Transatlantic Politics

So Biden is on tour again in Eastern Europe, in a bid to soothe the pain and humiliation brought about to Poland by the not-very-diplomatic way to announce that the promised missile defense shield will be scrapped, precisely on the day when Poles were commemorating 60 years since the Soviet attack on their soil. A bit like Pearl Harbour to the Americans, really.

True, the man seems genuinely attached to the pleople of the former Soviet bloc, and holds mesmerizing speeches in  Poland, Romania and Czech Republic, just the way he did a couple of months ago in Ukraine and Georgia.

But one can’t get rid of the feeling that Biden is used as a consolation prize, as a nice grandpa who will soothe your parents scolded you or - even worse - completely ignore you. Or, to be more precise, Mother Russia and Uncle Sam. Who are now feeling very cosy to each other. And despite all the reassurances of good ol’ Joe, Eastern Europenans are stil a bit jittery when it comes to the Big Bear.

When Biden talks to Romanians about their 20-year anniversary of the fall of Communism, which was the only bloody revolution among peaceful transitions in the region, when he says he brought his daughter and grand-daughter along "to see and understand first-hand the story of this region and of this continent", people are of course impressed. But some of them wonder.. what does this mean, what does it mean that it is this nice old man who is the Vice-President of the US, not the President, who comes here and tells us this. Is it because Obama doesn’t care much for history? Or is it because his priorities are now to get friends with Russia again? Or is it simply that he doens’t really connect with Europeans? Or maybe all of the above..

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Romania’s top anti-corruption prosecutor Daniel Morar was awarded  as "European inspiration of the year" in an Oscar-like ceremony on Tuesday night. The awards are a must to the Brussels "creme de la creme", although Mr Morar could not attend himself, but was represented by his spokeswoman.

The European recognition comes at a crucial time for the beleaguered prosecutor, whose mandate expired in August and was temporarily prolongued until the end of December. He has few supporters among the local politicians, who have gathered against him and his highly performing unit which has investigated and prosecuted high level corruption for the first time since the fall of Communism.

Corruption is still a major problem in Romania and it was thanks to Mr Morar and a reformist justice minister, Monica Macovei - ousted just three months after the country joined the EU and her presence in the government was no longer seen as necessary to convince Brussels that the Romanian politicians were committed to fight corruption.

Also highly bullied at home, Ms Macovei recently received the "Woman of Europe" award from the president of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Poettering, who expressed his deepest admiration for the reforms and fight against corruption she led at home, urging Europeans to follow her example.

How many more recognitions from abroad must come for the Romanian politicians to finally get it? Their impunity is an offence to the rule of law and respect for citizens. Yet some of the blame has to go also on the Romanians’ high tolerance for corruption. Former Prime Minister Adrian Nastase, charged with several counts of corruption, has just been elected as MP on Sunday, in the new direct voting system.

But this is also why reformists and anti-corruption fighters should be promoted and let to do their work, not bullied and sacked. They should be able to set an example and lead their country forward. Mr Morar should stay on as a top prosecutor and Ms Macovei maybe return as a justice minister in the new cabinet to be formed next month.

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Liberal politicians are the worst kind everywhere in the world. With parliamentary elections coming up on November 30, Romanian Liberal Party - currently in government - is flirting with the idea to get a lucrative deal with Gazprom and a quick gain, even if it means to sacrifice the country’s energy independance on the long run.

Liberal minister of economy and finances, Varujan Vosganian said on Thursday that Romania is open to South Stream, a Gasprom pipeline project designed to discourage European attempts to build a pipeline known as Nabucco, that would bring Caspian gas directly to the EU market via Turkey, thus bypassing Russia.

Romania has been the last country involved in Nabucco so far resisting Russian pressure to sign up for South Stream. Yet a Gazprom delegation is expected in Bucharest next week, amidst various media reports that the Russian monopoly is about to offer Romania to join its project.

While the Romanian president Traian Basescu still declares his backing for Nabucco and calls upon European leaders to speed up the process, the liberal government it is at odds with signals "openness" towards Gazprom, with the Ministry of foreign affairs mediating a meeting last week in Moscow between Romanian gas officials and the Russian monopoly.

Now, the economy minister’s wording suggest that gas politics might shape up the electoral debate in the run up to the elections.

The social-democratic opposition already called upon the Government to hold "direct talks" with Moscow in order to get a better gas price and dismissed the president’s "deep freeze" policy towards the Kremlin which was "disastrous" and only drew prices up.

Yet it is at least naive to think that direct talks with the Russian giant will put Romania in a better position. The debate is false, because unlike Hungary and Bulgaria, both Nabucco countries which signed up for South Stream as well because they are  over 85% dependent on Russian gas, Romania imports only a third of its total gas consumption from Gazprom, the rest being produced internally.

As Vladimir Socor from the Jamestown Foundation puts it, Romania is "only the latest addition to Gazprom’s list of candidate countries for the proposed South Stream."

The offer to Romania appears designed to increase Russia’s leverage vis-à-vis countries that have already signed up for South Stream and are now negotiating the commercial and financial terms separately with Gazprom. The Russians propose to include more countries in South Stream than the pipeline could possibly reach. By the same token, Russia offers to include more countries than it could possibly supply from Russian gas reserves in the years ahead.

Gazprom is tempting the maximum possible number of countries, playing them off against each other with the prospect of individual package deals around South Stream. Package deals would include supply contracts, transit revenue, and storage sites that could confer on this or that recipient country the coveted status of a gas-trading “hub.” Mostly aware of Gazprom’s limited gas export potential in the years ahead, the countries are vying to wrap up supply contracts ahead of their neighbors and to make the most out of any possible transit and storage opportunities.

For The Economist, all this works only because the European Union "is asleep on the job".

Bizarrely, Europe’s leaders publicly maintain that the two pipelines are not competitors. They have given the task of promoting Nabucco to a retired Dutch politician who has not visited the most important countries in the project recently (or in some cases even at all).

The main reason for the lack of private-sector interest is lack of gas. The big reserves are in Turkmenistan, but Russia wants them too. Securing them for Nabucco would mean a huge, concerted diplomatic push from the EU and from America. It would also require the building of a Transcaspian gas pipeline.

Yet as long as EU countries still give in to the temptation of bilateral deals with Russia, Nabucco, though twice cheaper than South Stream, has increasingly less chances to be completed.

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Condoleezza Rice spoke yesterday at a press briefing before travelling to Paris and Tbilisi about the importance to grant Georgia the NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP), an intermediate stage before granting full membership of the Alliance.

One of the reasons for NATO Membership Action Plan and, ultimately, for NATO membership, is that it allows states to overcome longstanding difficulties, differences and conflicts under the umbrella of a collective security organization, defense organization of democracies. I have noted before that had anyone said that you would be able to resolve, for instance, differences between Hungary and Romania, between Bulgaria and Turkey in peaceful ways — no one would have believed it when the Soviet empire broke up. But in fact, under the umbrella of NATO, that has been taking place.
 
And so if you now look across Central and Eastern Europe, one thing that is also very different from just a few decades ago is that the countries that were liberated after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, countries like the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Baltic states and the aspirants – Albania, Croatia, Macedonia and others are now – have made the transition and are making the transition into transatlantic institutions. That allows them both to resolve their differences and to have a reason, a spur, for internal reform and further democratization, the appropriate relationship between civilian and military leaders and so forth and so on. 

That is why Membership Action Plan has been so valuable, and it’s why the United States continues to stand for Membership Action Plan for Georgia and Ukraine.

She also fiercly condemned Russia’s military invasion beyond the South Ossetian borders and alluded to banning Russia from international organizations such as the WTO, the G8 and the OECD.

When you start bombing ports and threatening to bomb airfields and bombing a city like Gori and bringing troops in a flanking maneuver on the western flank of Georgia and tying up the main roads between Georgia – between Tbilisi and Gori, that’s well beyond anything that is needed to protect Russian peacekeepers. And that is why Russia is starting to face international condemnation for what it is doing.

 
This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it. Things have changed.

Meanwhile, a common naval exercise between Russia, US, France and UK in the Pacific was cancelled, and NATO refused the participation of a Russian vessel in common maneuvres in the Mediterranean. But are these gestures enough to protect Georgia from a brutal takeover by Russia?

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Corruption is still a big problem in most Eastern European countries, even after they joined the EU. The biggest failure, on the EU side, was to take for granted that once these countries adopt the EU legislation, their judicial systems will function exactly like in Western Europe. But in a Communist regime, the judiciary is a mere political tool. And by keeping all those judges and prosecutors who were trained in Communist times and have a distorted view of the rule of law, these countries cannot function properly.

A survey made amongst Romanian judges showed that most of them don’t consider corruption as being a serious crime. "It’s not like you kill someone. And how can I sentence someone to many years of prison for corruption, when I have to bribe myself nurses and doctors if I go to the hospital", said a judge as quoted by a German expert who ran the survey.

The Economist writes a sharp analysis on how the crackdown on corruption in Eastern Europe has eroded after the countries joined the EU.

For corrupt officials in central and eastern Europe, life has seldom been better. Joining the European Union has produced temptingly large puddles of public money to steal. And the region’s anti-corruption outfits are proving toothless, sidelined or simply embattled.

The biggest problems are in Romania and Bulgaria, the EU’s two newest members, whose apparent inability (or disinclination) to deal with high-level corruption has led to increasingly acerbic public warnings from Brussels. But other countries have done badly too.

Barely three months after it joined the EU in 2007, the Romanian government fired Monica Macovei, a doughty justice minister who had attacked corruption head-on. Her successor tried to fire the anti-corruption prosecutor for investigating his political sponsors. The incumbent is a former lawyer for Russia’s Gazprom. Procedural snags have held up all high-level corruption cases. Investigation of former ministers now requires parliamentary approval, sending every case back to square one. Although Romania comes out lowest in the EU in the rankings by Transparency International, a lobby group, the government seems determined to attack its critics rather than corruption.

(…)

As its economic competitiveness erodes, eastern Europe can ill afford bad government. Voters are generally disillusioned with post-communist politics. Yet from the Baltic to the Balkans, even politicians facing the most startling accusations of corruption seem not to suffer at the polls. A bit like Italy, really.

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