INTERNATIONAL
Russia in the EU? We should never say never
Spring 2006
Behind its prickly post-Soviet exterior, Russia is moving steadily closer to Western European values as well as responding to the EU’s economic pull. Roderic Lyne, a former British Ambassador to Moscow, examines the idea of eventual Russian membership of the EU, and says that it is “bad politics and nonsensical” to rule it out
When some of my Russian friends, led by Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov and Nadya Arbatova of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations, were planning a few years ago to found an organisation to promote the European ideal in Russia, I pleaded with them not to call it “Russia in the European Union”. My argument was that to raise the question of Russian membership of the EU was woefully premature and could only lead to a rebuff.
Yet I disagree even more strongly with those European leaders who, over the past few years, have declared that Russia can never be a member of the European Union, but is destined – or doomed – to remain forever a “separate pole” in a “multipolar world”.
Is this the signal we wish to send? And are any of us so prescient that we can rule out membership for ever? Not so many years ago, the rulers of the Soviet Union used to tell us that the achievements of Communism and the Warsaw Pact were “irreversible”.
Yes, right now it is extremely hard to conceive of the Russian Federation as a member of the EU – in the current state of the EU and the Russian Federation. Right now, it is pointless to spend time debating the question, because the answer in present circumstances is self-evident. Russia is not only inconveniently large, but a very, very long way from getting up to the required speed politically, economically, socially, or in terms of the Copenhagen principles. The Russians could not fulfil the EU’s acquis communautaire. Nor would they wish to accept the supranational aspects of EU membership. And the Russian government is not even close to enquiring in the most tentative way about the possibility of putting a first foot on a very long track towards membership. Quite the reverse.
And now is certainly not the time to ask anyone in the EU to give serious attention to this issue. The EU has its own future to sort out, and is mired in a deep identity crisis.
These are no more than glimpses of the blindingly obvious. But they are not reasons for announcing that the door is slammed shut, bolted and barred for all time to come. If we do that, we risk putting ourselves in a position which is both foolish and false.
Let us look at the Russian side of this question.
Are the Russians Europeans? Indisputably. Over three quarters of the population live to the west of the notional boundary between Europe and Asia. Siberia may be technically in Asia, but is heavily populated by people of European stock and is run as an extension of European Russia. It is much more European than, say, Guadeloupe. Like France and the UK and many EU Member States, Russia includes ethnic minorities – some from northern tribes, some from the Far East, and many from the Caucasus and Central Asia – who are thought to make up around 18% of the population. Does this disqualify Russia?
Since Slavic tribes first migrated into what is now Russia late in the first millennium, the country’s history has been linked to the development of European culture and civilisation, albeit from a fairly isolated (and often self-isolated) position. It has been a Christian country for a thousand years, though with a church fiercely protective of its territory and resistant to foreign intrusion. For about the past 300 years, Russian and Western European culture and ideas have been interwoven. Even Communist rule (with an ideology imported from Western Europe) could not keep them apart. Now that the Iron Curtain is down and Russia is exposed to globalisation, satellite broadcasting, the worldwide web, cheap travel (with 10m Russians a year going abroad) and much freer trade, cultural fusion is accelerating. Stand in a crowd of Russian students, and you will find them hard to distinguish from their Western European coevals, save that they tend to be more smartly dressed, better mannered and harder working.
But aren’t the Russians famously nationalistic? Proud of their separate identity and history? Xenophobic? Highly reluctant to be lumped together with smaller and lesser countries; not at all keen to go cap in hand to Brussels seeking permission to join? Can it really be said that they have a European aspiration?
National pride, and among the older generation hurt and humiliation at Russia’s sudden loss of status and empire, and especially at the dramatic and unforeseen collapse of the Soviet Union, are powerful and unappealing features of today’s Russia. It would be an exaggeration to say that country is fully de-Stalinised. Stalin’s excesses are played down. Gorbachev’s most influential ally, Alexander Yakovlev, who devoted his final years to uncovering and publishing the shameful record of Stalinism, was shown much less respect than he deserved when he died in autumn 2005. Older Russians credit Stalin with making Russia a great country and a world power. There is a palpable yearning for Russia to be strong again.
Such tendencies are not unique to Russia. Nationalism is far from absent from the nations of the European Union. Countries like the United Kingdom and France saw their empires dissolve by stages over the course of a quarter-century. They, too, found it painful to come to terms with their changed status, and took a long time to do so. The shock to the psyche of the Russians was far greater because they were not prepared for it; and because their empire was contiguous to their heartland and an integral part of their economy and their defences. The crumbling of the Warsaw Pact and the return to independence of the Baltic States were foreseeable and were long-term Western policy objectives; though the time-scale caught us too by surprise. But as late as 1988, no one foresaw that by Christmas Day of 1991 Ukraine and Byelorussia (UN members, but joined hip and shoulder to Russia) would be sovereign, independent States.
This geopolitical transition alone would have required an enormous adjustment. To have to adjust simultaneously to the collapse of the command economy and seven decades of Communist rule has made the Russian transition vastly more complex than elsewhere in Eastern Europe. We should not be surprised that the transition has gone in fits and starts; nor that, after only a decade and a half, it still has a very long way to go.
So what we see in Russia today is an incomplete transition in a country where half the population (and virtually all of the ruling establishment) grew up and were formed in the Soviet Union; and a nation racked by an understandable insecurity, after 20 turbulent years.
Beneath this troubled and at times truculent exterior, the last thing the Russians want is to be cut off again from Europe. Opinion polls have pointed in different directions, but some have shown a large majority favouring EU membership. This is not really a vote for membership, the implications of which are not widely understood, but a desire for the tranquil environment and high standard of living which the peoples of Western Europe enjoy.
In moments of pique, Russian politicians like to “warn” Europe that Russia has other options, and might prefer to align herself with allies to the south or the east. This reeks of the diplomacy of the 19th century, and lacks credibility when Russia’s biggest security headache lies to the south in Chechnya, and when her long-term strategic worry is how to cope with the rise of China. It is noteworthy that President Vladimir Putin, in his latest annual address, chose to declare his country’s adherence to European values: “Achieved by European culture through much suffering, the ideals of freedom, human rights, justice and democracy have for many centuries been our society’s determining values.” Critics would argue that the current promotion of these values leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, it is welcome that these are the ideals which Putin holds up, and not a different set of values (as in the past); and that, in saying this, he is playing to an audience which wishes to enjoy respect in Europe.
The benchmark for Russia is no longer the US, nor is it China. It is Western Europe. It was not by chance that early in his first term Putin set the goal of getting up to the same GDP per head as Portugal. Nor is it accidental that Europe is the destination for so many Russian businessmen, students, tourists, and, increasingly, wealthy owners of foreign homes. Nor that much recent Russian legislation has borrowed from the norms of the EU. This trend is likely to get stronger over the next 15-20 years, as the first post-Soviet generation of leaders and managers (many of whom have studied in the West and worked in or with Western companies) incrementally moves into the front row.
The European Union’s policy since 1991 has been to encourage convergence and to seek to build a much closer relationship with Russia. That is manifestly in the EU’s interests, and arguably in Russia’s too. It is impossible at this stage to define what the nature of that relationship will be 30 years hence – because we no more know what the EU will be like 30 years from now than we can say how Russia will have developed. Can we exclude the possibility that, within this timespan, Ukraine (and a reformed Belarus) might join the Union, Turkey and the Balkan countries having by then joined; and that the EU would necessarily have evolved into a more flexible institution than the Union modelled in the 1950s? If Russia by then had modernised and democratised, and chose to apply, is it axiomatic that our descendants would refuse her? Do today’s European politicians have the right to cast an eternal veto?
We need to shift our thinking away from sclerotic concepts dictated by past circumstances. Certainly the current framework could not accommodate Russia, nor probably Ukraine. We in the EU are going to have to develop a different approach that could well involve different forms of membership. Meanwhile, it is bad politics and nonsensical to tell the Russians that membership is out of the question. It makes a mockery of protestations that we do not wish to erect a new dividing line across Europe. And it undermines our long-term objective of building a partnership founded on broadly shared interests, standards and values. To insist that Russia must accept the rules of our club but would never be allowed to join does not sound like a policy with a high chance of success.