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Anaïs Marin
Ph.D. candidate,
Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po)

Russia’s “Baltic” Regions within the Northern Dimension: Challenges and Prospects for the Future

Over the past five years, the core of Europe has moved to the North, renewing the idea that the Baltic Sea Region is a test area where the interests of the EU and Russia meet and clash. Following a Finnish initiative, the Helsinki European Council in December 1999 invited the Commission to prepare an “ Action Plan for the Northern Dimension in the external and cross-border policies of the European Union 2000-2003 ”, which was adopted in Feira in June 2000 and is the key guide to the Northern Dimension (ND)

The ND covers a wide geographical area from Iceland to the west across to Finland and North-West Russia, from the Norwegian, Barents and Kara Seas in the North to the Southern coast of the Baltic Sea, covering 84 million inhabitants, of which 24 million live in the 5 Nordic countries, 7.8 million in the Baltic States, 38.6 million in Poland and approximately 13.5 million in North-West Russia, including Kaliningrad. The ND operates through the EU’s existing financial instruments available for the region - Interreg (structural funds for EU countries’ peripheral regions), Phare (for EU candidate countries) and Tacis (for Russia) – which means that it is mainly an umbrella covering existing programs. The ND is not, at least on paper, a “regional policy instrument” for the North of Europe, nor a part of the EU’s common foreign and security policy (CFSP) towards candidate and non-EU countries. The ND interests Russian “Baltic” regions [1] because its focus is mainly on low political issues (social and economic problems, culture and education) and soft security threats (environment, nuclear risk, public health, transnational organized crime). The idea is mainly to use the ND to coordinate public and private spheres, bilateral and multilateral cooperative efforts at work in that area, including those of other regional organizations (the CBSS, the BEAC, the Arctic Council), if only those programs bring in added value for the EU. The target fields selected by the Commission are: energy supplies, communications (transport infrastructures, telecommunications), cross-border cooperation in the field of trade, investment, health and fight against organized crime. Later on the question of Kaliningrad’s status as a Russian enclave within the Schengen space has been added to the ND’s priorities.

Because it aims at intensifying cross-border cooperation to avoid the emergence of new dividing lines between the EU and its neighbors, be they potential insiders or long-term outsiders of the EU like Russia, the ND is of deep concern for Russian peripheral, “Baltic”, regions. The main focus is on the Kaliningrad enclave, a major litmus test for relations between the enlarged EU and the re-federalizing Russia, that is being dealt with at the intergovernmental level. In contradiction to the recommendations made by neighbor Finland, which urged Brussels to adopt a “new deal” approach to Russia and its peripheries, the rest of the North-West federal district is rather neglected by the ND Action Plan – except as concerns energetic issues. The EU’s intention is merely to use the territories of the Arkhangelsk oblast’ or the Republic of Karelia and the port facilities of St. Petersburg and Leningrad oblast’ for the transit of Russian oil and gas exports to Europe. In Pskov, Novgorod, Murmansk and Kaliningrad oblasti, new models of cross-border cooperation with non-EU countries have also been thought of under the aegis of the ND, providing mental incentives and practical instruments for turning borderlands into areas of stability. In a way, these territories already see themselves in an imaginary “Europe of Regions”.

It took federal policy-makers in Moscow more time to react to the ND initiative than it took local actors from North-West Russia – regional administrations, business and epistemic communities, civil society – to develop their own strategy in line with the ND. This gap in the way the EU’s policies have been perceived and answered to from the Russian side forms the heart problematic of my research. The second problem at stake, which I want to address today, is where do Russia’s border regions stand within the ND, not only from Brussels’ point of view, but also in the eyes of the Russian Federation. Russia’s North-West federal district, as a contact point between the CIS and the West, is a laboratory for the geopolitical and economic “making” of Northern Europe. Unfortunately, views from Brussels, Moscow and Petersburg or Petrozavodsk do not necessarily converge as concerns the purpose and methods of the experiments at work in this laboratory-region.

Comparing how these regions’ future role is envisaged by the ND Action Plan and by Russia’s answers to it, both in diplomatic and “regional policy” terms, I came to select three spheres of analysis where EU and Russian visions still diverge and for which searching a consensus is a common challenge. First, defining North-West regions’ subjectivity as non-State members of the wider Europe shaped by the ND. Second, accepting a level of governance where the regional actors’ participation in EU-Russia relations is or should be optimal, with subsidiarity being a central notion for future developments. Third, taking notice of the border-breaking effects of the ND on the Russian Federation, the question of territoriality has to be considered in the long-term prospect of Russia joining the EU.

The identity sphere: what subjectivity for Russia’s “Baltic” regions?

The policies of Western European countries and of the various multilateral organizations operating regionally in Nordic-Baltic Europe since the beginning of the 1990s have granted Russian border regions, in many respects, elements of European identity. As soon as the Iron Curtain collapsed, many voices from the academic, political and business spheres, in Northern Europe and Germany especially, expressed the idea that the Baltic Sea area was to recover the crossroads role it had at its Golden Age, when the Hanseatic League was providing all peoples from Gothenburg to Novgorod with peace and wealth. To some extent, the North has been “constructed” as a sort of “future territory”, an “imagined community” in Benedict Anderson’s terms, “an experiment in post-modern territoriality whereby a region is being politically produced” [2], both by academics and politicians. My hypothesis is that institutional region-building in the Baltic Sea area has identity-shaping effects on the neighbor Russian regions, consequently giving them ground for enhancing their European identity and their international quasi-subjectivity (or “actorness”) – including through the rhetoric on the ‘Europe of Regions’.

After the USSR collapsed and the Baltic States were admitted back into Europe, Russia’s North-West became a frontier territory where Russianness was easily challenged by feelings of belonging to another spatial, if not civilizational, whole: the North, the Baltic, Europe. Developing friendly relations, doing business and exchanging experience and know-how with partners from Finland, Sweden or Germany was seen in North-West Russia not only as the best way to join back the community of civilized countries, but also as a return in the nature of things. St. Petersburg, for example, having left aside its Leningrad name, was recovering its mission as a “window to Europe”, assigned three hundred years before by Peter the Great to the imperial capital city. For people living in the Republic of Karelia, being able to communicate and work with Finns across an unnatural border that once divided East from West, was also a way to assess their Finno-Ugrian identity and Europeanness within Russia. Practical sub-regional cooperation programs, financed and implemented by Nordic partners, including NGOs, and by the regional organizations and business associations of that area have raised a specific awareness of “Us” and strategies of “we-hood” across borders among the people of the area. [3] Representatives from Russian North-West regions who were included in the Russian delegations sent to regional conferences had to sit down at the same negotiation tables as those from the Baltic States, despite the fact that these Republics’ relations with Moscow are characterized by enmity. Interestingly enough, the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs qualifies both the Baltic States and the four border subjects of the Russian Federation as “adjacent regions”, a terminology that erases, at least psychologically, the borders dividing this part of the Baltic Sea Area. In line with that, the mental map Russians from the North-West regions have of themselves and Europe radically changed over the past fifteen years: the notions of “Europeanness” and sometimes “Northerness” [4] have become central in the lexicon associated to ‘democracy’, ‘civilization’ and ‘doing good business’. Repairs in private housing need the “Evrostandard” label to be valuable, and shuttle-trade between Russia and Finland flourished because Finnish goods were considered to be of supreme quality.

Post-Soviet Russia still has to manage the two-facedness and Empire-size of its identity: both European and Asian. The problem is that all along the 1990s, Moscow-based ideologists have been unsuccessful in providing Russia, its leaders and citizens with a unifying “national idea”. President B. Yeltsin demonstratively called for a country-size wide brainstorming in order to fill in this notion with some meaning, but his initiative was met apathetically by the embryonic civil society and skeptically, if not with hostility, by the non-ethnic Russian territories of the Federation. Regionalism, localism and secessionism flourished, until a new “father” for the Russian (rossijskoe) State was elected in March 2000 with the aim of holding back the Federation together. Interestingly enough, V. Putin, a native from Leningrad who spent 5 years as vice-governor in charge of the foreign relations of the city under mayor A. Sobchak (1991-1996), has proclaimed so far the tactical need for a rapprochement with the West in general and with the EU in particular, but without addressing the question of identity: will and should Russia ever be, in his mind, a full-right European country? How far does he have to claim his affection to Western values for Russia to belong to the community of civilized nations? How does the new Russia apprehend and enhance its own “northern dimension(s)”?

This latter aspect is especially important for today’s European agenda, since it took several years for Russia to put forward the idea that it had a “Baltic” identity, through its maritime access on the Baltic Sea. All along the 1990s, Russia didn’t have any “Baltic” foreign policy: its diplomatic line towards the three Baltic States (Pribaltika) was literally separated from that towards the Nordic countries (Scandinavia and Finland) and more generally speaking Russia had no “regional” diplomacy within the Baltic Sea Region, at least until the CBSS Riga Summit of 1998 [5]. All those years, since there was no comprehensive idea about how far Russia shared a “Baltic”, a “North-European” identity with its neighbors through the North-West interface, many questions which are now tackled from abroad by the EU’s ND initiative have been left unsettled by the Russian federal policy-makers themselves (both diplomats and regional planners). Experts from the Russian Council for Foreign and Security Policy (SVOP) even stated in a March 2000 report that Moscow's foreign policy lacked a systematic and scientific character, because, among other reasons, “for the past ten years there has not been any goal-oriented written foreign policy doctrine, nor any clarity in relation to relatively “simple”, regional policy orientations”. [6] One can even say that diplomats and regional planners in Moscow have been more successful so far in thinking the interdependences between Russia’s Far East and the country’s foreign policy towards and within the Asia-Pacific region, than in developing a rational strategy in response to the regional challenges which await Russia in Northern Europe.

It is evident that this state of things has been evolving over the past two years, with Russia increasingly cooperating with the EU. Reforms oriented towards “re-federalization” are also noticeable steps undertaken by the new presidential administration, but the delimitation of prerogatives among federal organs of power – including the President’s Representatives in the Federal Districts – and regional administrations (elected governors and local assemblies) is still unclear. More than objects of ND policies, the regions have to be considered as complementary actors of pan-European politics and EU-Russia relations, which implies a minimum level of decentralization, both within the EU and the Russian Federation, for granting regional administrations enjoy some kind of low-level international subjectivity.

Level(s) of regional governance: which subsidiarity in EU-Russia relations?

Until now, the European Commission’s documents have granted little attention to the regional as a relevant level of governance in dealing with Russia. Generally speaking, Brussels sees the Russian regions as partners only for implementing cross-border cooperation and technical assistance programs. It does not grant them any legitimacy as initiators in the policy-making process, even within the ND. Moscow, for its part, still centralizes the flows of TACIS money and refuses to leave local actors the necessary autonomy for coordinating the programs locally and across borders.

On paper, regional administrations are to be consulted and associated to EU-Russia relations. Article 73 of the 1994 Partnership and Cooperation Agreement reads for example that the parties should “favour direct contacts between the relevant regions and state organisations responsible for planning regional development, with the goal, inter alia, of exchanging methods and forms for encouraging regional development”. [7]The EU’s Common Strategy on Russia, adopted in June 1999, goes a bit further, stating that the EU “will attach particular importance to regional and local administrations, within their powers. Relations between central, regional and local authorities are an essential factor in the future of the Federation.” [8] The EU’s instruments still work on a too centralized basis to allow Russian border regions the enjoying of an international subjectivity or a special role as mediators between Moscow and Brussels. An exception worthy of notice is the establishment of Euroregions across Russia’s external borders thanks to INTERREG III A and TACIS funding. Karelia has been the champion in this field, ahead of Kaliningrad, which takes part in the Euroregions “Baltika” and “Saule”. Euroregion “Karelia”, founded in early 2000, is the first manifestation of cross-border institution-building from the grass-root, a point made by the Finnish co-chair of the Euroregion, Tarja Cronberg. [9] Her counterpart from the Russian side, Valeri Shlyamin, the Minister for Foreign Relations of the Republic of Karelia, has been admitted, alongside other regional leaders from Russia’s North-West (like Mikhail Prusak, the governor of the westward-oriented Novgorod oblast’) in talks held in Brussels, but nearly always on an informal basis. Symbolically, the emergence of a transnational European space where Russian regions feel “at home” fosters an “identity hybridation” in borderlands and enhances these regions’ role as bridges having a foot in the EU, a role Moscow is still not ready to grant them. [10]

So far, the EU Commission and Russia have been reluctant to grant the regional level of governance any autonomy in the process of rapprochement. No delegation of sovereignty is envisaged within the framework of the ND. The European Parliament prepared a report of its own on the ND in 1999, which stressed, to some extent in contrast to the views of the Commission, that the ND should have a regional role, for example in creating and strengthening cross-border co-operation in line with the Euroregions in central Europe. [11] This proposition has so far not been translated into deeds.

However, the evolution in how Moscow perceives the regions as a level of governance in relations with the Brussels is visible in the Strategy for the Development of the Russian Federation’s Relations with the EU on a Mid-Term Perspective 2000-2010 (further: Mid-Term Strategy), presented by V. Putin in Helsinki on October 22^nd, 1999. Among the twelve chapters of this document, one (the eighth) is dedicated exclusively to cross-border cooperation. It calls for “increasing the level of trans-border inter-regional cooperation and development of the regions on both sides [of the common border] to the standard levels reached in the frame of so-called euroregions”. It asks the EU’s investment programs to be “directed not only towards the stimulation of extraction and export of raw material, but also towards the complex development of the North and North-West of Russia”. It mentions the necessity to “encourage contacts between regions of Russia and of the EU, including by using the possibilities of the Committee of the Regions, with the goal of furthering human and economic relations and exchange of experience on local self-governance and economic management”. No reference is made, however, to the internal reforms of Russian federalism that implementing such policies require. [12]

The EU Commission raised this problem only about Kaliningrad, without addressing the problem of devolution and subsidiarity in Russia in general. On April 9^th, 2001, the second ND meeting at the level of Ministers for Foreign Affairs between EU and non-EU countries was held in Luxembourg. Regional leaders were included in the Russian delegation and made propositions that were taken into consideration by EU member countries at the European Council in Göteborg on June 16^th, 2001. At that point, talks dealt mainly with Kaliningrad (concerning transit, future Schengen visa regulations and exceptions to this regime), environmental issues and organised crime. In January 2001 the EU Commission issued a communication on “The EU and Kaliningrad” [13] the purpose of which is “to contribute to a debate which the EU should launch with Russia (including Kaliningrad) and with the two neighbouring future Member States (Poland and Lithuania)”. The necessity to include Kaliningrad (should one actually read the regional administration of Kaliningrad ? – the text is not clear) in the negotiations constitutes a new step in the EU’s approach. However, Brussels is not ready to satisfy Russian claims of granting Kaliningrad a “special status”, including in economic terms, before Russia joins the WTO or goes through enough political transformation. According to Chris Patten, “The Russian Federation, and in particular Kaliningrad, stands to benefit economically from enlargement (…) We will work closely with Russia, Poland and Lithuania [note that Kaliningrad is not on this list] to find practical solutions and seize the opportunities offered by future EU enlargement.” [14] In this sense, Russian federal reforms should allow Kaliningrad to be a “pilot” for future EU-Russia, but not to function in “automatic pilot” within the EU. The Commission’s Communication challenges Russia to work out decentralising reforms, reminding that “since Kaliningrad is an integral part of Russia, it would be difficult [for the EU] to grant [it] any special status, such as free trade or a customs union. This would raise a number of political and legal issues apart from the fact that Russia is unlikely to grant the necessary degree of autonomy to Kaliningrad” [15]. Neglecting the regional dimension and not granting enough legitimacy to the local levels of governance is actually a mistake, since professionals from the Russian North-West regions have proven able to undertake audacious initiatives. St. Petersburg’s administration, for example, has proposed, in the framework of the city’s “Baltic Initiative”, to jointly work out a project called “Baltic Palette”, meant to reinforce cooperation at the economic and humanitarian levels between St. Petersburg, Helsinki and Stockholm cities, Leningrad oblast’, Estonia and Latvia. [16] Other interesting steps have been made by Russian regions - in the field of tourism, communication infrastructures (ports, roads, new information technologies), environment protection and people-to-people relations. So far, the regional organizations of the Baltic Sea area, such as the BSSSC or the Baltic Sea Chambers of Commerce Association, have given impulse and support to these initiatives. It is now time for the ND to recognize that subsidiarity in this field, with enough decentralization of the decision-making prerogatives, can give EU-Russia diplomatic and transregional relations a new start. By calling nearly all the cadres of St. Petersburg city administration to federal responsibilities in the Kremlin, V. Putin’s Presidential Administration has in a way only “vampirized” the regional organs of power and downgraded the level of professionalism on the field, without giving Russia’s second capital the necessary means to project Russia’s interests in Europe.

Borders and territoriality: prospects for our Common European House

The ND, as an umbrella for bilateral, multilateral, and public-private relations in the Baltic Sea area, has favored the emergence of a good-neighborly climate, even between countries whose diplomatic relations, especially because of border- and sovereignty-delimitation problems, are still chilly. On February 9^th, 2000, a meeting of Russian deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Ivan Ivanov with his Lithuanian counterpart Vygaudas Usackas led to the undertaking of a joint project, known as the “Nida Initiative”, the propositions of which were included to the ND program. Hence, some sensitive issues like border-delimitation, trade licenses and quotas, visa regulations, have been tackled in the context of the ND. The ND has also served as a catalyst for model grass-roots initiatives: Pskov oblast’ and the neighbor regions from Estonia and Latvia, for example, have raised the idea of creating an Euroregion within the framework of the ND – without, however, any concrete implications so far.

This is mainly due to the fact that Russia is reluctant to recognize the Euroregions as best practices in ND-labelled cross-border cooperation initiatives. Russia’s Mid-Term Strategy clearly states that the Euroregions should be handled at the intergovernmental level (within the PCA frame) and does not refer to the ND. Moreover, the “strategic conception” for the development of the North-West Federal District simply ignores the experience of Euroregions. This is evident from the working thematic of the “Centre for Strategic Elaboration – North-West” (Tsentr Strategicheskikh Razrabotok – Severo-Zapad), established on November 16^th, 2000 in St. Petersburg [17]. At first, the goals and deeds of this centre, which elaborated a “Doctrine” for the development of the North-West in May 2001 and a “Strategy” in the fall 2001, were rather obscure and not warmly welcomed by the local administrations. [18] The idea of turning the district into an “experimental polygon” was still not filled with practical meaning, and in no way was it perceived as the continuation of the “pilot” concept seeing Russian Western regions as intermediates between Russia and Europe.[19] There is no mention, on the Centre’s website, of the Euroregions. The Doctrine rather aims at re-blowing centralism in the Russian Federation, shaping a new regionalism within the boundaries of the North-West federal district, seemingly both to counter localist autonomism within each Federation subject and transnationalism of the most outward-oriented border regions (St. Petersburg, Leningrad, Novgorod and Karelia especially). In the opinion of one of the Centre’s experts, neighbors from Western Europe already have their plans – “turn Russia into a raw material colony” – which implies that Russia should gather forces to re-appropriate the North and its resources to “pull back” the development of infrastructures towards Russia’s own interests. [20] These are to take maximum benefit for the whole Russian territory from the EU’s financial instruments and programs, including by extending the TransEuropean Networks (TEN) further East (with the argument of linking them to the Asia-Pacific Region) and South (connecting Russian trade infrastructures with the Black and Caspian Sea Area).

Conclusion

Because of the global diplomatic context of 1999 (Kosovo and Chechnya crises), the EU’s Common Strategy on Russia, the Northern Dimension and Russia’s Mid-Term Strategy towards the EU have been worked out with little if any coordination. Local public and private actors from Russia’s North-West regions have not been associated enough to the decision-making process, both at the level of agenda- and priority-setting and in the follow-up phase of implementation. According to Christopher Browning’s quite critical lecture of Western policies in the Baltic Sea area, “the new region-building maintains within its premises a hierarchical and patronising view of Russia” where “Russians are implicitly emploted as the “needy” who want and need to 'learn to be like us'”.[21] The ND, especially, could be seen as a policy oriented towards satisfying the interests of a few Northern countries, in an attempt to “customise” the EU [22] and get maximum economic benefit from cooperation with Russia (to secure energy supplies to Western Europe). EU member countries have to make clear what common interests they have in the area (taking into account also the problems posed by NATO enlargement) and how far they agree on having a real strategy towards Russia. The regional level of governance, that is to say local and regional administrations from the border subjects of the Russian Federation, has so far been too neglected both by Russia and the EU, despite the fact that this platform territory could serve as a springboard, a window and a laboratory for further integration. The challenge now, both in Brussels and in Moscow, is to develop a more concerted approach to the ND as a comprehensive frame for consensual transregional relations involving more than it did so far Russia’s North-West regions. The role of Kaliningrad as a “pilot” region – of what, in which kind of race, as a model for which integration processes ? – has also to be explicated.