Memorandum by Dr Sergei Prozorov, University
of Helsinki
EU-RUSSIAN RELATIONS: BEYOND THE CONFLICTUAL
IMPASSE
Response to the Call for Evidence for the
Inquiry into "The European Union and Russia", undertaken
by the Sub-Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Development
Policy of the House of Lords Select Committee on the European
Union
l. For the most part of the postcommunist
period EU-Russian relations have developed in a singularly paradoxical
manner. On the one hand, the idea of Russia's progressive "integration
into Europe" has remained virtually unchallengeable in
both Russia and the EU, serving as the background assumption of
any assessment of EU-Russian relations. On the other hand, there
is an abundance of empirical evidence of the increasingly conflictual
character of EU-Russian relations from 1995 onwards. We need
only recall the sharp divergences between Russia and the EU over
the two Chechen wars, the Kosovo crisis, President Putin's state
consolidation policies, the Yukos case, the "colour revolutions"
in post-Soviet states, etc. There appears a wide gap between
the unchallengeable goal of integration on the level of policy
rhetoric and the manifestly problematic state of EU-Russian relations
that may well be considered not the exception but the rule throughout
the postcommunist period. For example, in 2004, the year when
EU-Russian relations sharply deteriorated over the issues of Yukos,
Chechnya, Kaliningrad and concerns over Russian democracy, President
Putin stated in his address to the Russian Federal Assembly that
European integration was not only a matter of economic policy
but also a "spiritual question" for Russia. It therefore
appears that the rhetoric of integration has acquired a life
of its own, entirely detached from the actual state of Russian-European
relations. From this perspective, the currently perceived "crisis"
in EU-Russian relations. whose intensification is often dated
to the Litvinenko assassination in November 2006, should not be
viewed as an aberration in the otherwise cooperative pattern of
interaction, but a somewhat belated adaptation of foreign
policy rhetoric to the actual situation in EU-Russian relations.
Thus the present crisis must be understood against the background
of the patterns of EU-Russian relations that prevailed throughout
the postcommunist period.
2. In Understanding Conflict between
Russia and the EU (Palgrave, 2006) I have proposed that conflicts
between the EU and Russia arise out of the "mismatch"
of the policy logics that the two parties deploy towards each
other. Against the facile argument about the EU as the champion
of the "integrationist" logic and Russia as the stubborn
defender of state sovereignty, it is possible to demonstrate that
both the principles of sovereignty and international integration
are at work in the policies of both Russia and the EU without
coinciding in particular cases. For instance, in the case of Russia's
recurrent proposals for a visa-free regime between Russia and
the EU it is evidently the latter that is deploying the conventional
instruments of sovereignty in its insistence on the uniform and
stringent visa regime for Russian visitors to Europe. The same
logic could be observed in the tendency to view socioeconomic
developments in Russia through a "security lens", which
resulted in the inflated images of "new security threats"
allegedly emanating from Russia, from infectious diseases to organized
crime. In such cases we may speak of the pattern of the EU's exclusion
of Russia from the European space, which manifestly contradicts
the EU's own integrationist ambitions. Conversely, in the cases
of the EU's admittedly modest attempts at influencing the sociopolitical
situation in Russia through eg technical assistance and policy
advice programmes, support to non-governmental organizations or
oppositional public figures, it was Russia that has regularly
invoked the claims of sovereign equality and non-interference
against the expansion of the EU's "normative power"
into the Russian political space. In these cases, which have become
increasingly accentuated during President Putin's second term,
we may speak of Russia's self-exclusion from the space
of European politics.
3. These two patterns have arguably dominated
the development of EU-Russian relations since the mid-1990s, the
main tendency being the gradual abandonment by Russia of the position
of the complainant over unwarranted exclusion by the EU in favour
of a more assertive "self-exclusive" orientation that
devalues concrete moves towards greater integration between Russia
and the EU without entirely dispensing with the ideal of integration
as such. The key motif in Russia's policy towards the EU in the
second term of the Putin presidency has instead been the demand
for symmetric, non-hierarchical interaction, particularly
in the sphere of norms and values, in which the EU has been held
to exert hegemonic influence on Russia. Russia's unwillinguess
to maintain the "subject-object" pattern of relations
with the EU was particularly evident in its refusal to participate
in the ENP (European Neighbourhood Policy) that succeeded the
TACIS programme, which was the key EU instrument of managing the
post-Soviet transformation, opting instead for a bilateral framework
of the four Common Spaces, whose ineffectiveness is now evident
to most observers. In this manner, Russia has visibly upgraded
its symbolic status in relations with the EU even though the political
and economic benefits of such a decision remain dubious.
4. The contemporary crisis in EU-Russian
relations may be understood as the radicalization of the logic
of self-exclusion on the part of Russia. This radicalization
is most evident in the political sphere, in which the increasingly
active European criticism of the authoritarian tendencies of the
Putin presidency is either ignored by the Russian party or reciprocated
by arrogant reprisals and crude "look at yourself!"
arguments. The latter form the substance of the proverbial doctrine
of "sovereign democracy", originally developed
in the amateurish theorizing of the Deputy Chair of the Presidential
Administration Vladislav Surkov and elaborated in the writings
of numerous apologists. As has been noted by critics inside and
outside Russia, the notion of "sovereign democracy"
ultimately comes down to the first term devouring the semantic
content of the second, so that "democracy" begins to
denote whatever the sovereign wants it to. Moreover, taking into
consideration the conventional definition of democracy as "popular
sovereignty", the term "sovereign democracy" either
becomes a classic case of a pleonasm or implies the expropriation
of the sovereignty of the people by another sovereign figure.
Whatever its conceptual deficiencies, the discourse of sovereign
democracy resonates perfectly with the self-exclusive orientation
of Russia with respect to Europe, insofar as it allows to dismiss
all European criticism of the anti-democratic tendencies of the
present regime while retaining "democracy" as a mode
of the regime's self-identification. In this manner, Russia
reserves for itself the sovereign right to define both the content
of the concept of democracy and its own correspondence to this
concept.
5. As Russia no longer participates in the
EU's technical assistance programmes and does not depend on external
financial aid, the EU is deprived of the instruments of conditionality
in dealing with Russia and its capacity to influence the course
of political developments is strongly undermined. Faced with the
self-exclusive orientation on the part of Russia, the EU can either
continue, rather half-heartedly, with its project of the expansion
of European norms and values to Russia or reciprocate Russia's
self-exclusion with its own self-exclusive project. The
first option logically reproduces a conflictual pattern of the
EU-Russian interaction (inclusion vs self-exclusion) of
the kind that prevailed at least since 2004. This conflict may
attain various degrees of intensity, depending on contingent events
of such kind as eg the Litvinenko case or Russia's pullout from
the CFE Treaty, but the overall pattern of relations is bound
to be marked by a radical incompatibility of the positions of
the two parties. In such a scenario, we may expect the introduction
by Russia of additional legal and political obstacles to the
EU's involvement in its affairs and the gradual limitation of
the domain of EU-Russian cooperation to politically neutral issues,
from research and education to energy policy. Indeed, despite
the currently fashionable focus on energy policy as the key to
the entire field of EU-Russian relations, we must insist on its
rather limited role in influencing the overall course of
EU-Russian relations. Against the exaggerated fears of Europe's
dependence on Russia's energy exports, we need only recall that
the extent of the dependence is relatively comparable to the situation
in the 1970s-early 1980s, which hardly translated into the loss
of the political independence of Western Europe. Just as during
that period, Russia's energy policy remains governed by economic
rather than political rationalities (including the much-publicised
conflicts with the Ukraine and Belarus) and could barely be expected
to become a hostage to political divergences. Thus, the scenario
of the political conflict between Russia and the EU over the questions
of sovereignty and democracy does not exclude the continuation
of mutually advantageous forms of cooperation, even if the latter
will tend to remain unstable and under-institutionalized due to
the overall climate of EU-Russian relations.
6. In contrast, the second scenario that
consists in the EU's reciprocation of Russia's self-exclusive
gesture would entail the recognition by the EU of the existence
of clear limits to further integration with Russia and thus of
Russia's legitimate difference from Europe in sociopolitical
terms. This pattern of development that may be termed "mutual
delimitation" is also conditioned by the abandonment
of the ideal of Russia's "integration into Europe",
whose unchallenged status was mentioned above. Opting for this
pattern requires a frank admission that in the last decade Russia
moved further away from (rather than closer to) Europe and
its political system is ever more divergent from the normative
standards operative in the today's EU. At the same time as Russia
must renounce its perennial ambition to "enter Europe",
the EU must logically renounce its ambitions to govern the postcommunist
transformation in Russia, which is no longer driven by the European
ideal and should not be expected to be modelled on the European
experience. In this manner, the two parties would bring their
grand policy rhetoric in line with the actual state of their relations,
thereby bridging the gap that was easily noticeable since the
early 1990s.
7. However modest or pessimistic this scenario
appears at first glance, it is arguably a more fruitful line of
development than the maintenance of the current conflictual impasse
in EU-Russian relations, particularly insofar as it would permit
a long-overdue revaluation of the EU's record in promoting
democratization in Russia. Without buying into Russia's defensive
rhetoric about the "double standards" employed by the
EU in its criticism of Russia's turn towards authoritarianism,
it must be emphasized that the EU has been complicit in this very
turn by means of its systematic prioritisation of liberal market
reforms over democracy in postcommunist Russia since 1991
onwards. In late 1991 European states wholeheartedly supported
President Yeltsin's recourse to rule by decree in order to push
through the programme of neoliberal socioeconomic reforms bypassing
the Congress of People's Deputies. In 1993 Yeltsin's unconstitutional
dissolution of the Congress and the violent suppression of the
ensuing popular rebellion similarly encountered Europe's support.
Similarly, the introduction of the new Constitution in December
1993 that granted extraordinary powers to the President, was received
as the progressive step along the pathway to democracy. In 1996
the EU endorsed Yeltsin's candidacy and recognized his victory
in presidential elections that were marked by the blatant abuse
of office by government officials and unprecedented smear campaigns
against Yeltsin's rival, the Communist Party chairman Gennady
Zyuganov. The irrational fear of the Communist revanche in Russia
has arguably also motivated the positive European reception of
Vladimir Putin as Yeltsin's successor in 1999.
8. Although the European assessment of the
Putin administration grew more critical during the present decade,
we must not forget the unequivocally positive assessment of
Putin's liberal economic reforms by the EU, reflected eg in
the Tacis Indicative Programme 2000-03 and the National Indicative
Programme for Russia 2004-06, which were explicitly oriented towards
the support of the governmental reform initiatives. And yet, the
reason why these reforms, planned as early as Yeltsin's first
term, were able to be implemented, is the very system of "sovereign
democracy" that the EU presently accuses the Russian state
of. Indeed, the present assault on the democratic freedoms
gained during the late 1980s is frequently presented by the regime's
apologists as the necessary condition for advancing liberal market
reforms, stalled during the 1990s by the parliamentary opposition
and popular protests, ie by democratic resistance. The
contraction of the democratic space in Russia is thus the regime's
solution to the problem of the non-coincidence between liberalism
and democracy, the goals of market reforms and the will of
the people—a problem that the EU has utterly ignored in
its dealings with postcommunist Russia. Putin's sovereign democracy
is nothing other than the most appropriate institutional form
for the liberal market reforms, long promoted by the EU and
regularly rejected by tbe Russian voters in relatively free elections.
The priority granted by Europe to market reforms over substantive
democracy has eventually led both to the destruction of the democratic
space, which flourished briefly during Gorbachev's Perestroika
policy, and the perverse mutation of liberal capitalism into a
rent-seeking bureaucratic oligarchy with little developmental
potential. In this sense, the EU's assistance to postcommunist
transformation in Russia has been a dramatic failure in that it
did not achieve the consolidation of either democracy or the market
economy in its modern European image. The lesson to be learned
from the experience of Russian postcommunism is that a policy
that gives precedence to market liberalism over democracy risks
sacrificing both.
9. From this perspective, the abandonment
of the EU's policy of "promoting democracy" in Russia
might tum out to be a blessing in disguise. Rather than
provide a veneer of legitimacy for the Putinite project of "authoritarian
modernisation", the EU's self-exclusion from further integration
with the Russian state must be accompanied by a long-overdue
engagement with the wider array of societal actors than
the dwindling group of discredited "pro-market reformers".
Unfortunately, since the early 1990s Russia has been paradoxically
present in Europe "through its representatives', be it the
political elite or the adventurous tycoons, while contemporary
Russian cultural actors, professional associations or non-governmental
organizations are barely known in Europe. By the same token, for
the majority of the Russian society Europe, with its culture,
norms and practices, remains almost as distant as it was during
the Soviet period. The future development of Russian-European
relations depends on the possibility to discriminate between
the Russian society and the existing regime of bureaucratic oligarchy,
so that any gesture of dissociation from the latter is accompanied
by the active engagement with those societal forces that defend
substantive democracy against its "sovereign" expropriation.
Insofar as democracy is not a form of state but above all a societal
ethos, such a policy is far more likely to succeed in the
necessarily long-term project of democratisation than the present
deadlock in EU-Russian relations that can no longer be concealed
by the rhetoric of "partnership and cooperation".
September 2007
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