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Europe wonders
if it can square its need for Russia with a distaste for Putin
As NATO foreign ministers gather Tuesday for an emergency
meeting on the Georgian crisis, Europe is divided over how to balance its ties
to Russia with concerns over the country's new aggressiveness.
The European dilemma is clear, said Clifford Kupchan, a
director of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm in Washington. "How do
they square their increasing energy dependence on Russia with their increasing
political discomfort with Putin?" he said, referring to Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin. "It's a very hard circle to square."
As the United States looks for more than symbolic gestures
on how to support Georgia and another former Soviet republic, Ukraine, there is
a split between "old and new Europe" — roughly Western and Eastern
Europe, Kupchan said. New Europe, backed by Britain and Scandinavia, is taking
a harder line toward Russia, while old Europe "will only be reinforced in
its view that Georgia and Ukraine are not ready for NATO."
After Russian behavior during the Georgia crisis, said
Jacques Rupnik, an Eastern Europe expert at the Paris Institute of Political
Studies, known as Sciences-Po, "There is little disagreement now in Europe
about the nature of the new Russia." Those Europeans "who didn't get
it before are getting it now," Rupnik said. Still, Europe is taking
comfort, as usual, "in the idea of mediating between Washington and
Moscow."
The cease-fire agreement now signed by Russia and Georgia
was negotiated by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, in his role as president
of the European Union. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, traveled to
Tbilisi to offer her support to Georgia but continued to straddle the American
position that Georgia be offered NATO membership soon and the European view
that it should happen at some future time.
This is not Europe's fight, said Stefan Kornelius, foreign
editor and columnist for the newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung. "I don't see
Europe prepared to go to war with itself over Georgia," he said. "The
European foreign ministers sense this is too big for them and they will in the
end align themselves with the United States, while trying to affect
policy."
The Americans are looking for concrete gestures to punish
and warn Russia — perhaps suspending or even canceling the NATO-Russian
Council, or as Ronald Asmus, director of the Brussels Transatlantic Center of
the German Marshall Fund, suggests, "fast-tracking NATO membership for
Ukraine."
NATO could also begin formal defense planning, including
putting in military infrastructure, to defend new NATO members like the Baltics
and Poland against even a hypothetical war with Russia.
As a gesture to the Russia of Boris Yeltsin, who grudgingly
accepted NATO expansion, "NATO never developed military plans to defend
central and eastern Europeans, because we said, 'Russia's not an enemy and not
a threat,' and we never backed up the new members with exercises and
infrastructure," said Asmus, who was a senior State Department official in
the Clinton administration.
The Germans opposed such moves at the time; Gerhard
Schroder, the former German chancellor, and Jacques Chirac, the former French
president, were considered a kind of pro-Russian axis in NATO. Both are gone,
replaced by more pro-American and more viscerally anti-Communist leaders in
Merkel and Sarkozy.
But France, Germany and Italy remain deeply dependent on
Russian energy. Sarkozy is eager to mediate between Washington and Moscow, and
Merkel is in a grand coalition with the left. Her foreign minister, the Social
Democrat Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a close Schroder aide, is considered very
friendly toward Moscow.
In an interview published Sunday, he urged the West against
a "knee-jerk reaction" like suspending talks between the European
Union and Russia on strategic cooperation or banning Russia from the World
Trade Organization.
The Russians say they are pulling out of Georgia — but it
will be their own definition of Georgia, which does not, apparently, include
South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where they have distributed Russian passports. Few
believe they will leave those ethnic enclaves, even if they redefine their own
occupation troops as "peacekeepers," let alone allow the regions to
be controlled by the Georgian government.
Even if the formal borders of Georgia remain unchanged for
now, in the long run Russia will have been seen to expand.
"Russia has never been a nation state, but always an
empire, with Muskovy gradually expanding its borders since the 15th
century," Rupnik said. "Russia built a state as it built its empire;
the two were inseparable."
The Russian Federation was never a state in its current
borders, and more than 25 million Russians live outside it, mostly in the
former Soviet Union. "These new borders are new and somewhat
artificial," Rupnik said. "And we in the West never fully measured
the effect of this loss of empire on the Russians, or how integral Ukraine is
to the Russian sense of self."
The Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which Russia failed to
stop, "was the real wake-up call for Putin," Rupnik said. "The
Russian conclusion then, and it's widely shared there, is that the limit has
been reached — no more concessions, a push for rollback, and definitely no
Georgia and no Ukraine in NATO."
Ukraine has its own built-in ethnic Russian enclaves in the
east and in Crimea — the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and handed to
Ukraine in 1954 by Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Ukrainian-born Soviet leader. Like
Ossetia, split by Stalin so that North Ossetia is in Russia and South Ossetia
is in Georgia, Crimea is a kind of poison pill to keep Ukraine in line, one
supported by nearly total energy dependency on Russia.
That is why, for those like Asmus, NATO's response to
Russia's actions in Georgia should involve Ukraine. But that is also why many
Europeans do not want to commit to defending another Russian neighbor when they
have neither the will nor the means to enforce that commitment.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there have been
numerous border changes in Europe — mostly recently in Kosovo, the example
Putin uses to defend Russia's move in Georgia. "We are still in the
process of building and making states," Rupnik said. "The map is not
finished."
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