The Future of Europe
All these years, Europe has been a major focus of my reflections, speeches and contacts. What will happen to the pan-European project? Will the move towards a Greater Europe continue? These questions have occupied me, not least because I was directly involved in the initiatives that gave impetus to what happened and is happening in Europe.
Speaking in December 1984 in the United Kingdom Parliament, I uttered a phrase that attracted a lot of attention: ‘Europe is our common home.’ That went on to become an important plank of Soviet foreign policy and integral to our new diplomacy.
The 1975 Helsinki Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, and then the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, adopted at an OSCE summit in November 1990, opened up the possibility of overcoming the artificial alienation of Russia from Europe caused by ideological confrontation and the preceding decades of the Cold War. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the Helsinki process stalled and people stopped mentioning the Charter for a New Europe. European integration came to centre exclusively on the European Union and a policy of drawing the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics into it. Europe increasingly came to mean Western Europe, in effect denying Russia the status of a European nation. New barriers replaced the old: less obvious, perhaps, but entirely real.
We continued, of course, to hear talk of willingness to develop relations with Russia and the importance of cooperation, but it seemed little more than a nod in the direction of political correctness. I saw this as a worrying development, and tried to draw our Western partners’ attention to possible undesirable consequences, to coax them back to a pan-European perspective, and make them see how essential and potentially rewarding increased cooperation with Russia might prove.
In summer 1993, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute invited me to give a lecture on the topic of ‘European Security’ in their series dedicated to the memory of the assassinated Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme. I wanted to convey my anxiety to the audience, and expressed a firm belief that developing pan-European integration would be essential if we were to successfully tackle the new challenges in different parts of Europe, not least the issue of relations with Russia. I felt those were short-sighted who wondered whether supporting the revival of Russia was wise, and whether it might not be better to keep her as a weak neighbour and source of raw materials for Western Europe.
We were approaching or had reached a threshold for deciding the future of Europe for years to come, I warned at a conference in Barcelona in April 1994. I repeated that message in Frankfurt in September 1996, speaking at a forum I had helped to establish there two years before. This time the topic was, ‘A United Europe: Reality or Utopia?’. The question had been raised of whether there was such a thing as Greater Europe. Those trying to draw Europeans into discussing this topic were implying, of course, that Europe ended at the Russian border.
My old acquaintances, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, spoke along those lines. If General de Gaulle had had a vision of a ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’, then my opponents were more in favour of a ‘Europe from Brest to Brest’. Others spoke as if there were already three or four Europes, but in all the arguments there was a sense that Russia was being fended off as something dangerous.
I have never doubted that Greater Europe already exists, its shared civilization a fact of history. Its foundation is its Christian roots and European cultural heritage, which means that Europe’s future must be built not only from the West eastwards but also from the East westwards.
I said I saw European union not as just parallel development of separate nations on the territory of our continent, but as movement towards a qualitatively new history. It is obvious, I said at that forum in Frankfurt, that the path to a united Europe is going to be long and arduous. We should have no illusions on that score, but to reject the goal is dangerous and, at the very least, unproductive.
My thinking was shared by another of the forum’s participants, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, whom I had first met in 1986, and already then found we had much in common. He was a man chastened by experience and politics, a man of profound intelligence, capable of seeing far into the future, as he had shown in the past and was to prove again in the years that followed.
Most national politicians in Western Europe favoured a different logic. After the Maastricht Treaty, which came into force in 1993, the European Economic Community became the European Union, which implied more fundamental integration. It continued to expand and, after the number of West European member states reached 15, the process spread to countries of Eastern Europe. In 2004, the EU admitted ten new states, including Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and the three former Soviet republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. In 2007, they were joined by Bulgaria and Romania.
At the same time, the degree of integration increased to affect all the main aspects of national life, economic, political, legal and social. The European Union became a major economic power and an independent and substantial player in global politics. This was a new situation that had to be given due weight. In 1997, three years after it had been concluded, the Agreement on Partnership and Cooperation between the European Union and the Russian Federation came into force. The Cooperation Council held its first meeting the following year.
The policy of rapidly expanding the European Union was not without problems. It became clear that the pace and scale of the process had not been carefully thought through. Without doubting its positive aspects, I had to point out that, although the first decade of the twenty-first century had seen the European Union advance triumphantly, problems had been accumulating which eventually broke through to the surface. First, in referendums the citizens of France and the Netherlands voted against the draft European Constitution. Economic growth began to slow. EU countries became less competitive relative to other rapidly developing economies.
Speaking in 2009 at a public meeting in Strasbourg, I said:
Every process, every association has limits to its speed and scope. The ability to absorb change is not limitless, and expectations that all the continent’s problems can be solved by integrating Europe only from the West have proved overoptimistic.
A more moderate pace of integration would allow more time to develop a model for relations with Russia and other countries which will not in the foreseeable future be joining the European Union.
It is obvious that the approach of swallowing most other European countries into the EU as rapidly as possible, while leaving relations with Russia unstable and uncertain, has run its course.
People appeared on both sides who questioned the need for close cooperation between Russia and the EU. In a 2005 article in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, I noted that among Russian politicians and analysts the view was gaining ground that we should probably take a break in developing our relations with the EU, be in no hurry to integrate further, and turn our attention in other, more promising directions. Some European politicians were beginning to express doubts about whether closer relations between the EU and Russia were even possible.
Criticism of Russia, sometimes justified but more often over-hasty, was accompanied by lofty generalizations. Russia was deemed incapable of mastering democratic principles and institutions, establishing civil society, abandoning imperial ambitions, and accordingly had little to offer Europe. I asked what could be behind these recriminations and the policies to which they gave rise. My answer was, ‘I believe there is a desire to keep Russia half-strangled for as long as possible.’ Not a pleasant conclusion, but one for which there was then, and still is, good reason.