How to Put the Fire Out? The EU’s Changing Approach to Eastern European Societies

On October 1, the Tbilisi State University hosted the first EU-LISTCO event, organized by the Georgian Institute of Politics. Through exchanges with leading universities and think tanks, EU-LISTCO aims to develop policy recommendations for the EU’s external action toolbox, focusing on investigating the shortcomings of European foreign policy in the EU neighborhood, years after the development of the Eastern Partnership.

The starting point of this new EU approach is the acknowledgment that the European Neighborhood Policy has failed in its mission to build a ring of stable and prosperous friends around the EU. Eastern European countries remain tangled up in violent conflicts, political failure, and are still vulnerable to external threats. It is even more worrisome that these shortcomings in relations between the EU and its Eastern partners are happening in a global context of contestation of the international liberal order, weakening the landmarks and orientation originally set by the EU and US themselves.

The October 1 public lecture opened with this concerning state of affairs and questioned how the EU can best support the three frontline EaP states in fostering societies resilient to domestic and external threats. The panel was composed of prominent European scholars, diplomats and local stakeholders from Georgia, Ukraine, and Poland.

EU-LISTCO diagnoses that the key risks in both the EU and in its neighborhood have to do with limited statehood and contested orders, or in other words, conflicts over how to organize domestic, regional and international politics. At the core of this issue is a defiance towards political liberalism and multilateralism by China, Russia, some countries in the EU and Trump’s USA, which all are important partners for Georgia’s political and economic development. In front of this concerning picture, the German Ambassador H.E Huber Knirsch reassured that US and EU diplomats are working closely to be coherent in their approach to Georgia, regardless of their political difference at the national level.

Nevertheless, the issue of the European integration of Georgia is specific to the EU, especially now that the limit of the Eastern Partnership has been reached, a fact being widely discussed among scholars and local stakeholders.

“The risk is creating defiance and fatigue if the EU is not seen to be making gradual commitments to maintaining trust in Georgia,” said Prof. Dr. Tanja A. Börzel, Chairwomen for European Integration at the Freie Universität Berlin. “It requires thinking about a different institutional framework to foster resilience about principles and human rights, not solely about trade, economic development, and security,” she added.

The panel argued that EaP countries need to think about Europeanization beyond the EU itself, in terms of values and political orientation, since the EaP does not offer many options in this regard. In Georgia, it boils down to the growing political polarization which certainly plays against the social cohesion and capacity to resist Russian threats, which go beyond security and territorial integrity.

Indeed, Dr. Agnieszka Legucka from the Polish Institute of International Affairs notes that the securitization of the problems of the European eastern neighborhood makes Russia a geopolitical opponent to the US and the EU, limiting both the analysis and the solutions. The threats posed to Georgia by the Kremlin are also a matter of disinformation, propaganda and social division over values and principles. Ultimately, assessing the European identity of Georgia and drawing on what unites society and the political parties, rather than what separates them, is the formula proposed by experts to build resilience.

Although the diagnosis of the global and regional situation was very well drawn, the panel did not propose concrete solutions on how to build social cohesion in a country that is entering a crucial election year. Moreover, they noted that issues of social resilience, limited statehood, and contested orders are a global problem that eventually weakens the international order, rather than a Georgian problem solely, which makes it even more complicated to solve. If the EU-LISTCO aims at providing policy recommendations that will answer to the shortcomings of the EU foreign policy, it may have to be more specific.

By Lorraine Vaney

Image source: GIP