After its landmark expansion eastwards, the EU will be understandably preoccupied with absorbing its new members and negotiating with the applicants already in line to join: Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and possibly Turkey. But the EU's next challenge will be its new frontier: the former Soviet bloc nations -- Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine and of course Russia -- which lie restlessly along its new eastern border. This mattered less when these nations were separated by "buffer states" such as Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. Neither EU incumbents nor aspirants paid much attention to Europe's eastern and southern states during the accession process: current EU members were fixated on the aspirants, while the aspirants were fixated on Brussels. But now the great challenges presented by the EU's new neighbors will push them to the forefront of the union's foreign policy agenda.
One reason is their sheer size. Just two of these countries -- Russia and Ukraine -- have a combined population that is triple that of all the new EU member states combined. Second, these states possess vital natural resources. The Russian Federation is the expanded union's largest energy supplier and a counterbalance to the volatile Middle East. Third, the new neighbors present the EU with its most important cross-border issues. Consider the Kaliningrad oblast: a piece of the Russian Federation, it will now lie wholly inside the EU, between the Baltic Sea coast and two new member states, Poland and Lithuania.
Other vital issues don't respect borders. The nearly perennial flooding of the Tisa River in Hungary (a new EU member state) cannot be controlled if the water management practices in upstream countries Ukraine (a new neighbor) and Romania (a next-wave accession country) are not addressed. The EU cannot reduce carbon emissions within its borders if it does not cooperate with Ukraine and Russia: carbon dioxide emissions per capita in these two countries rival those of many Western European states, even though their per capita income is 15 to 30 times lower.
The EU will also have to devise policies governing the movement of goods and people across its new borders. Porous before expansion, these borders must now constrain illegal migration and repel criminal activity. Visa regimes are now being introduced for many millions of people in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania and the Balkans who used to visit relatives or pursue commercial interests in new EU countries on a visa-free basis.
The so-called "Schengen wall" -- the EU's outer immigration frontier -- will limit and even criminalize the natural movement of goods, services and people that have emerged spontaneously since the fall of the Berlin wall. For example, millions of ethnic Hungarians living in Serbia, Croatia, Romania and Ukraine, who are culturally and in many cases economically tied to Hungary proper, now face barriers not previously encountered in their everyday lives. The EU's new frontier will face a huge flow of illicit labor and other forms of human trafficking. A growing share of undocumented immigration into the expanded union already comes from this region. These migratory movements could make it harder to reverse the escalating HIV-AIDS infection rates seen in Eastern Europe, most acutely in Russia and Ukraine.
These problems are, however, matched by equally large opportunities. The new neighbors are middle-income countries with reasonably good infrastructure and large, striving urban centers such as Moscow, Belgrade, and Kiev. The rise in household incomes and retail sales in markets of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) has outpaced EU growth rates over the last five years. Ukraine and Belarus have skilled workforces and wages that are less than one-quarter of those in neighboring Poland and Hungary. Inflows of skilled labor from the east and south can offset Europe's growing demographic imbalances.
In reaching across this new frontier, the EU will need the same magnanimity and vision that it showed in bringing the new member states into the fold. For example, the EU must rethink its trade policies, which are now the most discriminatory towards these new neighbors, all of whom lack membership in the WTO and are restricted from freely selling steel, textiles and a broad range of agricultural products in the EU. Countries such as Moldova and Ukraine, whose natural export markets lie in EU countries, must be offered the same type of "reform for market access" bargains given to Poland and Hungary 15 years ago.
In other words, any lowering of EU trade barriers must be matched domestically by free-market reforms and greater democratization.
But these countries are unlikely to heed EU demands for open economies and societies if EU borders and EU policies block the free movement of goods,
services and people. A "Fortress Europe" will not offer the incentives they need to truly reform -- and thus take their place as full partners in the new, expanded Europe.
Kalman Mizsei is UN assistant secretary-general and UN Development Program director for Europe and the CIS.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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