EU shivers in a chill east wind - by Bronwen Maddox
EUROPE should have been more careful in wishing that Belarus and Ukraine stay at a comfortable distance. Its wish has been emphatically granted. Sunday’s presidential elections in Belarus showed that the European Union’s influence on that half-frozen country is zero. The coming Sunday’s parliamentary election in Ukraine — a far better candidate for EU friendship — is likely to deliver the same message.
In the past year, the EU, sagging under its own sense of over-expansion, has been so anxious to deter any hopeful new applicants that it has been too chilly towards both countries, hurting itself as well as them. In Minsk yesterday, the triumphant 2½-hour rant by President Alexander Lukashenko claimed that his re-election, with more than 80 per cent of the vote, was free and fair. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), as expected, said the opposite. There is probably little the EU could do to provoke change in Belarus directly. Its influence through trade is small (just over a third of Belarus’s trade in 2004, compared to 45 per cent for Russia, according to EU figures). Russia’s subsidies to Belarus remain huge. Note EU-Digest: the EU Commission would do well to remain at arms length from any further expansion into Eastern Europe, given the experience it has acquired in dealing with some of the new EU members from Eastern Europe. At least no further expansion before there is a constitution accepted by the citizens of Europe, which is able to set some parameters on loyalty to the common cause of Europe.
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