this is not to weaken Russia, but to strengthen it, by encouraging it to govern itself better.

The EU's relations with Russia are bad and may get worse. Article forms part of a survey 'Meet the neighbours. A survey of the EU's eastern borders'.

• Primary Source