BATUMI (GEORGIA)

Leaders from Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine – all post-Soviet countries who pursue policies not to the Kremlin’s liking – met up in the Georgian Black Sea city of Batumi this week. Amid drama and pomp, they signed a symbolic “declaration” to aspire for EU membership.

EU Council President Charles Michel was also on hand, lending the event – and “declaration” an air of greatly enhanced importance. He had flown in from Azerbaijan, which decisively won a 30-year war with Armenia last year, though border clashes continue.

Michel uttered the usual platitudes. “The EU stands by you in solidarity… And there remain challenges to your reforms, it’s our common goal to overcome these challenges together,” he said on a showy stage at the Sheraton beach hotel.

STAGE SHOW VERSUS REALITY

However, the Batumi show was more of a “non-event.” The reality is none of the three countries are formal members for EU membership in the near future.

The EU has recognised them – and their general Western orientation – with visa-free travel to bloc countries, and tens of billions of dollars in a wide range of aid projects over the years.

Their common denominator is ongoing armed or frozen conflicts with Russia.

“We have a lot in common,” said Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili – a ceremonial President with few real powers.  Zurabishvili’s ancestors were emigres from Soviet Georgia to France in 1920. She then returned as French Ambassador to Georgia and later stayed.

“A common past, common challenges to our sovereignty and territorial integrity, common challenges to our security and those destabilisation attempts that can come from outside forces, as well as from internal forces.

“But we have in common also that we do not want to return to the past. We are ready and determined to fight for our European future.”

However, the prospect of a discussion regarding possible EU membership is much more complicated than making declarations. None of the countries are even “candidate countries” despite the rhetoric.

Some diplomats and analysts said the portrayal that some breakthrough had been achieved risked unreasonable expectations among citizens in the three countries, and in the end, disenchantment.

GEORGIA HAS LONG STATED EU AIMS  

Georgia has long declared – going back two decades – an intent to join the bloc. In fact, the EU flag flies alongside the Georgian White banner emblazoned with a cross – in front of practically every government building.

Whether intended or not, the visual sleight of hand has proven fortuitous: Talk to some Georgians and they believe the country already is an EU member, or conflate the EU with the Council of Europe, a diplomatic bit-playing talking shop.

It is true that more than 70 percent of Georgians support membership. Whether it is understood what EU membership entails is not clear, including economic coordination, rule of law issues, and a panoply of regulations. And eventually, EU states become net contributors to the bloc budget, not aid recipients as is the case now.

Even more curious – as far as Georgia is concerned – is that not only the largely ceremonial Georgian President – who wields very little real power – was on hand for the “declaration” with Ukraine and Moldova.

She was accompanied by Irakly Gharibashvili – the current Georgian Prime Minister. The two are not close allies.

Gharibashvili, 39, is in his second stint as PM after his predecessor quit last year, citing worries about creeping authoritarianism. Garibashvili has deflected blame for the beatings of journalists earlier this month which left more than 50 of them hospitalised.

One cameraman later died, though some in the government said the journalist died of a drug overdose. His relatives deny this.

The journalists, who assembled in different locations in the capital, were on hand to try and cover a “pride march” by LGBTQ supporters and activists. The march never took place due to the violence.

The failure by the police, who stood by and did not intervene, was harshly condemned by the EU as incompatible with European values.

The U.S. said it was mulling sanctions against those who promoted or allowed the violence. Gharibashvili blamed the planners of the LGBTQ event as “anti-state and anti-church” – a reference to the powerful role of the Georgian Orthodox Church.

Georgia has had no diplomatic relations with Russia since a 2008 war in which Moscow took effective control over the tiny South Ossetia region. And it lost control over the more attractive Abkhazia region in 1993, which is now also effectively controlled by Russian troops.

MOLDOVA

Also on the dais was Moldova’s President Maia Sandu, whose Western-oriented political party just overwhelmingly won snap parliamentary polls. This gives her a heavy mandate to engineer her anti-corruption campaign.

But the tiny country – its population is estimated at no more than 1.8 million – is largely rural, is not a tourist magnet like Georgia, has few resources, a tawdry recent past for trafficking women into the EU who later get into sex work – voluntarily or not.

Although Sandu’s government is acknowledged to be democratically elected, it is one of the poorest countries in Europe.

It too is still faced by a low-level separatist issue. The tiny Transdnistra area declared independence as the USSR collapsed. No one recognises it, a sliver of land home to around 150,000. Hostilities ended and movement between the statelet and the rest of the country is largely uninhabited, however, in contrast to conflicts in Georgia and Ukraine.

UKRAINE

First-term Ukrainian comedian-turned-president Volodymyr Zelensky heads a country of 40 million – almost ten times more than Georgia and Moldova combined.

But like Georgia and Moldova, Ukraine is beset by conflict with Russia – an active one over the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine which has killed at least 14,000 people. Russia also annexed Crimea in 2014.

Its vast size makes it an unlikely candidate for membership anytime soon.

The country is also widely acknowledged for very high levels of corruption, which has become a sore point in its relations with countries like the United States.

CORRUPTION CONCERNS

Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine said they would work towards implementing reforms – a hugely complicated task for countries in a far more advanced state of economic and political development.

“We confirm our unshakeable commitment to continuing the process of our integration into the European Union through comprehensive reforms aimed at strengthening our democratic institutions and gradually bringing our legislation into conformity in the appropriate spheres and key parts of EU law,” read a joint statement after the Batumi meeting.

But the idea of a joint approach to Western-oriented reforms is hardly novel. In the initial years after the collapse of Soviet rule the same three new states, joined by Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, formed a similar alliance (then known as GUUAM), but the grouping made no real progress.

NOT CANDIDATE COUNTRIES

In addition, none of the three are official candidates for membership in the EU, in itself a long process.

By contrast, the countries of the Western Balkans (Albania, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Montenegro) do hold candidate status and are a far greater priority. Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo are also identified as “possible candidate countries”.

Even Turkey is a formal candidate country – though the prospect of including the 85 million overwhelmingly Muslim country is not considered as a realistic prospect at present due to opposition by some member states.

INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES

Each of the three countries faces what appear to be insurmountable obstacles.

Georgia has faced repeated political upheaval. The bloc sent high-level officials to try and resolve a political dispute over recent elections. But the agreement has proven largely dysfunctional.

“We don’t need a summit for the sake of a summit. People are being killed in our country, we have a war going on,” he said. “We need the political wherewithal and a geopolitical vision of the future to this initiative,”  said Ukrainian President Zelensky.

PROBLEMATIC NEW EU MEMBERS A DISINCENTIVE

And the EU’s most recent members – former Warsaw Pact members under Soviet influence – have often been seen as more problematic than beneficial to other more longstanding members, and a financial burden.

Poland is currently embroiled in the latest of a series of spats with the EU over its judicial reforms which provide considerable government oversight of courts.

Last week, Poland was ordered by the EU court to cease all activities of the “disciplinary chamber,” a recently created organ that oversees Polish judges, with the power to lift their immunity to expose them to criminal proceedings or cut their salaries.

Hungary’s government under Prime Minister Viktor Orban has frequently been chastised for limiting press freedoms and infringing human rights, including those concerning sexual minorities.

However, during the heady days following the demise of the Kremlin-ruled east bloc, euphoria took hold, and there are no real mechanisms for removing a member country unless all other countries agree – a continuation of the “consensus” model which has proven defective.

Therefore, the happy proclamations in Batumi do not bode well for Georgia, Moldova or Ukraine in their quest for membership.