Russia and the European Union:

Programm

Conference languages: German / English

Introduction

After the enlargement of the European Union on 1 May 2004, the shared border between the EU and the Russian Federation will extend for more than 2000 km. However, the close links between the EU and Russia are economic as well as geographical. After enlargement, more than 50% of Russia’s foreign trade will be conducted with the EU, while Russia is the EU’s sixth-largest trading partner. Half of Russian oil exports flow to the EU, meeting around 15% of the EU's needs in imported fuel. Yet a corresponding political partnership between these two neighbours – which are both undergoing major transformation processes – has still to emerge. Both partners’ internal development processes are highly unpredictable, and expec-tations vary widely on both sides.

Although the European Union is now promoting the “Wider Europe” concept with the EU as the central actor, its capacity to act in the foreign policy field is limited and is likely to be re-stricted further by enlargement and the temporary collapse of the European constitutional project. In the security policy field, Russia does not really take the EU seriously – despite progress on the ESDP and the adoption of the European Security Strategy, which defines contributing to stability in the EU’s immediate neighbourhood as a priority objective. There are fears in Moscow that Russia’s existing spheres of influence could be rolled back further by EU enlargement. In order to prevent a new Iron Curtain, the Russian Government is de-manding a visa-free travel regime, for example, but the negotiations on a facilitated transit procedure for Kaliningrad have proved extremely difficult.

Russia has been in the throes of radical political, economic and social transformation for more than a decade. The direction in which President Putin and his concept of “Managed Democracy” will take the country is still unclear, as are the Russian elite’s political objectives. The repeated calls by the EU and other European organisations (Council of Europe, OSCE) for Russia to come into line with Western standards – on democracy, rule of law and human rights – conflict with Moscow’s handling of specific risks such as the threatened further col-lapse of the country and terrorist activity, especially in Chechnya. The West also finds Putin’s foreign policy course hard to fathom. Having lost its superpower status, Russia has still not positioned itself clearly in the new world order, as the Iraq conflict recently demonstrated. What are Russia’s foreign policy goals, and how much weight does it attach to the EU in this context?

In light of the imminent Russian presidential elections and EU enlargement, the Development and Peace Foundation (SEF) has selected relations and cooperation between the European Union and Russia as the theme of its Potsdam Spring Dialogues 2004. The event will open with presentations on the two sides’ expectations of each other. The first session will then analyse the development routes that Russia could take after the parliamentary and presiden-tial elections and explore their possible impact on Russia’s relations with the EU. The aboli-tion of visa requirements is impeded primarily by the new and often-quoted “soft risks”, such as organised crime. The second session will therefore focus on joint measures to combat these soft risks, which in Europe can only be curbed effectively through interaction between the EU and Russia. The third and final session will seek to analyse current developments in institutionalising European-Russian relations and identify policy areas where practical coop-eration could be fruitful.

l.t.r. Eckart Cuntz, Vladimir I. Seregin, Steffen Reiche and Burkhard Könitzer