Attention to the Eastern Partnership Summit held on September 30 focused largely on Belarus’ refusal to participate and the implications of the Timoshenko trial for Ukraine’s Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). However, the summit also highlighted some of the problems inherent in EU engagement with its Eastern neighbors, and especially in the case of Georgia. While Georgia’s EU orientation has become stronger after the 2008 war, many of the reforms required from Georgia to start negotiations for a DCFTA conflict with Georgia’s own market liberalization reforms. Moreover, the lack of clarity on what adherence to these requirements will imply in terms of long-term EU integration reduces the incentives for Georgia to comply.

BACKGROUND: EU engagement with Georgia has seen an incremental evolution over the years following Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003. Yet, while EU membership was declared one of the principal aims of Saakashvili’s government, the deterioration of Georgia’s relationship with Russia in the years following the revolution endowed Georgia’s relationship to the EU with a pronounced geopolitical dimension. The Georgian government viewed its orientation toward the West, as well as its ambitious reform program and especially its persistence in seeking to reintegrate the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia with the Georgian state, as incompatible with a cooperative relationship with Moscow. Hence, the immediate priority for Georgia in its relationship with Western partners was to obtain security guarantees which would alleviate the risk of Russian countermeasures against Georgia’s western orientation. 

The EU’s reluctance to engage directly in regional geopolitics and diverging views within the EU, especially between the new Central and East European members and West European ones, over whether the EU should support prospective new member states against Russian interests, or indeed provide perspectives of any further eastward enlargement, provided for an EU engagement with Georgia strictly focusing on support for reform. In addition, the enthusiasm of especially West European EU members to support Georgia’s integration with the EU dropped dramatically after the Georgian government’s decision to violently disperse protesters in November 2007. Georgia shelved its EU ambitions and instead strongly reinforced its relationship with the U.S. and opted for NATO membership as the most likely short-term measure of integration with Euro-Atlantic security structures. Instead of adapting its economy to EU standards, it opted for a libertarian economic approach and in its efforts to curb corruption, dismantled many of its regulatory institutions. While this approach to economic reform was applauded by the U.S. and propelled Georgia to a high ranking on the World Bank’s Doing Business Index, it also put Georgian economic reform at odds with economic integration with the EU.

In the aftermath of the war with Russia in August 2008, the geopolitical picture changed. Georgia’s strategic relationship with the U.S. became less pronounced during the Obama administration. The U.S. reset policy with Russia has rendered fears in Tbilisi that the U.S. may be prepared to sacrifice some of its interests in the South Caucasus in exchange for Russian cooperation over Afghanistan. While the U.S. has delivered reassurances that this will not be the case, Tbilisi can no longer count on the unconditional U.S. support it enjoyed during the Bush administration. The war also generated an increased EU engagement with Georgia and its other Eastern neighbors.

IMPLICATIONS: Consequently, Georgia has since the war seemingly reconsidered continued integration with the EU as the most feasible long-term option for gaining a foothold in western security structures. While this is in part due to the limitations on foreign policy options imposed by the war and its aftermath, it is also a consequence of the EU’s increased profile as an actor in the region. The EU in fact reacted more quickly to the outbreak of war than Georgia’s principal ally, the U.S. The ceasefire agreement mediated by French president Sarkozy and the decision to deploy an EU Monitoring Mission to the South Ossetian conflict zone, with all their flaws, still signaled a new readiness of the EU to function as a security actor in the region. In addition, the joint Swedish/Polish Eastern Partnership initiative (EaP) launched in May 2009 signaled that the EU was prepared to devise policies specifically targeting its Eastern neighbors, rather than handling them along with the Mediterranean neighbors through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP). With a budget of €1.9 billion for the period 2010-2013, the EaP focuses on supporting democratic and market reform, and offers gradual integration into the EU economy through visa facilitation, Association Agreements, and Comprehensive Deep Free Trade Agreements (DCFTA), along with “flagship” regional cooperation initiatives. Georgia signed an agreement on visa facilitation in June 2010 and negotiations for an Association agreement are ongoing. Negotiations for a DCFTA are envisioned to start “in the near future,” provided necessary reforms are carried out.

While the EaP is symbolically important in its specific focus on the Eastern neighborhood, it still suffers from some of the problems that are often raised against the ENP. One of the EaP’s main weaknesses is that it is often perceived, in Georgia and elsewhere, as a surrogate for an actual membership perspective. This makes the long-term political gains of adhering to the prescribed standards within the EaP unclear, which in turn reduces the incentives for reform. While the economic benefits of integrating with EU markets would seem more straightforward, the preconditions to be fulfilled even before Georgia can start negotiations on a DCFTA are set very high, and are in fact similar to those set for membership states on EU accession. As pointed out in a recent report by the Groupe d’Economie Mondiale, Centre for European Policy Studies and the New Economic School – Georgia, this places Georgia in a unique position among the EaP partners since such demands were not placed on Ukraine ahead of the opening of DCFTA negotiations – in spite of a worse reform performance. Moreover, in the case of Georgia the preconditioned introduction of EU internal market regulations in several instances contradict Georgia’s deep liberalization of trade and foreign investment introduced in 2006. The implementation of these regulations therefore risk damaging Georgian industry and growth. The combination of an extremely complicated implementation process and a lack of clarity on the actual benefits of implementing the DCFTA preconditions put into question which incentives really exist for Georgia to follow through.

Another impediment to the attractiveness of EU approaches to the Eastern neighborhood in general is that they lack a clear geopolitical dimension. The EU certainly has a rationale for relying on its “normative” power to stimulate desired development in the partner countries and avoid alienating Russia from regional developments. However, geopolitics and security play a significant role in the partners’ view of their relationship with the EU, which is especially true for Georgia. For Georgia, one of the key incentives for reform, especially in the sphere of democratization, were the prospects of becoming included in Euro-Atlantic security structures, primarily through NATO membership. These perspectives are now largely diluted. While the EU has shown a somewhat increased willingness to become involved in conflict resolution in Georgia after the 2008 war, a lack of clarity remains on what the EaP will actually imply for Georgia in terms of future political integration with the EU. This continues to breed skepticism in Tbilisi as to whether it is worth undertaking the reforms stipulated by the EaP, in spite of President Saakashvili’s positive remarks on Georgia’s EU membership perspective following the summit.

CONCLUSIONS: Whether the EU likes it or not, the EaP and EU engagement with the Eastern neighborhood in general, has a geopolitical dimension. While this perspective is not dominant within the EU itself, it definitely is in many of the neighboring countries, not to mention Russia. While for Belarus, Ukraine and Armenia, the EaP may largely be a means to balance their relationship with Russia, Georgia’s options are decidedly more limited following the war, although it has also opened for increased economic cooperation with its South Caucasian neighbors as well as Turkey and Iran. Along with Moldova, Georgia should arguably be the partner country most responsive to EU preconditions. However, this is contingent on the EU doing a better job at defining its own interests and ambitions in its relations with the partner countries. Yet, as pointed out by an EU diplomat, the EaP is the best and only option the EU can offer the partner countries for the time being.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Niklas Nilsson is a Research Fellow at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and Silk Road Studies Program Joint Center, Associate Editor of the Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst, and a PhD Candidate at Uppsala University/Södertörn University.