The European Union and Eastern Partnership’s Vague Future

Sergiu Ceban The coronavirus pandemic gave impetus to fundamental changes within the European Union. What are they to be? The head of the MFAEI met with the Ambassador of the European Union to Moldova Peter Michalko on April 8, and discussed joint efforts aimed at combating Covid-19. Recent weeks have shown that key international players, taking advantage of the pandemic situation, seek to more actively position themselves both in the world and in individual regions and countries. Moldova’s example in this sense is also indicative. It cannot but cause emotion when Washington, Moscow and Brussels compete in who and in what volumes is to faster help the Moldovan state. Thus, demonstrating the importance and significance of our republic’s foreign policy coordinate system. The world powers help, in a sense, can be called a preventive measure, since the rapid deterioration of the socio-economic situation threatens all world powers and especially, the European Union. The states located along the perimeter of the EU borders in a pre-default state might create additional migration pressure and complicate the process of overcoming the recession in the Union itself. In this sense, Brussels’s intention to allocate 15 billion euros for neighboring regions supporting, including countries from the so-called "Eastern Partnership" seems quite justified.  The only question is how effectively these funds will be spent. As the Moldovan experience shows, grant international financial assistance, not yet conditional on the need for reform is a great temptation for the kleptocratic part of the Moldovan elites. Meanwhile, European experts are already predicting a serious scale of the post-coronavirus crisis, that will be much stronger than the financial markets fall in 2008-2009. And even more tangible than the Middle East migration threat of 2015, caused by the massive displacement of refugees from Syria and other states of the region due to the sharp military-terrorist situation aggravation. The fact that the current European politicians’ generation is unlikely to be able return the EU to its original internal position is obvious. Experts still find it difficult to predict specific scenarios but they agree that Europe will face a significant rearrangement of the current Union’s functioning mechanisms architecture. Ordinary citizens of the continent will inevitably re-evaluate attitude towards the EU. They are unlikely to be able to find a proper explanation for the fact that once prosperous the Europe unexpectedly faced a massive shortage of medicines, medical equipment, and weak health systems. The latter simply could not cope with the crisis and what is most sad they did not save that very old generation of Europeans who was at the forefront and invested the maximum in the current well-being of the European Union. What is paradoxical is that in the midst of the pandemic, EU countries did not find the answer to the question who should respond and prepare for crisis developments. As a result, the capital began to blame the Brussels direction receiving quite reasonably responses as the lack of necessary powers. Apparently, the pandemic revealed a dangerous phenomenon for the entire Union, when national elites forget about their sovereign duties and hide under supranational pan-European institutions. There is no doubt that the voter will necessarily give an assessment and determine the one responsible for. The ratings of the ruling parties in the EU leading countries are already rapidly falling and their power configurations may undergo cardinal transformations in the future. At date, the situation looks under control, however, from the political point of view the European Union looks, to put it mildly, confused. No coherent pan-European political coordination of the problem has occurred. In such circumstances, the Covid-19 may well become, oddly enough, a kind of test for the European Union’s political survival and also demonstrate how justified its ambitions for regional and international leadership are. While the EU political future contours are not defined, there is an opinion among the expert community that the “collective Brussels” has two main directions. The first is closer integration with federal characteristics and that could allow creating more functional and effective central institutions capable of coping with various crisis phenomena by trimming the sovereignty of member states. An alternative would be the Union’s movement along the path of its members’ re-sovereignty with consistent disintegration. The probability of the second option is greatly increased by current forecasts on strengthening the Eurosceptics’ position in the European Union nuclear countries. The EU is on the verge of an existential crisis. In such conditions, the Eastern Partnership will gradually lose their long-term gravitational impact from Brussels, gaining more independence but at the same time less attention and financial incentives. Therefore, now it is better for the members, including Moldova to begin reconsidering their place in the regional alignment and their strategic guidelines in order to optimally prepare to live in completely new foreign political realities.