In early April, Uzbekistan hosted the most recent EU-Central Asia ministerial meeting, where a high-level delegation from Brussels met with the foreign ministers of all five Central Asian countries and took the opportunity to hold one-to-one bilateral meetings with each of them. For the first time, energy has appeared in a significant place in the formal definition of the agenda for discussion at this level and in this forum. While the preparation and overall tenor of the meetings reflect a somewhat better sense of purpose on the part of Brussels, the EU’s policy remains plagued by difficulties of goal definition and bureaucratic coordination.

BACKGROUND: The European Union’s relations with Central Asia date from the break-up of the Soviet Union, with which it had signed a Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) in 1989. Beginning in the early 1990s, bilateral relations with the USSR’s successor states in Central Asia were directed largely through the Technical Assistance to the CIS (TACIS) program. From 1991 through 2006, the EU spent over US$ 2 billion in Central Asia despite acute criticism from the EU’s own program evaluators for overfunding Western consultants to the detriment of real projects on the ground.

Over time the EU negotiated Partnership and Cooperation Agreements (PCAs), including not only trade and economic cooperation but also fields such as environment and culture, with most of the Central Asian states. In 1999, the PCAs with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan entered into force. The PCA with Tajikistan was signed in 2004 but the failure of various parties to ratify the agreement delayed its entry into force until 2010; the Turkmenistan agreement was signed in 1998 and still awaits ratification by all parties.

It was in fact the September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City that first really focused the EU’s attention on the region. Still, the EU did not itself take measures immediately in response to the events although its member states did so individually. It was the May 2005 civil unrest in Uzbekistan that led the EU to decide on a deeper engagement. The post of EU Special Representative for Central Asia was created in July 2005 and filled by Pierre Morel, who was tasked with coordinating the efforts of all EU actors in the implementation of a new EU approach to Central Asia.

Morel’s brief included a differentiated approach to the various countries in the region according to the given policy area (such as rule of law, environment, water and education) and also with helping to organize the individual EU members’ high-level meetings with the countries concerned. When Russia embargoed natural gas exports to Ukraine in early 2006, the EU was compelled to note that much of that gas originally came from Turkmenistan. Brussels then launched a deliberation process that culminated in the July 2007 promulgation of the EU’s new “Strategy for a New Partnership with Central Asia”, which forms the basis for the EU’s Regional Assistance Strategy to Central Asia (RASCA). It defined three priority areas: (1) promotion of regional cooperation and good-neighborly relations, (2) poverty reduction and increasing living standards, and (3) good governance and economic reform. Roughly one-third of the assistance was intended to promote multilateral cooperation with Central Asia as well as Central Asian regional cooperation with the South Caucasus and with the EU itself.

IMPLICATIONS: While Morel’s appointment in 2005 was a positive indication of the EU’s wish to engage Central Asia, it came eight years after Members of the European Parliament had first pointed to the need for the EU to become more deeply involved with the region. Yet even that appointment was subsequently undercut by Lady Catherine Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR-FASP), since that office was created in December 2009. She has proposed to abolish all posts of Special Representative as a move to consolidate her office’s control of the then non-existent European External Action Service (essentially the EU’s foreign service), and she has since relented.

Ashton’s missteps are symptomatic of the lack of coordination that continues to plague the EU’s policy in Central Asia. For example, her office’s disconnect from the crucial question of energy strategy is striking. Although she at first asserted such a competence (which would in fact make better sense), she had to be reminded that it is in fact assigned to EU energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger. The public tension between the two caused further embarrassment to Ashton. In the event, the EU commissioner for development Andris Piebalgs, himself formerly energy commissioner, nevertheless participated in the April meeting in Tashkent. Meanwhile, the EU’s once-vaunted TRACECA program for energy infrastructure development around the Caspian Sea littoral has been moribund for years.

The EU has undertaken Human Rights Dialogues with the various Central Asian states, with mixed results. It does not have a strategic vision and tends to be driven by events and individual circumstances. However, the EU lacks much leverage in this area and limits itself to the exchange of information and confidence building. The involvement of Central Asian civil society representatives is spotty and often limited to seminar participation. Such organizations remain beholden to institutional restraints by their national regimes (such as Uzbekistan’s infamous banking restriction rules) after the EU representatives have gone home.

The EU initiative towards Central Asia in the education field has had more substance than those in other fields. It has specific and prioritized goals, but it remains little more than a compartmentalized collection of pre-existing activities. It bears noting further that the European Parliament continues to hold bilateral meetings with delegations of parliamentarians from countries in the region under the aegis of its international Parliamentary Cooperation Committees (PCCs). However, there is no evident attempt to coordinate the activities of the PCCs with the HR-FASP’s activities or the European Commission more broadly.

CONCLUSIONS: The agenda of the Tashkent meeting reflected the difficulty of coordinating various relatively autonomous EU instances, and the overall lack of direction of the policy despite the existence of programmatic documents. RASCA’s first implementation disaggregated the three original priority areas into as many as sixteen policy areas, only to re-aggregate them into seven issues that, in turn, bore only passing connections to those identified in the original Regional Strategy Paper (RSP). Within those seven, the EU subsequently identified three priority initiatives for 2007-2010 that still radically differed from and effectively superseded the RSP’s normative direction. Those priorities have shifted still further in the triennial plan for 2011 through 2013, which now defines energy, environment, and the promotion of business cooperation networks (including small and medium enterprises) as the priorities under the newly-invented umbrella rubric of “sustainable regional development” for Central Asia.

Having eschewed a real presence in Central Asia until recently, the EU will continue to flounder in the search for a way to balance such powers as Russia, China and the U.S. for whom the region is also of major interest. Following Nursultan Nazarbaev’s recent landslide reelection as president of Kazakhstan, Ashton contradicted OSCE criticisms by congratulating the Kazakhstani people “for making their voice heard”. At the same time it was made known through media leaks that discussions were under way about the possibility of an “advanced” partnership agreement to bring EU-Kazakhstan relations to a new level. Nevertheless, truly strategic action is foreclosed until the EU is able to define its real interests unambiguously and follow through with implementation that does not change their identification and enumeration every time a new programmatic document is drafted. At the same time, the EU will have to find a way to avoid the danger of the Strategy becoming a device for simply pigeonholing an eclectic collection of programs lacking comprehensive direction.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Dr. Robert M. Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org), educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The University of Michigan, has researched and taught at universities in the United States, Canada, France, Switzerland, and Russia. Now senior research fellow in the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University, Canada, he also consults privately in a variety of fields.