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ISSUES OF TRANSPARENCY WITHIN THE FOUR COMMON SPACES CONCEPT.

Yulia A.Ovchinnikova, ‘R-US Expert Transit’ Center

 

In May 2005 at the summit in Saint-Petersburg the EU and Russia agreed to institutionalize the Four Common Spaces to improve economical exchanges, strengthen the mechanisms of political communications, and properly respond to such global problems as transnational crime, terrorism and corruption. According to the spirit of the agreement, the signatories pledged to be transparent in actions, disclose necessary information and openly interact with each other in the issues of mutual interest.

In this paper I am trying to deploy the issues of transparency in a new policy framework constructed by the concept of the Four Common Spaces. More specifically, there are two arguments to be made. First, the issues of fostering transparency are dispersed within all four spaces and, therefore, don't constitute a single policy track. Secondly, the EU is not the sole initiator of transparency-fostering policies, sharing them with a number of other organizations, to include the United Nations, the World Bank, Transparency International, and some others. Both arguments point to the fact that transparency is a semantically variegated concept which easily plugs into different “discursive situations”, to use a Foucauldian vocabulary.

Let me start with the first argument. Transparency can be reached relatively smoothly within the Common space of science, education and culture. The EU and Russia are eager to share their cultural experiences and develop inter-cultural dialog. In particular, in the aftermath of Russia’s decision to join the Bologna process [1], the two entities found an additional incentive to get closer to each other in education and research. ”We are preparing to prolong the science-and-technological cooperation agreement in this field”, says Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Vladimir Chizhov [2].

The Common space of external security is perhaps the most difficult to be implemented in practice, because many problems are still too delicate for the EU and Russia. Measures aimed against international crime and terrorism is evidently part of joint security policies. Javier Solana, the European Union Secretary General, said that the EU and Russia “have concrete perspectives for cooperation in the battle with terrorism and in dealing with civil emergency situations” [3].

It is clear from the agreement that the EU and Russia are going to sign and ratify all the 12 UN Conventions against the terrorist actions, and other UN conventions related to international crime [4]. But these Conventions are not valid till their ratification by all UN members. Of course, the EU and Russia can follow all the principles of the Conventions, but it will be less effective.

The Common economic space includes the perspectives of the free movement of goods, capital and services, which presupposes the wider possibilities for the European industrial and financial institutions to operate in the Russian market. Such a perspective clearly entails the issue of corruption in Russia and, concomitantly, the elaboration of anti-corruption strategies. According to the Transparency International findings [5], Russia is one of the most corrupted countries in the world. The aim of the EU and Russia seems to consist in raising the level of transparency in such spheres as business, economic activity, entrepreneurship, and banking. The two parties agreed, in particular, to use mass media to disseminate the information that uncovers the real damage of illegal actions, like bribes, financial wrongdoings and malpractices. This is within this framework that freedom of press is essential for Russia. During President Putin’s visit to the Netherlands in November 2005 more than once reporters showed their interest in the issue of media freedom. Mr. Putin replied that “more than 47.000 of periodical press and more than 3.000 of radio and TV companies are registered in Russia nowadays”. [6] There is no doubt that the number of newspapers and research centers is impressive, especially comparing to the Soviet times, but it doesn’t mean that quality and openness of information is high enough.

The Common space of freedom, security, and justice is based on an idea of legal protection of people’s freedoms against all sorts of security threats, including violence [7]. There are some grounds to expect that Russia will interpret this formula as an instrument of raising the issue of human rights violations in the Baltic States. In 2003 when ex-Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov held talks with politicians of the EU, one of the results was the EU statement that “discrimination against Russian-speaking communities in Latvia and Estonia will turn into a problem for Russia-EU relations, rather than bilateral discussions between Russia and these two countries, after the EU expands” [8]. However, recent events demonstrated that even after the European Court decided that the Sysoev family has all the rights to live in Latvia, the government of this Baltic country still doesn’t protect Russians in general and this family in particular from the violation of their human rights [9].

Summarizing what was said above and translating it to the hypothesis of the multiple understandings of transparency, the following scheme might be proposed:

The understandings of transparency - and the contexts it belongs to - directly depend, therefore, on the sphere where the EU and Russia are going to cooperate. The common space of culture presupposes, for instance, that the Russian educational system becomes more consistent with the European standards of teaching and research, which necessitates greater openness for innovative technologies and availability of information reflecting the state of affairs in Russian Universities. Within the economic space, an emphasis should be made on greater efficacy of anti-corruption strategies, with possible reliance upon the existing European experience. The space of external security entails a different connotation of transparency – which one primarily related to the circulation of information in a community of professionals in anti-terrorist and anti-criminal strategies. In the space of freedom, security and justice there is, apparently, a legal understanding of transparency related to monitoring of the implementation of the rules and regulations in a variety of areas related to trans-boundary operations.

Now, let me turn to the second argument to be presented in this scheme. The EU does not appear to be the only source of innovations in the area of fostering transparency and accountability, and usually acts in parallel with a variety of other institutions.

The scheme below might be used for better visualization of this argument:

Comments to the scheme

Communities:

 Religious: Muslim, Christian;

Cultural: Eastern, Western.

Countries: [10]

According to the level of development: developed, developing;

According to the type of society: traditional, streamlined and totalitarian;

According to the level of cooperation with other countries: open and closed.

Institutions:

Political: international, universal, humanitarian, conventional, monetary, public, economic laws

Social: Human rights organizations (the Human Rights Watch, the Amnesty International, and the International Migration Organization);

Economic: the WTO, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund;

Globally aimed: the UN, the Transparency International, the Transnational Crime and Corruption Center.

This scheme is based upon a presumption that there are three main structures in the world system (community, country and institution) that regulate and establish the relations between the unities. The EU has tried to create a model of governance that includes features of all three structures. The EU is an intergovernmental and supranational institution of 25 European countries, known as member states whose activities cover all major areas of public policy, from health and economic policy to foreign affairs and defense. In the meantime, the EU is a community-based union containing strong religious and cultural foundations.

But is the EU ready to perform a widely advertised role of a new structure that can bring innovations to other countries, in particular to Russia? Theoretically, this could be the case, but in practice the EU has to operate in a rather dense international environment that contains a number of other important institutional actors. Speaking in terms of transparency, such institutions as the Human Rights Watch, the Amnesty International, and the International Migration Organization have had an impressive experience of dealing with situations of violations of people’s rights due to a variety of shadow practices and opacity in policy making process. The EU is a powerful entity with a great potential, but in projecting innovations to other countries it faces a problem of assembling, aggregating and streamlining the best practices already existing within the international community.

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(1) - http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/88/354/11205_space.html   >>>

(2) - http://english.pravda.ru/main/18/88/354/11205_space.html   >>>

(3) - http://www.rosbaltnews.com/2003/04/30/62426.html  >>>

(4) - http://www.kremlin.ru/text/docs/2005/05/88008.shtml  >>>

(5) - http://www.transparency.com   >>>

(6) - http://www.kremlin.ru/appears/2005/10/31/1836_type63377type63379_96446.shtml   >>>

(7) - http://www.kremlin.ru/text/docs/2005/05/88008.shtml   >>>

(8) - http://www.english.pravda.ru/main/18/88/354/11205_space.html  >>>

(9) - http://www.cityspb.ru/events/25022.html  >>>

(10) - Pugachev V.P., Political Science, Moscow, 2003, p. 198. >>>

© INTAS Project 2006

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