The heating up of formerly “frozen conflicts” in the energy-rich Black Sea and Caspian region should be ringing alarm bells in Brussels, warns Ioan Mircea Pascu, Romania’s former Minister of Defence. The EU must therefore play a stabilising role there
The Crimean War of 1853 still widely remembered, in Britain especially, for the suicidal “charge of the Light Brigade” was followed by 150 years of relative calm in the Black Sea region, but now it has once again become a focal point of international politics. There are many reasons, but the two principal ones are that the end of the cold war and the dismantling of the Soviet Union destabilised the region, and its energy wealth has given it an increasingly prominent place on the world map. The Black Sea itself has substantial oil and gas reserves, but they are dwarfed by those of the neighbouring Caspian Sea. Between them, they have become a centre of international attention.
The Black Sea-Caspian area is strategically important because it opens not only towards central and western Europe, via the Danube and then the Rhine, but also towards Russia and the CIS states that once made up the USSR, towards the Middle East and, most important of all, towards central Asia. The area is located on the route between the Caspian and central Asian oil and gas producers and the consumers in the West. In politico-military terms, the area is for Europe both a springboard for action and a buffer against the asymmetrical threats that could stem from those three areas.
The result is that a sophisticated oil and gas transportation infrastructure has been built in the area, with still more projects pending. Oil is at present being transported through five pipelines, Tenghiz-Novorossiisk, Baku-Supsa, Baku-Novorossiisk, Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Odessa-Brodi and the Russian terminals for oil tankers at Novorossiisk and Tuapse. The new projects under construction are the pan-European Constanta-Trieste that comes into operation in 2011, and the Burgas-Alexandropolis and Burgas-Vlore pipelines, which should when completed substantially ease the present congestion of the Black Sea straits.
Gas is being transported under the Black Sea through the "Blue Stream" pipeline between Russia and Turkey, which came into commission in 2003, and in doing so increased Turkey's dependence on Russian gas from 66% to 80% of its total gas needs. The region’s gas is also being transported along the old Russian pipeline towards western and southern Europe, through the Central Asia-Centre pipeline linking Turkmenistan to Europe and the Mozdoc pipeline that links the Azeri and Russian systems. There are also three other major projects: the south Caucasus Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline that will make Turkey the main energy supplier to the European market, NABUCCO, that runs from Turkey to Austria through Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary and the "Gas Ring" that has been suggested by Russia’s President Putin that would be based on a pipeline linking Turkey to Italy through Greece.
In short, the Black Sea and Caspian region is becoming increasingly important to the western energy markets, both as a supplier and as a transportation route. So the question now being asked is how much do European nations need to “invest” in creating secure conditions in the area that will permit the safe exploitation and transit of its energy resources?
The uncomfortable truth is, needless to say, that the Black Sea and Caspian region is no exception to the general rule that the richest energy resources are located in the most volatile parts of the world. The region’s many "frozen conflicts", like Transdniestra, Nagorno-Karabach, South Osettia, Abkhazia and Chechnya have all been exacerbated by the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, leaving a legacy of unsettled border disputes, fragile democracy, weak institutions, corruption, minority problems and increased pressure from such asymmetrical threats as illegal migration, illegal arms transfers and drugs. On top of all that, there are serious risks of ecological disaster as well as many competing visions of how best to stabilise the area.
Taken together, the Soviet collapse and booming energy demand have opened up an area that had been completely locked into the former USSR. The result is that acquiring and maintaining strategic locations in it, and control over oil and gas transport routes, have become the main motives for involvement in the region. Competition is so intense that sometimes even economically sound solutions are not adopted because of political considerations. Oil and gas have become political instruments, with the recent Russian embargo on gas deliveries to Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova widely feared as just the first moves in a new style of energy-based realpolitik.
If Europe wants to ensure the smooth passage of oil and gas through the region and share in its energy bonanza it will have no choice but to increase its efforts to stabilise it politically. The potential for conflict is high because there is no sense of common identity around the shores of the Black and Caspian seas, and any impulse to establish such a sense would have to come from outside rather than from within. Having said that, Europe’s need for access to Caspian and Central Asian oil and gas reserves should be sufficiently pressing to ensure that it will give substantial help to stabilisation efforts.
The European Union is becoming increasingly aware of its energy vulnerability, especially with Russia’s gas embargo in mind. Oil and gas are already important instruments in the arsenal of politics, and will be more so in the future. Russia, although claiming that the recent embargo was market dictated, has apparently given assurances to friendly countries that they will not suffer – in other words “the market” will be kinder to some than to others. So, just as the building of marshalling yards along major railway arteries before the First World War indicated the great powers’ future war plans, today it is pipelines that may indicate political plans. That both Germany and Turkey – key partners for Russia – have been selected for preferential gas supplies through separate pipelines would seem to illustrate the point. Some specialists have even been moved to say that it is precisely in the region of the Black and Caspian seas that Russia is inaugurating its new pattern of behaviour in international politics.
The European Union is therefore confronted with a tough choice. On the one hand, this is a region that presents far from ideal ground to operate in. On the other, the need for some sort of action has become pressing, not to say indispensable. Other than actions by some individual member states, the EU has so far limited itself to including the countries of the region in its neighbourhood policy. Perhaps when Romania and Bulgaria become full members, the EU will begin to establish itself as a major actor in that part of the world.
But any European policymakers who believe that before the EU deepens its involvement, the region should establish a political identity of its own, would do well to think again. That would inevitably come too late to underpin Europe’s energy needs. By the same token, anyone who is tempted to say that the countries of the region should not expect the west to solve their problems should be aware that these problems are no longer solely those of the region – they have been greatly aggravated by the hunger of the outside world for the energy resources of the Black Sea and Caspian region.