ECFR has a new report out today with a provocative message: “Despite its economic strength and military might, the European Union has begun to behave as if it were subordinate to an increasingly assertive Russia”. The reason, they say: disunity among the EU’s member states, which fall into five different categories:
- ‘Trojan horses’ like Greece and Cyprus who “often defend positions close to Russian interests, and who have been willing to veto common EU positions”;
- “Strategic partners” like Germany, France, Italy and Spain who “have built special bilateral relationships with Russia, which has sometimes cut against the grain of common EU objectives in areas such as energy and the EU Neighbourhood Policy”;
- “Friendly pragmatists” comprising Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary, Luxembourg, Malta, Slovakia, Slovenia and Portugal, who “have a less close but still significant relationship with Russia, in which business interests come first”;
- “Frosty pragmatists” – the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Sweden, Romania and the United Kingdom – who keep business interests high on the agenda but “have not refrained from criticising Russia’s human rights record and failings on democracy”; and finally
- “New Cold-warriors”, Poland and Lithuania, who have “developed an overtly hostile relationship with Moscow and are willing to use the veto to block EU negotiations with Russia”.
For some useful additional context, compare all of this with the interesting conversation that Gideon Rachman reports having with a “senior administration official” in DC in mid-October, in preparation for his trip to Russia:
As this particular American sees it, the only solution to a newly assertive Russia is western solidarity. But he is worried that not everybody in Europe sees this. The French, the British and the German Greens are praised by him for “thinking strategically”. Angela Merkel was praised for her handling of Mr Putin. But the German SPD were condemned as “acccomodationist”.The EU’s major strategic vulnerability, as the Americans see it, is its growing dependence on Russian gas. The administration official mused that sometimes the Americans seem more concerned about this than the Europeans themselves.
“Europe”, he said “needs a serious gas policy, with a major high level EU push to get Caspian gas out on a pipeline that does not go through Russia.” That means that Europe must make the building of the Nabucco pipeline through Turkey, a “top strategic priority”. It also means continuing to support the independence of Georgia, for strategic as well as ideological reasons. If Georgia is brought back within the Russian ambit, then it becomes impossible to build a pipeline that is outside Russian control – unless (gasp) you go via Iran.
Europeans also need to develop their links to Norwegian and North African gas. And they should “revisit the decision to build the Schroder pipeline” – the shorthand name for the under-sea gas pipeline linking Russia and Germany, but bypassing Poland and the Baltic states.And what happens if we in Europe don’t do any of this? “The biggest medium-term risk is that Europe becomes irreversibly dependent on
Russia and Russia starts rolling back freedoms gained in the former Soviet Union – starting with Georgia and then moving onto Ukraine.”
