разозлили

Was it indeed ‘Bucharest’?

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres

T.S. Eliot, East Coker

Although the diplomatic wrangling in the aftermath of the ‘Olympian war’ is still far from over, attempts are being made to reduce this extremely complex affair to some single, allegedly self-explanatory label. The strategy is familiar. Whenever we see a sign of weakness in the actions of diplomats, for example, ‘Munich’ is ready at hand. And whenever some such label ‘sticks’, there is a good chance that the torturous work of understanding is put to one side (see Peeter Selg, ‘Pronksiunustusest ühiskondlikus mõtlemises’, Sirp, 01.08).

The catchword these days is ‘Bucharest’. First, Mart Laar and then Toomas Hendrik Ilves are telling us that the current tragic fate of Georgia was sealed in Rumanian capital when the European members of NATO refused to invite Kiev and Tbilisi to the Alliance’s Action Plan. That was when, the argument goes, Russia decided on staging the invasion.

Strictly speaking, this claim is hard to support and impossible to prove wrong with hard evidence. It is, as they say in social sciences, unfalsifiable. And this means, as far as serious analysis is concerned, illegitimate. Yet, we are not at a scholarly conference here. The matter is political and urgent at that. Thus certain allowances may be made. What counts is not the ‘truth’ of the argument but its persuasiveness.

Yet, persuasiveness is precisely at stake when it comes to the Bucharest decision. Why did Georgia and Ukraine, together with their powerful allies, fail to persuade the sceptics?

Let me sharpen the question further. This time in relation to the Russian Foreign Minister’s recent juxtaposition of ‘realities’ and ‘virtual projects’. Although the way Lavrov framed the choice between the two tells a lot about Russia’s possible motives for refusing to accept values-oriented rhetoric in general, I myself do not buy it. Politics is all about persuasion even when it operates with oil-prices. Geography, natural resources and fire-power, all this certainly matters. But how exactly they matter in this or that situation each time has to be decided anew. And insofar as such decisions are made in the presence of others, it comes down to persuasion.

So why is it that Georgia and Ukraine failed to achieve in Bucharest, what Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania achieved under at least equally hostile circumstances?

Let us be generous here. Let us assume that neither Ukraine nor Georgia had any serious domestic problems or shortcomings of their own. Let us assume, in other words, that the complex issue to be decided in Bucharest was, indeed, very simple: Western resolve vs. Russian opposition.

With these (rather generous) assumptions in place, the Bucharest (in)decision becomes even more puzzling. After all, Russia was strongly opposed to the Baltic NATO membership as well. The Baltics themselves could not offer any tangible immediate gains to the West, whereas Ukrainian and Georgian strategic contributions would have been much more weighty. Finally, rhetorically, Kiev and Tbilisi made arguments similar to those made by Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius. And yet, what worked for the Baltics did not work in Bucharest. Why?

Let us have a closer look at these arguments and how they actually worked in the Baltic case. By now, the strategies used by the Baltics are already well-studied and conceptualised theoretically. They even have a name: ‘shaming’ (see, Frank Schimmelfennig, The EU, NATO and the Integration of Europe: Rules and Rhetoric). We all have interests of our own, but what really interests us is shaped by our identities. Thus, the arguments goes, under certain circumstances, appeals to core values on which our identities hinge may be put to work against our own immediate interests, as it were. And this is what happened in the case of the previous round of NATO enlargement, when the Baltics ‘shamed’ the West into accepting them against the West’s own selfish interests.

So, again, why did not it happen now?

To put it bluntly, there was no common robust transatlantic identity to appeal to in Bucharest.

The cleavages produced (or, at the very least, mishandled) during the eight years of the Bush administration made ‘shaming’ – in fact, any explicitly moral argument – a weak weapon to be used against immediate individual interests.

Unlike Laar and Ilves, under these tragic circumstances, I would prefer not to point fingers at any specific decision-makers whose actions throughout these last eight years, all of them on record, have helped to undermine transatlantic identity and thus, albeit in a manner much more complicated than the one suggested by Laar and Ilves, prepared Georgia for its sad predicament. Be it as it may, whatever brought us all into the current situation cannot (and should not) be reduced to a single catchword, like ‘Bucharest’. That is, if we really want to understand what happened.