During the Upcoming Eastern Partnership Summit at Vilnius, the EU Should Provide Armenia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine with an Official Membership Perspective

The stark contrast in the transition success between those former Soviet bloc countries that were given a membership perspective, and those which were not, illustrates the point. Until today, the post-communist transformations behind the EU’s new Eastern borders are being subverted by the “simultaneity dilemma,” as predicted by political science in the early 1990s. There is a widening gap between the political, social and economic successes in East-Central Europe and the Baltics, on one side, and various stagnation and regression processes in the remaining post-Soviet countries, on the other. All this indicates that Brussels’ policies towards the post-communist space may be playing a larger role than the EU thinks or even wishes. In spite of some worrying detours in the political developments of such new EU members as Romania and Hungary, the overall results of the EU’s inclusive policies with regard to the East-Central European countries have been positive and sustainable.

Indeed, the individual stories of the EU entry negotiations, procedures and outcomes are more complicated than outlined here. The current socio-economic situation across the accession area from Estonia to Bulgaria remains uneven. As mentioned, in the Western Balkans, the EU membership perspective has so far been an only partially effective instrument. Yet, overall, making an official, but conditional offer to start accession negotiations once a country is meeting the Copenhagen Criteria (democracy, rule of law and economic competitiveness) has turned out to be a useful strategy – at least for the East-Central European countries of the former outer Soviet empire and three Baltic USSR successor states. The same approach should, therefore, today be applied to the more advanced official Eastern partners of the EU.

Continuing the EU’s Success Story Further East

The actual entry into the EU is for all of the Eastern Partnership countries probably still far away. For years to come, an accession offer would thus have only few consequences for the EU’s internal matters, and distract the Union officials only marginally from their more urgent immediate tasks. At the same time, Brussels would have to make sure that an explicit offer of possible future EU accession would not be propagandistically exploited by anti-democratic politicians. An official EU membership perspective would have to be formulated in a way as to avoid any suggestion that Brussels is awarding authoritarian rule. But these are questions about how rather than about whether. It would be odd for the EU to miss this historic opportunity just because it would take some effort to properly present the possibility and criteria of a future accession and what they imply for current authoritarian trends.

Brussels could today easily provide a conditional membership perspective for some Eastern Partnership countries without locking itself into an irreversible accession automatism. For example, Ankara was given a future entry offer as far back as 1963, and Turkey has now had official EU candidate status for several years. Yet it is still not clear when or if at all, the relatively advanced Turkish economy will become fully part of the EU. Turkey may even choose by itself to not enter the Union, if it decides that the cultural distance and geostrategic incongruence with Europe are too strong.

Against the background of the Turkish case, it seems illogical that Brussels still avoids giving any clear positive public signals to its official Eastern partners. Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union applies to the Eastern Partnership countries, and they thus have a European perspective. This article states that “any European state which respects the principles [of the EU] may apply to become a member of the Union.” Repeatedly, the European Parliament and the European Commission have, since the start of the Eastern Partnership in 2009, admitted that this de facto implies a membership perspective, for the EU’s Eastern partners. However, there still is no explicitly announced prospect for a possible future accession for Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and Armenia – neither in the texts of the Association Agreements, which Brussels currently negotiates with them, nor in the European or Foreign Affairs Council’s statements over the past few years. Thus, Brussels has been unable to fully employ the stick-and-carrot approach that so effectively supported the transformation of the post-communist states in the 1990s.

With its continued rejection to provide an unambiguous and credible membership perspective, Brussels not only acts in contradiction to the immediate needs of the Ukrainians, Moldovans, Georgians and Armenians, but also places the EU in dissonance with the broader interests of its own population. It is conducting a real life experiment in which the hitherto unknown “light conditionality” mechanism of the association process is supposed to fulfill a function similar to the hard conditions set out in earlier accession negotiations in East-Central Europe. By doing so, Brussels has entered a risky game that could tarnish the reputation of the Union’s foreign and security policies as well as democracy support efforts. It is missing an easy opportunity to initialize and consolidate democratic trends and political stabilization in the Eastern Partnership countries. Arguably, the EU already bears some responsibility for the fact that these countries are still deadlocked in unsustainable socio-economic and hybrid political orders. By denying them a long-term, conditional, but official entry option, Brussels deprives the pro-European elites in these countries with the most important argument for adopting the European model. The Eastern Partnership countries are instead left to swing between authoritarian and democratic practices, and they are prone to future revolutionary upheavals, like those in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004. The prospect of such instability in the post-Soviet area contradicts the interests of all the peoples of Europe. In the interests of everybody, Brussels should, at the Vilnius Eastern Partnership summit in November this year, end its inaction and finally take another bold step towards completing the European project.

First published in the “Harvard International Review” of June 6th, 2013.