To be a global player, a united Europe must include Russia
Russia and the E.U. must set the long-term goal of creating a Union of Europe, which would also include countries like Turkey, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. If Europe does not unite, the United States and China will dominate the world order. A geostrategic triangle between the United States, China, and a truly united Europe would benefit everyone.
Russia and Europe have missed two critical chances for rapprochement. The first window opened after the Russian revolution of 1991 and lasted until the mid-1990s. Russia had thrown off communism, and was ready to integrate with the West as a junior partner. The West hesitated, however, and turned its back on Moscow. It politely treated Russia as a defeated nation, although Russians did not consider themselves defeated. NATO began to enlarge. By excluding Russia, Europe demonstrated a stunning lack of historical and strategic vision. Instead, NATO embraced only the small countries in Central and Eastern -Europe.
The second chance emerged in the early 2000s when Vladimir Putin made an earnest attempt to bring Russia and the European Union closer together. The dialogue that began, while producing no tangible results, increased understanding between the two parties. The main obstacle to real progress was the lack of a common strategic vision that would form the basis of mutual relations. In addition, the Europeans nostalgically sought to maintain their dominance in relations with Moscow, refusing to understand that the restoration of Russian statehood had dramatically changed the balance of power.
At the same time, Russia persistently and arrogantly kept changing the rules of the game that were established in the 1990s.
As a result, the first decade -of the new century, just as the one before it, has been a time of missed opportunities for Russian-European relations. The parties declared their desire to cooperate but, in fact, have been bitter competitors. Brussels sought to use Russia to prove its ability as a legitimate foreign-policy actor and Russia responded with retaliatory and preemptive diplomatic strikes.
As Russia and Europe vied for political points and influence in the area of their common neighborhood, other parties suffered. The smaller countries of the region were forgotten by the sparring powers, and their development was hindered as a result. Hence, there emerged political figures like Ukraine’s Victor Yushchenko, who made first Russians and then other Europeans uncomfortable, and Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, who, for differing reasons, remains a troublesome figure for both Russia and the West.
Yet the main loss was different. While competing against one another within the political framework of Russia-EU relations, or the security framework of Russia-versus-NATO, both parts of Europe overlooked the rise of the new Asia and tectonic shifts in the world economy and politics.
Partnership for Modernization
The history of the last 20 years of Russia’s relations with Europe, largely personified by the European Union and NATO, is riddled with empty slogans and vain hopes. The trend began in 1989 with the “Common European House” advocated by Mikhail Gorbachev, or “Europe Free and Whole” proclaimed by George H.W. Bush. Then followed Boris Yeltsin’s proposal that Russia join NATO, which remained unanswered. After that, Russia and the European Union finally lost any desire to look for benchmarks for their joint development and instead busied themselves for years by writing an astonishingly shallow document on “four spaces” for cooperation. Later, Russia simply gave up on the European Union and officially focused its attention -almost entirely on bilateral relations with European nations—simply for -practical reasons.
Over the last year, both parties, sensing that their positions in the world are weakening, have begun to look for ways to resume their rapprochement.
The idea of modernization, proclaimed by the Russian president, has become
a convenient slogan. The Russia-E.U. summit in November 2009 declared a -“Partnership for Modernization” initiative. At the latest summit, held in June 2010 in Rostov-on-Don, Partnership for Modernization (PfM) was the subject of the central statement.
The summit proceeded well, “in a friendly atmosphere” and, indeed, as a dialogue of equals. But there are concerns about placing PfM in the center of the dialogue. It may well end up being another empty slogan distracting people from setting strategic tasks that are vitally important to both parts of Europe. There are two main reasons why the slogan may cause problems.
First, Russia’s ruling elite, with rare exceptions—and even the majority of the Russian population—do not yet want serious modernization that would require saying goodbye to rampant corruption and a relatively quiet way of life after years of hardship and chaos. At the same time, the Russian thinking class has begun to wake up and demand an end to the stagnant, corrupt state capitalism in Russia. There is an urgent need to overcome this model of capitalism because of the fast-growing non-competitiveness of both the Russian economy and its military-technical sphere. Without change, Russia will soon lose its foreign policy competitiveness, too.
Second, the two parties interpret PfM differently. Officials in Russia interpret modernization primarily as technological modernization or, in plain -language, as assistance to Russian corporations in their business projects. Meanwhile, Russians are not yet ready to sacrifice even a little of their sovereignty. Therefore they do not want to adopt European technical standards, even though the Russian president said that the construction of roads in Russia, for example, would be much cheaper if done by European standards.
In the European Union, there are still hopes among some parliamentarians that Russia will revert to the role of a “junior partner,” but for free, unlike the E.U. states of Central and Eastern Europe. At the political level, Europe views modernization as Russia’s movement toward broader political freedoms and respect for human rights. However, it habitually sees only the tip of the -iceberg—namely, the killings of several human rights activists and journalists or crackdowns on opposition demonstrations, rather than Russia’s main problem of bureaucratic corruption and police lawlessness, which violates the rights of millions of ordinary people.
The different concepts of modernization make PfM doomed to become yet another empty slogan. This does not mean that Russia and the European Union should not seek rapprochement or that this rapprochement will not promote Russia’s modernization.
The separation between Russia and the European Union in the last decade has largely weakened the factions of liberal, Europe-minded Russians, which historically almost fully coincides with modernizers. In addition, the feeling that “Europe cannot lay down the law for us” has been a major factor in barbarizing social life in Russia. After a brief period of reversal in the 1980s and 1990s, Russia has continued to retreat from the “European” 19th century, the best in its history.
The main interest uniting Western Europe and Russia is geopolitics and geo-economics. Moscow and the capitals of old European powers—even though only at the top level—have finally come to understand this. If the tendency -toward de-modernization in Russia persists for several more years, it will no longer be able to play the role of an independent first-class player. And if it does not pool its efforts with Europe, it will inevitably drift toward the role of a raw-material provider. In addition, degradation tendencies in society will increase, and the country may lose the status of a great sovereign power that was regained with so much effort. Furthermore, while China experiences great economic, cultural, and political success, Russia will become a younger, sub-ordinate brother to the superpower of the future if it fails to achieve similar growth.
Europe’s geopolitical prospects are even worse than Russia’s. The integration project, sadly for the European Union and Russia, is at a deadlock. Carried away by the euphoria over its past achievements and multiplied by the victory over communism, the European Union made a series of mistakes for which it now has to pay.
First, without federalizing budgetary policy, that is, without establishing a single decision-making center, the European Union admitted countries to the Eurozone that did not have an economic culture compatible with Western European values. Second, the European Union enlarged itself too fast and without sufficient preconditions for new members, thus enlarging the club of lagging nations and further complicating the adoption of common decisions. Then came the enlargement fatigue, which has deprived the European Union of its most important foreign-policy lever: the prospect of -entering the most comfortable and civilized community that mankind has ever created.
As a result, the political weight of the European Union has sharply decreased, especially in the eyes of countries such as Turkey, Ukraine, and Russia. Finally, it was a mistake to proclaim in the early 1990s the goal of working on a basis of a unified foreign policy.
The European Union now has a policy set at the lowest common denominator, which has largely tied the hands of great European nations and has not increased the European Union’s influence.
The geopolitical situation for the European Union has been aggravated by the return of a more assertive foreign policy and also economic growth as criteria for success in the world. Europe, except for Germany, East Central Europe, and the Nordic countries, is unwilling and unable to struggle for growth after -decades of social welfare, and no one wants to seek and to pay for military power. The comeback of traditional geopolitics, of nation-states as the main players, has exposed Europe’s historical fatigue. After the hardships of the 20th Century, which broke the back of almost all European powers, the Europeans simply do not want to sacrifice anything for grand strategic policies.
The economic crisis and the Lisbon Treaty have highlighted all these -problems which many Europeans did not—and still do not—want to publicly acknowledge. The Copenhagen Summit on climate change was an embodiment of Europe’s inability to translate its aggregate economic and cultural weight into political influence. Europe, which still has a great human, economic, and cultural potential, is unable to use it to adequately protect its interests. Now it has to admit its new weakness and old mistakes—and it has already begun to do so. Therefore there is hope that the European Union may work out a more realistic geopolitical strategy, especially in its relations with Russia.
There is growing realism in Russia as well. The economic crisis has reduced its oil-and-gas arrogance; yet it has not made it feel vulnerable, and therefore aggressive, to the outside world. We are now witnessing a rare combination of confidence and the awareness of their own weaknesses in Russia. The new realism has already brought about a -tangible foreign-policy achievement. Without conceding anything, Russia finally fully admitted the crimes in Katyn and behaved in a truly generous manner toward Poland.
A Union of Europe
This year many top-level European politicians and thinkers have begun to speak of the urgent need for rapprochement with Russia in order to avoid -further marginalization in the world. The past decades have shown that without mutual interest, and without a mutually understood long-term strategic goal, there will be no radical rapprochement between the parties. Both parts of Europe will not be able to reverse their shared tendency of losing the positions of first-class players of the new world, capable of effectively defending their interests and values which, in the field of international governance and especially in the management of the global economy, are close or even identical. Political values should eventually come closer together as well, from both sides: Russia cannot afford “new barbarism,” while Western Europe cannot afford post-European, post-historical values.
If Europe does not unite, it will be the United States and China that will call the tune in the future world, and the brilliant half-millennium of Europe will be over.
Such a bipolar world, with a large number of new competing players, would be highly unstable. A “triangle” between the United States, China, and a truly united Europe would make it much more stable. This is a major reason why Russia and the European Union must set a long-term goal of creating a Union of Europe, which would also include other countries without a clear-cut orientation, such as Turkey, Ukraine or Kazakhstan. This Union could be based on a treaty—a declaration on the establishment of the Union, which all European countries could join. It is a union that the parties must seek to establish, not a dull bureaucratic and strategic partnership. These efforts will be difficult and may fail, but they are worth it.
In legal terms, a Union of Europe could be formalized in a major treaty mentioned above, with another four treaties on four major areas for cooperation and co-development and a large number of smaller, “sectoral” agreements. The first of the major treaties could concern the creation of a common strategic space and provide for close coordination of the parties’ foreign policies. The soft power of the European Union would thus be combined with the hard power and strategic might of Russia. Some people may argue that the European Union cannot be a partner in this field. But Russia would have to be interested in the growth of E.U. foreign policy influence, as a weak Europe weakens Russia. This treaty could help solve the problem of Europe’s military-political division, an unwanted legacy of the Cold War.
This idea has already begun to be translated into practical politics. At the latest Russian-German summit in June, Angela Merkel proposed to Dmitri Medvedev to initiate almost monthly meetings between the foreign ministers of Russia and the European Union. The Russian president supported the idea.
Another key treaty could address energy and establish a single energy -complex in Europe, with common rules and equal access for the corporations of all countries to extraction and transportation systems (what the European Union wants) and, of course, to energy distribution (what Russia wants). Such a single complex could play the same role in the history of Greater Europe as was played by the European Coal and Steel Community, from which the European Economic Community and ultimately the European Union emerged. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder expressed this idea more than a decade ago.
The third treaty could establish a common economic and technological space in Europe with clear and uniform rules and a free movement of capital, goods and people. In the long run, it may provide for the establishment of a customs union. This has been said and written by many people, yet the relevance of this idea is growing as the World Trade Organization has been weakening as the world economy has been steadily splitting into regional blocs. In fact, what is proposed is the creation of a common economic and energy market of greater Europe, which would be competitive with the old and new geopolitical giants. And finally—and perhaps most important—is the establishment of a single human, cultural, and educational space that would provide for a visa-free movement of people, large-scale exchanges of students, and, in the long term, the creation of a single labor market.
This goal, if proclaimed officially, would require progress in Russia towards similar political institutions and equal -respect for human rights.
The European Union’s integration experience shows that there will be no unification of cultures but a positive mutual penetration.
Although a project like the establishment of a Union of Europe is obviously idealistic and difficult to achieve, the idea is imperative and realistic. All -citizens of a united Europe should believe in the great European values of rationality and reason. In the world of the future, Russia and the European Union are doomed to degradation and weakening if they act separately.