Die EU und die Zusammenarbeit in der Schwarzmeerregion: Herausforderungen der BSEC

Es wird oft behauptet, dass die EU über keine Strategie für die Schwarzmeerregion verfüge. Tatsächlich aber gibt es gleich drei Strategien: die Erweiterung nach Südosteuropa und Türkei, die Europäische Nachbarschaftspolitik (ENP) und die vier ‚gemeinsamen Räume‘ mit Russland. Hierin besteht laut Marius Vahl vom Centre for European Policy Studies ein Großteil des Problems.

Within each of these separate strategies, bilateral relations dominate. This is incidentally supported by all the neighbours themselves. In the ENP, the EU pays only lip service to regional cooperation, and its principal mechanisms and instruments are bilateral.   

One exception is the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI) of financial assistance, which provides significant opportunities for the Organisation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC). It is proposed that funding to the neighbours will be doubled under the ENPI, which will become operational from 2007 under the new EU budget. More importantly, it will target areas both inside and outside the Union’s borders, including all the countries of the Black Sea region.   

Thus, a first and immediate challenge for BSEC is to put regional issues on the ENPI agenda, and develop a list of priority projects of Black Sea regional cooperation for funding from the new instrument. 

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The dominance of the bilateral approach is a general feature of EU neighbourhood policies. But it is noteworthy that the EU has developed complementary regional policies in its relations with all of its neighbouring regions – for instance the Northern Dimension, the Stability and Association Process and the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership – except towards the Black Sea region. The EU participates actively in regional organisations and initiatives in the wider European area – such as the Barents and Baltic Councils, the Central European Initiative, the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe and others – with the exception of BSEC.   

This of course raises the question of why the EU has not developed a Black Sea ‘dimension’. EU officials would respond, however, that the EU has a Black Sea regional policy, through regional sectoral initiatives and programmes in key areas of regional cooperation in the region. These include the INOGATE (Interstate Oil and Gas Transport to Europe) programme and multilateral agreement, the TRACECA (Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia) and the Black Sea PETrA (Pan-European Transport Area) programmes on transport, and the DANBLAS (Danube-Black Sea Environmental Task Force) initiative, to mention the most important.   

A second challenge for BSEC would be to explain why these programmes and initiatives are not sufficient, and what the added value of greater EU involvement in BSEC would be. The EU could further respond that indeed it does participate in BSEC activities when it finds it is useful, but that most of the time, in its view, such participation is not particularly useful. BSEC is regarded by many in the EU as an inefficient ‘talking shop’ without significant regional cooperation of any particular relevance to the EU.   

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This is less true now than it used to be. BSEC has undertaken substantial policy initiatives in recent years, following a rather long period of consolidation. That this would take such a long time was however to be expected, considering the diversity and lingering animosities among many of the countries of the wider Black Sea region. These initiatives are all in line with EU goals and provide added value, increasingly also within areas falling within EU competences.   

It is in the interest of the EU and BSEC that such initiatives are not thwarted by technicalities and misunderstandings. There have indeed been instances in the past when BSEC members and EU members and candidates (Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey) have been reluctant or unwilling to support BSEC initiatives because of (unjustified) uncertainty about their compatibility with EU membership requirements. It would be useful to have the EU machinery involved throughout the process of development of such initiatives within BSEC.   

There have also been instances where opportunities to cooperate have been lost due to the EU’s tendency to ignore the Black Sea institutions. An important current example concerns the High-Level Group on the extension of the Trans-European Networks to the wider European area. This was launched by the EU in the autumn of 2004, with discussions underway in five regional groups, one of which covers the Black Sea region. International Financial Institutions participate in this dialogue, but the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank (BSTDB) has not been invited to the talks.   

This is an unnecessary omission which frankly should not have happened. It should be an immediate task for BSEC and the BSTDB, as well as the European Commission, to ensure that the BSTDB is invited to join the High-Level Group. 

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Progress in substantial cooperation in BSEC increasingly takes place in non-economic areas, including agreements on emergency assistance, organised crime, visas and the growing emphasis on security issues. From an EU perspective, this is probably the area where the potential added value of regional cooperation in the Black Sea area is greatest.   

Indeed, the BSEC – by bringing together countries that are not on bilateral speaking terms in some policies areas – is in itself an important confidence-building measure, which is often not appreciated in Western Europe. Correcting this oversight constitutes yet another challenge for BSEC.   

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The principal reason for the absence of an EU Black Sea dimension is the lack of support inside the EU. Although Greece – the only BSEC member that is also a member of the EU – has been a driving force in the establishment and operation of BSEC, its efforts to elicit support for a more active engagement with Black Sea regional cooperation during its EU Presidency in the first half of 2003 were scuttled mainly due to the debacle over Iraq.   

An interesting parallel was Finland’s effort to develop the Northern Dimension initiative during its EU Presidency in late 1999. All EU foreign ministers except the Finnish host refused to participate at the first Northern Dimension Foreign Ministers meeting in November 1999, in protest against Russia’s campaign in Chechnya. However, the Northern Dimension had other patrons. Sweden and then Denmark carried the Northern Dimension initiative forward during their EU Presidencies in 2001 and 2002, respectively, turning the initiative into a permanent fixture of EU neighbourhood policy.   

A similar situation could emerge in the Black Sea region. A few years from now, three BSEC members will also be EU members, while most of the other members of BSEC will be, whether officially acknowledged or not, candidates for EU membership, most of them in a ‘pre-pre accession’- phase. Being a candidate for EU membership requires that virtually all political energy and administrative resources are dedicated to the task of accession, making it basically the only foreign policy of the state concerned. This would weaken the push for regional cooperation in the Black Sea region.   

But this tendency could be counteracted by the new BSEC EU member states, in the first instance Bulgaria and Romania. This could indeed follow the pattern of Finland and Poland, neither of which had an active neighbourhood policy of their own in their pre-accession phases – in the early 1990s in the case of Finland and for Poland from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Both became active in soliciting stronger EU engagement with their non-member neighbours – Russia and Ukraine, respectively – following their accession to the Union in 1995 and 2004 respectively. There are indeed signs that Romania and Bulgaria, seen for instance in the Joint Statement issued by the Bulgarian and Romanian Prime Ministers on 31 March 2005, are moving beyond their preoccupation with accession and are taking an increasing interest in promoting Black Sea regional cooperation in Europe.   

Another initiative could be to develop a coordinated effort among the three soon-to-be EU members of BSEC to put Black Sea regional cooperation on the EU agenda. For this to be successful, however, it would be necessary to receive further support from other member states. Some of the new EU member states have shown a particular interest in strengthening EU policy towards the countries of the Black Sea region, and could support an EU Black Sea dimension. 

Indeed, the new EU member states and their Eastern neighbours are increasingly joining forces to promote cooperation between the EU and the countries of the wider Black Sea region, in what is increasingly referred to as the ‘Baltic-Black Sea axis’. In early February 2005, four new EU members (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland) and two candidates (Romania and Bulgaria) founded the ‘New Group of Georgia’s Friends’. The ‘New Friends’ propose to share with Georgia their experience in the process of accession to the EU and NATO and to promote such processes in the wider Black Sea region. Following the Rose and Orange revolutions, the members of GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova) are now looking to revitalise their grouping, and have invited the leaders of Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and a representative of the EU to participate at their summit on April 22nd.   

So far, these new configurations have been mainly limited to high-level meetings issuing high-sounding statements of good intentions. The challenge now is to translate this political rhetoric into practical regional cooperation, in which the BSEC clearly has an important role to play. 

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It would also be necessary to find support from other EU institutions. The growing role of the European Parliament has recently been seen during the presidential elections in Ukraine, where its support for free and fair elections led President Yuschenko to refer to the European Parliament as the ‘godparents of the Orange Revolution’. Developing closer relations with the European Parliament, principally a challenge for the Parliamentary Assembly of the BSEC (PABSEC) to handle, is thus likely to become increasingly important in developing EU-BSEC relations and a possible European Black Sea Dimension.    

This is an amended version of a presentation at a parliamentary conference on “The Wider Black Sea Region in the New European Architecture”, organised by the Hellenic Parliament with the support of the International Center for Black Sea Studies (ICBSS), Athens, 8 April 2005.
 

For more analyses from the same source, visit the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) website.