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32 Beyond Ukraine. EU and Russia in Search of a New Relation regard to the reorganization of the Eastern European and Southern Caucasus countries of the post-Soviet space. Since the end of the USSR, the European Union – in concert with the United States and NATO – has in fact pursued a policy of political and military expansion eastward that Moscow has always considered threatening and unjustified in light of the absence of the ideological and strategic danger previously constituted by the Communist system 6 . In fact, since the end of the USSR Western policy toward Russia has seen at the same time the establishment of forms of dialogue with the activation of a new containment strategy. A policy strongly influenced by the perception of the US strategic need to avoid “the reemergence of a Eurasian empire that could obstruct the American geostrategic goal” 7 . A decisive moment in this process was the enlargement in 2004, the largest single expansion of the European Union, which involved four countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) that had been members of the Warsaw Pac, as well as the three Baltic republics (Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia). All these countries (with Romania and Bulgaria) were already members of NATO, a military alliance created to deal with the Soviet Union and that Moscow perceives as a threat for its national security. We should not forget that the enlargement of the EU is closely linked with the expansion of NATO. And this not only in the Russian perception. As written by John Mearsheimer, “The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine – beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 – were critical elements, too” 8 . Of course Mearsheimer’s stance is not shared by the 6 For the Russian interpretation of this expansion in the first post-Soviet decade see S. Rogov, M. Nossov, La Russia e l’allargamento della NATO, in M. de Leonardis (ed.), La nuova NATO: i membri, le strutture, i compiti, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2001, pp. 183-202. 7 Z. Brzeziński, The Grand Chessboard. American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, Basic Books, New York 1997, p. 87. 8 J. Mearsheimer (2004).
EU-Russia: What Went Wrong? 33 majority of Western observers, but his political realism is very appropriate in such a complicated situation. Besides, after the great enlargement of 2004, the EU had stepped up its expansion in the post-Soviet space through the project of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP). This project is born in 2004, with the strategic objective to unite under a single set the post-Soviet countries that have become ‘new neighbors’ of the EU (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, Belarus). The European Commission has always said it wants to develop the ENP in parallel with the strategic partnership with Moscow, but failed to persuade Russia. Also because of the start of the ENP coincided with the so-called ‘color revolutions’, which involved two of these countries, namely Georgia and Ukraine, and raised serious concerns in Russia 9 . Moscow, in fact, accused the West of the organization of these regime changes, fearing to be involved. Therefore, Russia began to vigorously confront the whole process of expansion eastward of the EU, considered as substantially aggressive. Moscow seemed completely unable to understand that its political and economic model appears scarcely attractive for many countries of former USSR, namely Moldova, Georgia and in a certain measure Ukraine. This is indeed the main obstacle for the Russian projects of reconstruction of post-Soviet space. The following years saw then a progressive increase in political misunderstandings between Russia and the EU. The strengthening of the ENP through the so-called Eastern Partnership (EaP) has helped to deepen this misunderstanding. The EaP stems from a joint Polish-Swedish proposal of June 2008 to improve relations with the neighboring countries of Eastern Europe, Southern Caucasus and Southern Mediterranean. Given the traditional anti- Russian stance of Poland and Sweden, Russian suspicions that EaP aims at definitively removing from Moscow the countries of Eastern Europe and South Caucasus cannot be considered groundless. 9 D. Ó Beacháin, A. Polese, The Colour Revolutions in the Former Soviet Republics: Successes and failures, Routledge, Oxford-New York, 2010.
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