----- Original Message ----- From: Miroslav Antic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: BALKAN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; SIEM NEWS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: NATO <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 11:26 PM Subject: The EU, not Nato, looks like the advancing army [STOPNATO.ORG.UK] STOP NATO: NO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Get fast, easy info by phone: Call 800-555-TELL. News, weather, restaurants... & much more! http://www.tellme.com/signin/register.gsp?src=engage&i=12 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Times (UK) 23 January 2001 Editorial Russia's Europe The EU, not Nato, looks like the advancing army People in Russia, as Chris Patten acknowledged last week, have difficulty in understanding what the European Union is and what it wants to be. That is hardly surprising; most Europeans are equally in the dark. But it is potentially dangerous for Moscow to be confused. The closer the EU marches towards Russian frontiers and it is as a march that Russians see it the more vital it is for the EU to bring clarity and consistency to the relationship. The EU has made a poor fist of both. How is Moscow to distinguish between the superstate that, Mr Patten insists, is not on the cards, and the EU superpower invoked by Tony Blair last autumn? How is it to interpret assurances from Brussels that the EU is not competing for political or ideological influence, when the EUs official Agenda 2000 declares that enlargement will extend a guarantee of an increased stabilising influence over Europe, complementing that achieved through the enlargement of Nato? That parallel will look decidedly threatening to Russia once Poland and Lithuania join. Kaliningrad, the former Knigsberg, capital of East Prussia, which since 1945 has been the highly sensitive headquarters of the Russian Baltic Fleet, will then be entirely surrounded, a Russian enclave as isolated from Russia as was West Berlin from the rest of Germany in the Cold War. Before then, the EU must win back Russian trust. Until the mid-1990s, Moscow drew a clear distinction between Nato enlargement, which it opposed, and the eastward growth of the EU, which it saw as economic and therefore benign. It no longer does; that was bound to be a malign consequence of the EUs assertion of military power. The EU must allay suspicion in Moscow that it is exploiting Russian weakness to effect a political redivision of Europe, a Yalta-in-reverse that leaves Russia, in the words of Ivan Ivanov, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, without a residence permit on the edge of the continent. Unlike Nato, which has its Partnerships for Peace, the EU has made little effort to blur the divide between members and outsiders. Its co-operation agreement with Russia is a dead letter. Excessive bureaucracy has made it, in the words of a Brussels official, a triumph of process over substance. The Scandinavians, alert to the perils of a paranoid Russia, have been trying to give the EU a northern dimension. They have had little success. The EU needs one badly. EU enlargement looks to Moscow like the progress of a steamroller. Brussels pushes before it a massive wall of regulation which all new members must accept. This not only erects trade barriers; it sharply restricts the movement of people as well as goods across the new external frontier. This paper wall increases the risk that not only the Central Europeans but the Baltic states, with their large Russian minorities, will turn their back on Russia after accession, politically as well as economically. Kaliningrad, like Danzig before 1939, could then become a dangerous source of friction. Well before this Russian base is encircled, that prospect must be made unthreatening to Russian interests. It will not be easy. This wretched place, about the size of Ulster, is badly administered, poor, disease-ridden, and polluted. Its earnings come largely from drug-trafficking, smuggling, organised crime and petty trading which would be crushed if EU visa controls were introduced. Closed to foreigners in Soviet days because of its importance as Moscows warm-water base, it still houses around 18,000 Russian servicemen and the rotting remnants of a once-mighty fleet. It is supplied via a corridor across Lithuania access that Russia understandably wants the EU to guarantee. It seeks special status for Kaliningrad and, to underscore its anxiety about encirclement, has redeployed nuclear missiles there. The EU is entitled to demand that Russia clean up crime there as the price of a deal. But a deal there must be. Miroslav Antic, http://www.antic.org/SNN/ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
