Fig. 1
Map of European Union and Eastern Partnership countries, including the United Kingdom at the time of finalisation of publication, prior to Brexit
It all began so well. The then European Communityâs first enlargement after the 1989 revolutions in socialist Eastern Europe was one seamlessly coterminous with German unification: as the two Cold War-era Germanies fused on 3 October 1990, so the European Community inched slightly eastwards. European neutrals joined in 1995, and the admission of Austria, and especially of Sweden and Finland, brought the European Union (EU) into north-eastern Europe. Its borders then extended along Russiaâs, at that point still uncontroversially, by over 1300 kilometres.
Pressing demands from post-communist countries eventually led to the 2004 âbig bangâ enlargement of 2004. Eight post-communist countries entered the Union, along with Malta and Cyprus, in the Mediterranean. Already then the EUâs borders had moved decidedly eastwards, encountering post-Soviet ones and making new policy challenges. Belarus , still the political pariah of Europe, the only one of 47 European countries to be outside of the Council of Europe, now bordered the EU on two sides, through Lithuania and Poland. Ukraine, Europeâs second largest country geographically, and with immense potential but with severely stunted reforms and arguably a divided population, became immediately adjacent to the EU through the Unionâs new eastern frontiers of Poland, Slovakia and Hungary.
The entry of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 further projected the EU, this time in a south-eastern direction, into the Black Sea region, giving it over 600 kilometres of coastline. The new frontiers obliged the EU to face an impoverished and conflict-ridden Moldova, gave it additional borders with Ukraine and had it facing across the Black Sea to Russia, Turkey (already sharing frontiers with Greece) and Georgia. In physically moving itself East, and despite its claims to enhanced prowess and attractiveness, the EU engages a very different eastern flank now than it did when it was still the European Community and from when it slowly embarked on even the idea of enlargement in the early postâCold War era. This book is about those new challenges. Its concerns are threefold: about the EU; the multiplicity of actors and security issues along its eastern borders; and the interactions between the EU and those neighbours. The book is also necessarily about other actors that interact with the EU and the states and conflicts in the EUâs eastern flanks: the United States and the Russian Federation.
One immediate assumption of the EU that was upended in engaging with its eastern flanks was that this region, especially the immediately adjacent post-Soviet states, would respond to the EUâs requests, encouragements and expectations and would also do so uniformly. Not only did that assumption not materialise, but the EU also now confronts very different and differentiated challenges and threats from a region which it presumed might willingly refashion itself in the EUâs image. Such thinking was not fanciful but rooted in planning and resulted in the Eastern Partnership (EaP). Presented to the EUâs General Affairs and External Relations Council in Brussels on 26 May 2008 and launched on 7 May 2009 in Prague, the EU believed that the EaP had to, and could, transform its new immediate neighbours. Doing so would provide stability for both those countries domestically and, in turn, for the EU.
More than a decade since the EaPâs launch, the outcome remains very different than anticipated.1 To be sure, there are some successes, as the volume recognises. However, the EUâs East generates more chaos and catastrophe than could possibly be foreseen in 2009, which since then include rejections of the EU, revolution, conflict stalemates, and âhybrid warâ and territorial annexations. This is a horrific agenda, not least for an organisation largely predicated on peaceable aims and instruments. Nevertheless, the EU needs more than ever to recognise and deploy the values and the tools available to it for the security threats emanating from and beyond its eastern borders. A key starting point involves not merely identifying threats but reasserting and refocusing existing EU capacities and suggesting new ones, to address threats and achieve greater stability. This volume seeks to determine the nature of the security challenges to the EU emanating from its eastern flank, to reassess EU capacities in light of these challenges and to offer ways forward.
Although the EU faces various challenges, including internal ones, those identified in the present book are unlikely to dissipate in coming years, or even decades. To be sure, the unique fallout from the United Kingdomâs Brexit from the EU, whatever form that eventually takes, will change the shape of both unions.2 Issues within the EU will continue to arise and surprise. Cognates to or successors of the Eurozone crisis, anti-EU sentiments among populist movements, divisions between north and south, or east and west, within the Union remain likely.
Despite these internal challenges, the EU continues to see itself as a global actor. Within that ambition the EU has particularly identified as a central focus its Eastern Partnership with the six post-Soviet states of Armenia , Azerbaijan , Belarus , Georgia , Moldova and Ukraine . In addition to that, new, multifaceted and deeply challenging issues now emanate from that region, and from other countries and phenomena integrally linked to them, including Turkey, Russia, and post-Soviet Central Asia.
The external threats to the EU recognised in the volume thus present fundamental security challenges and call for both the renewed application of EU capacities and also for new ones. Although 2015 provoked crisis within the EU over dealing with an influx at the historic highpoint of 1,322,800 asylum seekers,3 the prospects of other influxes remain, as does potential societal disquiet and possibly new political tensions within the EU over compulsory relocation quotas. That is but one dimension. In attempting to secure its borders through delicate measures such as the six very different post-Soviet states in the EaP, one of the EUâs most ambitious foreign relations, it has ironically contributed to making some of its frontiers not only less secure but also the scenes of open violence and unilateral territorial rearrangement.
In short, Brussels faces, and will continue to face, multiple crises, or even âpoly-crisesâ.4 That may be the business of EU affairs. But the security issues, and their geographic origins, addressed here are likely to either endure even in their present forms, such as conflicts in post-Soviet European states, or, even in the best circumstances, still provide lasting challenges.
This chapter first establishes how the EU defined itself since 2016 as being a global actor, the priorities it has assigned to itself, and how also those proclaimed priorities provide a means to assess EU successes. The chapter then explains different geographical terminologies that the EU has adopted and, through that, offers a rationale for the countries and regions covered in this volume. Finally, the chapter identifies the challenges that the EU faces in its East, and does through an explanation of the choice and the interlinkages between the methods and the issues that it uses.
The EU and Global Ambitions
In addition to its expansion east- and south-eastwards and its intensified engagement with proximate post-Soviet states, the EU pronounced itself to be a global actor. This heightened ambition coincided with, and in some regards contributed to or even sparked, some of the crises in this immediate neighbourhood, migrant flows across the Mediterranean notwithstanding. The EU itself provides a statement both of its political aspirations and of its capacities, through its indicatively entitled A Global Strategy for the European Unionâs Foreign and Security Policy (EUGS), launched in 2016. Evaluating the EUGS gives a self-declared framework to identify and analyse the EUâs approach and capacity for dealing with challenges to its east.
Within the EUâs global ambitions is dissemination of what it deems to be constituent values that are also universal.5 Where the ECâs earlier trade agreements and development cooperation were notably apolitical, after 1992 and the Treaty of Maastricht, democracy promotion was introduced to all of its external endeavours.6 The promotion of this world view was further brought into practical policy with the launch of the EUGS. At almost the same time, in the preceding year, the EU ...