How can the West promote an East-Central European security alignment?

Illustration by Andrzej Zaręba

To be sure, contemporary Russian domestic affairs, the national histories of the countries between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black Seas, as well as the pathological obsession of many Moscow decision-makers with Ukrainian internal affairs are important corollaries of the so-called “Ukraine Crisis”. Yet, at its heart, Eastern Europe is insecure because there is – surprise, surprise – no comprehensive East European security structure.

New Zwischeneuropa

Instead, a geopolitical grey zone has emerged between NATO and the European Union on the one side and Moscow’s Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) on the other. While the Kremlin plays on many fields across the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s growing appetite for confrontation is above all focused on Eastern Europe and the Southern Caucasus. Yet, the nations of the region that Russia attacks with military and non-military means are divided through their inclusion in and exclusion from NATO and the EU. There is an aggressive regional hegemon causing nervousness, fear and instability across the entire area between Scandinavia and Asia Minor. However, the region’s hegemon’s various victims are, for some reason, not attempting to jointly balance against Moscow’s polyvalent soft and hard power attacks on them. 

Most of the Kremlin’s current target countries, not the least the three miniscule Baltic states, were lucky enough to have become members of the EU and NATO in 2004. In spite of their relative weakness, they are safe and stable. Yet, the lack of organisational embeddedness and partial failure of the remaining states in – what has become the new – Zwischeneuropa (in-between Europe), i.e. Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia (and to some degree Azerbaijan), is not only a problem for these nations themselves. It poses a grave security, political, economic and social challenge to the new EU and NATO members too. The possible future collapse of the current grey zone countries, within various worst-case scenarios, would have far-reaching implications throughout the region. Given Russia’s rising political unpredictability and overwhelming military might, such apocalyptic developments in the geopolitical nowhere-land between NATO and the CSTO cannot be excluded.

To name only one among several possible future sources of further escalation, the Crimean issue could come to haunt not only Ukraine but the entire region. Moscow might fail to build a permanently functioning bridge from Russia to Crimea, across the seismically, geologically and meteorologically instable Kerch Strait between the Azov and Black Seas. Such a development would be dangerous in view of the preeminent role of the success of the Crimea annexation project for the domestic legitimacy and approval of Putin’s regime. Should the Kerch Bridge crumble, or not work as envisaged, the Kremlin may decide that – in order to secure the continued popular acceptance of its kleptocracy – it needs another firm direct road to Crimea, i.e. a land connection between Russia and the peninsula.

Yet, Kyiv would most probably reject any Russian request for a transportation corridor from the Russian Federation to Crimean via south Ukraine. This, in turn, could provoke the Kremlin to militarily conquer those lands necessary to build a road and railway connection to the peninsula. Such a scenario would mean nothing less than a large, “regular” and high-intensity war between Russia and Ukraine along the shores of the Azov Sea. Ukraine is not and cannot be made, on its own, prepared for such a cataclysmic confrontation with one of the world’s most heavily armed military powers. 

Strategic provincialism and “astronomic” imaging

Such a catastrophic development would not only be disastrous for Ukrainians and their state. It would entail enormous risks for Ukraine’s neighbouring countries, including and above all the NATO and EU members Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. Suffice to mention is the fact that Ukraine has over 40 million citizens – potential refugees. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Ukrainians could start flowing westwards should the already battered Ukrainian state be struck by full-scale war, become dysfunctional or even implode. Ukraine also has four nuclear power-plants, one of which – namely, Europe’s largest in the Zaporizhzhia region – is less than 300 kilometres away from the current low-intensity war zone in Donbas. These and other threats to the entire region – and not only to the grey zone countries as such – are presumably no secret to the Polish, Slovak, Hungarian and Romanian political and intellectual elites. Yet, Warsaw, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest and other concerned capitals have been surprisingly inactive in comprehensively addressing them.

The reasons for this intellectual and political failure among East European elites are twofold: strategic provincialism in identifying foreign policy priorities and an “astronomic” imagining of East European geopolitics. First, strategic provincialism – until recently, also a pathology of German foreign political thinking – implies that the East European elite see themselves as peripheries or recipients and not as centres or fountains of seminal strategic thinking within the western community of states. Many East European intellectuals, politicians and diplomats tend to look for geopolitical guidance from Washington, Brussels, London, Paris or Berlin. Whatever foreign policy concepts and proposals come out of these and other western capitals will also be discussed in Warsaw, Bratislava, Budapest and Bucharest. And whatever theme is not prominently debated in the leading western defence and foreign ministries as well as think tanks will also not become salient in Eastern Europe.

Recent East-Central European projects, like the Three Seas Initiative or the Bucharest Nine, suggest at least some independent realism coming out of Warsaw, Bucharest and Zagreb. Yet, these two ideas – like other similar abortive initiatives prior – remain so far introverted lobbying schemes or talk shops within the EU and NATO. Until now, they do not amount to serious Central-East European geopolitical projects related to the foremost security issue of the region, i.e. the deterrence, prevention and repulse of further Russian attacks on those countries not protected by the Euro-Atlantic alliance.

For obvious geographic reasons, the stability, security and survival of the East European and South Caucasian grey zone countries are not treated as existential national threats within international relations debates in the US, Britain, Belgium or France. Unlike the latter countries, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania are located in East-Central Europe and are immediate neighbours of Ukraine. Yet, because of their low salience further west, the likely repercussions of this grey zone country’s possible destabilisation are also not treated as a top-priority in Warsaw, Bratislava, Budapest and Bucharest. In spite of its enormous implications for the entire East European region, Ukraine’s fate is, like in France, Britain or the US, treated as only one among several other foreign challenges and sometimes even commented on with condescension in East-Central Europe. Geographical escapism, strategic myopia and national exaltation suppress geopolitical rationalism, strategic foresight and international calculation.

A tale of two planets

This has to do with the second pathology of East European foreign affairs analysis, namely the wide-spread “astronomic” perceptions of European security affairs. According to this imagination, Eastern Europe is divided into two planets: the good EU/NATO planet, on the one side, and the bad, old post-socialist world, on the other, containing those unfortunate East European and South Caucasian nations that did not make it into the EU or NATO. The high art, ultimate aim and universal solution of Central-East European diplomacy lies, within this approach, in attaining full EU and NATO membership. Once secured, the inclusion into these two powerful western security alliances magically removes a country from the post-Soviet realm as well as its continuingly worrisome problems.

Too much interest, intense contact, close co-operation or, worse, official coalition with countries on the “bad planet” may put under question the firmness of an EU and NATO member’s continued location on the “good planet”. For the imagined galaxy’s continued existence and one’s own setting therein, any serious engagement of a new EU and/or NATO member with luckless Eastern neighbours is not only unnecessary, but dangerous. Among surprisingly many serious East-Central European analysts and diplomats, more or less magic beliefs, like these, trump sober assessment of their countries’ topical security challenges today. The resulting strategic omissions in the foreign policies and continued non-alignment of the countries between the Baltic and Black Seas, in turn, enhance the actual insecurity of the immediately concerned states as well as Europe as a whole.

To help overcome this stalemate, western countries as well as NATO and EU decision-makers should clarify more explicitly two basic facts about their respective organisations. First they need to explicitly emphasise the limited gamut of NATO and EU security guarantees and second, to publicly declare the West’s agreement to bolder coalition-building across East-Central Europe. Once these two signals have been received in Warsaw, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest and other East European capitals, it would be up to the elites of these countries to draw the necessary conclusions.

Most of all, major western powers and organisations will have to make clearer than hitherto the limitations of NATO and EU mutual aid promises. While – in a worst-case scenario – a collapse of the Ukrainian state would entail massive security challenges to Ukraine’s western neighbours, NATO and the EU may not be able to provide much help in addressing them. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, as Ukraine’s immediate neighbours, will be largely left on their own to deal with various cross-border repercussions of a Ukrainian collapse or/and Russian-Ukrainian war. NATO will neither risk an out of area deployment of troops within Ukraine and thus a military confrontation with Russia, nor shoot Ukrainian refugees flowing, for instance, across the Polish-Ukrainian border. NATO has no regular mandate to make the state of a non-member country secure, even if that state’s collapse may entail considerable repercussions for certain members of the Alliance.

NATO, to be sure, can and will defend Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania against Russian regular troops and hybrid attacks. But it cannot and will not protect these countries from potentially millions of desperate Ukrainian immigrants leaving their home country out of sheer misery and fear been caused by a possible new escalation of Russia’s hybrid war against Ukraine. Dealing with such challenges will be left to the nation states who face them and, perhaps, to altruistic countries from around the world. But there is no obligation of NATO members to help each other in such a crisis situation.

Quid pro quo

A similar story goes for the EU. Unlike NATO, the EU has certain mechanisms and instruments to aid both member states in extraordinary situations and neighbouring countries facing cataclysmic challenges. Yet, there is no way the EU will be able to comprehensively suppress, neutralise or disperse the enormous security issues that Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania would be confronted with once the Ukrainian state starts to collapse. After the unhelpful behaviour of several eastern EU member states in the recent refugee crisis, many politicians in Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Rome or Athens may not be willing to react to possible future Polish or Hungarian requests to let in Ukrainian refugees coming via Poland and Hungary. Their sarcastic “Welcome to the club!” will be addressed to Polish and Hungarian political elites, but not to Ukrainians migrants.

Countries like Germany, Italy and Austria may also want to explain to eastern EU members why and how war refugees are different from labour migrants. It is true that during the last several years Poland has been able to more or less successfully integrate several hundred thousand Ukrainians, including permanent immigrants, guest workers, and university students. Smaller, but also relatively significant numbers have been absorbed by Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. It would be, however, a different story to take care of a couple of million refugees arriving, say, in Poland out of plain desperation rather than with plans of how to organise their lives outside Ukraine. Neither the EU’s member states nor its supranational institutions have now, or will have in the future, any satisfactory action plan as how to meet such challenges that go beyond ad hoc erection of some provisional camps for the first refugee wave. The EU will also be unable to restrict the freedom of cross-border movement by radioactive particles once a Ukrainian nuclear power plant has exploded.

The second signal that NATO and major western powers need to send to Warsaw, Bratislava, Budapest and Bucharest is that the Alliance’s security guarantees to its eastern members will remain fully intact in case of their engagement in competing regional security structures in Eastern Europe. In particular, the United States should make clear to Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and other East European countries that it will continue to cover their backs, should they start building new coalitions going beyond NATO’s confines. After all, the US too has provided numerous security guarantees across the world, via its Major Non-NATO Allies scheme, involving its allies by means of the Washington Treaty’s Article 5 into potential conflicts in connection with third countries that are not members of the Alliance. In 2010, NATO member Turkey concluded a strategic partnership and mutual aid treaty with non-NATO country Azerbaijan – an agreement duly ratified by the parliaments of both countries. In article 2 of the Turkish-Azeri treaty, the two parties promise each other military help in case one of them is attacked.

Geopolitical nowhere land

Neither the US’s various security guarantees around the globe nor Ankara’s mutual assistance pact with Baku have so far weakened the Alliance. The precedent of the military aid treaty between Turkey and Azerbaijan has particularly far-reaching implications for Eastern Europe. It is a close partnership between a non-nuclear-weapons member of NATO and an Eastern Partnership programme participant – thereby resembling a possible future constellation within East-Central Europe. Moreover, Baku is – because of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute with Yerevan – involved in an indirect confrontation with Russia; in so far as Armenia is a member of the CSTO and EEU, and hosts a large Russian military base. The Turkish-Azeri 2010 treaty could thus be referred to in western re-assurances to East-Central European NATO and EU members which may consider engaging, out of their own national interest, into closer security co-operation with Moldova, Ukraine and Georgia.

Neither NATO nor the EU are going to enlarge further east anytime soon. They are also not going to provide security assurances beyond their borders within some NATO Plus programme or the on-going EU association process. For the time being the US is also unlikely to extend their Major Non-NATO-Ally scheme to the insecure states of the East European and South Caucasian grey zone. Against such lack of serious western engagement in Europe’s geopolitical nowhere land, those NATO and EU member states that perceive this lack of security structure in the east as a salient problem for themselves should be not only allowed to do something about it.

Countries like Poland and Romania (as well as all other nations sufficiently concerned) should be actively and publicly encouraged by Brussels, Washington, London, Paris and Berlin to engage in pan-regional coalition building. The eastern members of NATO and the EU should be told frankly by their western partners that they will essentially be on their own when refugee flows and other forms of cross-border instability hit them from the east. Once these two signals are received in Warsaw, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest and other East European capitals, we may see the emergence of some institutional structure that makes Europe’s grey zone less grey.

Andreas Umland is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv and editor of the book series Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society published by ibidem Press at Stuttgart and distributed by Columbia University Press in New York.

East Central Europe, Intermarium, Poland, security, Ukraine