3. Analysis of Ukraine’s European integration
3.4 Obstacles to integration
On 29th of January 2019, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko speaking about Ukraine’s future in the EU, said: “We will apply for membership in the European Union in 2024, and there is no doubt that we will receive it, and we will begin to implement the Action Plan regarding NATO membership" (“Ukraine to apply”, 2019). Notwithstanding, it is hard to say with such confidence, will it be or not. So far, as it was mentioned in the previous chapter, Ukraine was never offered with a clear perspective to become a member state of the EU in a near future, setting an approximate timeframes for a next 20 to 25 years. The process of Ukraine’s integration to EU is complicated by many internal and external factors. As an example of internal factor, serious problem of systematic corruption in Ukraine may be stated. As for the external factor, it is definitely Russia.
There are a number of countries that wants to become a member of the EU and even has fulfilled all the needed conditions for the official application. Five countries are officially listed as a candidate countries, these are: Turkey, Serbia, Albania, The Republic of North Macedonia and Montenegro. Moreover, there are two potential candidates which, unlike Ukraine, have a clear prospect of joining the EU in the future but have not yet been granted a candidate country status, which are Bosnia and Herzegovina, that signed the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SSA) on 16 June 2008, with the SSA entering into force in June 2015, and Kosovo that also have SSA with the EU, that entered into force in April 2016.8
8 Thus, Turkey was declared a candidate country in 1999, but still has ongoing negotiations and a long way to go. Serbia applied for the candidate country status in 2009. It took five more years before the first Intergovernmental Conference took place, signaling the formal start of Serbia's accession negotiations. Albania applied for the EU membership in 2009 and received the candidate status in 2014.
37 As stated by the European Commission:
An underlying principle of the negotiations is that countries have to fully transpose and implement the EU legislation by the time of accession. Transitional measures can be granted essentially for investment-heavy directives, provided that the measures are limited in time and scope and do not create distortion of competition for the EU single market … Transition periods are only granted on the basis of detailed justification of the needs, and on realistic implementation plans specifying the steps that will be taken to ensure full compliance with the target legislation by the end of the transition period. (“Candidate countries”, 2019, p.1)
Tremendous problems of transformation waiting for Ukraine ahead, including principal constitutional reform, economic recovery, overpassing political and economic interests of a distinguished people, getting the publicity to cope with fundamental change and the painful problem of dealing with eastern Ukraine and Russia. Though, the EU has showed its ability to be engaged in thislong-term process through its support programmes for Ukraine. However, at the present moment it is important to give Ukraine a true membership perspective now as this would raise the country’s pro-Western orientation which is brought back in Ukraine after the Euromaidan and Russian aggression, according to Pridham (2014).
As it was stated in the previous chapter, the offensive realism theory cannot explain the lack of a membership perspective for Ukraine. However, there is another variation of realism, that is out of the scope of the thesis’ analysis, which is the defensive realism. If one would apply defensive realism lenses in order to analyse and explain the absence of the membership perspective for Ukraine, then he or she can see, that the defensive realism can actually account for this. Even though this strand of realism is not used in the thesis, it is always useful to show the great extent to which the particular strands of realism may depart from one another. Where one variation of realism cannot provide an explanation for the absence of an accession perspective to Ukraine, another one may do so.
Defensive realists can reason that the EU merely is not confident in Ukraine as a member state since the power the EU has already gained via other foreign policy actions towards the Ukraine conflict is enough to ensure its survival. In addition, the EU internal conflicts in regard of a potential membership of Ukraine may damage the EU and eventually, the unity of the EU may be weakened. Thereby, there is no clear membership perspective for Ukraine.
In December 2018, the Ukrainian Center for European Policy delivered the results of the monitoring of implementation of the AA by Ukraine. The Center reported progress during the 2017, as well as the progress during the whole four-year process of implementation. However, their findings have also a critic of Ukraine’s progress. The center stated that during 2017, the government increased the dynamics of the agreement implementation from 11% to 21%.
However, when taking into account the entire period of 1 November 2014 to 1 November 2018,
Montenegro was granted with the candidate status in 2010, while The Republic of North Macedonia was declared a candidate country in 2005. All these countries have applied for a membership in the EU more than 10 years ago. In every particular case there are a great deal of complicating factors that detain the progress. However, it is an example of the complexity and uncertainty of the integration process (Candidate countries, 2019).
38 the progress of implementation has been 24%, with the hardest work left for a future (Ukrainian Center for European Policy, 2018). So, it is clear that, albeit with uneven success, Ukrainian government moves toward the integration and implements the policies and laws required for that. In this regard, there is one key question about EU policy towards Ukraine left, whether the EU really has a strategy – that has to include a membership perspective – or whether it is largely tactical and short-term in its approach. Knowing that Russia heavily against Ukrainian membership in the EU, the Union is worried with integrating Ukraine speedily, as this may provoke Russia to the highest extent.
In this way, the absence of a perspective to become a member state may be understood as a concession to Kremlin, since European leaders are well aware of Russian attitude to it.
However, the disagreements between the EU member states, especially with Germany and France having a strong economic cooperation with Russia, may be seen as an additional reason (Youngs, 2011).
It is important to mention that the EU member states has different views on the Ukraine’s membership in the EU, what is a strong external factor representing an additional obstacle to the Ukraine’s integration. Despite the EU-28 unanimously and unconditionally responding to Russia’s aggression with economic sanctions, the Union still lack full cohesion in terms of what to do with Ukraine. Thus, in Netherlands in 2016, 64% of the participants of the referendum voted against the AA ratification. This referendum was a not legally binding one, however, Dutch then-Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that the results of the referendum should not be ignored, and that the agreement must be adjusted for the Netherlands to ratify the agreement (Wessel, 2016). This issue was fixed with the help of European Council, however, that is one of the examples of the internal disagreements within the EU.
For the majority of people, when they contemplate about the possible obstacles to Ukraine’s membership in the EU, the first thing that comes to mind is Russia’s aggressive policies aimed on keeping Ukraine in its sphere of influence. Despite that Russian influence is the main focus of this chapter, one should understand, that besides Russian policies, Ukraine by itself have a great number of internal problems that complicates the integration process and creates an obstacles to it. One of the most important such factor is the corruption, on what the EU focuses its attention so much when speaking to Ukrainian leaders.
According to Mearsheimer (2006), the ultimate end of the great power is to gain hegemony, as it is the best way of ensuring survival of the great power. In practice, however, it is almost impossible for any country to achieve global hegemony, what the Mearsheimer partially explains by the amount of water on the planet and as a result, impossibility to project and sustain power around the globe and onto the territory of remote countries. Thus, the maximum on what the state can count on is to become a regional hegemon, what means dominating one’s own geographical area. Russia clearly see itself as a great power and strive to become a regional hegemon, and Ukraine is historically part of the Russian sphere of influence, what means that Russia will do it best to keep Ukraine attached to it, or will make every effort to destabilise the country and keep it in such a condition that will allow it to influence its actions.
Thereby, offensive realism should be able to account for the decisions made by great powers in particular situations, and as rational actors striving for a regional hegemony, they “are expected to act in strategically smart ways most of the time” (Mearsheimer 2009, p. 246).
39 Followers of the same theory usually agree that according to offensive realism, the decision to invade Ukraine represents an example of this tendency. Thus, Götz (2016) adds to Mearsheimer’s propositions, stating that installing dominance over Ukraine’s political attachment had been one of the central ends of Russian foreign policy after the dissolution of the USSR.
According to Götz (2016), who analysed the great power – small state, Russia – Ukraine relations through the prism of offensive realism and argued that except for a period of Russian weakness in the late 1990s, Russian government usually conducted its foreign policies toward Ukraine according to offensive realist logic. With the Euromaidan revolution, he asserts, Russia
“faced a nightmare scenario of having a giant client state of outside powers on its doorstep” (p.
314), what created a necessity for Russia to apply a hard-power intervention in order to comply with the structural imperative for regional hegemony.
However, Mearsheimer’s and Götz reasoning of Russian intervention in Ukraine should be regarded on a differentiated basis, as they primarily refer to NATO expansion and, while Ukraine’s accession to NATO was already negotiated and Ukraine’s aspirations to become a member of the alliance were greeted with enthusiasm, for the most part it is still far from a realization. However, historically Russia puts the EU and NATO together in one category – the West and therefore justifies its actions in Ukraine.
In this regard, Maksymenko (2015) argues, “Moscow is clearly seeking to dominate the entire post-Soviet area and positions itself as a new global center of power, geopolitical speaking”
(p. 119). Same logic is followed by Semeniy (2007), who notes that “the Russian intention since 1991 has been to keep Ukraine within its sphere of influence as part of its broader desire to maintain great-power status after the collapse of the USSR” (p.124).
Korolev (2017), in its turn, interprets Russian reaction to Ukraine’s crisis as caused by the necessity of anti-hegemonic balancing in “an area of core strategic interests” (p. 9) and credits the “balancing response” with having “fulfilled its goal once again” (p. 18), thus echoing Mearsheimer’s evaluation of the action as both rational and successful.
Thus, according to the report of the National Intelligence Council (NIC, 2017):
Russia will continue to seek to destabilize any Ukrainian government that attempts to integrate itself into the West through the EU or NATO. Moscow will also continue to use a range of measures—from financial incentives for friendly governments to support for political parties and an active campaign of disinformation, through to military intervention—to support anti-Western forces in other states in the region.
(p. 127)
From that, it is possible to conclude that opposition from Russia will complicate the already difficult process of the Ukraine’s European integration. Threat of Russian further military aggression may seriously influence and slow down the decision making of the EU in regard of accepting Ukraine to the Union. Russia can sow doubts among some member states of the EU and prevent by that the implementation of the steps aimed on deeper integration of Ukraine. As a result, the EU policies will be very cautious and prudent.
40
Conclusion
In this chapter, the outcomes of the analysis are summarized and the explanatory power of the Mearsheimer’s theory of offensive realism used in the context of the thesis’ research is assessed. Therefore, the research questions and the overarching goal of the thesis is answered.
The transformation of the international community from a post-Cold War order or as one can claim, unipolar order, to a multipolar order, should be understood as the main theoretical framework in which this research operates. Therefore, the overarching goal of the thesis is ‘to identify the impact of the world order transformation on Ukraine's prospects and obstacles toward the EU membership and to determine the challenges and possibilities it brings for Ukraine’. The goal of the thesis was achieved, and elaboration of the outcomes of the analysis and evaluation of the success of the research is in order. For the sake of comprehensiveness of the research and in order to assist in achieving the goal of the thesis, following research questions were introduced:
• Did transformation of the world order influence Ukraine’s “European choice”?
• What were other factors that weren’t related to the world order’s transformation that contributed to this choice?
• How do all these factors affect Ukraine’s prospects to become a member of the EU and what challenges in this regard Ukraine faces?
Firstly, the analysis has shown that the transformation of the world order has indeed influenced Ukraine’s “European choice”. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, global changes has struck the world, leading to a fundamental restructuring of the political realities and transformation of the international community. For the first time in the very long period, the whole territory of Ukraine became a single state and gained independence, and was free to choose its future.
Presence of a developed neighbour from the West, the EU, which expressed an interest to cooperate with newly established country made Ukrainians and their government to consider the possibility of rapprochement with the Europe. By initiating cooperation by the means of the PCA in 1994, the EU gave Ukraine the opportunity to think of going other than Russian-led direction. Ukraine and what is important, Ukrainians, in fact had endeavoured to get closer with the Europe. When the people of Ukraine felt that its government does not represent a general wish to integrate with Europe no more, they went outside, what is now known as the Orange Revolution in 2004. When the situation has repeated ten years later, Ukrainians reiterated their position once again.
However, that is when the results of the restructuration of the international society has influenced Ukraine’s choice again, but in a negative way this time. Russia, seeing the possibility of Ukraine becoming a part of the Western block, which would endanger its power and critically decrease Russian influence on Ukraine, had acted aggressively and annexed the part of the Ukraine’s territory, along with heating up and supporting the insurgents on the east of the country, causing a situation of instability in Ukraine, what can give Russia a time for maneuver or at least will postpone and slow down the integration processes. Thus, the transformation of the international order has direct impact on the Ukrainian prospects to become a member of the EU.
As the world moves toward a multilateral structure of order, which is also in some ways caused
41 by the actions of Moscow, the relative power of the former global hegemon and its ability and willingness to defend the democratic values and/or defend its interest on the periphery if the Eastern Europe is decreasing, as the main focus of the global politics is moving toward Asia-Pacific region. In this way, the answer for the first research question is positive, the transformation of the world order indeed influenced Ukraine’s “European choice”.
However, what were the other factors that influenced it? The full and comprehensive answer for this question was presented in the Chapter 3.2 and Chapter 3.3. Summarizing, both internal and external factors had influenced Ukraine’s choice. Internal factors, such as bad economic situation, critical levels of corruption, lack of confidence in government and general people’s desire for a change, complicated by the differences between western and eastern population of Ukraine were among the most important internal factors, which were translated to the people’s desire to become a part of Europe. External factors, in turn, were the European community itself, that gave Ukraine such an option and cheered it all along the way, by providing different kinds of help and guidelines on the one hand, while having some degree of disagreements within the Union about Ukraine’s integration on the other, and Russia, strongly opposing Ukraine’s rapprochement with the West.
So, the combination of all the factors represent some kind of a counterbalance. Whereas there are factors positively influencing Ukraine’s prospects to become a member of the EU, there are also the factors that act as a counterbalance and impact these prospects in a very negative way. As a result, Ukraine does not have any clear prospects to become the EU member state in observable future, at least for “the next 20 to 25 years", as it was said by the President of the European Commission (“Juncker Says”, 2016).
Therefore, the overarching goal of the thesis was achieved, as the factors influencing Ukraine’s prospects and obstacles toward the EU membership were identified and analysed, as well as the challenges and possibilities they brought to Ukraine.
Throughout the course of the research, the applicability of the theory of offensive realism was evaluated. It is should be mentioned that this strand of realism has some degree of explanatory power in the given case, however, cannot explain some of the points. One of its main weaknesses is that the theory cannot explain the reasons why the EU has never proposed to Ukraine a real opportunity to become a member state. From the offensive realists point of view, the final end of the EU should be eventual integration of Ukraine into its structures, as expansion of a state territory increases its power. However, it is interesting that another variation of realism, the defensive realism, can actually account for this, and to show that where one variation of realism cannot provide an explanation, the other can do so.
42
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