Brussels, 26/05/2008 (Agence Europe) - As we suggested (see EUROPE 9666), at the External Relations Council on Monday, Poland and Sweden presented their joint proposal to strengthen the eastern dimension of the European neighbourhood policy (ENP) through an “Eastern Partnership” with Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Belarus. In the wake of the EU's “North dimension”, the “Black Sea Initiative” (BS Initiative) and the proposed Union for the Mediterranean, the two countries felt that, for reasons of balance, neighbouring countries on the east were also worthy of special attention. “There is a need to strengthen the European offer in the Eastern direction and to develop an Eastern Partnership. Such a partnership should be base on, but go beyond the current ENP … by building horizontal links between these neighbours and the EU,” states the text which Polish and Swedish foreign ministers, Radoslav Sikorski and Carl Bildt, put to their counterparts on Monday. The initiative will also be on the table for heads of state and government at the European Council of 19-20 June.
Addressing the European Policy Centre (EPC) on Monday morning before the Council meeting, Sikorski said that Poland distinguished between the EU's neighbours to the south and those to the east. “The neighbours to the south are neighbours of Europe, whereas the countries to the east - Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus - are European neighbours, who form part of Europe and who, under the Treaty of the Union, have the right to apply for membership of the EU,” he said, hastening to add, “The ENP is not about that”. Belarus, with which the ENP has been suspended until there is greater democracy in Minsk, could also form part of the Eastern Partnership, but contacts would be restricted to the technical level in the first instance. Sikorski was in no doubt that Belarus should, in time, be a full member of the initiative. “We should create contacts with the (Lukashenko) regime. Sanctions are good, but there should also be incentives for change,” he said. He also announced that setting up Eastern Partnership would be the main priority of the Polish Presidency of the EU in the second half of 2011.
Under the terms of the Polish-Swedish proposal, the Eastern Partnership should have a dual aim:
1) To enhance bilateral cooperation with the six countries involved by offering them “more profound integration”. Ukraine which is currently negotiating an enhanced partnership agreement with the EU and a free trade zone is likely to be the first state to benefit from the Eastern Partnership offer. The others will follow more or less quickly according to ambition and performance, the text says. Warsaw and Stockholm have identified other areas where action may be taken: visas - they suggest further facilitating procedures for obtaining a visa and making preparations for dong away with visas completely (“A roadmap towards visa freedom, with clearly laid down steps and conditions, should be established”); free trade - the EU will negotiate “deep” free trade agreements with all the countries involved to create a broad free trade zone to the east; aid for domestic reform and aligning laws with the acquis communautaire - the EU should further increase its aid to the countries involved to help them complete their domestic and economic reforms in accordance with European standards; the countries in question would also enjoy increased support to help them bring their legislations into line with the acquis communautaire, and, for this, a “new generation” of action plans for legislative alignment would be negotiated with each of the eastern neighbours; people-to-people contacts - contacts involving scholar and student exchanges, civil society platforms and seminars and cooperation between regional and local players from EU member states and eastern neighbours should be intensified; enhanced partnership agreements - just like Ukraine, the six countries concerned would be offered new agreements which would go beyond what current partnership and cooperation agreements offer; the new enhanced partnership agreement which Ukraine is currently negotiating with the EU could be used as the “reference”, the Polish-Swedish text says. Each of the countries, the text of the Polish-Swedish proposal says, should be treated according to their own merits (principle of differentiation).
2) To create a permanent structure for multilateral cooperation among the 27 EU member states and the six eastern countries. In addition, some specific projects should include Russia, for example at Kaliningrad.
One of the Eastern Partnership's main “added values” would be to foster regional cooperation among the eastern countries themselves, the proposal says. Speaking to the EPC on Monday, Sikorski compared this new regional cooperation with the creation of the Visegrad Group, which, at the start of the 1990s, brought together Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary which were all preparing to join the EU. The Visegrad Group, which enhanced cooperation among the four countries, helped “persuade our Western partners that countries capable of that would also be valuable members of the EU,” he said. Regional multilateral cooperation would operate on the basis of concrete projects proposed by the European Commission as part of the ENP. Poland and Sweden suggested several areas for possible multilateral cooperation, including: strengthening democracy and the rule of law, common foreign and security policy, migration policy, visa facilitation, border management, economic reform, trade liberalisation, development of transport and telecommunications infrastructure, tourism, environmental protection, cross-border cooperation, education, research, and more. These projects should permit “flexible and voluntary participation” by all the interested parties and should complement existing regional initiatives, such as the EU's Northern Dimension and the Black Sea Initiative, the proposal states.
Funding. The projects are to be funded though the existing ENP budget, which allows those proposing the Eastern Partnership to say that “strengthening the Eastern partnership will be neutral for the EU budget”. Additional sources of funding (EIB, EBRD, voluntary contributions from member states or members of the EEA) could be sought, the proposal says.
Institutions. The Partnership's institutional structure “should be as light-weight and goal-oriented as possible” and “based on well-tried Community mechanisms”, in particular ENP structures. It would also be useful to appoint a “special coordinator” and to set up appropriate working bodies, such as regular conferences or “tables”. As multilateral cooperation develops, it might be useful to consider regular ministerial meetings, the proposal says, and it also suggests that multilateral parliamentary cooperation with eastern neighbours would be of use. (H.B.)