The EU and the South Caucasus 25 Years Since Independence Nov 25, 2016 by Amanda Paul

The EU and the South Caucasus 25 Years Since Independence Nov 25, 2016 by Amanda Paul Wedged between regional powers Russia, Iran and Turkey, the South Caucasus is an extraordinarily complex region; one of the most security-challenged and fragmented regions in the world with internal and external security threats working to reinforce each other. The three South Caucasus states – Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan – are complicated even in their internal configuration. Twenty-five years since the collapse of the Soviet Union the region remains plagued by conflict, its people living in insecurity. Moreover, the region has not been politically or economically integrated. Rather Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia have integrated into a wide-range of different, sometimes opposing, organisations and alliances. The EU joined the mix of actors and organisations engaged in the South Caucasus in the early 1990‟s intensifying its engagement over the years with the three states becoming part of the EU‟s European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and Eastern Partnership (EaP). Despite hopes that the ENP/EaP could act as transformative tool to help strengthen stability, security, democracy and bring about a more cohesive region, the results have been rather patchy. The EU has failed to carve out a clear strategy or policy for the region and with the exception of Georgia there has been little genuine will to implement serious reform. Moreover, Russia‟s annexation of Crimea and war in the Donbas in 2014 and the increasingly polarised standoff between Moscow and the West has further exacerbated the fragile security situation, further exposing the inability of the EU to guarantee or even shore-up a partner‟s security. Today the region is more fragmented than ever before with Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia choosing different geostrategic trajectories. While Georgia remains committed to a future as part of the EU, Armenia has joined the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Azerbaijan meanwhile has chosen to align itself with neither. Nowadays the EU lacks real leadership and vision. The Union is stuck in a never-ending cycle of crises with populism on the rise, key elections on the horizon in France and Germany and a waning appetite for further enlargement, while a revanchist Russia is working overtime to ensure the region stays in what the Kremlin claims is its sphere of influence. This has given rise to serious concerns from the partner states not only over the future of EaP and the ability of the EU to stick to the pledges it has made, but more broadly the EU‟s commitment to the region. The 2017 EaP Summit is likely to be a new litmus test in this respect. The EU’s creeping engagement The EU can be considered a late-comer to the South Caucasus. During the early 1990‟s the region scarcely figured on the EU‟s radar as there was little interest for a region that was broadly viewed as an obscure and distant periphery; a region burdened with numerous problems and largely considered Russia‟s backyard. Moreover, during that time the EU was also absorbed with the bloody events in the Western Balkans and developments in its eastern neighbourhood following the collapse of the iron curtain. Among the then EU-15 only France, Germany, the UK, Italy, the Netherlands and Greece opened embassies in all three South Caucasus countries. The EU‟s initial involvement was principally in terms of financial assistance. The EU was the biggest financer of development projects in the region between 1991 and 2000, investing well over one billion euros in the three states. Today the picture is considerably different. The EU has significantly increased its footprint in the region, deepening ties – albeit to different degrees – with all three countries. A number of factors led to this increased engagement and interest in the region. First, all three states wanted to develop relations with the EU to help counter the massive influence that Russia continued to wield. In this respect the EU became progressively engaged through the first and second TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Community of Independent States) programmes and then further down the line, in 1996 with the signature of Partnership and Cooperation Agreements (PCA‟s). However, the fact that these PCAs came into force later in all three Caucasus countries than in Russia or in Ukraine which reflects the EUs priorities in the former Soviet space. Furthermore, by contrast to its humanitarian and assistance engagement, the EU was not directly involved in security and conflict resolution issues, which were central in the 1990‟s following the outbreak of conflicts in all three countries. This in part can be put down to the fact that a number of international actors (not least Russia) and organisations had been present in the region since the collapse of the USSR, which strongly constrained the EU's engagement1. Second, eastward enlargement brought the South Caucasus geographically closer to the EU, especially when Romania and Bulgaria acceded in 2007. Third was the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia which brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power. A young and assertive Atlanticist, in his inauguration speech as President, Saakashvili underlined that Euro-Atlantic integration was a foreign policy priority for Georgia. 2 The 2008 Russia-Georgia war was a further important milestone. In the aftermath of the conflict, the EU gained a new visibility in the region, becoming the main security actor in Georgia with the deployment of the EU Monitoring Mission (EUMM). Lastly is energy. Azerbaijan, with its vast gas resources, has taken on a key role in EU efforts to diversify routes and sources of natural gas. The development of the Southern Gas Corridor (SCG), which will bring gas from Azerbaijan‟s Shah Deniz II field in the Caspian, across Turkey and Southeast Europe to Italy, is one element of an EU strategy aimed at reducing dependence on Russian gas, strengthening the internal energy market, and breaking the Kremlin‟s hold on the East-West gas route. A further development that came about in the aftermath of Georgia‟s Rose Revolution was the EU‟s December 2003 Security Strategy stressing the need for the EU to „take a stronger and more active interest in the problems of the South Caucasus‟, stating „we need to extend the benefits of economic and political cooperation to our neighbours in the East while tackling political problems there. We should now take a stronger and more active interest in the problems of the 1 Lynch. D. 2005. “The Security Dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy”, The International Spectator, (XL) 1, January-March, 33-43. 2 President Saakashvili's Inauguration Speech, 25 January 2004, http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=26694 Southern Caucasus, which will in due course also be neighbouring region‟3. This was followed by the appointment of the first EU Special Representative for the region, Heikki Talvitie. He had a regional mandate, in an attempt to foster EU political involvement in the region. In 2005 the South Caucasus became part of the ENP, although the region has not originally been included in the policy. The change of approach was triggered by strong lobbying from Georgia and Saakashvili‟s declaration that Georgia intended to join the EU. The inclusion of the South Caucasus states in the ENP was a qualitatively new stage in bilateral relations and indicated the EU‟s willingness to engage in deeper relations moving beyond existing partnership and cooperation agreement (PCA) frameworks4. Hence since the launch of the ENP, the EU has been increasingly present in the region, inter alia through the signature of the three bilateral Action Plans in November 2006 and through the opening of a regional delegation in Tbilisi (2005), then of two delegations concomitantly in Baku and Yerevan (2008). With the introduction of Eastern Partnership (EaP) in 2009 the door was opened for even closer political and economic cooperation using a “more for more” approach. Association Agreements (AA) including Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas (DCFTA), as well as visa facilitation/ liberalisation, were put on the table. With EaP having both a bilateral and multilateral dimension it was hoped that the that the multilateral track could be a useful framework for representatives of the three South Caucasus states to meet and foster ties including via the Civil Society Forum, as well as within the framework of EURONEST, ultimately leading to strengthening regional cooperation. Yet despite the deepening of ties, EU policies in the South Caucasus have produced only limited results. While the EU has become the largest trading partner of all three states, perhaps not surprisingly, the ENP and EaP have failed to replicate the transformative power witnessed in the CEE region and more recently – but to a lesser degree – in the Western Balkans. There are several reasons for this. Firstly the EU has never had a strategic vision or clear policy for the region; secondly, ENP/EaP had inadequate political and economic support because many EU Member States did not view the policy as a priority and have been reluctant to increase finance for it. This reflects the gap in geographic priorities because while the countries in the East were the biggest supporters of EaP, along with the likes of Sweden, member states coming from southern Europe had priorities elsewhere. Third is the fact that there is no membership perspective which increased the difficulty attached to painful reform. Fourth, the leverage the EU believed it could have and the conditionality it believed it could place has not been there. Fifth, there was a lack of will for change from some of the partner states. The ENP Action Plans are political documents relying upon the commitment of the partner country toward common values and reforms.

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