Proposal for a France and Germany, in order to grant Ukraine the alleged "symbolic membership" of the European Union, shows how much the European enlargement policy is present between utopia and political and economical constraints on the logic of facts. According to the "Financial Times" reports, it is an intermediate model – 1 that would give Kiev access to any of the EU's mechanisms and political anchoring in the West, but at the same time it would retreat full membership in time with its financial and organization consequences.
Berlin and Paris want “symbolic” Ukraine's entry into the EU. In practice, this would mean participating in selected EU programmes and structures without key rights specified as co-decision. It is peculiarly crucial to exclude from this model the Common Agricultural Policy, which has remained 1 of the most costly and delicate elements of the EU budget for decades. Agriculture is the main barrier to Ukraine's fast accession today.
The scale of the Ukrainian agricultural sector makes its inclusion in the EU's payment strategy a major shuffle. Ukraine has immense areas of arable land and developed agroholdings, which already compete on planet markets. If they were covered by the same subsidy strategy as farmers from associate States, this would require either a crucial increase in the EU budget or a simplification in support for current beneficiaries. In both cases, this would mean political tensions, especially in countries specified as France and Poland, where the agricultural sector is of advanced social importance.
Against this background, the another side of the problem is becoming clearer. Ukrainian agricultural companies, already benefiting from the partial beginning of the Union market, are starting to make their own demands on Brussels. They request not only further liberalisation of trade, but besides access to subsidies and a level playing field. From their perspective, the deficiency of subsidies while beginning the marketplace means a permanent asymmetry, where Ukrainian producers gotta compete with Europeans without having access to the same support instruments.
At the same time, agroholdings do not want to quit the existing model of their agricultural production, in which they benefit from a number of banned plant protection and fertilisation products in the EU. This is, of course, a hypocrisy which the EU itself has contributed to, without access to the EU market, without any food quality requirements.
In this context, the concept of "symbolic membership" begins to look like a solution with a large interior contradiction. On the 1 hand, the Union is trying to send a political signal of readiness to integrate Ukraine and its strategical importance for Europe. On the another hand, it clearly draws the boundaries of this integration where real costs start, especially in the agricultural field.
This creates a model that can be described as conditional or incomplete membership – presence in structures without full participation in benefits. specified a solution can be convenient for associate States as it allows them to buy time and avoid immediate budgetary decisions. At the same time, however, there is simply a hazard of increasing tensions, both on the Ukrainian side and within the Union itself.
In the long term, it is hard to imagine that this condition can be stable. The more Ukraine integrates into the EU marketplace and institutions, the stronger the force to get full rights, including access to agricultural subsidies. For the Union, this means responding to the fundamental question of the future of the common agricultural policy and being ready to bear the costs of another major enlargement.
Today's proposal by France and Germany so seems to be an effort to reconcile what cannot be reconciled in the short term: the political request to integrate Ukraine with the economical reluctance to full finance it. It is simply a typical EU policy – a policy of split-up, utopian reasoning and undue privileges for the impudent, assertive country of Ukraine.
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