Kiev still stuck in limbo
Let's unite. During a rally in central Kiev, 24 October 2009. (Photo AFP/Sergei Supinsky)
The European Union refuses to give Ukraine a shot at EU accession, thereby leaving the country without any bright prospects and slowing its stabilisation. This will go down in history as a huge mistake, foresees the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
It is widely mooted that political chaos reigns in Ukraine. What goes unmentioned in these appraisals, however, is that the Ukraine’s principal Western partner, the European Union, is partly to blame for keeping the country unmoored and adrift with no political destination in sight.
Hardly anyone would deny that the prospect of EU accession went a long way toward expediting the stabilisation and democratisation of Central Europe after the Soviet bloc fell apart. Precious few European politicians, however, are prepared to publicly pronounce the obvious corollary for the Ukraine. If participation in the European integration process, the prospect of and negotiations toward EU accession, had positive repercussions from Tallinn to Dublin, then the Ukraine, if denied even a shot at future EU membership, remains at sea and sorely deprived of the beneficial beacons that lit the way for its western neighbours.
Ukraine's democrats are getting short shrift
Western Europe’s isolationism relegates the Ukraine to a sort of “old Europe”, in other words to a situation that harks back to the continent’s prewar status quo. Unlike most European countries, the Ukrainian leadership is condemned, now as before, to manoeuvre in a world of competing nation-states, changing national alliances, closed political camps, and gruelling zero-sum games in which one national or international player’s gain means another’s loss.
The Ukrainians would be the first to admit their country is still far from being a resplendent candidate for EU membership. Nonetheless, European-minded Ukrainians have a hard time understanding what yardstick the EU goes by: Why is Turkey already an official hopeful, Romania and Bulgaria long since full members, while Ukraine doesn’t even get a look-in at admission to the EU in the distant offing? Didn’t the Orange Revolution and the 2006 and 2007 parliamentary elections go to show that Ukrainians feel attached to democratic values and practices?
The secessionist threat
Well, in recent years there have been a number of developments pointing in the opposite direction. Now as ever, graft keeps the state machinery all too well-greased, the legislative and executive branches are paralysed time after time by bizarre political infighting, badly needed administrative reforms bog down and fizzle out. The restructuring of industry or social policy has made but sluggish headway, if any. Should these setbacks be viewed as the causes, or as the effects, of the EU’s reluctance to hold out any official prospects of eventual membership? Is Ukraine’s purported unfitness for the EU becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy?
Absent any long-term development prospects, Ukraine has become the battlefield in a cultural proxy war. Pro-Western and Pro-Russian governmental and non-governmental, national and international contenders are vying for the future of this pivotal and as yet unconsolidated European nation. Brussels, Paris and Berlin ought to be watching closely, given the enduring threat of regional secessionism within Ukraine’s borders. Separatist tendencies could, in turn, serve as a pretext for Russian interference.
Saying "Yes" won't hurt
An official “Yes” from the EU to an eventual Ukrainian candidacy, on the other hand, would commit the European Commission and the member states to very little in the foreseeable future. And even though a statement along these lines would hardly make a dent in the EU’s foreign relations for the time being, it would make a deep impression on the powers that be in Kiev – and Moscow – and send a powerful signal to the Ukrainian people.
The EU heads of state should try to see the Ukraine in historical context – and recall the recent history of their own countries – instead of drawing ahistorical distinctions between Ukraine’s present-day difficulties and those their own countries faced before joining the European integration process. In a word, the Union should hold out accession prospects to the Ukraine sooner rather than later – for the sake of everyone concerned.
It’s a long way to Brussels – at least from Kiev
“Of all the former Soviet Union countries, none bar Russia matters as much to the EU as Ukraine – and none tries the EU’s patience as much,” writes Tony Barber in the Financial Times. “For one thing, Ukraine is the conduit for 80 per cent of the EU’s natural gas imports from Russia. As the bloc learned to its cost in January, when a Moscow-Kiev dispute cut off gas supplies for two weeks, events in Ukraine can cause havoc in member states that depend entirely on Russian gas. Some experts fear another gas crisis in January. However, gas is far from the whole story,” Barber adds. “With 46m people, a 1,400km border with four EU nations and frequent tensions with Russia that have nothing to do with gas, Ukraine is pivotal to the security of the EU’s eastern flank. After Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, some EU strategists hoped that the path to liberal democracy, the rule of law and economic prosperity would become irreversible in Ukraine. But it has not turned out that way.”
Moreover, “the Russian-Georgian war of August 2008 shocked the EU into realising that the Kremlin was prepared to use force if necessary to halt the expansion of western influence into former Soviet republics.(…) Then the global financial crisis laid low Ukraine’s economy, which at present survives on a $16.4bn loan from the International Monetary Fund.(…) Worst of all, the Orange Revolution failed to clean up the corruption that runs deep in Ukraine’s business world, especially the energy sector. Corruption is bound up with the personal animosities and shadowy connections with Russian interests that bedevil Ukraine’s political scene. All these difficulties,” concludes the FT, “explain why many in the 27-nation bloc are unwilling to offer Ukraine even a vague promise that it may one day be invited to join the EU.”