Ольга Кравцова - Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1

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Officials and lobbyists would frequently be unaware of discussions about legislation that could affect British industry, except at second hand, through officials in a friendly nation. “We take our Scandinavian colleagues out to lunch and ask them what happened,” explains Petter Brubakk of NHO, Norway's main business lobby. It would depend on other countries to fight its corner, as Norway now relies on Britain to resist proposed EU legislation on offshore oil-drilling. It would be as though Britain maintained a golden fax machine linked to Brussels, which cost billions of pounds a year to run and from which regulations issued ceaselessly. It could ignore the faxes about farming and fishing: members of the EEA are allowed to run their own agriculture policies. But it would have to obey the others.

The Norwegian option could well fail for domestic reasons. As soon as British MPs learn that Norway has to swallow almost every regulation that comes out of Brussels, despite having virtually no power to shape them, they will waver. When they also learn that Norway has to pay for the privilege, they may reject it outright.

Britain might, however, seek a more distant relationship. It could steer clear of the EEA but join EFTA, which it helped to set up in 1960. Optimistically, it could come to look rather like Switzerland.

Switzerland does business with EU countries through bilateral deals, and by routinely aligning its regulations with those made in Brussels. To an extent, it can pick and choose. In the same position, Britain could drop some irksome labour rules. It could also move to co-operate more, and trade more freely, in some areas than in others. Switzerland has a comprehensive bilateral agreement with the EU covering trade in goods, but no equivalent agreement for financial services.

Switzerland has got into the occasional trade dispute with the EU, over Gruyere cheese for example. Still, for the most part it has secured good access to European markets so far. Its firms have subsidiaries in EU countries through which they can trade freely. And non-membership of the EEA means Switzerland has remained partly aloof from financial regulations emanating from Brussels. But the Swiss have come up with their own, often extremely stringent, financial regulations, partly in fear of losing access to EU customers.

And the country is not beyond the reach of Brussels. The Swiss are currently exercised over several European directives, including those covering finance, chemical factories and the movement of labour. Switzerland is hampered by the lack of an accord with the EU on financial services and by its lack of representation in Brussels. In the broader fight against protectionism and financial over-regulation in Europe, it relies on an informal alliance with another country that also has a big financial-services industry, as well as a valuable seat at the negotiating table: Britain.

In any case, it is unlikely that Britain could get similar treatment. The EU is already trying to muscle Switzerland out of its special niche and into an arrangement more like Norway's, where EU legislation would be speedily taken up by the country. Relations have become more fraught since the EU expanded eastward. The EU used to be a club of Western nations which share a broad culture with Switzerland (many share a border with it, too) and tolerated its peculiarities. The club is now bigger and more bureaucratic, and includes east European countries which were forced to swallow much unpalatable stuff as the price of entry to the club. There is little chance that Britain, a far bigger country with a history of being difficult, would be allowed to squeeze in alongside Switzerland.

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No country has ever left the European Union (though Greenland, an autonomous dependency of Denmark's, voted to leave in 1982). The halfway options of Norway and Switzerland were offered largely in hopes of tempting both to become full members one day. Britain would be travelling in the opposite direction, without a map. In this, as in so many other ways, leaving the EU would be a colossal gamble.

The British would doubtless try to negotiate a special deal with their former partners, using the argument that trade benefits both sides and that Britain is itself a large market for many. But the process could take many years (it took a decade for the much smaller Switzerland). Europe might well be more of a fortress with Britain outside. And even the country's closest friends, who would rather keep Britain in to bolster liberal voices inside the EU, would be unlikely to be generous to a country that had chosen to leave.

The most likely outcome would be that Britain would find itself as a scratchy outsider with somewhat limited access to the single market, almost no influence and few friends. And one certainty: that having once departed, it would be all but impossible to get back in again.

http://carnegieeurope.eu/2014/07/10/how-eu-sleepwalked-into-conflict-with-russia

By Ulrich Speck 65 65 Ulrich Speck is a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, where his research focuses on the European Union's foreign policy and Europe's strategic role in a changing global environment. July 10, 2014

The EU and Russia are fighting over their joint neighborhood, and the stakes are too high for either side to back down. Can they bridge their divides?

The EU and Russia are engaged in an open conflict over their joint neighborhood. Yet, curiously, the EU never intended to get into a geopolitical confrontation with Russia. Quite the opposite — it sleepwalked into it.

But now the stakes are too high for both sides to back down. Both sides see the conflict as vital, and it is shattering fragile relations between Russia and the West. How did they stumble into a confrontation that the EU, at least, wanted to avoid? Why is this conflict so intense? And what have both sides learned so far from the confrontation?

The EU has two vital interests at stake in the current conflict with Russia. First is a stable and prosperous neighborhood in the East. The second is Russia's respect for the ultimate taboo of Europe's peace order — the prohibition against changing borders by force. For a bloc that is founded on accords between states, upholding the rule of law in international agreements is vital. And to see a powerful country invading and annexing the territory of a weaker neighbor for Europeans brings back memories of a darker age of ruthless competition.

In addition, the longer the open confrontation lasts, the more not losing becomes an important goal in itself, as the EU's credibility as a united and powerful actor on the international scene is on the line.

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What is at stake for Russia is its position as a great power, which in the Russian view implies dominance over the post-Soviet space. A state that cannot even control smaller and weaker neighbors is, from the perspective of classical power politics, not even a regional power. Losing in Ukraine would be seen in Russia as a humiliation, especially after Kremlin-controlled Russian media have strongly beaten the drums of war. And without Ukraine, Moscow's Eurasian Union project is unlikely to gain traction.

Both sides have unique instruments at their disposal in the struggle over their joint neighborhood. Russia can attract states mainly by offering low energy prices in return for closer relations. It can also threaten states with trade restrictions and bans as well as with military force (in traditional and “hybrid” forms, as it did in Crimea). And it uses a sophisticated propaganda apparatus to paint the EU and, even more, the United States as enemies who are threatening Russia.

The EU, meanwhile, attracts its neighborhood mainly by offering access to its huge common market and a joint space defined by principles of liberal democracy. The bloc has, however, long been hesitant to develop forceful instruments to bring its Eastern neighborhood into closer association. It was not until 2009 that the EU — reluctantly — agreed to put a bit more energy into its European Neighborhood Policy by adopting the Eastern Partnership initiative.

The Eastern Partnership, in which partner states are meant to eventually sign a free trade agreement and a wide-ranging association agreement with the EU, was conceived of by Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski in 2008. It was built as an offer of closer relations with six countries of Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine — following the Russia-Georgia war of August 2008.

Sikorski had proposed the Eastern Partnership to Frank-Walter Steinmeier, German foreign minister from 2005 to 2009 in a grand coalition led by Chancellor Angela Merkel (and in the same position again since December 2013), but Steinmeier declined to make it a joint initiative. Sikorski then decided to launch the initiative with Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. Together they managed to convince the EU to give the project the green light.

But the Eastern Partnership never had the full support of the strongest member states. They were reluctant to engage because of various fears — of increasing their financial burden and the perspective of opening up markets (especially the labor market) to new and economically very weak entrants, of another heated debate within the EU over further enlargement, and of a confrontation with Russia.

Indeed, one reason Steinmeier declined to join Sikorski was that he had just proposed a modernization partnership to Moscow. Engaging with EU neighbors in the post-Soviet space appeared to threaten the German attempt to deepen relations with Moscow.

Germany's support for the Eastern Partnership was always halfhearted at best. Merkel provided some rhetorical backing before the November 2013 Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, calling on Russia to accept Ukraine's sovereign right to choose its alliances. But neither Berlin nor other big member-state capitals sent clear signals to the Kremlin that the EU was ready to confront Russia over the right of countries in the post-Soviet space to associate themselves more closely with the EU.

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When Moscow began to put pressure on Ukraine and Moldova in summer 2013 using embargoes and bans, the EU failed to respond in a resolute way that might have convinced Russia that the union and its powerful member states were ready to make Russia pay a price for sabotaging the Eastern Partnership. When Armenia suddenly stopped its process of EU association in September 2013, apparently under pressure from Moscow, EU leaders just shrugged; no EU government made an effort to change Yerevan's mind. And the promise of EU accession — the strongest carrot — has never explicitly been offered to Eastern Partnership states (it hasn't been excluded either, though).

Meanwhile, Central European EU member states were much more eager than their Western neighbors to move ahead with the Eastern Partnership. Poland was the main driver. Warsaw found a strong ally in the European Commission, especially in the person of Stefan Fule, a Czech diplomat and European commissioner for enlargement and neighborhood policy. And Germany was willing to support Polish initiatives to a certain extent in the context of the Polish-German rapprochement that has taken place in the last year.

From a “postmodern” EU perspective the Eastern Partnership looked like a win-win project to all sides concerned. For years, the EU hoped that it could indeed have both: a closer association with the Eastern neighbors and unshaken relations with Russia. Moscow would profit as well from a stabilized neighborhood. And Eastern countries could continue to engage with both sides equally, becoming a kind of bridge between the EU and Russia.