The Elephant and the Bear

The Elephant and the Bear:
The European Union, Russia, and their Near Abroads

Michael Emerson
with Nathalie Tocci, Marius Vahl, and Nicholas Whyte

2001

Preface

This book is based on an address by Michael Emerson to the Annual Assembly of the Israeli Association for the Study of European Integration in Jerusalem, 15 March 2001. It was subsequently revised and expanded through into the autumn of 2001, and in the course of this became a team endeavour involving several members of the "Wider Europe" programme at CEPS. These colleagues and their areas of specialisation are: Nathalie Tocci, Caucasus and Mediterranean, Marius Vahl, Russia and the Northern Dimension, and Nicholas Whyte, South East Europe.

The Wider Europe programme seeks to develop a general view of the concepts and policies required of the enlarging European Union in relation to its neighbours in the rest of Europe. In practice so far the EU's policies towards its neighbours have proceeded in two categories. The first consists of the accession candidate states, which are subject to preaccession strategies. Conceptually this process has the merit of clarity. The EU has a mass of legislation that the candidates have to put on their statute books and become able to implement (the acquis). In addition, there are some qualitative tests concerning the character of their democratic practices (altogether these are summarised in the "Copenhagen criteria"). The candidates face tough requests from the EU, but they also receive large-scale economic assistance. Functionally this process is seen to be extremely powerful, since it is instrumental in transforming not only the economic and political systems of former communist states in a technical sense, but it also connects with the sense of historical destiny of these societies, which are "re-joining Europe".

The second category of states of the Wider Europe consists of weaker states that need the anchor of robust West European structures, if anything, more and not less than the accession candidates. Yet here there is no clear and powerful mechanism at work, in spite of the political speeches about a new Europe whole and free, with no more Berlin walls. At best it is vaguely hoped that the processes of post-communist transition should be working in parallel, only somewhat slower, compared to the more advanced accession candidates. But there is a less sanguine reality to be observed. It is not a linear process. At some point the distance (qualitative as much as geographical) from core Europe is so great that the more distant societies do not perceive, or indeed have, the same incentives to effectively achieve this profound transformation. In the worst cases, there is outright failure of the post-communist transition by societies that perceive exclusion, and make it an even deeper self-exclusion, as the gangrenous growth of criminality and corrupt governance combines with vicious, primitive nationalism and ethnic conflict. The misfortune is that the needs of these states are at odds with the EU enlargement process, which privileges the states that are closest to achieving EU norms. One cannot criticise the EU for setting high standards for full membership, because it has fundamental values to defend, and institutional arrangements that could be made ungovernable by excessively fast enlargement. It is hardly a good idea, to say the least, to expand the EU in order to destroy it, remembering that this has actually been the fate of many empires (even if the EU does not think of itself as an empire, it exhibits some such properties).

Therefore the main purpose of the book is to try to find ways of overcoming this unresolved dilemma of post-communist Europe. An extensive conceptual apparatus is offered, with sketches of how a more inclusive Wider Europe strategy might be formulated by the EU. This has to cover all the rather unruly parts of the EU's neighbourhood, through to and including the enormous Russia.