Torn between East and West

Europe's border states

Iulian Chifu, Simona Tutuianu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317139027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This book is a very timely account of the legal, economic and political consequences for border states caught in the current tug-of-war between the West and Russia.The Ukraine crisis of 2014 focused policy-makers' attention on a geographical area full of dangers that had gone relatively unnoticed since the breakup of the Soviet Union, namely the security dynamics of the border states of Eastern Europe and the Black Sea. Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a strong Russia returns alternatively threatening and cajoling, but at risk itself of suffering economic injury from western reprisals over its nostalgia for the map drawn at Yalta. That conflict, which hotted up over the Ukraine, was soon being played out over - and in the air space over - Syria and Turkey, while the border states themselves are likely to be drawn into the European refugee crisis and have the potential, after the 2015 Paris atrocities, to be breeding grounds for international terrorists.

This groundbreaking book contains prescient warnings that must be heeded by leaders and diplomats on both sides of the East-West divide.

1
New states, new borders

Nothing succeeds like secession?

Şerban Pavelescu and Simona Ţuţuianu

The Yanukovich administration, in November 2013¹ decided to renounce the signing and initialling of the association agreement with the European Union, and followed up, one month later,² by concluding an agreement with the Russian Federation that brought Ukraine into the proximity of the Eurasian Economic Union and moved economic recovery efforts in Ukraine eastward. These decisions represented the starting point of one of the most powerful crises to rock the ex-Soviet space in the more than two decades that separate us from the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The ousting of the pro-Russian presidential administration in Kiev in February 2014 and the turnover favouring the partisans of European integration have become the key factors in the priming of a profound crisis in the foreign and security policies of the Russian Federation regarding the entire ex-Soviet space. Until then, similar demarchés made by states in this area were, one by one, either discouraged or countered with strong retaliatory measures.³ Russia was now confronted with the prospect of losing a strategic glacis fundamental⁴ to its plans to reconstruct and rise again as a great power in the contemporary system of international relations: its reaction was surprisingly swift and efficient. The Kremlin decided to save what could be saved from one of the most resounding failures recorded in the ex-Soviet space and started a decisive counter-attack, first in Crimea and later in the east and south of the Ukrainian state.⁵ The speed and efficiency of its military and political actions even led to debates in elite circles on the possibility that, in Ukraine, the international community is facing a ‘new’ type of armed aggression.⁶

The crisis in Ukraine is the latest and most serious case study about the evolution of the security environment and international relations system in the post-Cold War years. That is because of the recent emergence of two more parastatal separatist structures – the so called de facto states.

First, it demonstrates the difficult issue of defining and delimiting self-determination rights of people in an extremely hostile political and strategic context such as that represented by the formerly Russian imperial and Soviet space. One of the sub-products and, at the same time, one of the favourite means of promoting the interests of the Russian Federation in the ‘near vicinity’⁷ space has been the encouragement, support and manipulation of separatist and autonomist movements within the states spawned by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. These so-called de facto states,⁸ meaning the state entities that result from the presence and active support from Moscow, raise issues of self-determination and accession to international recognition by nations as a sovereign and independent state by nations. A third major subject of interest for the present paper can also be traced back to the breaking point that the crisis in Ukraine represents for the evolution of the regional and international security environment of the post-Cold War period, namely the issue of the use of force and the right to intervene, taking into account all the definitions and evolutions that have come to being in the context of substantial redefinition and reformation of the system of international relations, as well as of the international practice and legislation in the field, in the years following the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Legitimacy, sovereignty and international recognition of states in eastern and southeastern Europe

The end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the political-military communist bloc, and the disappearance of the USSR – the dominant power in the communist power bloc that was essential to the bipolar world order of the post-war period – have together opened the way for important changes in the security environment and the system of international relations. An unpredictable and fluid security environment; a system of international relations whose main constituent-institutional reference points are under reconstruction; an exponential growth in the number of conventional risk factors for the national security of member states of the international community and of the community itself; the emergence of unconventional risk factors associated with the new developments of the system of international relations; all are noteworthy characteristics of the changing system of international relations in the early years of the post-Cold War period.⁹

In this strategic and political international context, the dissolution of the federal state entities in the Cold War political-military bloc dominated by the Soviet Union represents one of the contemporary processes connected to the fall of communist political regimes in eastern Europe. They followed peaceful or violent evolving scenarios and logic threads depending on the way in which the central power controlling the territory of the former federal states accepted the consequences of the dissolution of legitimating political sources in the state entities mentioned. Between the extremes represented by the ‘velvet’ dissolution of the Czechoslovak state¹⁰ and the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia¹¹ lies the Soviet experience. Regard less of the paths taken, the revolutionary processes discussed were accompanied by a recrudescence in crisis situations and conflicts in the spaces formerly controlled by federal authorities.

If in the case of the Czechoslovak example the crisis mentioned is rather one associated with institutional and economic reconstruction, in the other two cases invoked the crisis is major and escalates to the stage of armed intra and inter-statal conflicts. The determining factors in such situations are several but, in the context of these conflictual situations, one of the most invoked principles of international law is that of self-determination and national emancipation.

Self-determination represents a relatively recent appearance in the concert of conceptual structures that govern the functioning of the system of international relations.¹² It was discussed by the international community in the decades preceding the conflictual finale of the age of stability and balance of forces inaugurated in the historical evolution of the system of international relations by the Peace Congress of Vienna (1815).¹³ It is a direct connection between the concepts of sovereignty and nation. The processes of identity affirmation and construction¹⁴ of great European nations, guarantors of the European and world balance, took place during the nineteenth century. Similar processes manifest in the east and south-east areas of Europe are more important in raising the concept of self-determination in international discussion.¹⁵

As a point of debate and point of reference for demands ethnic and national in nature aimed at the obtaining of rights or status, or even the possibility of seceding from the multinational states in which the claimants were integrated, self-determination was raised in the context of the dramatic events of the end-years of the First World War. President Woodrow Wilson did so in his famous fourteen points defining the reasons of the United States’ entry into the world war, a decision that would markedly affect the fate of the war in the favor of the Entente.¹⁶

The principle of self-determination of peoples in the multinational states of the early 20th century has constituted, from the very beginning a subject of debate and interpretation. The imprecise formulation of the principle as well as the collapse of the grand multinational empires of the European continent at the end of the First World War were the circumstances which produced a far more general interpretation that would, in the later decades, raise issues in managing a system of international relations centered around the nation-state – independent, indivisible and sovereign – the sole legitimate actor in the system.

Restrictive interpretations and clarifications on the right to self-determination and, implicitly, the right of any community possessing an ethnic identity, which lives in and controls a defined territory, to claim the attributes of sovereignty and the recognition of its legitimacy as an actor with full rights in the international relations system, have appeared from several sources. One of them traces back to the American administration which noted, in 1920, immediately after the conclusion of the works of the Paris Peace Conference, that self-determination should be abandoned because it has no place in the functioning of a system of international relations: it would result in anarchy and desperation.¹⁷ Indeed, through the decisions of the peace treaties signed between 1918–1920,¹⁸ the victors had proceeded towards a significant restriction of the content of the concept of self-determination through the exclusion of colonial territories by deciding the legitimate rights of ethnic groups to self-determination, sovereignty and existence as an independent state in the new national states formed on the ruins of the Russian, Austro–Hungarian and Ottoman empires. A system to protect minorities and to file appeals was instituted in direct reference to newly-appeared or reformed successor states. This too, through its method of conception, was limited and lacking in the universality promised by the concept in its initial form.¹⁹

The principle of self-determination, and the associated principle of national emancipation, follows a contradictory path in its interwar evolution. It was invoked until the point of abuse, used to promote diverging political and economic interests, and to intercede in and weaken the processes of national-identity construction, especially in the successor states of the former multinational empires.²⁰ The principle encountered a new stage in its conceptual evolution with the International Conference in Montevideo (1933) that proceeded to set the criteria of accession to international recognition of any parastatal entity claiming sovereignty and national independence by use of the right of self-determination.²¹

The next evolutionary stage, the postwar years, incorporated the experience of the Second World War as well as the transformation of the security environment and the system of international relations. The massive decolonization process, as well as the problems associated with it, has mandated a redefinition of the concept of national self-determination as well as the criteria of international recognition for states that appeared within that context. Through a series of consecutive resolutions of the General Assembly of the United Nations spanning the 50s and 60s²² the framework through which the former colonies acceded to sovereignty and to recognition as fully-fledged members of the international community was laid down. Of note is that, as was the case of the other discussions or clarifications on the concept of self-determination and the methods of international recognition of claimant states, these debates are also restrictive in nature. In fact, self-deter mination was limited to the colonial space and the ways of acceding to sovereignty and independence by resulting state entities were also limited to the administrative–territorial configuration created by the arbitrary demarcations operated by colonial powers. Moreover, once the massive decolonization process ended, the interpretation of self-determination became extremely restrictive: the recognition of political-territorial realignments occurring in the formerly colonial space was refused in case the state entity initially recognized as a member of the international community proved incapable of fulfilling the minimal conditions of a functioning state.²³ In this context the phenomenon of ‘weak’ states incapable of exercising sovereignty over parts of their national territory due to powerful separatist movements,²⁴ became a matter of continuing concern.

The importance of precedent and current international practice in the realm of secession and national self-determination is crucial in explaining the way in which, in the context of the ending of the Cold War, the international community chose to stand regarding the processes taking place in the formerly communist space, in direct reference to the former federal entities of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. If in the case of the first example problems did not aris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
• Introduction: the plight of Europe’s border states
• 1 New states, new borders: nothing succeeds like secession?
• 2 One rope, two ends: NATO and EU facing Russian interests
• 3 Is energy really flowing from East to West?
• 4 Migration and transnational crime: Europe, the new Noah’s ark
• 5 The frozen conflicts seem to melt down
• 6 Security challenges of the MENA region
• 7 Soft power of the East: from benign influence to dominance and informational warfare
• 8 Reestablishing a fault line between Europe’s East and West: Russia’s ‘hybrid war’ and how should NATO respond
• 9 Conflict resolution efforts – recovering the loss?
• Index