Hypocrisy and incoherence in EU foreign policy as EU Commission pursues own agenda

On January 31, the EU’s Foreign Affairs Council approved a travel ban on 158 representatives of the Belarus state and a freeze of any assets they may hold in the EU. The sanctions don’t go nearly as far as some Belarusian opposition politicians had called for, nevertheless, in light of the recent round of diplomatic overtures by the European Commission towards three authoritarian leaders in the Caspian and Central Asia, viewed as a whole the EU’s foreign policy is emerging as inconsistent and hypocritical

The EU’s powerbroker—President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso—visited Azerbaijan on January 13, and then Turkmenistan on Jan. 14 and 15. Both countries rank below Belarus in the Economist’s Democracy Index for 2010 -  Azerbaijan is five places lower than Belarus in the 135^th spot, while Turkmenistan is 165^th; only Chad and North Korea scored lower (though Chad has a far higher civil liberties rating). Then on January 24, Islam Karimov, former Soviet Politburo member and President of Uzbekistan since 1991, was received in Brussels by Barroso. Unsurprisingly, the EU Commission’s boss attempted to keep the meeting as low-key as possible. Uzbekistan ranks one place above Turkmenistan in the Democracy Index.          

In the Azeri capital Mr. Barroso paid mandatory but very brief lip service to the pursuit of democratic reforms at the beginning of his address following his talks with Azeri President Ilham Aliyev (a very easy job for the censor there), then quickly proceeded to praise the “strong and flourishing” relationship between the EU and Azerbaijan and announced that € 122.5 million of EU taxpayers’ money was to be transferred to Baku within the framework of an Association Agreement between Azerbaijan and the union. He then divulged a few details about the true purpose of his visit, i.e. securing as much gas as possible for the Nabucco pipeline.      

Unsurprisingly, there were absolutely no official statements, video footage or press releases from the EU about Barroso’s visit to the Turkmen capital Ashgabat. Since the death in 2006 of President for life Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan under his successor Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov has shown little enthusiasm for opening up anything other than more gas and Afghan heroin to the outside world – (In 2007 a Russian TV documentary exposed the import of heroin to Russia through Turkmen diplomatic channels. According to Russian anti-narcotics agents, “we haven’t received any signs of willingness for strategic cooperation from the Turkmen side in this area”).

Presumably, Barroso’s talks there centered uniquely upon on the potential supply of Turkmen gas to the EU’s planned Southern Corridor – at the center of which is the Nabucco pipeline. Yet the geopolitical reality is that Iran and Russia will block all attempts for a pipeline under the Caspian to ship Turkmen natural gas west: to the advantage of Tehran and Moscow, no treaty demarking the sea’s maritime borders is in place. In any case, for a year now Ashgabat has been supplying China via a new pipeline and plans for the Turkmenistan – Afghanistan – Pakistan pipeline are on the table. There’s more than enough demand from the east to enable Turkmenistan to leveraging better prices from Gazprom, which it has done with some success in the past year, so why antagonize Russia and Iran—which is also interested in serving as a transit route for Turkmen gas—by attempting to make arrangements to by-pass them?        

As numerous analysts have repeatedly pointed out, Azeri gas supplies will not be nearly enough to fill Nabucco’s planned 31 billion cubic meters (BCM) capacity; even when the Shah Deniz II gas field in the Caspian Sea comes online, Azerbaijan will only supply a maximum of around 8 BCM for Nabucco.  

Additionally, with the prospect of shale gas being tapped within the EU, the opening up of the massive reserves on the Yamal peninsular in Russia’s far north and the construction of the Nord Stream and South Stream pipelines by Russian-led consortiums, Europe could in the medium term have a gas glut. The reasoning behind Nabucco is to avoid Russia having a monopoly on the gas supply to many parts of Europe. The gas crisis of early 2009 is the consistently mentioned as proof that this is all too possible, but the indisputable theft of gas by Ukraine is one of the main reasons why Russia is building pipelines directly to the EU. Even when considerable tensions arose between the West and Soviet Union following the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, Soviet oil exports to Western Europe were not disrupted and construction of the Trans Siberian gas pipeline to EU markets west of the Iron Curtain continued.   

Experts agree that for the foreseeable future the only way to fill Nabucco’s capacity is to source gas from Iran, or Russia. Gazprom has already expressed willingness to provide supplies, but this would of course defeat the whole official raison d'être of the project. Do Barroso and his Energy Commission really think that Azerbaijan, and moreover Iran, can serve as a trustworthy counterbalance to Russia’s dominance as a supplier and a backup in case of a major political dispute with Moscow?

Some observers are convinced that the major motive behind the Southern Corridor is less to do with reducing the EU’s dependence on Russian gas, but rather an attempt to weaken Russia’s influence in the Caspian region and Central Asia. This explains the intense support for the project from the US. But this cannot be called “realpolitik” because the project doesn’t make political sense, unless the aim is to see Iran’s influence in the region grow. 

The scenario of Russia turning off the gas supply to Europe will be pretty much unimaginable when Nord Stream and South Stream come on line. With the gas crisis of 2009, Russia could point the finger at Ukraine and indeed had legitimate claims of foul play on the part of Ukraine, (although political motives towards Kiev were undoubtedly involved). Even then, Russia’s reputation as a reliable gas supplier took a costly blow.    

It’s quite possible that now a central motive for Barroso and his Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger’s insistence on courting the likes of Aliyev and Berdymukhammedov and Karimov is that the wheels of corporate spending of EU taxpayers’ money on the Nabucco project have been set in motion and all the interested corporate parties involved are already rubbing their hands in anticipation of the large contracts ahead. Also millions have been spent on planning the pipeline and scrapping the project now would be widely interpreted as a sign of gross incompetence by Barroso and the energy commission.  

Against this background of engaging with central Asian despots, imposing sanctions on Belarus indeed represents double standards on the part of the European Union as a whole. But it also illustrates how autonomous the European Commission is in practice and how removed it is from the democratic processes of the European Parliament and the councils of ministers. The European External Action Service (EEAS) headed by high commissioner for foreign relations Catherine Ashton has so far proven to be a spectacularly impotent and this is due to its limbo between the parliament and the commission, as well Ashton’s diplomatic inexperience and apparent subservience to Barroso as a member of his commission. In her statement on December 20 in reaction to the brutal suppression of the mass protest in Minsk the day before, Ashton did not even call for the release of political prisoners and made no threat of sanctions or even a suggestion of a revision of the EU’s policy of engagement with the Lukashenko regime. She then waited until Jan. 23 for US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in order to deliver an official joint EU-US statement.      

At a recent debate in Prague about the post-election situation in Belarus Pavol Demeš, director of the German Marshall Fund in the CEE region who was an official observer in the Belarus elections, spoke about the need for a united EU stance on Belarus and multilateral sanctions: “This is no longer about just them, it is also about us,” Demeš said, adding that the repression of human rights in Belarus represents the first major challenge for the EU’s attempt to form a united foreign policy within the framework of the Lisbon Treaty.

I would go further: outside the prism of political alliances and memberships of economic blocs, Belarus— which through its turbulent history has proved to be a land where a mixture of cultures and religions have coexisted in remarkable relative harmony—is no less European than Portugal or the UK. They are us. If the EU’s new foreign policy body cannot come up with a coherent and effective strategy to promote the values central to the European project—i.e. promotion of human rights, democratic mechanisms and civil society— in a European country, the institution should be abolished and money saved. Ashton’s statement to the European Parliament on Jan. 19 was nothing but a watered down synthesis of proposals put forward previously by several EU foreign ministers, Belarus opposition figures and President of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek and contained absolutely no new initiatives. The European Commission and the EEAS have failed the foreign policy test.