A reality check for Moldova-EU relations

Igor Dodon, Olivér Várhelyi Photo: European Commission.

The state of plagued institutions and dual perceptions (where Russia would be an accessible alternative to the EU) about the country’s strategic orientation have been a constant of the Moldovan political system since the beginning of Moldova’s independence. The decade-long Eastern Partnership programme, even if not designed so, came to be perceived as a challenge to the system by the great majority of stakeholders in Chișinău. To the disappointment of many in Brussels and Chișinău (among the pro-EU circles), the association status which Moldova managed to achieve in 2014 did not succeed in reforming the social-institutional and political fabric. Association status only came to be accepted as a reality in as much as it could represent a source of rent-seeking and legitimisation, especially among the ruling elites.

Imitating Europeanisation

What is new are attempts at reforming the system, including the political culture of Moldovans. And it is a matter of interpretation as to what degree Moldovan stakeholders have succeeded in Europeanising their country over the last decade, yet it is a matter of certainty that the political-institutional system has not changed enough to consider it a genuine success story. Even before the creation and launch of the Eastern Partnership and the structured dialogue that followed, a majority of Moldovans had a positive perception of the EU and its values.

Nevertheless, the communist governments of the 2000s were compelled to incorporate a pro-EU narrative into their rhetoric – not out of conviction, but in order to ensure that they could further dominate the political landscape. It is due to the attractiveness that Europeanisation and association status has had over the last 15 years that the Moldovan elite has managed to continue with business as usual while imitating the Europeanisation process. Furthermore, only as a result of a gradual acquaintance with the “idea of Europe”, the association status became a mandatory and internalised element of political reality for about two-thirds of Moldovans.

The Eastern Partnership programme’s evolution produced a pro-EU elite of sorts which has influenced opinions and trends in Moldova. Generally, those who write about Moldova often project a prescription-driven narrative, expecting to extract a “more strategically-applied” approach from Brussels over the next decade. According to this narrative, the multifaceted deliverables of the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) and a range of other institutional-functional mechanisms are all supposed to generate an upped strategy to reach a teleologic end in an idealised state of integration (i.e. EU membership). At the same time, these same opinion-makers do not hide their frustration with the lack of integration perspective offered from the EU. This approach is supposed to translate in the foreseeable future (say, five to seven years) into grand(er) policies covered by respective budgets, institutions, normative prescriptions, roadmaps and action plans to which the societies within the Eastern Partnership countries should deliver.

However, we should ask ourselves what has the Eastern Partnership delivered structurally different in its decade-long existence, especially from the vantage point of the common citizen? Is Moldova in 2020 – eleven years after the “transformative” agenda of the EaP was launched – a qualitatively better place to live for its citizens? The so-called exodus of Moldova’s population (about 40 per cent of its citizens have left the country over the last two decades) to EU countries in search of a better life suggests that the transformative agenda has had, at best, a limited impact. It is not a surprise that Brussels speak of “stabilisation” and “differentiation” rather than “transformation”. Transformation has, in fact, been rejected by default.

Objective reality

Perhaps it would be more useful to scrutinise not what has been achieved – it is enough to check the grading of any index examining the quality of democracy, governance, prosperity and the level of trust in institutions. Instead, it might be worth examining what the Eastern Partnership has failed to deliver on for Moldova. In this regard, it is a cliché to read any report on Moldova that the strategy “started as a transformative mechanism and ended as a stabilisation and differentiation package of norms and measures”. Moldova has not become more stable or predictable, more prosperous or functional –and definitely not a place where the majority of its citizens would prefer to get old.

By trying to answer the questions above, the EU could better understand how to re-launch the Eastern Partnership as a strategy capable of delivering breakthrough changes for, and with the help of, Moldovans. 2019 proved, time and again, that external and independent centres of power from Chișinău can be sources of momentous political change. The EU took an active part in the negotiations for the formation of a coalition between previously irreconcilable rivals within Moldovan politics. Without the EU, the five-month long interregnum of a genuinely pro-European executive would have been impossible.

But here lies the irony of the “objective reality” of Moldovan-EU relations. The EU had to put its diplomatic-political weight behind informal negotiations with Russian and American “external partners” (as they are called in Chișinău) in order to form a genuinely pro-EU government in a country which has supposedly been building a structured dialogue within the framework of EU conditions. In other words, by the end of the first decade of the Eastern Partnership, and five years after signing the Association Agreement, the EU was still struggling to install a group of stakeholders that would not imitate Europeanisation. Thus, imitation aside, the EU did not manage to become, in this period, “the main game in town”. It is also an open question whether it really wanted to.

Means not an ends

Even if the unexpected escape of Plahotniuc from Chișinău in June 2019 brought the most pro-European prime minister (Maia Sandu) in Moldova’s independent history to power, her five-month cabinet only managed to modestly unearth the dysfunctionality of the political system – one that is in a state of slow self-destruction and is mostly incompatible with the goals of Europeanisation. What is left outside our view is the fact that, while the Eastern Partnership is a decade-long story of purported strategic interaction between Moldova and the EU, the Moldovan political and institutional system in reality is mainly incompatible with EU rules and values.

Here lies the problem of compatibility. How can EU institutional arrangements fit within a system of oligarchic patronage dominated by contending strategic choices of identity (EU integration vs. Russian structures vs. neutrality vs. unification with Romania)? Even putting aside the identity differences, the Moldovan system is based on informal networks which captured the state at local, regional (see Transdniestria and Gagauzia as distinct regions) and the central levels, and is increasingly connected to informal and illegal flows of resources on the regional and even global level. For them the EU is a means, not an end.

The system that discredited the idea of Europeanisation under Plahotniuc was not a form of innovation – it was a spiralled form of a patronal-clientelist corrupt system which has its roots in the second half of the 1990s, during the rule of President Petru Lucinschi. The system was later finessed by Vladimir Voronin whose “informalised” system subsequently educated a generation of politicians who dominated the last decade and were supposed to be the EU’s counterparts throughout the association process. It was under the supervision of this political class that Moldova became the site of the theft of one-seventh of its budget in 2014. Moldova also became a hub of possibly the biggest money laundering scheme in modern history (between 20 and 40 billion US dollars). At the same time, the state protected regional smuggling rings – illegally trading cigarettes, alcohol, medicines, amber, drugs and human organs – and the country lost about 40 per cent of its population due to emigration.

What the Moldovan elite sought most throughout the last decade was legitimisation behind a pro-EU narrative and a source of rent funding, but not Europeanisation as such (not to mention of an membership perspective). One can only wonder what would happen if Moldova had received a membership perspective. Should Moldova have been in this position, the behaviour of the elite might have differed, since public demands would have received a very different stimulus.

Bleak prospects

In order to fully understand to what degree the Eastern Partnership has made an impact on Moldova, we could try to imagine what the country would look like if it had not received association status. Obviously, Moldova would be in an even worse place if that did not happen. Yet it is debatable to what degree the association has delivered in terms of quality social goods the state is supposed to provide to its citizens. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that the EU has, to some degree, replaced the Moldovan state as the provider of public goods. It is enough to consider the sheer number of Moldovan citizens working, studying and living in the EU. Roughly 60 per cent of Moldovans who count for labour migrants have moved to the EU for employment reasons (that is, 500,000-600,000 citizens out of an official population of 3.5 million, Transdniestria included).

The most tangible benefit of Moldova’s relations with the EU has been framed as the significant increase in trade relations (70 per cent of trade is with the EU). At the same time, Moldova has adopted, and is still adopting, a vast array of laws and norms under the umbrella of the AA and DCFTA, yet there is still a huge discrepancy between the paper reporting and reality on the ground. The EU has also been an essential budgetary lifeline for basically all the Moldovan governments during the first decade of existence of EaP, and it increasingly proved to be a source of humanitarian relief as the coronavirus pandemic has illustrated.

The situation has only worsened under a chain of events related to systemic corruption scandals, state capture and fake institutional performances. State institutions have not been reformed even if the EU continues to use conditionality to reform the justice system in Moldova. Regarding energy efficiency and climate change, Moldova is, at best, in a state of stagnation. The state continues to rely on energy provided by Russian gas and electricity from Transdniestria, while the gas and electricity interconnection with Romania is seven to eight years behind schedule. Less than two per cent of the total energy output of Moldova is produced by renewables.

Mobility and people-to-people contacts, however, have seen some important deliverables. Moldovans have significantly reoriented their mental map, from being introverted and Russia-oriented, to leaning towards the EU. This is reflected in the mentality of the new generation, yet the vast majority of the best and brightest prefer to migrate to EU countries rather than make use of their skills in at home. Time and again, this is reflected in the visible ageing of Moldovan society (one of the fastest ageing populations in the world) and in the penury of human resources felt within every social level.

Who will switch off the lights?

On June 27th Moldova marked six years since the signing of the EU Association Agreement, and on July 1st it was four years since the entrance of the DCFTA into force. In this period Moldova’s position within the Eastern Partnership has been far from what the EU might have expected. Chișinău’s performance on the 20 deliverables for 2020 has been subject to interpretation, and attempts have been made to extract positive evaluations from poor or suboptimal performances. Over the last decade, Moldova has in fact witnessed some of the worst moments of governance since independence.

The EU is compelled to come to terms with the fact that the behaviour of the Moldovan elite, in terms of strategic choices, is also dictated by their multiple identities. These identities are reflected in foreign policy changes with every electoral cycle. They are reflected in the duality of the official narrative, the inconsequentiality of choices that cyclically may be observed in Brussels (and other relevant EU capitals) and the fragility of the Eastern Partnership goals regarding Moldova.

As the EU is planning a new association agenda, starting with 2021, the key words that transpire from evaluation and recommendation reports are “resilience” and “interconnection” along with “stabilisation” and “differentiation”. This sounds like a long way from transformation. Meanwhile, a popular but very sad saying in Moldova queries: “Who will switch off the lights in the country?” It is an allusion to the population crisis that has materialised over the last decade as a result of public disappointment. Perhaps in the context of the new agenda for the Eastern Partnership – the question should indeed be: “Who will be left to need resilience?”

Oktawian Milewski is a political scientist specialising in Central and East European studies. He is currently a Poland resident correspondent for Radio France Internationale, Romanian office.

Eastern Partnership, EU-Moldovan relations, Moldova