Pippidi, Alina Mungiu

Policy Documentation Center

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
There are important advantages of regional 
initiatives seen in the previous attempts to 
create a region out of the countries around 
the Black Sea. Among the most important we 
usually outline: 
• The ability to focus more Western 
attention if a group of countries of low 
interest are packed into one region whose 
profile is raised by an awareness 
campaign. 
• The simplification of resource mobilization 
if one framework is offered instead of 
many. This was the logic behind the 
Balkan Stability Pact. 
• The easier spread of best practices from 
the most developed part of the region to 
the less developed.  
However, not every group of countries come 
together to form regions with equal ease. 
Also, not every region constructed on policy 
grounds has met with success in recent years. 
The Baltic countries were greatly helped by a 
regional approach because they could cluster 
together, sharing a similar political vision of 
their future, and they could rely on their very 
developed fellow countries in the 
Scandinavian Peninsula. The Balkans would 
have evolved similarly with or without the 
Stability Pact. The Pact’s fundamental mission, 
to bring the region closer to Europe, remains 
largely unfulfilled to this day. Regional 
approaches can stumble over important 
difficulties, such as: 
SAR POLICY BRIEF No. 20 
 
 
On the occasion of the Black Sea Forum, 
opening this week in Bucharest, Romania, 
Alina Mungiu Pippidi ponders the 
chances of such regional initiatives 
 
BLACK SEA 
DILEMMAS 
 
 
 
 
Can the creation of a Black 
Sea ‘Region’ help push 
democracy, development 
and europeanization to the 
East? The Black Sea 
Forum, held this week in 
Bucharest, invites reflection 
on the opportunities and 
challenges of the attempt 
to gather the countries 
surrounding the Black Sea 
in one region, encouraging 
them to speak with one 
political voice. This brief 
reviews the dilemmas 
raised by this approach.  
 
        June 2006 
Alina Mungiu Pippidi 
 
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• The risk of selling one product with 
multiple copyright owners. Regions tend 
to have promoters, within the expert and 
donor community, as well as among 
policymakers. They tend to ‘sell’ a thing 
that they do not control, and worse, 
which does not exist as a coherent 
whole. If a virtual buyer is found, the 
‘copyright’ problem immediately 
becomes apparent in the lack of 
cohesiveness and coordination within the 
‘region’, especially when specific projects 
are put forward.  
• Regions risk reducing action to the 
lowest possible denominator, as the 
promoters struggle for consensus, 
necessary for the single voice. 
• Regions risk demobilizing the more 
advanced without mobilizing the 
laggards if no clear carrots exist for 
them.  
In the cases of the Balkans and the Black 
Sea, the incentive for the countries lured 
into the region was an eventual accession to 
the European Union. If we review the 
process to date, however, the only countries 
well on the way to join are Romania and 
Bulgaria, and chances are they would have 
joined anyway. In other words, the carrot is 
perceived as largely an illusion, a chimera 
without real transformative potential. There 
are no guarantees that behaving 
cooperatively a country will advance faster 
than if it takes the old bilateral approach. If 
anything, the Balkan experience seems to 
validate the latter route, not the former. 
Comparing the Black Sea with the Balkans or 
the Baltics, one realizes the immense 
challenge that this region poses. The Black 
Sea countries are less developed than the 
Balkans, despite economic growth surfacing 
recently in some of the countries. There are 
large disparities, from population to 
democracy among countries (Fig. 1). 
Although we have witnessed recently 
encouraging ‘electoral revolutions’  in 
Ukraine and Georgia, other countries in the 
region stagnate. State capture remains high. 
The trend of the Freedom House's Nations in 
Transit score is negative; in the Balkans the 
same indicator has a positive dynamics   
(Fig. 2). Even with the recent developments 
included, the region itself is still not 
performing at the level of the Balkans. Its 
most democratic member has an inferior 
score to the least democratic country in the 
Balkans.  
 
Fig. 1. The population of the Black Sea 
countries. 
Country Population
Bulgaria 7,450,349
Romania 22,329,977
Moldova 4,455,421
Ukraine 47,425,336
Russia 143,420,309
Georgia 4,677,401
Azerbaijan 7,911,974
Armenia 2,982,904
Turkey 69,660,559
 
The challenges are therefore important, 
qualitatively similar to those in the Balkans, 
but even more difficult, due to the proximity 
of important political actors, such as Russia, 
with an occasional discourse on the legitimacy 
of its domination of its near abroad. These 
challenges can be summarized as: 
• Nation building: frozen conflicts in 
Moldova, Georgia, Armenia-Azerbaijan, as 
well as minority problems in Ukraine and 
North Caucasus.  
• State building. These states rank high on 
World Bank’s state capture survey, and 
their politics, despite the recent 
revolutions, have yet to produce a 
balanced political system as a first step 
towards a permanent solution to the state 
capture problem. 
• Society building. Black Sea countries have 
small democratic and European 
constituencies, far smaller than the 
Eastern Balkans. What they have in 
common with Eastern Balkan countries are 
large proportions of dependent 
populations. Due to the lack of economic 
reform many people rely on state aid to 
survive. 
SAR POLICY BRIEF No. 20 
 
 
 3
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The first solution to the regional problems is 
regional cooperation with a view to a future 
integration of the region. This is easier said 
than done, however, as various logics 
conflict on ground. We shall phrase this as 
the ‘Security Dilemma’: the regional 
cooperation logic would mean to multiply 
contacts, open new border crossings, 
facilitate exchanges and trade. However, the 
European security logic implies securing 
borders and hindering circulation. One must 
be exceptionally naïve to imagine that these 
two logics can coexist, or some miraculous 
solution exists to do both in the same time. 
The Balkan experience shows that the logic 
of sealing the borders is far stronger for EU’s 
vital interests than the logic of regional 
cooperation. The small economies of 
Macedonia or Albania, crippled with 
unemployment, would have received a 
substantial boost had EU lifted the Schengen 
visas as it did for Romania and Bulgaria a 
few years ago. However, EU refuses even 
visa facilitation, while criticizing these 
countries for their high unemployment, a 
factor which in turns becomes a reason to 
delay the process of accession. 
The second solution in the regional 
approach, which has been often tried, is 
redistribution. The richer part of the region 
helps the poorer one, by either aid or by 
investing in it, as the Scandinavians did for 
the Baltics. This leads to the second possible 
trap, the ‘Development Dilemma’: there are 
no obvious development leaders in the Black 
Sea region to support this exercise. Some of 
these economies do grow currently, but 
growth in countries with high state capture 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
and low infrastructural power risk being 
squandered. Rather, we see it in the 
flourishing of dachas at the seaside for various 
entrepreneurs than in the necessary highways 
or oil terminals. 
Of course, there is some hope that the 
developed European Union will invest in the 
area. However, the EU finds it hard currently 
to finance properly even the Western Balkans’ 
accession – it is unlikely to invest heavily in 
the Black Sea. The Europeanization dilemma 
of the Black Sea is that the strongest 
countries in the region are not the most 
Europeanized, while the most Europeanized 
(Romania and Bulgaria) barely have resources 
for their own Europeanization.  
The orange and rose Revolutions created a 
positive trend in the Black Sea area, stalled by 
the elections in Azerbaijan and Belarus. This 
mix of experiences show how difficult the task 
is and how refined a plan for the region 
should be.  
A minimal plan would try to secure local 
cooperation for some alternate routes for 
energy to Europe. Such a plan means avoiding 
waking the sensitivities of less than 
democratic local regimes, buying off the 
perpetual rent seekers in breakaway regions 
by offering them rents elsewhere and building 
a security environment where democrats and 
non-democrats would meet on equal foot to 
deal with security only. Europeanization would 
remain a distant prospect, not to the dislike of 
Europe. Even with such reduced ambitions, 
the plan needs the vital cooperation of Russia, 
which stands to gain nothing from the whole 
arrangement. 
Fig. 2. Black Sea and Balkans Democracy Compared 
Country  NIT 2005 Trend Country  NIT 2005 Trend 
Armenia 5.18 -0.39 Albania 4.04 0.71 
Azerbaijan 5.86 -0.24 Bosnia 4.18 1.24 
Belarus 6.64 -0.39 Bulgaria 3.18 0.40 
Georgia 4.96 -0.79 Croatia 3.75 0.71 
Moldova 5.07 -0.82 Macedonia 3.89 -0.06 
Ukraine 4.50 0.13 Romania 3.39 0.15 
Black Sea Average  -0.41 Balkans average  0.52 
 
Alina Mungiu Pippidi 
 
4 
A more ambitious plan should address, 
rather than avoid, the dilemmas outlined 
above. It should also build on the only 
certainty the region has: the existence in 
each and every of these countries of pro-
European and democratically minded 
reformers. The basic idea of a regional plan 
which considers the future of these 
countries, besides the routes of oil pipelines, 
should be to help build in the broader area 
around the Black Sea pro-reform and pro-
European constituencies that can trigger real 
internal change, on the Central European or 
Baltic model.  
The constant help and conditionality of 
European Union and United States prevented 
Romania from taking the path of Belarus, 
which was as likely in 1990 as the path of 
Europeanization. In the fifteen years after 
1989, a balanced political system and a civil 
society developed in Romania, able to 
ground the country firmly on a European 
path. This is the kind of work to be done in 
the region for those who want to help it, and 
this requires indeed considerable 
cooperation, but more between the 
benevolent outside helpers than the 
countries itself.  
In this design, the Eastern Balkans and the 
Central Europeans are important for best 
practice transfer. An investment in the elites 
of the region, rather than in infrastructure, 
may seem an uncertain investment, but it is 
the only one that can generate a sustainable 
return in the long term.  
 
 
Alina Mungiu Pippidi, president of SAR, welcomes 
comments at alinamp@yahoo.com  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Romanian Academic Society (SAR) 
61 Eminescu, Bucharest 2 
tel/fax (4021) 211 1477 
office@sar.org.ro  
www.sar.org.ro 


Black Sea dilemmas

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