Europe’s ring of fire

IT SEEMS safe to assume that Johnny Cash, born in Arkansas in 1932, gave little thought to European foreign policy. Yet one of the Man in Black’s better-known numbers sums up the European Union’s troubles with its neighbours. “Love is a burning thing,” he sang in “Ring of Fire”, a hit in 1963, “and it makes a fiery ring. Bound by wild desire, I fell into a ring of fire.”

Wild desire is a mild overstatement, but there was certainly an abundance of goodwill behind the EU’s decision to launch its European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2004. Aiming to construct a “ring of friends” to its east (former communist countries) and south (across the Mediterranean), the EU took enthusiastically to the task of transforming its 16 ENP partners. Like Cash with his guitar, the EU had powerful instruments, including trade, aid and political reform. Fresh from an enlargement that took in eight central and east European countries, the club believed itself influential enough to bring about change in its neighbours without the carrot of eventual membership.

Yet ten years on, the EU is facing a ring of fire on its eastern and southern flanks. Over 3,000 people have been killed in Ukraine’s fighting this year. There, and in Georgia and Moldova, two of the other five eastern ENP countries, Russian troops are present against the will of the legitimate governments. Azerbaijan is imprisoning activists and tensions are rising with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave the pair fought a war over in the early 1990s. Belarus’s long-serving president, Alexander Lukashenko, still merits his label as Europe’s last dictator. Meanwhile, to the south, Libya is in turmoil, the hopes from Egypt’s 2011 uprising have been quashed by a military counter-revolution, and Israelis and Palestinians have again shown that any number of EU action plans cannot stop them killing each other.

Why has the ENP fallen so far short of its goals? The EU cannot control the internal political dynamics of other countries, of course. In many cases, particularly in the south, its technocratic approach has simply been overwhelmed by domestic forces. But elsewhere it has been guilty of naivety. Take Ukraine. Last year the EU and Ukraine concluded an “association agreement”, an ENP instrument par excellence that included a free-trade deal and various political elements. But under pressure from Russia, which was alarmed by the prospect of Ukrainian integration into Western institutions, Viktor Yanukovych, then Ukraine’s president, declined to sign at the last minute, causing protests that led to his downfall. This was followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its invasion of the south-east.

The thousands of Ukrainians who occupied the Maidan in Kiev were not demonstrating for tariff reform and patent protection. They were asserting a European identity and rejecting the backward-looking, post-Soviet vision of Mr Yanukovych and the corruption that flourished on his watch. They understood that Europe had not banished geopolitics. So did Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, although his conclusion that Ukrainian sovereignty must be sacrificed to secure Moscow’s interests was altogether darker. The irony was that the Russians took the ENP far more seriously than the Europeans ever did.

Europe, too, has woken up to the return of geopolitics. Last week the association-agreement circle was completed when the EU and Ukraine, after lobbying by Russia as well as some EU members, decided to delay many of its provisions for a year to help underpin a ceasefire in the south-east that is barely holding. This week, in a powerful piece of symbolism, the European and Ukrainian parliaments ratified the agreement simultaneously via video link. Yet the different understandings of Ukraine’s European vocation seemed apparent when Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s pro-European president, declared that, after all the violence in his country, “nobody will dare close the door of the EU in front of Ukraine”. Some MEPs looked awkwardly at their feet.

Technocratic policies are not toothless. The EU accession process, during which candidates must adopt rules on everything from food safety to public procurement, is mind-numbing but also powerful. Yet it requires the lure of membership to work. Nobody believes the EU’s eastern neighbours are anywhere near joining; the southerners never will. But signals count, and today the EU seems more concerned to downplay its neighbours’ aspirations. One of the first pledges of the incoming president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, was that there would be no expansion of the club in the next five years.

Yet the EU must find some way to quell the flames licking at its borders. Poland and the Baltic trio worry that a weak-kneed European response in Ukraine has encouraged Russia to make more mischief. To its south, the EU has not found a solution to the human tragedies of would-be migrants dying in the Mediterranean; recently, over 500 drowned after their boat was rammed by human traffickers. Relations with Turkey, which have soured as Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has turned eastward, are especially tricky, as its membership talks are stuck and it shelters as many as 1m Syrian refugees, many of whom want to get to the EU.

Federica’s challenge

The EU’s eastern policy was dented by a previous bout of muscle-flexing by Russia: the 2008 war with Georgia. This year, after a slow start, EU members have finally begun to act, although a senior official warns that internal differences will make it hard to move beyond the latest sanctions. The incoming EU foreign-policy chief, Italy’s Federica Mogherini, is to produce an assessment of global challenges. This is a chance to rethink Europe’s security strategy, if Ms Mogherini has the ambition and is given enough space by the big countries. It is a fine line between being tough and staying united, but the EU, as Cash once sang, must walk it.