The dangers of tightrope walking

As the world reels from the shock of the downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane in Ukraine, the speed with which accusations have been flying thick and fast highlights the fragility of the political balance in eastern Europe. In a region beset by separatist struggles and political instability, the burgeoning rivalry between two regional integration projects – the European Union (EU) on the one hand, and the new Russia-driven Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) on the other – is elevating tensions and creating dangerous dilemmas for governments.

In the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc in the early 1990s, the EU viewed its eastern engagement as a natural extension of its mandate. Its attempts to foster integration with former members of its rival bloc by encouraging them to reinvent themselves according to the EU institutional model succeeded in a number of cases. Several east European countries have become active members of the EU and stalwart defenders of its values. Notably, Poland has emerged as an influential eastern counterpoint within the Union, not afraid to chastise more established member states like Germany on their mishandling of the euro zone crisis. In other cases, however, the EU’s strategy of trading membership and access to its internal market for domestic reforms has not paid off as well, as demonstrated by the Hungarian government’s increasing disregard for the Union’s rules.

The Russian government has long viewed the EU’s Eastern Partnership Outreach as a menace to its own conception of the region as its sphere of influence, conflating it in diplomatic terms with NATO expansion. More recently, it has sought to counter these efforts through the Eurasian Customs Union, an international institutional regime that is slated to become the full-fledged Eurasian Economic Union in January 2015. So far, Russia’s only partners in this endeavour are Armenia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, but the prospect of an EAEU membership puts pressure on other eastern European governments, which are now being courted, and sometimes threatened, by advocates of both regional projects.

Of the eastern European countries that are not members of either union yet, some, like Albania and Serbia, are in negotiations to join to the EU outright, while others, like Moldova and Georgia, have signed Association Agreements with it. Questions over the relative attractiveness of looking west rather than east however remain: the EU’s approach to its potential partners in the region has been criticized for imposing unrealistic conditions for reform on already-beleaguered national governments. Equally troubling is the Union’s unwillingness to commit to firm membership plans for countries such as Georgia or Moldova, leaving their governments with the high up-front cost of adapting to the European regulatory framework without a clear promise of future rewards in the form of EU membership. From the other side, Russia can offer discounts and energy security as an incentive to join the EAEU, but countries that have long histories of suffering under Russian rule are wary of finding themselves in an economic union marked by an immense power asymmetry and a hegemon willing to engage in coercive diplomacy. Trying to remain independent of these regional efforts can be equally problematic, as Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych found earlier this year. In this case, the government’s attempts to play the EU and Russia against one another ultimately backfired on itself and its citizens.

Eastern Europe’s dilemma can only be resolved if both the EU and the EAEU stop creating a zero-sum game in an area where in terms of regional economic integration there does not necessarily have to be one. In today’s world of multi-level governance, an eventual inter-regional free trade agreement between the EU and the EAEU (within a common WTO framework) should not be impossible. Only the softening of the stark “either/or” choice currently demanded by both unions will put an end to the precarious tightrope walking of eastern European governments and prevent their citizens from becoming the victims of increased regional instability.

Katharina Obermeier is an intern with Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. She is currently pursuing an MPhil degree in International Relations at the University of Oxford.

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