Time to offer more to Ukraine during ‘birth of a new European nation’

By Jacek Pawlicki and Robert Soltyk

Date: 16/12/04

At this turning point in history, when Viktor Yushchenko, the opposition candidate for president of Ukraine, is announcing "the birth of a new European nation", the European Union is offering Kiev only an unambitious 'action plan' of cooperation in the years to come. It is a political mistake, especially after all that Javier Solana and European mediators achieved in the round-table talks in Ukraine.

Yushchenko wants Ukraine to become recognized as a market economy, then to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), later to become an EU associate member before eventually acquiring full membership. He gives no timetable for this process.

"If Ukraine wants to enter the EU and is welcomed there, then we can only be pleased," said the Russian President Vladimir Putin last Friday, after weeks of fierce battle to block Yushchenko from power. "We have a special relationship with Ukraine, close economic links, very high industrial cooperation. Therefore the integration of this part of our economy in the European structure would, I hope, have a positive effect for Russia," Putin said.

If Russia has nothing against it and if Ukraine is ready to start a difficult road to join the EU, why has Brussels so little to offer to one of its most important strategic partners?

Jan Truszczynski, the Polish vice-minister of foreign affairs, describes the attitude of most European capitals towards Ukraine's eventual membership of the EU as "prudence, procrastination, reluctance and dislike".

According to him, "a lot of EU members are strongly attached to the idea that the EU should develop itself gradually". That means first 'swallowing' the present enlargement of ten plus two (Bulgaria and Romania), then having the EU constitution ratified, then starting negotiations with Turkey. "With this kind of spirit it is hard to imagine that at the European Council in Brussels on 17 December we will get any real breakthrough," Truszczynski says.

According to Günter Verheugen, the vice-president of the European Commission and author of the concept of new neighbourhood policy, "membership of Ukraine in the EU is not even being considered". "Only Poland is showing any interest," he says. Truszczynski replies: "We will discuss this issue more vigorously. If the campaign and presidential vote on 26 December is according to international standards the EU has a duty to be prepared for it. The more Ukraine can prove the depth of the change, the more the EU will come under pressure."

The European Commission did not wait for Ukraine's election to be repeated. Last Thursday (9 December) it accepted the action plan that had been negotiated a few months ago with Viktor Yanukovich's government in the framework of the neighbourhood policy. This plan defines relations between Brussels and Kiev in the next three to five years. It offers assistance in bringing legislation in line with the EU to increase access to the Union's internal market, participation in EU programmes including education, research, environment.

It also boosts cooperation on border management, migration, trafficking in human beings, tackling organized crime, money laundering, increased cooperation on counter-terrorism, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and improved links with the EU in the fields of energy, transport and information technology.

The plan puts Ukraine in the same category as Moldova, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

There is another way of doing things: the EU's stabilization and association process with the western Balkans, which focuses on respect for democratic principles and strengthening links between the region and the EU's single market. It foresees the establishment of a free-trade area with the Union and sets out rights and obligations in areas such as competition and state aid rules.

Janusz Reiter, head of the Centre for International Relations in Warsaw and a former Polish ambassador to Bonn, thinks that Germany "will be extremely prudent but is not lost" for the cause. The Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz prepared a paper jointly with his German counterpart Joschka Fischer that describes in detail how the EU should respond in case of positive developments in Ukraine.

Although the Polish-German paper is silent on the prospects of Ukraine's "European perspective" (otherwise Berlin would not co-sign it), it states clearly that the EU should go further and beyond the agreed action plan. "We are talking about a strategic partnership between the EU and Ukraine," Cimoszewicz said. "It should be a treaty."

Polish efforts in the Ukraine crisis were supported last week by the prime ministers of the other Visegrad countries (Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic), as well as Slovenia and the chancellor of Austria. Similar attitudes are to be found in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Crucial in this case is the support of Germany, which may influence France and other EU partners.

• The authors are European editor and European correspondent of the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

Major commentary feature in which the authors criticise the fact that at a turning point in Ukrainian history, marked by the democratisation movement's protests against the fraudulent Presidential elections in late 2004, the European Union was offering Ukraine only an unambitious 'action plan' of cooperation in the years to come. He goes on to say that this was a political mistake, especially after all that Javier Solana and European mediators had achieved in the round-table talks in Ukraine.