On Thursday, 47 heads of state and government met at Mimi Castle, a winery southeast of the Moldovan capital Chisinau, for what promises to be an exciting day for Moldova, the second the poorest country in Europe and one of the most recent recipients of the EU. candidate status. The second European Political Community (EPC) summit since its establishment last year presented one of the biggest logistical challenges encountered by the small country linked to Romania and Ukraine.
All the political problems facing the leaders since 2022 converge in Moldova, whose government is worried about becoming the next target of Moscow’s aggression if Russia prevails in Ukraine. A pro-Russian region —Transnistria — declared its independence from Moldova in 1992, and has been occupied by Russian “peacekeeping” troops ever since. Ukraine – one day.
United vs. Russia
These are the exact topics on the agenda: Russia’s war in Ukraine, EU enlargement, and intensified cooperation between all European countries except Russia and its close ally Belarus.
Since the founding summit in Prague in October, participating members have said the new format is useful. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz considers it an “innovation” and at the Council of Europe summit in Iceland in May, he praised it as a well-designed forum that allows exchange without pressure to perform. in any formal paper decisions. Speaking in Prague, French President Emmanuel Macron, who introduced and implemented the format, even expected it to be an instrument to prevent civil war, which he described as “the childhood disease of Europe.”
There is no alternative to EU membership
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama warned that the EPC would not become another waiting room for EU candidates and stressed that the accession talks should continue regardless. Negotiations are currently underway with Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia, while Bosnia-Herzegovina is a candidate for accession talks. Kosovo and Georgia are only potential candidates.
As part of his keynote statement to the European Parliament in early May, Chancellor Scholz said he wants to speed up the EU accession process but for this to be possible the bloc itself needs urgent reforms.
Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan have also been invited to attend the summit in Moldova and will bring their own set of tensions. Warring Caucasian neighbors Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet after recent talks in Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin has long kept a lid on the decades-old Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, buoyed by his recent reelection, is expected to voice criticism of the EU, while still insisting on Turkey being a candidate for membership.
For their part, Serbia and Kosovo are fighting over the status of the ethnic Serbian minority in North Kosovo. Meanwhile, Britain, the only former member of the EU, is still trying to find its post-Brexit footing.
The “million-dollar question”
The few hours Mimi Castle leaders have is not enough to come up with real solutions for the many problems facing Europe. But maybe they are enough to gather new ideas. What else is good for the new “debating society,” as critics of the EPC call it? After all, European leaders just met two weeks ago at the summit of the Council of Europe in Iceland, where they talked about the war with Russia. EPC is better?
“I think that’s the million-dollar question,” said Amanda Paul, senior policy analyst at the Brussels-based think tank European Policy Center. “If you ask the participating countries, they are still scratching their heads.”
He said that for non-EU heads of state and government, this forum is a good opportunity to meet in person and discuss problems. “There should be something more of substance coming out of Chisinau than in the case of Prague,” he told DW, such as “an objective or a clear road map of what the EPC, or EPoC, wants , which can be achieved in the short, medium, and long term. In terms of security, it is a good platform, which unites EU members and non-EU members.
Next meeting in Spain
The EPC made a decision at its first summit in Prague: The third meeting will be held in Spain in October, and the fourth in Britain next year. The EPC does not have any formal structure, using that of the General Secretariat of the Council in Brussels. It already has its own Twitter and Facebook accounts but it does not yet have its own website.
President Macron’s vision for the EPC is not new. In 1989, his predecessor, Francois Mitterand, proposed a similar community in response to political unrest in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But his idea quickly failed because he wanted to integrate Russia, so eastern Europe politely declined the offer.
This article was translated from German.
