European Council on Foreign Relations: Misrule of law: Ukraine’s constitutional crisis

 Instead of just replacing the prime minister, Zelensky progressively removed all reformers from the cabinet, state-owned enterprises, and government agencies. His timing could not have been worse. The new prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, was competent enough in his response to the coronavirus crisis. Yet Ukraine is one of several countries in which bad actors have used the crises of the moment as an opportunity to covertly dismantle reforms, betting that there would be no pushback from a European Union focused on the pandemic and a United States preoccupied by its presidential election.

Zelensky did nothing while revanchist oligarchs and Russian propagandists attacked EU agreements as “external governance” and domestic reformers as Sorosyata ([George] Soros’s piglets). Worse, some of Zelensky’s new appointments – such as that of the chief prosecutor, Iryna Venediktova – fanned the flames. As Zelensky was elected to fight corruption, his Servant of the People party fared poorly in the October local elections. The party’s once-impressive majority in the national parliament seems certain to disintegrate. Smelling blood in the water, judges on the Constitutional Court have thrown out every vestige of reform they can find.[...]

The crisis partly results from the efforts that Ukrainian oligarchs and other anti-reform forces have made to rebuild their influence in the judiciary in 2019 and 2020. When Poroshenko was president, they were largely on the defensive, intent on resisting legal reforms at every stage. Zelensky’s first chief prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, initially led a campaign against such resistance. He was not prepared to selectively prosecute leading figures of the Poroshenko era or the enemies of the oligarchs who backed Zelensky. In contrast, Venediktova appears to have shot the messenger – by harassing and laying charges against reformers, including Ryaboshapka.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: The slow dismantling of the Belarusian state

 The first and most visible parts of the intervention were in the media. The Belarusian regime not only replaced striking Belarusian state media personnel with Russian teams but also adopted the Kremlin’s style in its overall communications effort: depicting the protesters as foreign-orchestrated agents of a “colour revolution”, and promoting the idea of a border conflict with Lithuania. State media outlets broadcast stories that bore little resemblance to the reality on the ground, and that citizens could easily disprove. The amateurish ‘copy and paste’ techniques Russian media operatives used to spin the situation only reflected the prejudices of many Russians audience on Belarus. The protesters have increasingly responded by mocking Russia and its political leadership. In parallel, Russia will help Belarus refinance some of its debt. [...]

The third remarkable change in Belarus concerns domestic security. By calling on the police and the (Belarusian) KGB to restore order on 19 August, Lukashenka initiated a second crackdown that followed a completely different playbook than the first. Instead of engaging in random violence and repression, the security forces targeted the leaders of the demonstrations on 22-23 August and the following weekend. This crackdown struck at the political representation of the protest movement: members of the transition council and strike committee leaders. Without leaders, the regime reasons, the protests will lose steam sooner or later. The fact that the Russia Federal Security Service has closely consulted its Belarusian counterparts suggests that Moscow is, in fact, directing these targeted operations. And, when Lukashenka appeared to congratulate the riot police for handling street protests on 23 August, he was accompanied by bodyguards from an unknown security service who were carrying Russia’s new service rifle, the AK-12. As the rifle has not been introduced into any branch of the Belarusian security services, Lukashenka may well be receiving personal protection from Russia. [...]

Beyond the current crisis, the dismantling of the Belarusian state will have profound long-term consequences in the region. Before the 2020 election, Lukashenka preserved a minimal degree of independence from Moscow by refusing to recognise the annexation of Crimea or to allow Belarus to become a springboard for Russian military interventions. He will no longer have this freedom, and will have to accept new Russian military bases and deployments on Belarusian territory. Accordingly, Ukraine will have an even longer border with territory in which Russian forces can manoeuvre, leaving the country more vulnerable. The shift will alter the regional balance of power on NATO’s eastern flank to the detriment of the alliance. Europe must now prepare for all these changes.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: Poland in the EU: How to lose friends and alienate people

 This year, when Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, was the first to call for an extraordinary EU summit to discuss the EU’s reaction to violent events in Belarus, his words did not generate an immediately positive reaction from other capitals. An extraordinary Foreign Affairs Council is eventually taking place today – but credit should also go to Lithuania, Germany, and Sweden. It is not just the result of successful diplomatic efforts on the part of Warsaw, even if the Polish foreign ministry has sought to present it this way for its domestic audience. If any capital is currently leading on the EU’s reaction to events in Belarus, it is not Poland but the much smaller Lithuania – which merits a separate story about how to punch above one’s weight. [...]

The Law and Justice party formed a government in 2015 with a lofty promise to lift Poland’s foreign policy from its knees. Since then, however, the country’s standing in the EU has hardly improved even a bit. If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction. The Coalition Explorer survey of policy professionals reveals that collectively they regard Poland as the second most disappointing country in the bloc, after Hungary. It is also among three countries (alongside Italy and Spain) that are most often seen as punching below their weight in EU politics. [...]

However, as usual, the devil lies in the detail. Apart from a limited group of the EU’s eastern member states (Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria; half of them Polish neighbours), rarely does anyone consider Poland as having the same longer-standing interests on EU policy; and only some of these countries (plus Germany) include Poland on the list of their most contacted partners. This clashes with Warsaw’s ambition to play the role of one of the EU’s post-Brexit ‘Big Five’, alongside Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. [...]

Most notably, the United Kingdom used to be the key western EU member that considered that Poland shared similar interests with it. This translated into strong contacts between the two capitals. Now this alliance has been moved outside the EU framework and, as a result, nowhere in the EU’s western part do policy professionals consider Poland as sharing interests with their country. Germany is the only pre-2004 EU member where Poland is among the most contacted partners – but Poland ranks only fifth, after France, Netherlands, Austria, and Spain (with which Germany does not even have the border). Relations between Warsaw and Berlin are far from perfect, to say the least, largely upon Poland’s own wish.

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European Council on Foreign Relations: Rise and fall of populism

Not so long ago, 2017 was set to become the annus mirabilis in European politics, a year in which the liberal establishment in key EU countries would be blown away, opening up space for their populist competitors. Representatives of the illiberal tide who had already taken power, such as Kaczynski in Poland or Orban in Hungary, saw themselves as the avant-garde of a new European mainstream. The Polish national-conservatives (PiS) were so certain that the zeitgeist was in their favour that they declared the Eurosceptic United Kingdom to be their key ally in the EU (instead of Germany). PiS strongly believed that the Polish-British idea of less Europe and more power for the capitals was destined to gather momentum. But that prediction proved to be wrong. Instead, the history books will mark 2017 as a moment in which Europe could take a breath, with special thanks to Emmanuel Macron and his German counterpart (whomever it will be). It is now safe to predict that upcoming changes in the architecture of the EU will follow a different script than that advocated by Kaczynski, Orban or (in the past) Cameron. [...]

There are multiple studies, including one by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, which confirm this new pattern in Western politics. The classical division of the left and right, defined by the attitude of voters to economic and social issues (the role of the state in the economy, the scale of redistribution) has lost its dominance. A new conflict has begun to polarise Western societies, one centred on cultural values: attitudes towards the so-called others in terms of race, community and globalisation. It is precisely these “combined with social and demographic factors [that] provide the most consistent and parsimonious explanation of voting support for populist parties”, Inglehart and Norris wrote. While some people view globalisation, immigration and cultural/religious pluralism as something either neutral or positive (if requiring some modification), others reject these phenomena as being in conflict with national interests and traditional values or undermining their identity. The divide between these two approaches largely defines the very strong cultural subtext of modern politics. [...]

There is no silver bullet for liberals attempting to hold their ground. It will take time until they fully adapt to the new circumstances and grasp the magnitude of the challenge posed to them by identity politics. As things stand, however, resistance against the proponents of nativism and illiberalism will not succeed unless liberals rethink at least three key components of their political agenda. First, the populist appeal benefits from people’s need for community and belonging. Liberals are not good at thinking in terms of community. They tend instead to underline the values of individualism and diversity. But the ideas of common good, social cohesion and unity are not at odds with liberal fundamentals. In fact, the opposite is true. Liberals have simply ignored the importance of these concepts and left their definition to the right or, most recently, to populists. The rise of the nationalconservatives in Poland would not have been possible without liberals having fully abandoned the issues of history, national identity and culture as non-political. In the era of identity politics, this approach is a recipe for failure. Politics has become (highly) emotional again, and to win the game one needs to find ways not to let the opponents monopolise the discourse about identity and culture. A new liberal narrative must therefore take the value of community seriously, but shape it in line with its own principles.

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