Perspektiv på Ukraina

Det pågår en omfattande, internationell diskussion om Ukrainakrisen. Det finns många olika aspekter på den.

Fareed Zakaria tog i helgens GPS-program på CNN upp ett perspektiv som kan vara värt fundera över.

Consider how Europe has dealt with Ukraine. For years, it could not really decide whether it wanted to encourage Ukrainian membership in the union, so it sent mixed signals to Kiev, which had the initial effect of disappointing pro-European Ukrainians, angering Russians and confusing everyone else. In 2008, after Moscow sent troops into Georgia, Europe promised an “Eastern partnership” to the countries along Europe’s eastern fringe. But, as Neil MacFarlane and Anand Menon point out in the current issue of the journal Survival, “The Eastern partnership was a classic example of the EU’s proclivity for responding to events by adding long-term and rhetorically impressive, but resource-poor, bolt-ons to existing policy.” European leaders were beginning to woo Ukraine without recognizing how this would be perceived in Russia. Moscow had its own plans for a customs union, to be followed by a Eurasian Union, which was meant to be a counter to the European Union. Ukraine was vital to Russia’s plans and was dependent on Russia for cheap natural gas. Plus, of course, Ukrainians were divided over whether to move west or east.

Negotiations between the European Union and Ukraine for an association agreement meandered along, with the lawyers and translators taking a year to work out the text. In describing this tardiness as a mistake, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said, “The same thing applies to the [European] Union as to the Vatican. God’s mills grind slowly but surely.” The deal that was offered to Ukraine was full of demands for reform and restructuring of its corrupt economy, but it had little in the way of aid to soften the blows and sweeten the pot. When then-President Viktor Yanukovych rejected Europe’s offer and sided with Moscow, he set in motion a high-speed, high-stakes game that Europe was utterly unprepared for and could not respond to.

If Europe was trying to move Ukraine into its camp, it should have been more generous to Kiev and negotiated seriously with Moscow to assuage its concerns. Instead, Europe seemed to act almost unaware of the strategic consequences of its actions. Then when Russia began a campaign to destabilize Ukraine — which persists to this day — Europe remained a step behind, internally conflicted and unwilling to assert itself clearly and quickly.

The problem is now being described as European cowardice and appeasement. It is better explained by an absence of coherence among the European Union’s 28 very different countries, a lack of strategic direction and a parochial inward orientation that looks for the world’s problems to go away. The result is a great global vacuum, with terrible consequences.

If we look back years from now and wonder why the liberal, open, rule-based international order weakened and eroded, we might well note that the world’s most powerful political and economic unit, the European Union, with a population and economy larger than America’s, was the great no-show on the international stage.

Jag blev så nyfiken på hänvisningen till MacFarlanes och Menons artikel att jag läste den. De skriver bl a att att  EU  was rash to proceed without attention to the Russians’ perspectives on their neighbourhood. For more than 20 years, Moscow had made clear its claim to a privileged position in what it saw as its periphery.(—) In other words, while the EU appeared to assume that the neighbourhood was empty of risk, there was good reason to expect pushback from Russia. (–) The EU was equally naive in its failure to take account of the genuine economic and geopolitical dilemmas confronted by Kiev.”

Deras kritik mot EUs östpolitik är alltså minst lika hård som Zakarias. Sammanfattningsvis skriver de om den hybris som EU uppvisat, om hur bristen på konsensus inom EU leder till en ineffektiv och alltför långtgående politik och om hur priset för denna högst bristfällig politik kommer att få betalas av dem som EU initialt tänkte sig hjälpa.

Misstagen har begåtts och framtiden är oviss.