on the EU and its East European Partners after Kyiv

The European Greens, met for their 2nd Council, May, 7th-9th, 2005, in Riga. They were very much aware, that these were and still are days of remembrance:

60 years ago the allied armies ended the war and German-fascist tyranny, which had destroyed Europe and its people;

Europe was liberated, but it got new dividing lines, which deepened during the “cold war”, with the Baltic States as a consequence of the Hitler-Stalin-pact against the will of their people under direct soviet tyranny and the other Middle East European countries again under foreign dominance.                   

 20 years ago – while all over Middle and Eastern Europe dissidents in Russia, participants in protest-movements like “Solidarnosc” or “Charta 77”, of the “singing revolution” in the Baltics or the “Citizens Rights Movement” in East Germany, to name only some of them, asked for freedom and democracy - Mikhail Gorbachev responded to the aspirations of people in these countries with his concepts of “Perestroika” and “Glasnost” and his vision of a “Common European House”. With this he went back to the ideas of west European statesmen like Winston Churchill, who just after the war had initiated the “Council of Europe” in order to rebuild the whole of Europe.                                                                    

 The reunification of Germany by most German and European politicians was thought to be embedded in the unification of Europe. Therefore after the dissolution of  the Warsaw Pact and  the Soviet Union their former members became members of OSCE, and the European members  applied also for membership in the Council of Europe and with the exception of Belarus, where a new dictatorship was established, they were accepted as new members -after adaptation of their political systems to the European principles of  rule of law, independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, free and fair elections, political control of police and army. Most of them became accepted as new members “under monitoring”, until they would have implemented the new principles into domestic legislation and transformed the institutions of ruling by command into democratic institutions.

But because in real political life the EU has, in the public’s awareness, long since overshadowed the Council of Europe as an organizing force with the two enlargements of both, NATO and EU, the unification of Europe was in reality only the unification of Western Europe and the MOE- States. Eastern Europe was left out.

 Now, after the democratic Revolution in Georgia and Ukraine suchan understanding of Europe is no longer possible. The European Greensdiscussed therefore in Riga, the EU Neighbourhood Policy and  their own relations to the Eastern Europe beyond the Polish borders The resolution introduced by the Committee in Riga is now to be voted upon at the 3.Council meeting in Kyiv.

 Resolution

 1.   In its founding documents and according to Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union every European country, which shares its values, can apply for membership to the European Union as it is also repeated in the now pending Draft of its Constitution. In order to bring the promise into conformity with reality, the EU developed its Neighbourhood Policy: to support the economic development of these countries and the trade with them, and on the other hand to define the relations with them more precisely. They defined the means of enlargement as one of the most successful instruments of foreign policy of the EU. But the EU felt it had its geographical limits. Therefore the document of the EU-Commission on its Neighbourhood Policy needs to be improved. In the case of east-European countries, which had already expressed their intention to join the EU, any further decision had to be preceded by a debate about the eastern frontiers of the EU.  Having said this, the EU designs action-plans for each of these countries.

 2.   As a counterweight to the enlarged EU, Russia under the presidency of Putin has tried to organize the CIS, but with hegemonic rather than democratic institutions. In a similar way it went back to re-reform its domestic institutions with the principle of the “vertical of power”: the presidential administration designed a “party of power”, it used “administrative resources”, especially in preparation of elections. There even the means of pre-selection of the candidate and of falsification of the election itself were in use. All this was done in order to protect the existing power-structure against democratic change.  As a consequence of this hegemonic attitude they have ended up in the Chechnian massacres.

     And reacting upon the shock of the Orange- Revolution in Kyiv the Putin-Administration even strengthened the authoritarian structures, e.g. by raising the membership-quota for new parties to be officially recognised and allowed to participate in elections.         

 3.With the insistence of the people of Georgia in the Rose-Revolution to have real democratic elections, with the determination of the Ukrainian people in the Orange-Revolution to stand up against falsification, an epochal breakthrough for the sake of true democracy in Eastern Europe happened. We congratulate these people and we congratulate the Greens in Ukraine for having stood on the right side, on the side of democracy. 

In the meantime, democratic expectations of Europeans concerning further revolutionary changes in the Eastern part of the continent have been seriously affected by the political crisis of September 2005 in Ukraine.  But this is not a crisis of democratic values.  Authoritarian thinking is still poisoning some leaders of the transformation process.  The dramatic clash of the reformers makes it important to extract a few lessons for Ukraine and other states of the region, confirming once more evident rules:

• Good leaders can be really efficient for social developments only in the frame of democratic capabilities;

• People, who lead the nations with democratic slogans must live up to the expectations they rise with consistent practice;

• Power and business must be separated clearly.

In the same time the demand of countries like Ukraine and Georgia brought forward by their democratic elected presidents before the European institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg for a perspective of joining the EU can not be ignored.

  4.  But this EU is in a deep crisis. We must not underestimate the strains under which the coherence of the EU is.  We all acknowledge that a weak and ineffective EU is of little interest and that all efforts must be made so as to undertake the necessary deep reforms enabling the EU to function smoothly and make it capable to promote peace, democracy and sustainable development thus guaranteeing freedom, democracy, and stability to its citizens.  With the European Council in the referenda on the Constitution in two of the founding member-states defeated, the controversy about the accession of Turkey unresolved, the strife about burden-sharing in the financial preview 2007-2013 under way, the danger of the EU overreaching its possibilities is obvious.

 5.   But because the political unification of the whole of Europe is of utmost importance to ensure lasting peace and democracy across the continent, we urge the EU and its member states,

• to accept, that

-       The agreed-upon conditions for accession with Romania and Bulgaria should be adhered to. To postpone accession because of other than these agreed-upon obligations would be harmful for EU-credibility;

-       The EU sticks to the conditions agreed upon with Croatia and Turkey. To delay negotiations because of other than these agreed-upon obligations would be harmful for EU-credibility. The aim of negotiations should be full accession;

-       The European perspective for the West Balkans has to be maintained and strengthened. The European perspective for this area has to be a key priority for the EU over the next years and has to include all the countries of the region;

-       There is a European perspective for Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. The time-perspective for these countries, however, is to be seen on the very long term, and is dependent also on the substantive progress of the institutional reforms of the EU.

• to improve in the meantime the ENP examining instruments and means for a stronger association and integration in specific political areas with those countries as Ukraine willing to cooperate in a stronger way with the EU;