The summit of the heads of state and
government of the Member States of the Eastern Partnership and its EU partners
took place in Warsaw on 29 and 30 September 2011. The opinions on the progress
and results of the meeting differed widely. An extremely brief statement by the
Warsaw correspondent of the German state television network ARD spoke of the
undertaking as a complete fiasco, as did some of the other German media. The
official Polish side insisted that the summit had been a success; a column in
the left-liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza emphasised the importance of
democracy and human rights issues during the meeting and pointed out the
extremely difficult circumstances under which the summit was held.
A realistic summation of backgrounds,
course and results of the summit yields an assessment somewhere between these
extremes. The summit of the Eastern Partnership was originally supposed to take
place in Budapest in May 2011, in the final phase of the Hungarian Council
Presidency. Problems in the domestic politics of Victor Orban’s government and international critique on the
increasingly authoritarian tendencies of his administration led to an agreement
to postpone the summit until the Polish Council Presidency. As co-initiator of
the Eastern Partnership, Poland accepted the challenge, declaring the further
arrangements and the summit itself to be a priority of the Polish Council Presidency. Even well before the summit, the great pressure
to succeed alarmed many sceptics. They pointed out the current conditions in
the six quite heterogeneous partner states, all of which emerged from the ruins
left behind by the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and were marked by
its historical heritage. While for Moldavia and Georgia the record of reforms
and the progress in negotiations in many fields of the Eastern Partnership can
be assessed as relatively successful, the picture for the other four
participants looks much gloomier. Armenia, and even more so Azerbaijan, are
characterised by authoritarian, restorative regimes and have proven completely
incapable of dealing with their mutual territorial conflicts. Through obviously
fraudulent presidential elections and his brutal course of action against the
protesting opposition in December 2011, Lukashenko, Europe’s last dictator, has
plunged the country back into international isolation. Membership in the Eastern Partnership
remained the only link connecting Belarus to the European Union, and thus
practically the only possibility for exerting influence on the country beyond
tightening the sanctions already in place. The results of the democratic
presidential elections in Ukraine in February 2010 put Viktor Yanukovych in
power, who ever since has been increasingly blatant in proving how little he
respects the standards of democracy and the rule of law, both of which are
essential milestones along the successful path to the European Union.
Ukraine
Well before the summit the Polish
side mobilised its diplomatic and political forces to influence the Ukrainian
government and President Yanukovych himself on various levels. The visit to
Poland by the Ukrainian president and his meeting with the Polish president in
the latter’s summer residence on Hel peninsula seemed to offer an excellent
opportunity. The Polish president Bronislaw Komorowski did his best to convince
the Ukrainian side not to waste their chance by pursuing a seesaw policy
between the European perspective and any kind of Russian-Eurasian option. They
emphasised that the door to Europe was open and that the potential for
negotiating the Eastern Partnership offered bridges leading all the way to free
trade and association agreements. But in order to cross these bridges, the
Polish side continued, it was necessary to develop standards of democracy and
the rule of law rather than dismantling them.
This scenario was repeated even more
intensively at the meeting of the informal Yalta Forum in Crimea in early
September. Leading representatives of the EU, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw
Sikorski and ex-President Kwaśniewski, who had successfully mediated in the political
conflict in Ukraine back in 2004, met with the Ukrainian president in
one-on-one talks and confidential group meetings. Only just before the summit
Yanukovych underlined his clear preference for the European variant and his
hope for a speedy, successful conclusion of the negotiations on the association
agreement. Those efforts were all in vain as it became clear during the summit that
the trial against and imprisonment of Yulia Tymoshenko were a foregone
conclusion, because the Ukrainian president feared losing face and felt trapped
between the camps of his oligarchic sponsors.
The complete article can be downloaded by using the PDF button at the top of the page.
Born in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949, Wolfgang Templin studied philosophy at the HumboldtUniversity in Berlin. From 1970 to 1983 he was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). As a result of his contacts to opposition groups, among others Polish, and critics of the communist regime from both GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany he abandoned Marxism and left the SED. Because of his commitment to democratic movements, he was deprived of continuing his academic career. Wolfgang Templin became one of the leaders of the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights as a member of which he took part in the East German Round Table Talks. From 1994 to 1996 he was a researcher at the Berlin Wall Museum. In 1996 he became a co-founder of the Federal Foundation for the Reconciliation of the SED Dictatorship. Wolfgang Templin is a publicist, concerned mainly with the history of the GDR, the former Eastern Bloc and the German reunification and an associate of many institutions of citizen education. Since July 2010 he has been director of the Warsaw Office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. In September 2010 he was awarded the Medal of Gratitude from the European Solidarity Centre which was presented to him by the Polish president Bronisław Komorowski.
Maxim Rust was born in Ukraine in
1988. He went to school at the Belarusian Lyceum for Humanities until the
institute was closed down in 2003 for ideological reasons. After finishing his
high school studies via correspondence course he went to Poland in 2006
to study at university. Maxim Rust is currently a student of political sciences
at WarsawUniversity
and works as an assistant at the Warsaw
office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
Please also see our dossier on the Polish Presidency.