Groucho Marx once famously quipped that he did not want to join any club that would have him as a member. But in today's European Union, Groucho need not apply. The Union now does not want to accept anybody who applies for membership, because the countries queuing up to join are too big or too poor, or both.
On May 1, the EU formally admits ten new members, eight from central Europe. All are far poorer than the EU average. Bulgaria, Romania, and possibly Croatia are supposed to join in 2007. By the end of this year, the EU is to decide whether to open membership talks with Turkey - a country that is not only poor and big, but Muslim. If the EU is to talk about membership with Turkey, there is no legitimate reason for keeping out my country, Ukraine?
Current EU thinking, however, holds that Ukraine should be placed in the same framework as countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The EU's "Wider Europe" strategy does call for closer ties to Ukraine, and for allowing us increased access to the EU's "single market." But it does not view Ukraine as a candidate for EU membership, at least not in the foreseeable future.
One reason for this is that the EU does not want to pick a fight with Russia, which still sees us as its close ally, natural business partner, and as members of an enlarging Russian-led economic zone. Indeed, last week Ukraine's parliament ratified a treaty creating "a single economic space" with Russia. But this supposed free-trade zone seems more like a recipe to enrich oligarchs and stifle competition, not promote trade.
Of course, Russia won't look on happily if the EU tries to lure Ukraine. But membership in the EU does not mean estrangement from Russia. Besides, excluding Ukraine from eventual EU membership will encourage Russia's imperial ambitions. This will diminish Russia's chances of ever becoming a full democracy, for it can rule an empire only as a militarized state.
It is the mark of a good club that people clamor to become members. An ever-larger EU including Ukraine would create a political unit with a huge population, furthering the Union's ambitions to be a global power. As the latest round of enlargement proves, the EU is very effective at molding the governance and behavior of would-be members. Preparations for EU entry strongly motivated the eight former communist Central European states to entrench or restore democratic institutions and market economies.
The further Europe export its laws and values, the more it expands a zone committed to peaceful, democratic, and prosperous co-existence. A country equipped to join the EU is a country equipped to make its way in the world peacefully, if it chooses to do so. Europe needs such countries on its border.
So far, the Union's actions have achieved the opposite. For example, three years ago Ukrainians crossed the border with Poland six million times. Most were small traders buying goods for resale at home, boosting the economy of eastern Poland, the poorest part of that country. Others worked cheaply in Poland as cleaners and building workers.
As a step towards imposing EU border controls and visa rules, Poland began demanding visas from its neighbors. Crossings at Polish border stations quickly fell by over two thirds. Thus the new EU border with Ukraine is making its presence felt in the most negative way imaginable - by hurting business on both sides of the border.
In the EU, only Poland seems to want Ukraine as a prosperous, stable, and accessible neighbor, not as a poor and rickety one with a dodgy democracy and even dodgier nuclear power stations. Poland worries that the more Ukraine is shut off from the Union, the more it will fall behind, economically and politically.
But today's other EU members view the prospect of an ever-expanding Union to include Ukraine with fatalism and dread, for several reasons. The first, inevitably, is money. The EU redistributes billions of euros from rich to poor members: more poor members mean more claimants on that purse.
A second is immigration. One of the Union's fundamental principles is that there should be freedom to move from one member country to another. But anti-immigration parties are gaining ground across western Europe; they could make huge political capital out of potential Ukrainian membership. There is also a feeling that a larger EU might simply be unable to function.
Manufacturing plausible-sounding objections to Ukrainian membership is easy. We are not really European, we are too poor, we are too different. But the Union has consistently rejected the idea of insisting on a minimum income level for members. Its only serious economic demand - rightly so - is that members should have a "functioning market economy." As for whether we are European, I submit that Balzac would never have asked that question during the years he lived here.
Where Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus rub up against one another, an economic fault line is forming. What the EU does now to bridge this fault line will determine whether these countries westernize or stagnate. The dream of a Europe free and whole, from the Atlantic to the Urals, remains to be completed.
