#13 - RW 11-12-04 - RW Home
RIA Novosti
November 10, 2004
RUSSIA-EU: A USEFUL CRISIS
MOSCOW, (RIA Novosti political commentator Georgy Kiselev)

A good excuse has been found for delaying an EU-Russia summit that was due to take place in The Hague on November 11. The Europeans have failed to determine the line-up of the European Commission before this date. However, even if they had, the Russian-European event would have had to be postponed.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, has confessed that some documents drafted for the meeting were not ready to be signed, which is unprecedented in the ten years of the Russian-European partnership. Although Russia's diplomatic representative Vladimir Chizhov has stated that Russia and the EU have no fundamental differences on the substance of strategic partnership, but only on the details, the latter are obviously so essential that they can dramatically stall Russia-Europe partnership.

The present problems between Russia and the EU are well known: regulations for Kaliningrad transit and movement toward simplified visa regulations. Declarations have been made, but a great deal of work remains to be done to implement them. Russia recently included the ten new EU members in the Russia-EU agreement on partnership and cooperation, which means there is probably one problem fewer in bilateral relations. However, Russia is still concerned about the status of Russian-speaking non-citizens in the Baltic countries. According to Moscow, they have been treated in a manner that runs counter to European and civilised norms for nearly 15 years. The Europeans, in reply, when speaking to Russia, rarely refrain from posing questions about Chechnya and Yukos, the oil giant that has suddenly found itself outside the law.

Chechnya has become one of the main obstacles in the Russian-EU dialogue. At the Hague summit, the Europeans intended to make this a fundamental issue and include it to the documents on a common security space. This is unacceptable for Russia. Europe views human rights as the main problem in Chechnya, but Russia sees it as the fight against terrorism. It will be hard to find a compromise here.

In the past, the sides managed to find mutually convenient vague wordings on the Chechen problem. However, it is impossible to follow this path any longer. The first reason is that Russia and the EU have seriously changed in the past few years. The new 25-member EU is drastically different from its former incarnation. By concentrating on internal integration, Europe now attaches far more importance to traditional European values and has, therefore, become a more demanding foreign policy partner. Moreover, the EU now includes newcomers from central and eastern Europe whose "young" and "defiant" position with regard to Russia is at odds with the stances of Berlin and Paris. Russia has changed too, particularly in the wake of the Beslan tragedy, when it realised that its efforts to combat international terrorism would take decades and require a huge mobilisation of all its internal resources. Like the EU, Russia is now focused on its internal problems and is also ready to defend its values. Accordingly, the numerous declarations and political statements in the past decade about the Russian-European partnership are now losing their value. It is time for practical action, for clarifying previously overlooked details, and solving overdue problems.

In this respect, Chechnya is only the tip of the iceberg, as the "common" economic space alone will expose hundreds of questions that both Russia and the EU will find hard to answer immediately.