Une parole franche

Medvedev’s Draft Treaty on European Security: Dead on Arrival

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

 

Readers of this blog may be forgiven for not having known that on Sunday, November 29, the website of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev www.kremlin.ru posted on its home page a draft Treaty on European Security and that Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is officially submitting this document to the Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) being held in Athens today. The fact is that both the publication of this document and the venue for its presentation have been largely ignored by mainstream media, and when mentioned have not been subjected to analysis. They almost passed without comment within Russia itself – one exception being the typically vigilant daily Kommersant, which briefly examined the text in a report filed yesterday entitled “Security Without Borders.”

 

The draft treaty is the end result of an initiative announced shortly after Dmitry Medvedev took office. In a speech delivered in Berlin in June 2008, he called for a comprehensive new security structure for Europe to be put in place. At the time, commentators in the United States and Western Europe expressed skepticism over the idea. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was among the first to cold-shoulder the proposal, saying that Europe’s security arrangements had already taken concrete form. People asked where were the specifics. Many expressed concern that the proposed treaty might take the form of a new Helsinki Final Act of 1975. Still other Western Russia-watchers proposed to play along with Medvedev in this initiative which they did not expect would amount to much and could ultimately embarrass its authors,

 

It should be remembered that the Helsinki Accords were the embodiment of détente in the Cold War. They successfully reduced geopolitical tensions in the Old Continent through the recognition by all participants of the post-WWII borders. On the positive side, the Helsinki Accords set the groundwork for institutionalized monitoring and reporting on respect for human rights in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries. On the negative balance, it consolidated Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Very much to the point in the proceedings going on today in Athens, the Helsinki Accords provided the groundwork for the creation of the OSCE, where Medvedev’s document is being submitted for review.

 

Though it usually distances itself from the Kremlin, in this instance Kommersant was very generous to the Russian leadership, treating the draft text deferentially and explaining various of its formal provisions. It omitted saying the obvious: that the Russian draft treaty on European security is all form and no content. What intent there may be in promoting it is nowhere to be seen in either the large or small print. As a monument to “wooden language” it goes even further in recreating Soviet diplomacy than the remarkably hollow U.S. strategic partnership agreements with Ukraine and Georgia concluded in the closing days of the Bush Administration, in December 2008 – January 2009. So what is going on now?

 

The draft agreement is first of all a non-aggression pact among and between all interested states in the Atlantic-Eurasian space. To come into force it must be signed and ratified by a minimum of 25 states. It establishes a framework of deliberative meetings in which all Member States will hear cases of the threat of use of force or the actual use of force against any Member State, in which decisions will be taken by unanimity and the voice of the state in question determined to be in violation of the treaty will not be counted.

 

However, non-aggression is merely window dressing, identifying something which everyone can understand and say ‘amen’ to. It is in fact superfluous since the preamble of the draft treaty states that the treaty builds upon the Charter of the United Nations and other conventions which already outlaw the threat of force or the use of force against states and provide venues for conflict resolution.

 

The second stated objective of the document is to ensure the collective security of its members under the principle that no state or group of states may promote its (their) security at the expense of other Member States.

 

This notion has been a leitmotiv of the Medvedev presidency. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has repeated it at every imaginable forum, usually when protesting U.S. plans to expand NATO membership to Russia’s borders and the U.S. scheme for establishing an anti-missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland, which Russia considers a threat to its national security.

 

What is missing from the draft treaty on European security is precisely the definition of what constitutes enhancing one’s security at the expense of another. Absent such definition, one may assume that it will be whatever the plaintiff party deems it to be. In this case, the entire sense of the proposed treaty is to create a large forum embracing most of the northern hemisphere where Russia might present its grievances on the aforementioned and other actions by NATO countries which it believes detrimental to its interests.

 

The document itself does not draw borders or define a Russian sphere of influence, as Russophobes will probably claim with reference to Helsinki once the public debate over it begins. It does not set in concrete the existing status quo in Eurasia. At most it establishes a generally recognized venue where Russian objections to intended NATO encroachments on the status quo could be discussed openly

 

Because of the very emptiness of the draft treaty, it is hard to see how or why Member States of the OSCE would want to present it to their general public and legislatures for ratification.

 

At the same time, the very objective which we discern in the Medvedev initiative has already been addressed by NATO Secretary General Rasmussen during his maiden public address in Brussels on September 18. In that speech, Rasmussen proposed to rejuvenate the NATO-Russia Council as a talking forum so that Russian concerns on the Euro-Atlantic security architecture would be taken into account in NATO deliberations. That is probably the most which Russia can hope to achieve in this matter in the immediate future.It does not require getting dozens of additional states to approve a new and starkly empty treaty.

 

Otherwise, the Russians could take up the idea put forward by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his article “An agenda for NATO” in the September-October 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, namely pushing for a pact between NATO and the Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) while trimming away the condition stipulated by Brzezinski whereby states could choose freely to join either or both alliances.

 

Of course, if the Russians genuinely want to put the Cold War behind them and us, they would be better advised to re-open back-channel discussions over being admitted to NATO. We have raised this issue in previous blog articles. We have heard back from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that it is still the official policy of Russian diplomacy not to consider membership. They argue that until NATO completes its own re-definition of its mission and structure, which is presently under way, any change in the Russian position on membership would be premature. I humbly beg to differ.

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow 2009