COMMENTARY: Ukraine and Belarus: barred from Europe's exclusive club (12/08/02)

COMMENTARY

Ukraine and Belarus: barred from Europe's exclusive club

by Dr. David Marples

Leonid Kuchma, the embattled president of Ukraine, was recently snubbed by not being invited to the NATO summit in Prague, the NATO-Ukraine Commission instead chose to meet at the foreign ministerial level. The reason given for such shocking treatment was the reported sale two years ago of a Kolchuha radar system to Iraq.

The Czech Republic refused a visa to Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who subsequently was banned from all but one of the countries of the European countries (the exception being Portugal), along with seven of his leading ministers for human rights violations in his country. Such measures may be justified. However, they have broader implications.

The potential new members of NATO taking part in the Membership Action Plan discussed in Prague include Albania, and Croatia, while Russia, the only other post-Soviet state currently in favor, has been working through the NATO-Russia Council since last May. Ukrainian and Belarusian links with the defensive alliance are weakening.

Within the European Union, Slovakia recently imposed a visa regime on the countries of the former Soviet Union; Poland will do likewise in the near future. Traders, students and migrants are about to face a mire of bureaucratic blockages when attempting to travel from an "outsider" to an "insider" nation. The ensuing divisions could mirror those of the Cold War.

There is some logic to these new developments. The countries of NATO, for example, are now focused on the threat of world terrorism and wish to punish Ukraine for violating a U.N. Security Council agreement on arms exports to Iraq. The E.U. has undertaken its largest ever expansion and promotes open borders and trade within its boundaries. The question arises, however, of the wisdom of restricting trade and travel by citizens of outsider nations, and of promoting wealth within an ever more exclusive circle of countries to the detriment of those that suffer from the Soviet legacy.

Ukraine is a case in point. The country has long made plain its pro-European orientation, but it has been beset by political scandals, corruption, and the recordings made by former presidential bodyguard Mykola Melnychenko, which portray the president as capable of killing political opponents and selling arms to the highest bidder. President Kuchma, it is true, is no saint, and Ukrainians may be better off without him. But why should residents be made to suffer for the sins of their president?

Belarus remains the most authoritarian state in Europe. It is considered by some to be a dictatorship. But its citizens are well-educated, and many are anxious to develop careers outside the confines of the repressive state. Private business in the republic has increased in recent years and poses a legitimate threat to the sort of state control adhered to by the Lukashenka regime. It cannot survive, however, without links to the rest of Europe.

After the fall of Communist regimes in 1989-1991 the playing field was scarcely equal. Several East European countries had already experimented with a market economy - Hungary being the most successful. The collapse of the USSR, on the other hand, followed by Russian President Boris Yeltsin's headlong, blindfolded plunge into market relations (spoon-fed, admittedly by Yegor Gaidar) brought about a catastrophic drop in living standards in those Soviet republics tied to the intricate economic structure of the USSR. It could not have been otherwise.

There is a tendency today for the international community to be more accepting of the distorted trends in Russia that culminated in the financial collapse of 1998. And there is some justice to this outlook, which reflects the dramatic and unprecedented nature of the transition. But that approach has not been applied to the other Slavic ex-Soviet republics.

In Ukraine and Belarus, such sympathy and understanding are lacking. Blame for the follies and idiosyncrasies of the leaderships is being extended - through penalties and exclusion - to their populations, including a struggling, but by no means negligible private sector. No one would deny that Presidents Kuchma and Lukashenka are unpleasant and vindictive personalities more reminiscent of petty officialdom of the Soviet era. But they do not necessarily - and one could say in many instances plainly do not - represent the interests of their electorate.

Europe in 2002 has become a mansion in which new doors are opening today, but others, inexplicably, are locked. The inequities between the have and have-not nations are being exacerbated by this policy.

David R. Marples is professor of history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and director of the Stasiuk Program for the Study of Contemporary Ukraine at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, which is based at that university.

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