John Löwenhardt

A Wider Europe: the View from Moscow and Kyiv

The expansion of NATO and the enlargement of the EU will produce outside states in which perceptions and policies will be influenced by feelings of exclusion and isolation. Russia and Ukraine are two important examples. In Russia the sense of exclusion results from NATO expansion and it was exacerbated by the air strikes against Serbia. Although Ukraine also responded negatively to NATOs attack on Serbia, Ukrainian perceptions of exclusion are caused primarily by disappointment that EU membership is proving so difficult to attain. Based on elite interviews, opinion surveys and the analysis of focus group discussions, this article compares and contrasts the attitudes towards NATO and the EU in the two countries.

A wider Europe: the view from Minsk and Chisinau

The expansion of NATO and the enlargement of the EU will produce outside states in which perceptions and policies will be influenced by feelings of exclusion and isolation. Building on an earlier article published in International Affairs (January 2000) on Russia and Ukraine, this article analyses two countries ‘inbetween’ in which these feelings are particularly strong. Belarus and Moldova, two classic borderlands, are small, new states with borders not of their own choosing and little sense of identity. Their economies are in dire straits and each has a large problem that hampers European integration. For Belarus the problem is its president; for Moldova it is the separatist regime controlling 12 per cent of its territory. Based on elite interviews, opinion surveys and the analysis of focus group discussions, this article compares and contrasts the attitudes towards NATO and the EU in these two countries.

The OSCE, Moldova and Russian diplomacy in 2003

Is there a way, any way, for Western governments and international organizations to contribute to the solution of the ‘frozen conflicts’ at the edges of Russia? Governments and multinational organizations such as NATO, the Council of Europe, the European Union and the Organization on Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE, the only one of these with both the US and Russia as full members) have tested various policies to counter Russian manipulation of secessionist regimes in Georgia and Moldova–Abkhazia, Southern Ossetia and Transnistria. These tests have largely failed. In the OSCE, the most inclusive of all, Russia proclaims itself willing to co-operate with all in order to reach peaceful solutions. But progress has been disappointing. This is a case study of the attempt during 2003 to unfreeze the Transnistria conflict. As such, it aims to shed light on issues of diplomatic competence, professionalism, effectiveness and imagination, both of the governments directly involved and of other key players. The leading part is played by the OSCE’s chair during that year, who was effectively blocked by the presidential administration in Moscow. But was this a victory for Russian diplomacy? Was it an example of its professional superiority? Few foreign ministers will jump at the opportunity to chair the OSCE. With 55 member states, each with veto power, the organization is of such nature that progress through consensus is like wading through liquid asphalt – a challenge, indeed. In late 2002, the Netherlands minister of foreign affairs, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, established a large task force within his ministry to help him through the 2003 chairmanship. With the benefit of hindsight one can say that he has done reasonably well. At the end of the

The village votes: The December 1999 elections in Tatarstan's Pestretsy district

The Russian parliamentary elections of December 1999 were conducted with varying degrees of democratic reliability in different parts of Russia. In Tatarstan, with its own constitution and electoral regulations that differ substantially from those of the Russian Federation, the elections were conducted with less than complete adherence to the principles of democratic procedure. In particular, a range of features of the old Soviet‐style electoral process were in evidence. This was particularly the case in rural constituencies observed by the authors, including examples of sharp practices to trick the voters into supporting particular candidates or parties. The tardy publication of the results led to cynicism on the part of observers, and, although the complexity of the process ‐ with several elections taking place simultaneously ‐ partly explains the delay, the effective control over proceedings on the ground by regional and local politicians thwarted the intent of the admirable federal election legislation.

'You no longer believe in us and we no longer believe in you': Russian attitudes towards Europe

Ten years after Hungarian border troops started cutting the Iron Curtain, new borders are emerging that threaten to create dividing lines almost as forbidding as the old. For several decades, barbed wire prevented the citizens of communist states from leaving for the ‘capitalist abroad’. The Curtain was the ultimate frontier, a ‘territorial based code of obedience in a binary form’.1 Now freshly installed barbed wire and ‘Schengen’ borders again prevent them from entering our prosperous Europe. With central and east European states at various stages of transition, three groups are emerging in relation to the entry to NATO and the EU: the ‘ins’, the ‘pre- or perhaps ins’ and the ‘definitely outs’. For the third category, the prospect is that a prosperous and impregnable ‘Fortress Europe’ will rise up with steep, unassailable walls at the western frontiers of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova’s inhospitable wastelands.

Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine: Looking east or looking west?

Abstract The expansion of the European Union and of NATO will leave Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine among a new group of ‘outsiders’. Surveys in the first half of 2000 suggest that Belarusians are more likely than Moldovans or Ukrainians to think of themselves as Europeans, and that Moldovans are the most positive towards the EU itself. Levels of commitment and of knowledge, however, remain low, and there are strong attachments in the other direction, towards Russia and the CIS. These responses, in turn, relate closely to patterns of party support, and they suggest that elites will have limited room for manoeuvre in their foreign policy choices between East and West.