What Will We Bring to the Talks in Istanbul?
NATO has at last decided and duly announced that President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine is being invited to its Istanbul summit on June 28-29. The Ukraine-NATO Commission will also hold a session during the summit. This means there will be no mystery of the kind that shrouded the Ukrainian delegation’s participation in NATO’s Prague summit in November 2002. Nor will there be, by all accounts, a clear answer to the question that has been posed in previous years: when and under what conditions can Ukraine count on being invited to join the Membership Action Plan?
NATO’s Prague summit was memorable not only for the fact that for the first time in the alliance’s history, heads of states and governments were seated at the table “French-style,” i.e., according to the names of countries in French. That summit also adopted the Ukraine-NATO Action Plan and the first Target-Oriented Plan for 2003. When the alliance’s spokesman was asked where the President of Ukraine would be sitting this time, he said he hoped the president would find himself where he should be — between the US president and the British prime minister, next to NATO’s Secretary General.
Last year Ukrainian government officials often expressed the hope that NATO would take the next step toward Ukraine and invite it to join the Membership Action Plan, specifically during the Istanbul summit. Later, after the events in Donetsk and the problems with the Western radio stations, these kinds of statements sounded less optimistic. Foreign Minister Kostiantyn Hryshchenko began to opine that the main thing is not participating in the summit (at the time it was not yet clear at what level the Ukrainian delegation would be represented) but what can be actually achieved before and after it, and he promised to “work proficiently in this sphere.”
Representatives of the alliance’s governing bodies refrained from giving clear-cut answers concerning Ukraine’s prospects. Often heard in both Brussels and Kyiv was the statement that in many respects the Ukraine-NATO Action Plan emulates the Membership Action Plan. NATO’s top officials have also been saying that even if a country is not a NATO member, it may be more important in terms of international security, enjoy closer cooperation, and reap greater additional dividends than some NATO member-states.
Analysts differ in assessing the prospects of the very near future. Some, like Bruce Jackson, president of the US Committee on NATO, are convinced that on the heels of the latest enlargement (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania officially joined NATO this year), “the southern flank” is assuming paramount importance for NATO and helping to place the Ukrainian question on the agenda. Others, like James Sherr, senior analyst at the Conflict Studies Research Center of the British Royal Military Academy, note that although Ukraine and NATO are maintaining a high level of relations today, there is a “lack of strategic thinking” in both NATO and the EU. In any case, at the moment the “Ukrainian question” is obviously not of supreme importance for the West in general and NATO in particular. NATO is going through a difficult period of transition from being a military- political alliance to becoming a North Atlantic mechanism of international security.
Considering that Cold-War stereotypes are dying hard on both sides of the negotiating process, it would be wrong to expect an easy solution. By spearheading a peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan, NATO laid claim to being a global organization. However, it is no secret that this operation has bogged down and requires considerable effort. The admission of new members also necessitates a critical revision by NATO not only of its missions (defined at the Washington and Prague summits of 1999 and 2002, respectively) but also of the decision-making mechanisms and state of relations between the US and its European allies. The rift caused by the situation in Iraq has not yet healed, although clearly neither the United States, France, Germany, Belgium, nor, lately, Spain wants this rift to exist, or worse, deepen. This is a brief outline of items slated for the Istanbul summit.
There also are purely Ukrainian problems. While the progress of military reforms is not being called into question, even though the defense sector is chronically underfunded, the situation in other areas looks far worse. Ukraine is constantly being reminded of the importance of press freedom and democratic procedures (above all, statewide and local elections). A number of laws that were supposed to have been passed under the 2003 Target-Oriented Plan have automatically become part of the 2004 plan. People’s Deputy Oleh Zarubynsky, deputy chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on European Integration, says Ukraine has slowed down its march toward NATO. Addressing a roundtable discussion, he pointed out that the executive branch had not fully implemented the resolution passed in the wake of parliamentary hearings in the fall of 2002. Western experts also stress the necessity of reforming not only the defense sector but also law-enforcement bodies.
Likewise, informational policy on the principal TV channels is not aimed at supporting the government’s strategy of rapprochement with and eventual entry into the alliance. Perhaps for this reason Ukrainians’ support for their country’s membership in NATO has been on the wane in the past few years. What is more, the public remains absolutely uninformed about the growth of NATO and the benefits that may accrue to Ukraine from cooperating with and forging closer ties with the alliance; nor is it aware that Russia enjoys, albeit formally, a far higher system of cooperation with NATO than Ukraine — via the NATO-Russia Council authorized to make decisions on various matters.
Therefore, we can expect qualitatively new steps and shifts in the Ukraine-NATO relationship only if certain fundamental prerequisites are fulfilled. The first of them — the importance of Kyiv for overall security — is beyond doubt, as is this country’s potential, the best example of which is the agreement on utilizing Ukrainian cargo airplanes. But given the fact that the alliance is undergoing a makeover, we must bring home to our partners the importance of switching from the partnership level to that of allied relations. Analysts note that Ukraine has enlisted solid support in this respect from Poland, as well as from the United States and Britain, provided this country meets such basic conditions as democracy, economic development, and civilian control over the armed forces. Even factoring in Washington’s clout may not be enough. But no one can deny that some progress has been made since the difficult Prague summit.
