July 17, 2013
Author : Victor Kogan-Yasny

The “Eastern Partnership” is an important and interesting programme of the European Union. In my view, this programme is substantially more important than it can seem at the first glance.

Let me stipulate at once: it is foolish and wrong to oppose this programme to the contradictory Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan “Customs Union” and to a rather declarative “Eurasian Economic Community”, to believe that one contrasts the other.

In my view, the Eastern Partnership has two main tasks. The first task is to introduce on the post-Soviet space the best from the political culture formed in Western Europe after the Second World War. The second task is to assist in solving numerous questions of stability and security, reaching internal and international accord. Economic association in various formats is one of the serious means of solving these tasks.

The image of the Eastern Partnership consists in overcoming conflicts. Due to its rather undecipherable status the programme is capable of daring non-standard approaches, impossible both for individual countries and unions with a legible status.
The “Eastern Partnership” is an interesting and serious political “start-up”, so needy now for many reasons. Here lie its pluses and a potential force.

The first thing the “Eastern Partnership” can do is to become an important supplementary mechanism to look for the keys to overcome “the frozen conflicts”. It could be done by the way of particular diplomacy that is inaccessible to the European Union as an entity and OSCE due to their status reasons. “Eastern Partnership” can build contacts and establish a dialogue with anybody irrespective of its self-designation, if only it is useful. The Eastern Partnership can give more attention to representatives of all political and social spectrum of participating post-Soviet countries and make this intercourse more topical, so that it can contribute to making adequate forecast and attaining bold results directed at peace, security, freedom and well-being of people. The above-said concerns above all Transcaucasia and the territory of Moldova. Ukraine and Belarus also have not so obvious but still dangerous lines of interregional tension which require conflict-prevention approach.

The second thing, but not least (to define order in such things is hardly possible) is the topic of Ukraine. Being relatively stable for some time and having acquired much from the European political culture, Ukraine, in my view, should rapidly move in the direction of Europe.

In Ukraine a generation of people is growing and entering the world of politics. This generation does not remember the Soviet power or political peripetias of the 1980s-1990s (and even Maydan-2004 they do not remember properly). For this generation the notion of independence is something given which, as it were, does not need to be comprehended and treated with care and responsibility. For this reason, what people were afraid of 20-10 years ago (regionalization, disintegration by language, aggravation of antagonism), may become dangerous in the forthcoming ten years. Realization of European perspective is a major, in my view, means of consolidation of Ukraine, non-admission of tendencies harmful for it and its neighbors, first of all for the Russian Federation.

The problem here is not so much in the ambitions of some Russian figures, but if Ukraine begins to lose its identity, ethnosocial logic will involve Russia into a whirlpool of a dangerous development. This must not be categorically allowed. (Incidentally, in a lesser degree, a similar danger exists for Ukraine from the Southwestern direction not because some governments want to intervene.)
The perspective of Russia’s attachment to the Eastern Partnership and possibly someone else (David Cameron spoke about it in this vain during his visit to Astana) will balance the situation in the post-Soviet region and remind proximate peoples and their political classes of the perspective and possibility of restoring their unity not by a search for strange and artificial apical chimeras, but in the direction normal for entire vast region political vector conditioned at least by a two-century historical basis.
The author is grateful to Dr. Grigory Yavlinsky, Dr. Andey Kosmynin and Ambassador Petras Vaitiekunas for fruitful discussions and to Alexander Markov for his assistance in preparing the English version. Keyword search EUROPE-Russia Report inappropriate content.
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