To precisely defi ne what the European Union’s Eastern policy actually entails is not an easy task. Th e European Union has to this day failed to develop a clear and consistent position to this region that would be supported by all Member States.
Subsequently, the policy represents a conglomeration of various undertakings which comprise of diff erent projects, initiatives, programmes and actions that, in addition, have been undergoing dynamic changes over the years. Some of them overlap; others simply compete with each other. Th ere are also no commonly adopted and accepted classifi cations, typologies or nomenclature. Th is creates problems for both the scholars
147 The Eastern Policy of the European Union – a Challenge for Poland’s Foreign Policy
who study this complex subject matter and the decision-makers on the national and the EU level, involved in the implementation of the EU’s foreign policy.
Nevertheless, one can still strive to defi ne what the EU’s Eastern policy actually means. It covers the European Union’s approach to the countries of Eastern Europe, that is the objectives, principles, instruments and means of pursuing a certain policy towards specifi c recipients. Th us defi ned, the EU policy comprises various elements, including broad and more or less vague political concepts (like the EU’s Eastern Dimension), as well as more specifi c undertakings with concrete legal and organisational forms, such as the Eastern Partnership. More precisely, the EU’s Eastern policy can be described as joint formulation of specifi c principles, development of institutional solutions and execution specifi c undertakings and actions by EU organs and institutions, as well as the Member States under their broadly understood relations with the countries of Eastern Europe.
Another aspect in need of defi nition is the geographical reach of the Eastern policy.
From the historical perspective, the extent of this reach keeps changing. Initially it covered a much larger group of targeted countries in Central and Eastern Europe, but following the EU accession of a signifi cant number of these countries, it now encompasses merely the countries actually located in the eastern part of the continent.
Th erefore, it can be argued that the defi nition “the policy towards Eastern Europe”
is not entirely precise. One of many signs of this ambiguity is the fact that the term seems to include adjacent areas, such as the Balkans and according to some analysts, also Turkey. Moreover, the evolution of the EU’s Eastern policy means that the concept of Eastern Europe in its context should be treated very broadly, encompassing areas in the Caucasus and on the shores of the Black Sea, as well as the Russian Federation.
Seen from this angle – and this should be strongly emphasised – the concept of Eastern Europe is certainly a more geopolitical, rather than a strictly geographical one.
Th is is related to the historical and chronological aspects of the EU’s Eastern policy.
Th e turning point marking the launch of this policy were the events which took place during the Autumn of Nations at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, when the Euro-Atlantic integration structures faced the issue of establishing relations with the newly emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe. Th e second milestone was the year 2004, when eight countries of this region accessed the European Union; this process continued during 2007 and 2013 with the accession of the next three states.
At that point, the Eastern policy turned to the remaining countries of Eastern Europe only, creating several special action measures for that purpose. It meant that until 2004, the EU’s Eastern policy was addressed both to the candidate countries from Central and Eastern Europe (in a more concrete and involved way) and the remaining Eastern
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European countries. Aft er the EU accession of the fi rst group, the EU’s Eastern policy was targeted at Eastern Europe only.
1.1. The Genesis of the EU’s Eastern Policy
Th e history of the attempts of the European Community Member States to formulate a more or less coherent policy towards Eastern Europe is as long as the functioning of these integration structures. However, during the peak of the Cold War tension, East-West relations were driven by the logic of confrontation. It was only the 1960s and 1970s that brought some normalising measures. Th e symbolic examples of such measures were the political initiatives launched by the leaders of France and Germany – in the case of general Charles de Gaulle it was the ‘Europe from Atlantic to Ural’
concept, and for the German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, his ‘Eastern policy’ (Ostpolitik).
Th e most important milestone, however, was the Autumn of Nations at the turn of the 1980s and the 1990s, which led to the collapse of the communist system in Central and Eastern Europe. Th ese changes had a historically signifi cant meaning not only for the countries of this region, but for the whole of Europe, too. As a result of this unprecedentedly peaceful revolution, the Cold War’s international system of power was destroyed, fi rst on the European continent and then on the global scale. From the point of view of the European Communities and the emerging EU, these changes raised the urgency of the need for redefi nition of the European integration objectives (Barburska 2013). From the point of view of the Central and Eastern European countries, in turn, it was important that most of them – both the already existing countries, such as Poland, and the newly formed ones, such as Ukraine – entered the path of political transformations aimed at establishing liberal democracy and free market economy.
In the new situation, they had to make a historic choice of rapprochement either with Russia or the Euro-Atlantic integration structures: NATO and the European Union.
In a relatively short time, two groups of states emerged. Th e fi rst one, composed of the Central European countries of the former communist bloc and the post-Soviet Baltic states, was clearly in favour of integration with the West. What followed was more than a decade of adjustment to western standards in all areas of life and, eventually, their accession to NATO and, between 2004 and 2013, to the EU.
Th e second group of newly formed states in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova) proved politically less stable and economically less developed, and their governance systems were considerably diff erent from the western standards. While these countries expressed some interest in rapprochement with the EU, they were and largely still are politically and economically dependent on Russia. Of course, this hampers their eff orts towards integration with the EU. Th e cooperation established
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between Russia and the EU and the unclear and inconsistent policy of the Union, which fi rst had to determine for itself whether Eastern Europe was important to it and how it would like the relations with to develop, were additional complications.
Despite the fact that in the entire post-World War II period the members of the European Community supported democratic opposition in the communist bloc (very actively at times, as in the case of supporting the Solidarity movement in Poland), at the beginning of the 1990s they showed certain hesitation and concerns about the course of political transformations in the eastern part of the continent. Th ere were concerns, among others, that the new democracies would only be ‘seasonal entities’, unable to ensure stabilisation and security in the region, which could result in scenarios similar to what happened in former Yugoslavia.
However, relatively quickly, western decision-makers largely accepted both the pragmatic and the political-ideological necessity to continue the past commitments and support the processes of democratisation and economic transformation in the East. Th us, the European Communities engaged in treaty-based relations with the new democracies, in some cases even before the changes in the formal system took place.
Between 1988 and 1992, the EC signed trade and economic cooperation agreements (called the fi rst generation agreements) with most of them. More advanced agreements with some of these countries followed, providing deeper forms of mutual relations, i.e. association with the Communities (called the Europe Agreements). Th e fi rst agreement of this kind was signed in 1991 with Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the countries that most strongly expressed their integration aspirations.
Th e key issue in the development of the EU’s approach to Eastern Europe was the strategic decision on off ering full membership instead of loose forms of cooperation, at least to selected countries of the region. Th is way the idea of eastward enlargement was born (Milczarek 2014; Milczarek 2010). Th is long and complex process of a political, economic, legal, and social nature, etc., eventually led to the accession of 13 new members to the EU in 2004, 2007 and 2013, of which only two (Cyprus and Malta) are outside the region of Central and Eastern Europe.
1.2. Evolution of the EU’s Eastern Policy
It should be emphasised that the EU’s enlargement to the East was an important but ultimately only one of many elements of its Eastern policy because only the members of the fi rst of the aforementioned groups of countries, those that expressed such aspirations from the beginning of the transformation process, took advantage of the opportunity to become EU members. (One of the most pro-European countries in this context was Poland – the proof was that even though the Europe Agreements did
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not explicitly mention possible future membership in the EU, Poland was offi cially expressing the will to join the organisation.) It means that the years 2004–2013 constituted important landmark in the EU’s Eastern policy because in that period the countries from Central Europe admitted to the EU gradually stopped being subject to the Eastern policy. Th eir relations no longer belong to the sphere of the EU’s foreign policy but to internal relations. At best, they may still be aff ected by the EU’s Eastern Dimension, treated as a sort of preference for their regional specifi city, similar to the Northern Dimension, which concerns mostly the Nordic countries, most of which are also members of the EU.
For the remaining Eastern European countries the European Union needed to create new mechanisms and forms of cooperation that would better refl ect the specifi city of the mutual relations. At present, the EU Eastern policy de facto concerns only relations with the non-EU countries of Eastern Europe, which have become its main recipients and subjects. Th e countries of this group are very diverse and primarily include the immediate neighbourhood of the EU: Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, gradually joined by countries located further away, in Transcaucasia – Armenia, Azerbaijan or Georgia. Apart from that, one has to take into account the Russian Federation, which has very specifi c ties to the EU’s Eastern policy under the strategic partnership. Under this approach, it should be strongly emphasised once again, Eastern Europe is much more a geopolitical notion than a geographical one.
Th us, the EU Eastern policy can be divided into two separate, although interconnected parts: the Eastern Partnership and the Strategic Partnership with Russia. In our inevitably abridged discussion, only the Eastern Partnership will be analysed, because it represents an excellent example of the implementation of the entire EU Eastern policy; its merits and its shortcomings.
It should be reiterated that at the same time, the EU’s Eastern policy has become the eastern component of the European Neighbourhood Policy – ENP (Casier 2012;
Maurer, Simão 2013; Pietraś and al. 2012). While this policy was established in order to pursue broader goals, it was undeniably to a great extent a response to the challenges coming from the East. Leaving aside any deeper analyses of this broad subject, let it suffi ce to say that the ENP, offi cially established in 2004, is addressed to two groups of states: seven abovementioned countries of Eastern Europe and ten countries of Mediterranean Basin (namely: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria). Th e ENP thus covers a total of 17 countries territorially spanning the area from Gibraltar to the Caucasus, inhabited by some 400 million people representing very diverse civilisations, levels of socio-economic development, political systems, etc. (Kapuśniak 2010; Lyubashenko 2012).
151 The Eastern Policy of the European Union – a Challenge for Poland’s Foreign Policy
It was fundamental to the ENP to support the cooperation between the EU and its neighbours in the spheres of economy, politics, culture and security. Th is cooperation should be based on shared political values (such as democracy, the rule of law, protection of human rights) as well as on the principles of free market economy.
Th us, the EU off ered to its neighbours both privileged political relations and deepened economic cooperation. It should be stressed, however, that participation in the ENP by no means implied inviting the recipients of this policy to become members of the EU (Marcinkowska 2014).
Th erefore, the EU’s Eastern policy should be viewed in this broader context.
Th e primary legal basis for the cooperation with Eastern European countries are the Partnership and Cooperation Agreements (PCAs). Agreements of this type were fi rst concluded in 1994, and they have diff erent characters, such as, for example, the special strategic partnership agreement with Russia. Given the more or less resolutely expressed aspiration of some countries to join the EU (as it is the case with Ukraine and Moldova), it has been proposed to try to meet these expectations. Usually these proposals do not go as far as to actually suggest accession, which would be a very far-reaching solution because the Union itself seems to suff er from enlargement fatigue aft er the last wave of enlargement process, and apart from that, the ENP principles do not provide for such a possibility.
Nonetheless, some options of concluding the Association Agreements between the EU and the Eastern European countries are being discussed. Th is would facilitate the development of economic cooperation and political dialogue, leading to mutual rapprochement and more comprehensive adjustment of the countries concerned to EU standards. In other words, the idea is to encourage the integration of Eastern European countries with the EU in a form that goes beyond the framework of PCAs.