Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-12-Speech-4-017"
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"en.20090312.4.4-017"2
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"Mr President, the Eastern Partnership is a project which covers six countries. One of them, Belarus, is a dramatic example of self-isolation, to which we have responded in the past with a policy marked by the ‘too little, too late’ syndrome, both in terms of sanctions and of incentives. Belarus has little in common with, say, Georgia. Cooperation between Mr Lukashenko and Mr Saakashvili looks like political fiction and political horror combined.
The other five countries are on the Black Sea, where we have a synergy – which means that there is no strategy yet. Could the Eastern Partnership stand in for a Black Sea strategy? One could hardly imagine a regional strategy there without Turkey and Russia, but these particular countries are left out of the process. What all these countries have in common is the fact that they were all part of the Soviet Union, and they are all neighbours of Russia as much as they are neighbours of the European Union. In other words, we are dealing with a common neighbourhood. Russia looks to that neighbourhood as being its reserved sphere of interest. We certainly cannot accept that but, on the other hand, the Eastern Partnership appears to be a way to reciprocate the Russian policy on its neighbourhood. This makes that neighbourhood an area of conflicting interests and rivalry.
The real challenge is how to develop an EU-Russia common policy in respect of their common neighbourhood. Otherwise we will not achieve security and stability there, but the opposite. As far as everything else is concerned, we already have democracy and good governance, economic integration and convergence, energy security and human contacts on the agenda. From this point of view, Ukraine is much further advanced than the others, and I assume that it is not very happy to see that our offer now has to be shared with the others.
The real problem was not the lack of labels but the lack of delivery. By putting our money where our mouth is – and of course, Madam Commissioner, you are perfectly right to say that we need a budget in order to make good policy – and by adding a little visionary realism instead of naive confrontation, we might really transform the Eastern Partnership into a valuable and positive asset."@en1
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