- 29 Dec 2013 04:23
#14346223
If you look at the program of any wannabe-liberal party in Russia, you will always find a clause there about the prioritization of European integration of Russia with the goal of full membership in mind. Some might also tack on the NATO membership as a goal worth pursuing, but that one is far less common.
I've decided to give it some thought: Could Russia ever be a member of the European Union?
Let's remember how it worked out for Turkey. For all we know, Turkey has been working diligently for some 50 years now, trying to please the EU and become a full member, until recently the European leaders lost patience and said "psst. Listen, dear Turkey, you DO know that no matter what you do, we will never let you in... Right?" But it seems as if the Turkish leadership was genuinely surprised by that revelation, and was put in a pretty awkward situation as a result. 50 years had been largely wasted for Turkey as it was trying to go in a wrong direction. For the next decade its foreign policy was thrown into disarray as it tried to urgently adjust to the apparent reality, leading to numerous blunders and eventual isolation, with disputes with almost every single neighbor. At this point, it doesn't look like Turkey will ever join the EU. And if it doesn't, how could Russia? Isn't Russia more or less just like Turkey, except that for every problem Turkey has with respect to EU integration, Russia has two?
To see why Russian membership in the EU is a total impossibility, consider a scenario where Russia did actually become a member, in, say, 30 years from now.
Let's look at it from the angle of the current main leaders of European Union - Germany and France, in order to find out whether they ever allow this to happen or not.
First things first, once they allow Russia to become a full member, they will suddenly discover that... they're no longer the leaders of the EU. With a population of some 143 million people, Russia will have almost twice as many MPs in the European Parliament as Germany does. And yes, the Russian population IS projected to decline a little bit in the coming decade... But hey, so is Germany's, and Germany quite possibly has it worse than Russia. In addition to its sheer population weight, Russia will have the EU's largest economy, by far the largest military, and a sphere of cultural influence that extends deep into Central Europe and the Balkans. This will seriously disturb the existing intra-EU power balance.
Russia would be far from being able to lead Europe - any potential power ambitions by Russia within the EU would still be checked by others. But Germany and France will have lost control of the Union for sure. Europe will have become unmanagable, with no single driver or even a firm coalition, instead it will be pulled by many competing centers of gravity in radically different directions. The Russian direction will be the most problematic, since Russia will certainly be a troublemaker. Kind of like Britain is today, except 5 times worse. Russia has radically different national interests and priorities than most other European Great Powers of today do, and it will prevent any meaningful alignment between them which could advance further integration.
In the cultural/social sphere, Russia can be expected to be a bastion of unreformed Conservatism (I imagine at least for the next 50 year or so - then we'll see), whereas most of Western Europe including Germany and France will stay radically liberal. Russian conservatism is partially a factor of its Orthodox religious tradition, long cultural history, but also modern day necessities as well. The recent decay of the USSR followed by a decade of anarchy had produced a culture of nihilism, corruption, decadence, alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, and a collapse of the nascent civil society. Even the issue of demographics is largely an extension of this problem. Needless to say without addressing these issues, Russia's future will be bleak. But there are not many realistic ways in which it can address them. One of them is Puritanically fanatical religious Conservatism, which is by now completely alien to the nations located west of the former Iron Curtain. Russia will, however, find sympathy on this issue among those nations located to the east of the curtain, even those who hate Russia's guts more than anything else in the world (by the way, good luck in overcoming their vetoes to get entry into the EU, Russia! And by overcoming I mean sucking their dicks of course). Right now those eastern countries are understood to be simply backwards - but definitely unrepresentative of the European mainstream. They are hard pressed to conform with the mainstream, and many try their best to do just that. Last thing the Europeans would want is for Russia to come in and tell them that it's cool to be a conservative fanatic and support them in that regard. With Russia as a member state, the EU will certainly no longer be able to find any agreement on social/cultural issues, and it will henceforth present a schizophrenic image to the world, with half of it very strongly progressive, the other half very strongly conservative - and both seeing each other as inhuman barbarians, or "eurofags and eurobigots".
In terms of economic policy, if Russia is to open its borders, remove its tariffs and allow its domestic industries to be wiped out by European competitors, it will sure as hell expect a great deal of economic aid from Brussels in return. If Russia is to sacrifice its sovereignty to such an extent, it will want a lot of money from Europe to make it worth it and to deal with the trade imbalance issue. Problem is, where the hell will Europe get the money from? The Brussels bureaucracy had swallowed 28 countries in the past two decades, it had spent those decades trying to converge its members, or at least prevent them from diverging under pressure of the common market - with questionable success. In the end it turned out that the EU barely has enough funds to continue funding even its old and small member states, like Greece or Portugal. Where the hell are they going to find enough money to please a country as huge as Russia? This is a rhetorical question - they will never have enough money for that. The European convergence machine is already on life support, adding a country as gigantic as Russia to it will surely push it waaay over the edge. It doesn't help that much of Russia outside of Moscow and maybe the next 2 or 3 cities is as backwards as Albania. And it also doesn't help that once again, Russia is different from most of Europe. Russian climatic and environmental factors force it to have many different models than what the Western Europeans are used to dealing with. Many technological and economic standards which make perfect sense in Western and Central Europe will cause a disaster if applied to Russia. Things may be so bad, in fact, that one of these factors may very well be free market capitalism itself. It has been theorized in various places that Russian specificity makes liberal capitalism very inefficient in Russia. In the STRATFOR analysis, they blamed it on the very large distances between crop fields and settlements which lack natural transportation in the form of interconnected unfreezing rivers and warm water ports. Western and most of Eastern Europe is very rich in those, but not Russia. This environmental factor supposedly makes the natural accumulation of capital by means of free market very unprofitable and therefore inefficient in Russia, and requires a strong hand of the state to manage it. This means the Russian economic model, whatever it will be, will likely never conform with the established European standards and there will always be a conflict between the interests of the two.
Finally, and probably most importantly is the field of political/military policy, which will likewise not be conductive whatsoever to Russian-EU integration. Ask yourself, how often did the foreign policy priorities of Russia and EU match on important issues in the past two decades, and how many times did they totally contradict each other? Even leaving out all the disputes directly related to EU expansion, which would not be an issue in the case of Russian entry (at least, not in the same way as it is now), there are still probably more points of conflict than congruence. And for a union to work, there should not just be more concurrence than conflict, there should be very very little conflict. All these disputes are not just a result of Putin's fancy, they are a result of Russia's objective national interests, and they will not go away should Russia become an EU member state. However, Russia will gain the ability to trainwreck any common European foreign policy. Regarding the dispute over EU expansion, it will quickly turn into an even bigger dispute over the LACK of EU expansion, as Russia will surely begin to press upon EU to continue expanding its borders into areas like the Caucasus and Central Asia. These are areas where Russia has a big stake militarily, economically, and culturally, but old Europe does not - and therefore old Europe will fiercely resist expanding the EU there. Last thing Western Europe would want is to bring in even more close Russian allies into the union, who also happen to be extremely backward and in urgent need of cash assistance from European pockets. This is like a German or Frenchman's worst nightmare come true. They will therefore tell Russia that they don't want its bitches in the Union and they won't pay for them either, but Russia will be very unhappy with that answer. It will be very unpleasant and painful for Russia to become EU's frontline state while severing its existing privileged partnerships with the other former states of the Soviet Union, many of which even have substantial ethnic Russian populations. Conflicts will therefore range over and over regarding this issue. Other foreign policy projects of the EU will likewise be trainwrecked and subject to constant verbal clashes. The EU external policy will totally lose any sense of direction and become non-existent. Forget military integration, are you kidding me? The best EU will be able to do in the world is send a few hundred peacekeepers to clean up after earthquakes in east asia. Any other subject will turn out to be way to controversial for there to be any consensus whatsoever. Even when there seemingly might be some agreement in terms of EU integration/federalization, Russia will still most likely join up with UK and fellow travelers in blocking any inroads in that direction anyway. As seen above, on too many issues Russia, like Britain, is an outsider in the European club, and there is no sense for an outsider to allow the club to get more powerful. Nah, Russia and Britain will rather do their best to make EU as weak as possible until it's nothing but a glorified discussion forum for European heads to gather and insult each other endlessly.
Wow, sounds like a great arrangement for everyone involved, doesn't it? It doesn't. France, Germany, and even UK will simply not let Russia in the EU, each for their own reasons. The simplest way in which they could do it is bribe some recent member state like Lithuania to veto the entry for an arbitrary reason and with insane requirements, and then Russia will be left standing in queue for as long as it wishes to. Like Putin himself had said I believe, neither Russia nor Europe would stand to benefit from their unification. That doesn't mean that closer ties with the EU wouldn't benefit Russia, but membership? Nah. It's just not going to happen, neither now or probably ever.
Which is just one of the reasons why the Russian liberals are such loons and nobody votes for them.
I've decided to give it some thought: Could Russia ever be a member of the European Union?
Let's remember how it worked out for Turkey. For all we know, Turkey has been working diligently for some 50 years now, trying to please the EU and become a full member, until recently the European leaders lost patience and said "psst. Listen, dear Turkey, you DO know that no matter what you do, we will never let you in... Right?" But it seems as if the Turkish leadership was genuinely surprised by that revelation, and was put in a pretty awkward situation as a result. 50 years had been largely wasted for Turkey as it was trying to go in a wrong direction. For the next decade its foreign policy was thrown into disarray as it tried to urgently adjust to the apparent reality, leading to numerous blunders and eventual isolation, with disputes with almost every single neighbor. At this point, it doesn't look like Turkey will ever join the EU. And if it doesn't, how could Russia? Isn't Russia more or less just like Turkey, except that for every problem Turkey has with respect to EU integration, Russia has two?
To see why Russian membership in the EU is a total impossibility, consider a scenario where Russia did actually become a member, in, say, 30 years from now.
Let's look at it from the angle of the current main leaders of European Union - Germany and France, in order to find out whether they ever allow this to happen or not.
First things first, once they allow Russia to become a full member, they will suddenly discover that... they're no longer the leaders of the EU. With a population of some 143 million people, Russia will have almost twice as many MPs in the European Parliament as Germany does. And yes, the Russian population IS projected to decline a little bit in the coming decade... But hey, so is Germany's, and Germany quite possibly has it worse than Russia. In addition to its sheer population weight, Russia will have the EU's largest economy, by far the largest military, and a sphere of cultural influence that extends deep into Central Europe and the Balkans. This will seriously disturb the existing intra-EU power balance.
Russia would be far from being able to lead Europe - any potential power ambitions by Russia within the EU would still be checked by others. But Germany and France will have lost control of the Union for sure. Europe will have become unmanagable, with no single driver or even a firm coalition, instead it will be pulled by many competing centers of gravity in radically different directions. The Russian direction will be the most problematic, since Russia will certainly be a troublemaker. Kind of like Britain is today, except 5 times worse. Russia has radically different national interests and priorities than most other European Great Powers of today do, and it will prevent any meaningful alignment between them which could advance further integration.
In the cultural/social sphere, Russia can be expected to be a bastion of unreformed Conservatism (I imagine at least for the next 50 year or so - then we'll see), whereas most of Western Europe including Germany and France will stay radically liberal. Russian conservatism is partially a factor of its Orthodox religious tradition, long cultural history, but also modern day necessities as well. The recent decay of the USSR followed by a decade of anarchy had produced a culture of nihilism, corruption, decadence, alcoholism, drug abuse, crime, and a collapse of the nascent civil society. Even the issue of demographics is largely an extension of this problem. Needless to say without addressing these issues, Russia's future will be bleak. But there are not many realistic ways in which it can address them. One of them is Puritanically fanatical religious Conservatism, which is by now completely alien to the nations located west of the former Iron Curtain. Russia will, however, find sympathy on this issue among those nations located to the east of the curtain, even those who hate Russia's guts more than anything else in the world (by the way, good luck in overcoming their vetoes to get entry into the EU, Russia! And by overcoming I mean sucking their dicks of course). Right now those eastern countries are understood to be simply backwards - but definitely unrepresentative of the European mainstream. They are hard pressed to conform with the mainstream, and many try their best to do just that. Last thing the Europeans would want is for Russia to come in and tell them that it's cool to be a conservative fanatic and support them in that regard. With Russia as a member state, the EU will certainly no longer be able to find any agreement on social/cultural issues, and it will henceforth present a schizophrenic image to the world, with half of it very strongly progressive, the other half very strongly conservative - and both seeing each other as inhuman barbarians, or "eurofags and eurobigots".
In terms of economic policy, if Russia is to open its borders, remove its tariffs and allow its domestic industries to be wiped out by European competitors, it will sure as hell expect a great deal of economic aid from Brussels in return. If Russia is to sacrifice its sovereignty to such an extent, it will want a lot of money from Europe to make it worth it and to deal with the trade imbalance issue. Problem is, where the hell will Europe get the money from? The Brussels bureaucracy had swallowed 28 countries in the past two decades, it had spent those decades trying to converge its members, or at least prevent them from diverging under pressure of the common market - with questionable success. In the end it turned out that the EU barely has enough funds to continue funding even its old and small member states, like Greece or Portugal. Where the hell are they going to find enough money to please a country as huge as Russia? This is a rhetorical question - they will never have enough money for that. The European convergence machine is already on life support, adding a country as gigantic as Russia to it will surely push it waaay over the edge. It doesn't help that much of Russia outside of Moscow and maybe the next 2 or 3 cities is as backwards as Albania. And it also doesn't help that once again, Russia is different from most of Europe. Russian climatic and environmental factors force it to have many different models than what the Western Europeans are used to dealing with. Many technological and economic standards which make perfect sense in Western and Central Europe will cause a disaster if applied to Russia. Things may be so bad, in fact, that one of these factors may very well be free market capitalism itself. It has been theorized in various places that Russian specificity makes liberal capitalism very inefficient in Russia. In the STRATFOR analysis, they blamed it on the very large distances between crop fields and settlements which lack natural transportation in the form of interconnected unfreezing rivers and warm water ports. Western and most of Eastern Europe is very rich in those, but not Russia. This environmental factor supposedly makes the natural accumulation of capital by means of free market very unprofitable and therefore inefficient in Russia, and requires a strong hand of the state to manage it. This means the Russian economic model, whatever it will be, will likely never conform with the established European standards and there will always be a conflict between the interests of the two.
Finally, and probably most importantly is the field of political/military policy, which will likewise not be conductive whatsoever to Russian-EU integration. Ask yourself, how often did the foreign policy priorities of Russia and EU match on important issues in the past two decades, and how many times did they totally contradict each other? Even leaving out all the disputes directly related to EU expansion, which would not be an issue in the case of Russian entry (at least, not in the same way as it is now), there are still probably more points of conflict than congruence. And for a union to work, there should not just be more concurrence than conflict, there should be very very little conflict. All these disputes are not just a result of Putin's fancy, they are a result of Russia's objective national interests, and they will not go away should Russia become an EU member state. However, Russia will gain the ability to trainwreck any common European foreign policy. Regarding the dispute over EU expansion, it will quickly turn into an even bigger dispute over the LACK of EU expansion, as Russia will surely begin to press upon EU to continue expanding its borders into areas like the Caucasus and Central Asia. These are areas where Russia has a big stake militarily, economically, and culturally, but old Europe does not - and therefore old Europe will fiercely resist expanding the EU there. Last thing Western Europe would want is to bring in even more close Russian allies into the union, who also happen to be extremely backward and in urgent need of cash assistance from European pockets. This is like a German or Frenchman's worst nightmare come true. They will therefore tell Russia that they don't want its bitches in the Union and they won't pay for them either, but Russia will be very unhappy with that answer. It will be very unpleasant and painful for Russia to become EU's frontline state while severing its existing privileged partnerships with the other former states of the Soviet Union, many of which even have substantial ethnic Russian populations. Conflicts will therefore range over and over regarding this issue. Other foreign policy projects of the EU will likewise be trainwrecked and subject to constant verbal clashes. The EU external policy will totally lose any sense of direction and become non-existent. Forget military integration, are you kidding me? The best EU will be able to do in the world is send a few hundred peacekeepers to clean up after earthquakes in east asia. Any other subject will turn out to be way to controversial for there to be any consensus whatsoever. Even when there seemingly might be some agreement in terms of EU integration/federalization, Russia will still most likely join up with UK and fellow travelers in blocking any inroads in that direction anyway. As seen above, on too many issues Russia, like Britain, is an outsider in the European club, and there is no sense for an outsider to allow the club to get more powerful. Nah, Russia and Britain will rather do their best to make EU as weak as possible until it's nothing but a glorified discussion forum for European heads to gather and insult each other endlessly.
Wow, sounds like a great arrangement for everyone involved, doesn't it? It doesn't. France, Germany, and even UK will simply not let Russia in the EU, each for their own reasons. The simplest way in which they could do it is bribe some recent member state like Lithuania to veto the entry for an arbitrary reason and with insane requirements, and then Russia will be left standing in queue for as long as it wishes to. Like Putin himself had said I believe, neither Russia nor Europe would stand to benefit from their unification. That doesn't mean that closer ties with the EU wouldn't benefit Russia, but membership? Nah. It's just not going to happen, neither now or probably ever.
Which is just one of the reasons why the Russian liberals are such loons and nobody votes for them.
The common market alone is a huge problem for Russia for more than one reason.
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