Transitions Online: "The gum in GUAM"

The former Soviet Union has given birth to many groupings. There is the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and, recently, the Single Economic Area (SEA). And in its southern and western edges, there is GUAM and the Black Sea Economic Cooperation group (BSEC).

One seems moribund (the CIS), another seems badly stunted (the BSEC). One is new but still in the formative stage (SEA), but it does at least have brighter prospects than the CIS from which it emerged. Another – the SCO – putting on a late growth spurt, is gaining in numbers (Iran may soon become a member, and Belarus an observer), but its significance is only now emerging. Another Russian-backed grouping with a similar security mandate, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, effectively split in 1999, increasingly being eclipsed by the SCO. And a regional organization that started as a sub-group of the CSTO but then budded off continues to mutate: In 1997 Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova formed GUAM, which was duly transformed into GUUAM in 1999 by the addition of Uzbekistan. It then returned to being just GUAM last year, when Uzbekistan left; this week, GUAM mutated again, to become ODED-GUAM.

Give ODED-GUAM its full name – Organization for Democracy and Economic Development-GUAM – and it seems that its members believe democracy may unite them better than the historical, economic, and security ties that were supposed to underpin the other organizations. But to mention Azerbaijan in a club of democracies should stick in most people's craw.

That would suggest that internal contradictions doom ODED-GUAM to the fate of practical irrelevance that beset its earlier mutations and that have largely hamstrung the other organizations spawned after the demise of the Soviet Union. But that may be too bleak an outlook.

There may be something that will give the new organization some sticking power. It is something more immediate, tangible, fungible than democracy – oil and gas. The energy rationale of the new grouping was put very clearly by Ukraine's president. "Azerbaijan has unique oil producing capabilities, while Ukraine has unique oil transit facilities. Why don't we unite them?" said Viktor Yushchenko. The idea is that Azeri oil and gas could perhaps travel not just through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline currently under construction, but branch northwards through the pipeline that leads from the Ukrainian port of Odessa to the Polish border via Brody and – with EU support – possibly onward to the Baltic Sea port of Gdansk.

Whether this will happen is an entirely different matter, since most of Azerbaijan's oil seems to have already been contracted to travel through the BTC pipeline to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

So, paradoxically, if the 'energy factor' is to be the decisive feature of ODED-GUAM (as Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliev expressly hopes), the decisive player may not actually be a member of the grouping. For if little or no Azeri oil flows through the Odessa-Brody pipeline, the energy hopes of the group lie with Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan should certainly have plenty of oil: production is expected to triple between 2004 and 2015. But would Kazakhstan send its oil to Azerbaijan, to be forwarded through the BTC pipeline and possibly along the Odessa-Brody route? The important relationship here is Kazakhstan's with Russia. On recent evidence, Russia may well convince Kazakhstan to do as it wishes. At a recent meeting – on 20 May, in Sochi – Russia and Kazakhstan appeared to agree in principle to a number of new energy deals. This came a day after Kazakhstan changed its stance on the possibility of a gas pipeline along the bed of the Caspian Sea, bringing Kazakhstan into line with the position of Russia and Iran, two of the sea's five littoral states.

That could still change. Certainly, that is the hope of the United States and the European Union, which dispatched senior officials – Vice-President Dick Cheney and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso – on recent, separate trips.

Ultimately, that may depend how Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, decides to balance his country's interests. The big Western energy companies have huge investments in Kazakhstan and would prefer not to be restricted to sending oil west via Russia. Nazarbaev will presumably bear that in mind – but if he is too considerate to Western interests, there may be a price to pay. One of the costs could be the future of SEA, envisaged as a means of improving the economic prospects of its members, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

If Kazakhstan were to decide to go with Russia and send almost all its westward-bound oil to Novorossiysk in Russia rather than to Azerbaijan for onward dispatch, what would remain of ODED-GUAM? Would it become, as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk described the CIS, a 'useless' and 'unresponsive', "not a normal international organization"? And would there be anything to regret if it were to collapse?

In large part, that depends on the members themselves. There are other pillars to ODED-GUAM other than oil and a general wariness of Russia. One is democracy. But that looks unlikely to be a very strong pillar, in part because of the difficult birth of more democratic systems (in one example, Ukraine's parliament opened this week two months after parliamentary elections but still the country has no government) and in part because of the membership of Azerbaijan. The best that can probably be hoped for is that the GUAM presidents will lobby Ilham Aliev to improve his act.

A more promising pillar is the notion of a free-trade zone promoted by Yushchenko. This would essentially be a form of self-help. These countries need it: Russia currently excludes or imposes major restrictions on products from Georgia (wine, mineral water, and a large number of agricultural products), Moldova (wine), and Ukraine (meat and dairy products), and the EU is very diffident about opening up its markets (for example, to wine from Moldova, one of Europe's neediest countries and a steady source of illegal immigrants). The solidarity of self-help was already on show last week, with billboards in Kyiv urging Ukrainians to buy Georgian wine (the 'wine of liberty') and with events organized by the Ukrainian authorities to promote their partners' wine. If these four countries can liberalize their markets, they could ultimately make ODED-GUAM a more attractive grouping than the BSEC and, as Yushchenko hopes, convince Romania and Bulgaria to join. That would help the region and advance Moldova's and Ukraine's cases for EU membership.

But these countries and GUAM need some external help. The EU is in a position to offer it.

It should, partly out of self-interest. One of those interests was demonstrated this week in Sochi, when the EU's head honchos (the European Commission president, the current holder of the EU presidency, and the EU's foreign policy chief) met with Putin in a bid to improve relations with Russia, particularly with an eye to energy security. They should not be comforted by the telling metaphor that Putin found for the nature of Russia's relationship with the EU. "It's very easy to understand" Russia's position, he said "if you recall our childhood. You go out into the courtyard with some candy. You're told: 'Give us some candy.' And, with your hands clammy, you say: 'And what will you give me?' We want to know: what will they give us?" The simple answer to that is, of course, is “money,” which is exactly what the EU offers. But that is not what Europe and Russia are really discussing: Europe essentially wants to know that money will bring the certainty of delivery, while Russia wants to buy downstream energy infrastructure in Europe. Putin's search for a quid pro quo ("what will you give us for certainty?") merely feeds the uncertainty. If GUAM can help diversify Europe's risks, so much the better.

But it is also in Europe's political interests to help GUAM. If these countries can, by working together, improve their democratic credentials, and become more stable and prosperous, so much the better. If they can, as they want, turn this into part of a broader Black Sea–Baltic Sea axis of democracies (under a "Community for Democratic Choice," as outlined last August), so much the better.

For any of this to happen, these countries need to adopt an agenda for change similar to the EU's criteria for accession. The onus is on them. But they should not be left to do so by themselves. Europe needs to do more. These are countries that have gone out on a limb to open up their systems and lead them westward. Russia has shown quite clearly that it is prepared to cut that limb off.

Some sign of solidarity is needed. In the two and a half years since Moldova turned west, and in the year and a half since Ukraine's Orange Revolution, the EU has proven incapable of finding a policy for these countries that would show more than symbolic support. Instead, Ukraine and Moldova languish in a basket known as the EU's Neighborhood Policy alongside North African states with no ambitions of EU membership, a policy that offers very little encouragement from the EU to take the domestic politic risks entailed in reforming their systems. The EU needs s a special policy for these countries. Seemingly incapable of formulating a policy response to a historic moment, the EU should at least embrace ODED-GUAM and reward advances it makes. ODED-GUAM is no substitute for a better neighborhood policy, but it offers a bandage to cover over the EU's inability.

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