Oleksandr Sushko: Problems with the signing of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement lie in the political sphere
On November 18, Warsaw hosted the seminar “Association and Free Trade Zone between Ukraine and the EU: how close is this goal?” organized by the European Program of the International Renaissance Foundation (Ukraine), the Stefan Batory Foundation (Poland) and the European Commission Representation Office in Poland.
The event was attended by leading experts on European integration, representatives of the governments of Ukraine and EU member-states, the European Commission, diplomatic missions and NGOs.
“It was expected that by November 18 the sides would not only conclude negotiations on a deep and comprehensive free trade zone, but also agree a procedure for signing the Association Agreement at the December EU-Ukraine summit,” Oleksandr Sushko, research director at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Co-operation and head of the board of the International Renaissance Foundation, said about the results of the discussion. “It was expected that they would be able to discuss practical implications of the Agreement, particularly for the Ukrainian economy.”
“However, the political ‘chill’ between Ukraine and the EU has forced us to look at the situation completely differently. The discussion revolved mainly around whether the sides will be able to follow the previously defined direction based on the formula ‘political association and economic integration’ or whether there will be a long period of stagnation due to the incompatibility of Ukraine’s declared course [of European integration] with the obvious attempt by the Ukrainian government to build an authoritarian regime instead of the declared commitment to democracy and rule of law,” said the expert.
“Over the last three months the Ukrainian government has put into the hands of its opponents in the EU all the arguments and leverage needed to block the association process, while Ukraine’s friends in the EU have lost all the earlier applicable arguments in support of Ukraine. Ukraine is no longer that ‘champion of democracy in the CIS’ that was talked about with hope a year or two ago,” stressed Oleksandr Sushko.
“Under these conditions, talk about the consequences of the Association Agreements moves to a purely theoretical dimension, such as: is there a 5 or 10% chance that the Agreement will be signed this year? If not in December, then when and under what conditions? Or if the Agreement is ‘shelved’, how ‘thick’ will it be and how long will this long-suffering document lie there?” he said.
“So, if until recently the main problems with the Agreement were the text, due to different unresolved negotiating positions, now all the problems are beyond the content of the Agreement – they lie in the political atmosphere of EU-Ukraine relations, which were sacrificed by the logic of the internal political war in Ukraine,” concluded the expert.
European Program
Iryna Solonenko
(+38 044) 461 95 00
solonenko@irf.ua
***
The Goal of the European Program is to promote Ukraine’s European integration by providing financial and expert support to relevant civil society initiatives.
