14 April 2016
That Other EU Referendum
Perhaps it should have been about Ukraine, after all.
by Neil Tidmarsh
This week, voters in the Netherlands rejected the EU’s trade and security treaty with the Ukraine. The result has been presented and received largely as a protest vote against the EU rather than against Ukraine. This has unfortunately over-shadowed its nominal issue: the Ukraine and what has been happening there in the two years since that EU treaty was drawn up. And this is an issue worth considering, particularly as this week also saw the resignation of Ukraine’s controversial prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
The referendum in the Netherlands was triggered by an on-line petition organised by Dutch Eurosceptics which gathered 430,000 signatures, enough to invoke the country’s new referendum law. The referendum rejected the treaty by 61.1% to 38.2% of the vote. Turnout was low – 32.2% – but just high enough (the minimum is 30%) to be constitutionally valid. Bad weather, fewer than usual polling stations and the complexity of the treaty (few people could have read its 2000-plus pages) have all been blamed for the low turn out. But it has been hailed by Dutch Eurosceptics, still smarting from Brussel’s reaction to the last referendum, in 2005, when Dutch voters rejected the proposed EU Constitution only to see it passed anyway by EU heads of state as a treaty (the Lisbon Treaty) with few changes. Every EU country had been promised a referendum about the Constitution, but after the Dutch result that promise was quietly and shamefully dropped. Those Dutch voters protesting about the EU’s democratic deficit were no doubt also aware that their referendum result is unlikely to have any effect on the EU; the treaty is supposed to be ratified by all 28 member states, but it has provisionally entered into force anyway.
But is it possible that at least some citizens of the Netherlands took a look at Ukraine and the effect this treaty has had on it, and decided to vote against it in the light of what they saw?
The EU drew up the trade and security Association Treaty with Ukraine in late 2013, hoping that it would encourage this unstable and corrupt Russian satellite on its eastern borders to evolve into a reassuringly modern, stable, liberal democracy, observing the rule of law and the sovereignty of parliament. So what effect has this had on Ukraine? What has been happening there in the past two years?
First and foremost, of course, is the collapse of the pro-Kremlin government in late 2013, as a direct consequence of this alliance with the EU, and the terrible civil war which was a direct consequence of that collapse. Many Ukrainians, it seems, prefer Russia to the EU, and are prepared to see the country bloodily partitioned as a result. The war rumbles on, in spite of the Minsk agreement and both Kiev’s and Moscow’s attempts to reign in the maverick extremists on both sides.
There is little sign of the country becoming more liberal: last summer, a gay pride march in Kiev was attacked by a masked gang throwing stones, flares, smoke grenades and teargas grenades; and last November, parliament rejected a gay rights bill (without laws banning discrimination and guaranteeing equal rights, Ukraine cannot be considered for EU membership). Last September, violent protests broke out against parliamentary votes to devolve power to break-away rebel regions; three policemen were killed and over 100 people injured. Last April, a former member of parliament, Oleg Kalashnikov, and a journalist, Oles Buzyna, were murdered in Kiev. They were shot dead in separate but almost simultaneous attacks. Both were known for their anti-government views. Last month, the lawyer for a Russian soldier captured in Ukraine and on trial in Kiev for terrorism, was kidnapped and murdered.
Efforts to combat widespread corruption have come up against immovable obstacles and vested interests. In an anti-corruption operation last June, security services raided the homes of a deputy chief of the investigations arm of the general prosecutor’s office and a deputy prosecutor for the Kiev region; they found diamonds, a Kalashnikov rifle and $400,000 dollars in cash. Last November, a leader of the anti-corruption campaign, the state prosecutor Viktor Shokin, survived a murder attempt when bullets fired by a sniper using a thermal imaging rifle hit bullet-proof glass.
Since last December, prosecutors have been examining allegations that Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk himself is involved in corruption at the state-owned Odessa Port Plant. He has also been accused of abusing his position by furthering the business interests of oligarchs such as Ihor Kolomoisky, the billionaire ex-governor of Dnipropetrovsk region. Soon after these accusations, a fight broke out in the parliament in Kiev when an MP tried to remove the prime minister from the rostrum while he was making a speech about the country’s economy. A few months later, the Western-backed and trusted finance minister Aivaras Abromavicius resigned, claiming that corruption in government made his job impossible. And soon after that, the deputy prosecutor-general Vitaliy Kasko also resigned, accusing the government of failing to reform the country or to tackle corruption. The government narrowly survived a subsequent vote of no confidence; nevertheless, thousands of demonstrators rallied in Kiev to demand its resignation.
This week, at last, prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk did indeed resign. It looks like a victory for President Poroshenko; the two of them have been engaged in a long-running feud. Whether it will prove to be a victory for Ukraine remains in doubt. Europe and the USA were hoping that the finance minister Natalie Jaresko – who is from Chicago and holds joint Ukraine and US citizenship and was a US state department official – would be appointed as head of a new coalition government. She was offered the position by President Poroshenko and prime minister Yatsenyuk before his resignation, but they withdrew their offer when she made it clear that she would appoint only technocrats in order to create a government without party politics, cronyism or the influence of oligarchs. Now it seems that the president will appoint his own man, the parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Groysman as the new prime minister. Groysman is a former mayor of the small city of Vinnytsia, but commentators claim his loyalty to the president trumps his political inexperience.
On top of this political turmoil, Ukraine faces great financial problems (the IMF is withholding billions of pounds of credit which have been reserved for this cash-strapped country), energy problems (last December, Ukraine’s supply of oil from Russia was cut off by Gazprom, the Russian state energy company; Russia accuses the Ukraine of failing to pay in advance; Ukraine has legal claims against Russia for allegedly over-pricing supplies; Russia is also threatening to halt coal supplies) and health problems (an epidemic of H1N1 swine flu is spreading across the country and has already killed at least 72 people and possibly as many as 400).
President Poroshenko has shrugged off the Dutch referendum result. “We will continue our movement towards the European Union” he said, insisting that it will not prevent the association treaty from being implemented. But there are few pro-Western reformers left in the government; most have resigned or been kicked out over the last two years.
And the EU finds itself facing a dilemma of its own making. The treaty has come into force, however provisionally, without the necessary ratification from all member states, a ratification which now might never happen. What is the EU going to do? Override the democratic wishes of a member state? Or tear up the treaty and renege on its obligations to an embattled Ukraine?
It’s all a bit of a mess. I suppose we should simply be grateful that the EU does not yet have an armed force (thanks to the first Dutch referendum, back in 2005, that clause at least was dropped from the Constitution when it shamefully morphed into the Treaty of Lisbon). If it did, it would almost inevitably have been drawn into the armed conflict in Ukraine, triggered as it was by that well-intentioned but reckless Association Treaty. That at least is one mess – or should we say one hell of a mess – which the EU has so far managed to avoid.
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