The Mismatch of Russia and the EU as Actors in a
Globalized World
Presentation by Mette Skak
[1], University of Aarhus, Denmark for the
conference "Russia and the European Union after Enlargement: New
Prospects and Problems", Oct. 7th 2005, Faculty of International
Relations, Sankt Petersburg State University
Abstract: In theory, the EU-Russia relationship is of the
utmost importance for both parties, but in reality interaction
between the parties is quite superficial. This paper argues that the
two parties have quite incompatible perceptions of themselves and
one another, in particular Russia fails to comprehend the uniqueness
of the EU and its own standing in international affairs. The
analysis reviews the state of EU-Russia affairs and then goes on to
portray how Russia sees itself and acts in international relations
emphasizing the Russian (mis-)understanding of the EU, This is
contrasted with a brief analysis of how the EU really works and the
real options for an intimate EU-Russia relationship. The conclusion
is guardedly optimistic, depending on Russia's capacity for bringing
its approach to international affairs, in case the EU, up to date.
The disappearance
of the watershed between the domestic and the foreign
policies has been a tendency of the last 30 years. Some
call it the dilution of national sovereignty. The world
has become more transparent in terms of information, and
it is no longer possible to hide or deny things. But
people’s behavior is still based on the ideology of
relationships that date back to the so- called
Westphalia system of several centuries ago.
It is being
diluted now but people can’t adapt so quickly and the
political class denies these changes. […] This happens
in every country, not only in Russia. […] But as I have
said, we are going to be much more affected by this
process than other countries and their political classes
simply because there is a very small stratum of people
in this country who can monitor global tendencies
thoroughly, if it exists at all.
Sergei Karaganov,
Radio Ekho Moskvy, May 11th 2004.
Introduction
In theory, the EU-Russia
relationship is of the utmost strategic importance for both parties,
but in reality interaction between the two parties is quite
superficial. True, EU-Russia relations have undergone a dynamic
evolution since the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union in
1991 making it possible to be speak of a special relationship
between the two parties as reflected in the pioneering Common
Strategy of the European Union and Russia of June 4th, 1999. But
when taking into account Russia’s enormous geopolitical significance
for the entire EU area as one vast continent-sized buffer between
Europe and Asia - for good or worse, that is both as a market for
Europe and a potential zone of stability protecting Europe or just
the opposite - and, conversely, the EU's absolutely vital importance
for Russia as the world market integration avenue, the
democratic institution-building frame of reference etc. etc., it
becomes clear that EU-Russia relations ought to be far more intimate
and dynamic. Please observe that I am not speaking about Russia
becoming a formal member of the EU as this is an issue I believe is
best left outside the discussion as too farfetched for the time
being. In short, the EU-Russia relationship
is suboptimal or underdeveloped which is readily recognized by EU
officials and Russian spokesmen [2]. So what is
wrong or rather: why is it that the two parties fail to deepen
their cooperation and merely go on speaking past one another?
This is the research puzzle I intend to solve through a brief
analysis of the dynamics behind the EU-Russia relationship. The
explanation offered reiterates the opening statement of Karaganov
quoted on top of page one, dwelling on the anachronistic outlook of
Russia's decision makers. What I argue is that Russia's approach to
the EU rests on a misunderstanding of what kind of actor the EU
really is. In other words, this paper
represents a skeptical attitude to EU-Russian affairs stressing the
unsophisticated nature of this relationship whereas other scholars
are much more enthusiastic [3].
The evolution of EU-Russia
relations - a brief, polemical review
Arguably,
the one and only watershed in EU-Russia relations came not after,
but before the collapse of communism, namely as early as 1972, when
the Soviet (!) economist D. Melnikov published an article arguing
that the Common Market (as it was then called) represented a rising
centre of power in the capitalist world challenging the dominance of
the United States in world affairs [4]. This
legitimized the opening of dialogue between the CMEA, the communist
forum for economic integration which was abolished in 1991, and the
Common Market. As will be shown later this Soviet Marxist point of
using the EU as a way to exploit and benefit from
‘inter-imperialistic contradictions’ as it was called in the jargon
of the time remains valid in today’s Russia as the essence of the
Primakov doctrine of multipolarity. Apart from that the EU-Russia
relationship has been far from harmonious. It took until the summer
of 1994 before a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement could be
entered and almost immediately after EU-Russia relations went sour
due to Russia's invasion of Chechnia. Since then relations have
improved, not least because of the extraordinary events of 9/11 in
the United States which created a new community between Russia and
the Western world in general. Among other things the EU in May 2002
promised to extend full market status to the Russian economy, and
new ambitious programmes have been launched, e.g. the EU's Northern
Dimension initiative. However, it is symptomatic for EU-Russia
relations that Russia sought to exploit the French-German opposition
to U.S. policy in Iraq - and that it gained virtually nothing from
this. Similarly, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried in vain to
exploit his position on Kyoto to blackmail the EU, Japan and Canada
to guarantee a further economic exchange with Russia worth 3 billion
$ which they all refused. "The EU in
particular made clear that it was displeased with bargaining of
this kind" as observed by the American analyst Mark N. Katz in his
verdict on Putin's foreign policy [5]. This had the
effect of inspiring the EU to make its approval of Russia's entry
into the WTO - a top priority in Moscow and for good reasons -
contingent upon a pledge to ratify the Kyoto Treaty which then
happened in 2004.
Russia's anachronistic
approach to world affairs, notably the EU
Already, I made the point that
today's Primakov doctrine inspiring much Russian foreign and
security policy merely continues the old Soviet reasoning of
exploiting conflicts and clashes of interest between the power
centres in world affairs, notably exploiting tension between Europe
and the United States. Yet, is it fair to Russia to speak of this
kind of continuity? Does Putin not - at least the post 9/11 Putin -
display a fairly enlightened view of world affairs including a
recognition of Russia's own limited power in world affairs and
desperate need for intimate cooperation with the Western democracies?
Until recently I invested much energy
in arguing just that - insisting that Primakov’s view was being
replaced perhaps not by outright liberalism and institutionalism,
but at least by a fairly healthy doctrine of internal balancing - of
making Russia strong through reform [6].
Certainly, much of what Putin is
saying and Russia is doing on the international arena confirms that
Putin is more sophisticated than, for instance, Primakov. The
influential and hard-nosed analyst Karaganov heading Russia's
Foreign and Defense Policy Council may have delivered some of the
analytical ammunition behind this, but his own frustrations about
the limits to the analytical capacity of the Russian political class
quoted at the outset of this paper are, unfortunately, very
well-founded.
The good news is that the
Russian elite no longer cites Lenin and Marx, but has de-ideologized
its view of world affairs for the benefit of what is known as
realism within the study of world affairs.
The key canonical text
revealing this is the foreign policy doctrine of Russia of 2000
which makes it clear that Russia-EU relations are to be understood
in the context of Russia's balancing against the United States and
NATO [7]. Realism emphasizes the theme of conflict
and rivalry in world affairs and as for actors and their motivations
focuses exclusively on states and raison
d'etat, i.e. seeking to maximize one’s position in world affairs,
if possible at the expense of others (seeking relative gains to use
the jargon of neo-realism). Realism has many proponents, academics
and practitioners, so in a sense Russia is just joining the
mainstream.
The bad news is that this
approach is utterly inadequate and outdated as basis for
understanding what the EU and its integration process is all about.
On this account, Karaganov himself
lives in a disturbingly Westphalian (: realist) world of driving a
hard bargain with Brussels, deploring the EU’s "petty squeezing out
unilateral concessions in favor of its own countries or market
components." [8]. Karaganov 's realist recipe for
how to deal with the EU is a recipe for Russian defeat and further
frustration over EU-Russia affairs as it forces the EU to
reciprocate using its superior powers as seen in the Kyoto Protocol
episode cited earlier. The brute fact is that Russia needs the EU
more than the EU needs Russia because of the EU's superior soft
power resources which Russia badly needs to copy and to use in order
for the Russian society to recover from almost a century of Czarist
and Soviet mismanagement. Accordingly, Russia must abandon its
realist macho approach to EU diplomacy and take stock of the EU (and
itself!) as an actor in a globalized world in the sense brilliantly
epitomized by Karaganov at the outset of this paper.
The EU as an actor in world
affairs - and options for Russia
This is not the place to go deep
into the vast theoretical literature on the EU for the sake of
profiling the author as an expert on EU integration which she is not,
the idea is only to establish some important facts and trends within
the EU. As already pointed out the EU stands out as an actor in
world affairs due to its immense soft power, that is its enormous
attraction for people living outside the EU due to the prosperity,
the consolidated democracies and generally smoothly running
non-corrupt states that characterize the region.
This is what at one time inspired the
Danish neo-realist Hans Mouritzen to characterize not the United
States, but the EU as the real unipole for the European
neighbourhood [9]. In a basic sense this is
recognized by Putin and other Russian decision makers as reason for
the EU’s position high on the Russian foreign policy agenda, but the
problem is that Russian analysts treat the EU as an outcome rather
than a 'work in progress’ and they prefer to ignore what it takes to
become such a success in world affairs. In order to be taken
seriously by the EU, let alone emulate the EU Russia must look
inside itself and fight corruption, poverty, authoritarianism,
militarism, pollution, and abuse of powers. Russia also has to
reconsider its policy in Chechnia (which is not to say that Russia
must pull out its troops at once and leave Chechnia to itself).
In terms of its actor quality
and capacity the EU is unique in more than one sense. Russian
foreign policy makers mostly treat the EU as a simple unitary state
actor in a global balance of power game - and as a conventional
Westphalian player in a great power concert akin to the Concert of
Europe of 1815-1851 to which Czarist Russia was a key party. In
reality, the EU is anything but a normal territorial state and
unitary actor, but a highly complex and yet fuzzy actor. Most
analysts simply give up the search for adequate theoretical models
to apply upon the EU as it is neither a federation, nor just a
confederation for that matter, but a network-like sui generis
actor which among other things is characterized by multi-level
governance. What this means in practice is that the EU is a
notoriously slow conservative actor in world affairs, quite the
opposite of what one might expect from its dynamic and magic on the
inside. Most important of all, it rarely makes sense to consider the
EU one single actor, as Russia would like to do. The EU is a
structure rather than an actor, a cacophony rather than a concert,
clumsy rather than swift - except perhaps when engaged in zero-sum
games by the outside world. The latter has been seen in WTO affairs
and United States-EU trade conflicts. The internal EU decision
making is typically one of horse-trading, compromising, and
coalition-building, but always in an effort of creating win-win
solutions for all parties suggesting that this may be the trick for
the EU’s external partners as well. Not that EU-Russia relations are
devoid of this as seen is the compromise reached on the thorny issue
of Kaliningrad in November 2002, but even then the Russian
negotiators could not resist the temptation to play machos - in
effect threatening to sell their Kaliningrad compatriots down the
river hereby shooting themselves in the foot.
The EU is
often criticized for its irrelevance when it comes to hard power,
that is military power, and its weak military and security policy
actor capacity [10]. There is much to be said for
this point of view including the deplorable lack of vision and
political leadership in world affairs displayed by today’s top
politicians of the European Union (one result being the Yugoslav
disaster of the early 1990s). Even so, one should not underestimate
the dynamism of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP)
including the EU's efforts of building up military peace-keeping and
crisis management capacities (the 60,000 man strong Rapid
Reaction Force, RRF) as well as the intimacy of EU-NATO
relations. In general, Russia has been far
more enthusiastic about the CFSP [11] than NATO
due to the latter's enlargement and -1 am tempted to speculate -
exactly because Russia perceives the EU as militarily weak. But
again, this Russian approach may be self-defeating. Clearly, the EU
is not going to become a military alliance copying NATO's collective
defense capacity not to speak of a military superpower akin to the
United States nor will there probably ever be a truly international
EU army. The relevant thing to consider is the Petersburg concept
for the EU’s role in crisis and armed conflicts outside its
territory. The Petersburg Tasks of the RRF include humanitarian
search and rescue missions, peace-keeping missions, crisis
management tasks including peace-enforcing, environmental protection
and the trend has been to allow for a more ambitious 'hard security'
interpretation of this concept. To take but one example, the EU
acted rather swiftly when stepping in as guarantor of the recently
negotiated peace in the Aceh province of Indonesia, something of an
'out-of-area’ mission! What this means is that the EU is not
necessarily irrelevant as a partner for Russia when it comes to, say,
monitoring some kind of negotiated solution in Chechnia, perhaps
even enforcing order and supporting a reconstruction of the war-torn
region. Already, both the United States and Europe is beginning to
take on a role as a stabilizing economic force and
institution-builder (with Russia's approval) in the notoriously
unstable North Caucasian parts of the Russian Federation. Needless
to say, if this scenario is to extend into Chechnia itself, Russia
has to abandon its Westphalian approach to its own sovereignty and
adopt one matching "the disappearance of the watershed between the
domestic and the foreign policies" and the transparency inherent in
globalization as correctly observed by Karaganov.
What about ordinary economic
cooperation? Already there is an intimate trade relationship between
the EU and Russia making the EU combined Russia's largest economic
partner and in the eyes of some observers making the EU dangerously
dependent upon Russia as source of energy imports. Also from the
point of view of Russia this relationship is lopsided as Russia
would like to diversify its exports to EU in the direction of
processed goods instead of raw materials. One of the costs of
Russia's continuing exclusion from the WTO is that Russia cannot
make use of the organization’s machinery for resolving trade
disputes and hence is at a disadvantage concerning the harsh
antidumping measures of the EU. This is all more or less well-known.
What is less well-known to Russian
decision makers, I suspect, is the enhanced trade creating and
transformative powers of the old 1994 Partnership and Cooperation
Agreement (= the PCA) as a result of the increasing integrative
dynamics of the European Single Market as argued by the Swiss
scholar Stephan Kux [12]. His entire reasoning is
one that looks upon the EU-Russia relationship from the bottom-up
perspective of de facto integrative and transformative
spillover from Russia-EU cooperation in continuation of the
so-called neo-functionalist theory of integration. In contrast,
Russian decision- and opinion makers like Karaganov tend to see the
matter only from the top-down perspective of state-level costs and
benefits. This made perfect sense in the Soviet era of the unified
planned economy and the CPSU monopoly on political power when the
Russian side at least was a unitary Westphalian actor, but this is
no longer so.
What Kux argues more
specifically is that Russia is going to see itself placed in much
the same position as Norway and Switzerland - countries that are
forced to adapt to EU standards, harmonize laws, implement decrees
etc. issued by the European Commission and reform administrative
institutions in order to really profit from their EU relationship -
without having a formal say on internal EU decision making. The
point is that this compelling integrative logic is bound to slowly,
slowly but irreversibly transform Russia in exactly the direction
required for being eligible for future full European Union
membership. To take but one example:
"If Russian producers
intend to export furniture to the EU, they have to comply
with European safety norms and quality standards. If Russian
export companies want to avoid antidumping rulings and
increased custom duties they have to respect the European
competition law. Thus, it makes sense for Russia to adopt
European safety norms and quality standards and to pass laws
that fully comply with European competition rules [...] the
PCA will have a double spillover, from the economic into the
political realm, from the international trade into the
domestic arena. Thus there is
much more to the PCA than its 112 technical articles,
ten appendixes and two protocols." [13]
Conclusion
What I have just argued through
the long quotation from Kux' analysis is not the least interesting
prospect, on the contrary. One further point made by Kux is that
European Union membership for Russia or not is not really the crux
of the matter, Russia will in any event benefit tremendously from
adapting itself to the acquis communautaire as the only way
to make itself EU compatible and be taken seriously as a truly vital
partner for Brussels. True, there may be losers in the process, for
instance the siloviki now reputedly running Russia behind the
scenes, but apart from this handful of people the Russian society at
large - civil society - may benefit enormously from these
integrative dynamics politically as well as economically.
Already now, Poland’s entry into the
European Union is opening new avenues for Russian, Ukraininan and
Belarussian construction workers [14]. In other
words, from a long-term perspective it is almost irrelevant what
goes on at the top level diplomacy between the EU Chairmanship at
any given time and the Kremlin as long as Russia does not turn into
a closed society and undisguised political dictatorship.
The EU-Russia process may slow down, may
have its zig and zags but it is in Russia’s good interest to keep it
alive, because in this asymmetrical power relationship the EU is
going to be more patient, not to say indecisive and hence strong
party and Russia the more desperate and impatient party in need of
what the EU can offer. [15]
Or to be more exact: it is a
necessity for Russia to modernize its approach to the European Union
in order to fully and intelligently exploit the inherent
opportunities. Russia has to grasp the uniqueness of the EU as an
actor and abandon its realist convictions. Similarly, the EU is also
well advised to be more forthcoming and visionary in its approach to
Russia, not least when it comes to security policy issues such as
how to de-escalate the violence in Chechnia and stabilize the entire
Caucasian region, an issue that has a bearing upon European security
in general. At one occasion Russia actually showed a willingness to
abandon its earlier Westphalian stance of insisting that Chechnia is
an internal affair into which no outside party should be seen
meddling. I have in mind Putin's visit to Germany by the turn of the
year 2004/2005 when he directly invited the EU to take on an active
role in regulating the Chechnia conflict as agreed between him and
the German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. As far as I know, however,
precious little has come out of this. Nevertheless, this episode
shows that there is reason for guarded optimism concerning Russia's
capacity for changing the tenor of its EU diplomacy. Things are as
not as black and white nor static as often maintained, but gray and
if not wildly dynamic, then slowly changing.
1
- For further contact you may, for instance e-mail me:
msk@au.ps.dk
. My postal address: Associate Professor Mette Skak,
Department of Political Science, Universitetsparken Bldg. 331,
DK-8000 Arhus C., Denmark (tel.: (+45) 89 42 12 80, Fax: (+45) S6 13
98 39. (Back)
2 - Sergei
Karaganov likes to depict a crisis in EU-Russia relations, see
Rossiiskaya Gazeta, April 2nd, 2005 as reprinted by
Johnson’s Russia List # 9111. Not that I always agree with this
or other diagnoses by this author although it is the second time I
refer to him! (Back)
3 - See Flemming
Splidsboel-Hansen, "Russia’s Relations with the European Union: A
Constructivist Cut", International Politics, vol. 39:
399-421, December, 2002. (Back)
4 - D. Melnikov,
''Zapadnoevropeiskii tsentr imperializma", Mirovaia Ekonomika and
Mezhdunarodnye Otnoshenia, no. 1,1972. (Back)
5 - Mark N. Katz,
"Exploiting Rivalries for Prestige and Profit. An Assessment of
Putin’s Foreign Policy Approach", Problems of Post-Communism,
vol. 52, no. 3, May-June, 2005, pp. 25-26. (Back)
6 - See Skak,
Mette (2005). "Russian Security Policy
After 9/11", pp. 53-71 i Roger E. Kanet (ed.),
The New Security Environment, The Impact on Russia, Central and
Eastern Europe, Hants & Burlington; Ashgate.
(Back)
7 - "The Foreign
Policy concept of the Russian Federation, approved by the President
of the Russian Federation V. Putin, 28 June 2000",
www.mid.ru .
One could also quote then Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Igor
Ivanov: "To be able to turn into a moving
force for the formation of a new multipolar system of international
relations, Europe should become a powerful independent entity."
Mezhdunarodnaia Zhizn’, No. 1, January, 2001.
(Back)
8 -
Rossiiskaia Gazeta, April 2nd 2005. (Back)
9 - /At this
time of writing I cannot come up with the exact reference, so
contact me later!/ Perhaps an even more interesting reference is the
recent book by Mark Leonhard, Why Europe will rule the 21st
Century (Fourth Estate Publishers, 2005) that makes the case for
EU’s rise to global pre-eminence on the basis of the subtle, but
evidently non-provocative nature of its powers. He singles out the
EU's law making capacity - the result of which is the acquis
communautaire - as the strongest transformative weapon of our
times. The American political scientist Charles Kupchan has a
similar argument about EU strength. (Back)
10 - This was
most powerfully argued by Robert Kagan in his famous Power and
Weakness article a couple of years ago, see
www.policyreview.org/JUNf02/kagan_print.html .
(Back)
11 - See
Splidsboel-Hansen, op.cit. (Back)
12 - See his
contribution "European Union-Russia Relations, Transformation
Through Integration", pp. 170-184 in Alexander J. Motyl, Blair A.
Ruble and Lilia Shevtsova, Russia’s Engagement with the West
Transformation and Integration in the Twenty-First Century,
London & New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2005. The entire volume is most
stimulating reading concerning both Russia's domestic transformation
and its real options and interests in world affairs (as opposed to
imagined ones). See my forthcoming review of the book in Slavic
Review. (Back)
13 - Kux
op.cit., p. 176. (Back)
14 - See
Gazeta Wyborcza, Sept. 20th 2005. Cf. Vibeke Sperling,
"I Polen er blikkenslageren fra Ukraine'',
Sept. 22nd 2005, Politiken (A Danish daily).
(Back)
15 - For
instance, Russia's "energy weapon" cannot be used indiscriminately
and forever as recent breakthroughs in the technology of hydrogen
power seem to underline. (Back)
©Skak Mette
2005
