UKRAINE BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: EAST EUROPEAN GEOPOLITICS 101

Everyone nowadays talks about Ukraine's Nato-membership, and how Russia is dead set against it. Amazingly, the chatter about Ukraine's full membership in the EU--a topic that had dominated international news around eight years ago or so--seems to have vanished until the 3rd day of the aggression. Then it came back with a vengeance.

Why am I mentioning this? Just because, if my memory serves me right, the Maidan (today it is called "Euro-Maidan", or should it be €-Maidan?) protests were all about the EU-membership of Ukraine. It seems the heart of Yanukovich's (the then Ukrainian President's) fatal mistake was that crowds of young people of Kyiv had misunderstood the content of Ukraine's draft Association Agreement with the EU--whose signing Yanukovich decided to postpone, a bad move as we know now. The protestors thought the document was stating that there would be an unambiguous, immediate road for Ukraine to becoming a full member of the EU (sort of like it was the case with Poland, Hungary, and the rest of erstwhile-state-socialist east-central Europe). The crowd completely missed the fact that the entire point of the draft Association Agreement was that Ukraine got "Association" (read: unfettered access to Ukraine by west European Big Capital and a few kind words in exchange) instead of membership. This is not idle chatter or an exercise in memory: Apparently Ukraine's leadership has not given up on the idea and had announced its plans to do so, apply for full membership in the EU, in 2024. 

Today, the widespread talk concerning the European Union's internal problems, especially its member-state-to-member-state income stratification, is all about how the countries that became members through "Eastern Enlargement"--among them, especially Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary--are "too poor" to be able to be full fledged members of the EU, posing a major aid burden on the EU, how they import all manner of social problems into west Schengen. 

Imagine all that with respect to Ukraine that has, according to the Maddison's dataset, a per capita GDP that is 53,2% of Bulgaria's, 48,7% of Romania's, and a mere 38,3% of Hungary's GDP/cap. Put differently, if the EU were to receive, and seriously consider / evaluate, Ukraine's application for full membership--totally against the totally obvious objections of Russia, not a small problem, as the events of today, the day of the Russian onslaught on Ukraine, indicate--the EU would be asked to give an entrance exam for a country from, or at least very close to, the Global South with a per capita GDP at a mere 51% of Turkey's. And even Turkey has been "waiting" for a response to its application for full membership in the EU since 1987, that's 35 years. And Ukraine's per capita income is half of Turkey's. (Of course the reasons for the EU stalling Turkey are manifold and complex, entangled with a number of cultural problems both in the EU and in Turkey, but, simply, the idea that a country with approximately half of the income levels of Turkey would be given access to the subsidy structure and the unrestricted economic space of the EU is . . . let's just say, mind boggling based on the EU's track record thus far.)

So, of course Ukraine has not been encouraged particularly strongly to dream "big" about EU-membership, to say the least, by various European powers. The enormous crisis created by the Russian military attack makes it more difficult to see this but--even if, by some miracle, a Dove of Peace were to flick its wings and both the Russian and the Ukrainian militaries, plus the various paramilitaries involved on all sides, were to return to their usual position and focus on male egos, hockey and football instead of threatening genocide for the pleasure of controlling Europe's industrial wasteland, it is not like Ukraine will ever, in the foreseeable future, be allowed to be part of the European Union. 

x x x

UPDATE - March 1.

On February 28, the government of Ukraine has filed what it calls its "application for membership in the EU." I can see how that is an act of deep desperation, and a truly admirable act of creativity in foreign policy, trying to maneuver what it sees as the nearest "western" large power that has sympathy for, but refuses to commit itself to saving, Ukraine, into a posture that it would have to take more responsibility for saving the lives of Ukrainians. I also wish it had a chance.

In my mind, however--based on the behaviors we have seen on part of the EU with respect to east-central European, erstwhile-socialist applicants--it would take a miracle if it were to succeed. I am saying this for several reasons. 

1. Full accession to the EU has taken, in the earlier cases of east-central European erstwhile-Soviet-bloc applicants, several years of intense negotiations. Unfortunately, one consequence of the state of war is that Ukraine is in no position competently to carry out such negotiations for now. 
2. Full accession to the EU is based on a long and extremely detailed application document. Production of such a document is not something any state can undertake under the imminent threat of annihilation. 
3. That document is, then, "evaluated" by the EU's various specialized organs. A very humiliating and overall unpleasant procedure. Also this is what takes longest, and the applicant state has no influence on the length of the time it takes.
4. Ukraine has also had a few, apparently somewhat serious, problems meeting the EU-membership criteria. E.g., the undeniable presence of neonazi political forces and the domination of various parts of the country by neonazi paramilitaries, pretty much throughout the preceding 8 years since the ouster of Yanukovich, not to mention some widely reported political murders. This does not sit well with the absolutely fundamental requirement of "a stable democracy with the rule of law." 
5. The first step toward full accession to the EU is the asymmetrical opening-up of the applicant state's economy to EU capital. That may very well have already happened--an Association Agreement is in place, after all, and I am not familiar with the way it is implemented. To be kept in mind, however, is that the purpose of Association Agreements is to make arrangements for the EU and nonEU-states for extended periods, and explicitly NOT for full membership for the nonEU-state. Association Agreements make sure EU capital has unrestricted access to the non-EU-member state's resources: raw materials, markets, labor.
6. We have never seen a successful application for full membership at the point where the applicant state's economy is in the periphery of the world economy. Even before Russia waged an open war on it, Ukraine's per capita GDP stood at around half of the world average. Since then, it must be revised downward, simply because of the damage inflicted by the war, the drainage of labor for fighting and refugee flows. If admitted, Ukraine would require structural funds and other subsidies to flow from the current EU to Ukraine on a scale previously unimagined, let alone seen. We are talking Marshall Aid--only on a much greater scale. And, should all that happen--it would probably take at least a generation--then Ukraine would reach the level of per capita GDP where least wealthy current members of the EU (Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary) are--or, for that matter, where Russia is--at the moment. 
7. If such a procedure were to be implemented, that would require that the EU transform itself in very fundamental ways indeed. It would have to abandon what it is today--a geopolitical supra-state representing the overlap area in a Venn-diagram of the interests of west European Big Capital, west European states vying for global influence, and, under some fortuitous circumstances, some current EU-citizens, particularly west-Schengen elites and beneficiaries of the remains of the west European welfare state provisions. The EU would have to create the world's largest subsidy dispensing public authority, with the requisite institutional arrangements, oversight procedures, etc. That would require not only a very significant increase in the Union budget (the smaller problem in my mind) but the exponential growth of the EU administrative apparatus and the creation of an organizational know-how that nobody in the world has.
8. Should such a transformation happen, that would be, clearly, an astonishingly consequential precedent. The world has a fairly large number of states that are below the current income level of the EU, and they, all of them, would appreciate some kind of subsidies from the EU. There is also no substantive, morally acceptable, etc. argument to deny them, should Ukraine receive such subsidies. Such a transformation would probably also require abandonment of capitalism as we know it. For, I don't see how such a global redistributive mechanism could be achieved without reducing, or even eliminating the waste of value currently flowing through private profit appropriation. For that to happen in a constitutional, legal and peaceful way, the EU would have to transform itself into the world's most powerful redistributive state and the transformation would have to eliminate the current function of both the member states and the EU as "the executive committee" of capital, especially Big Capital. At the current juncture, I don't see it happening in the EU, not even close to the scale that such a transformation would require. If it were to happen, such a transformation would have to come from some other source, not a request for full membership.  
9. Then, there is the biggest, immediate problem: Ukraine has been drawn into a war with Russia, a neighboring state with one of the world's largest armies. I just cannot imagine that the EU, as it is constituted right now, would move to "internalize" a war. Basic self-defense aside, that would also be wildly violating the stated geopolitical objectives of the EU ("maintenance of peace"). This is not a small matter as the EU was born in the great sobering up after World War II, and its greatest achievement, conventionally speaking, is that it has eliminated wars within itself. In other words, including Ukraine into the EU would create a Russia-EU war.
10. To be noted, last, is that, while the EU of course has no armed defense of its own, it has "subcontracting" arrangements with a number of states and international organizations, most prominently with Nato. In other words, a Russia-EU war would automatically mean a Russia-Nato war, with the threat of predictably horrific, nuclear / chemical / biological annihilation for vast populations in all states involved. In other words, the EU would have to be truly, really, genocidally mad to volunteer itself as the battle field for such a global war.

The President of Ukraine also stated that he had talks with EU leaders. Two days earlier, Charles Michel made a vague promise to Ukraine, regarding the country's immediate needs in the war: "Further help is on the way." That is hardly a form of assurance of "emergency admission". In fact his statement is a softly formulated "HELL NO". 

It is NO-NO-NO--with much affection.

In a similarly velvety tone, Ursula von der Leyen stated, "Ukraine is one of us and we want them in the European Union". Again, it is unclear who the "we" is, what Ukraine being "in the EU" means in this context, and how she hopes to achieve that one-ness. None of the issues I raised above is even mentioned in the--to my taste, astoundingly unsophisticated--conversation about such vital issues. I am also somewhat afraid that von der Leyen's "one of us"-ness can, and absolutely will, be read as a reference to the idea that Ukrainians are "White," read "civilized" reinforcing a global "race" hierarchy. 

Jumping into the fray, presidents of eight erstwhile-Soviet-(bloc) states have stated, they "strongly believe that Ukraine deserves receiving an immediate EU accession perspective." Apart from me protesting the singularly meaningless, mixed metaphor of "receiving a perspective", it is to be noted that this is perfectly vacuous diplomatic babble: "strongly believing" is not the same as actually supporting an application; that Ukraine "deserves" membership is not the same as saying that it meets the admission criteria, and of course what they "strongly believe" Ukraine deserves is not accession but an "accession perspective," a phrase that 1 has, again, zero meaning in the EU's extremely elaborate official language so that, therefore, unfortunately, 2 it does not say that ***Ukraine should be admitted.*** It says, at best, that Ukraine should be kept expecting to be admitted. 

Also to be noted is that, among the eight "strong-believers", we don't seem to find any of the western Schengen states that, according to the logic outlined above, would have to foot the bill of the "immediate admission" of Ukraine to the EU. Standard within-EU posturing, yes; anything meaningful, absolutely no.

Given that there is a war on, I find these empty not-quite-promises extremely cruel. They work to fuel the hopes of a society for an immediate entry into the exclusive club of some of the world's wealthiest (and most insanely insulated) states of the world, while in reality there is very little chance that would happen in the lifetime of anybody alive at the moment. Meanwhile, Ukraine's residents are showered with less and less "precision guided," more and more anti-population, war-crime weapons from a neighboring state. And that state will be Ukraine's neighbor even if a little angel descends from heaven and enters Ukraine into the EU.

x x x 

Below see of the various entries I have posted on this blog concerning Ukraine:

November 2013-May 2014:

UKRAINE BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: EAST EUROPEAN GEOPOLITICS 101

TERMS OF UKRAINE'S EU-DEPENDENCY

SMALL SLIP, BIG WHITE LIE

RESPONSIBILITY OF "THE WEST" FOR UKRAINE

A NEW PROJECT FOR RUSSIA, UKRAINE--NAAH. . .

BOYS WILL BE BOYS: UNSOLVABLE GEOPOLITICAL CONFLICT GETS MILITARIZED, BECOMES EVEN LESS SOLVABLE

UKRAINE / RUSSIA: MIGRATION PATTERNS SHOW DEEP MUTUAL DEPENDENCE

In February 2022:

BACKGROUND TO THE GEO-ECONOMIC LINEUP OF RUSSIA / UKRAINE AND EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE

BORDERS: THE NATIONAL 'SQUID GAME'

THE SHADOW OF MACKINDER: HOW EARLY-20TH-CENTURY BRITISH IMPERIAL GEOPOLITICS UNDERLIES THE PERSPECTIVE OF ALL SIDES IN THE UKRAINE CRISIS

UKRAINIAN REFUGEES IN HUNGARY, REPORTS, UPDATES, REFLECTIONS--BASED MAINLY ON SOCIAL MEDIA REPORTS