Nowadays, the 10th anniversary of the
Partnership for Modernization is unlikely to attract much attention either in Russia or in the
European Union. European leaders will not arrive at a new Russia–EU summit. Experts, entrepreneurs
and journalists will not flock to crowded international conferences and forums marking the
anniversary. The participants in the Rostov-on-Don summit will not be looking back and reminiscing
to the younger generation about the preparations, discussions, and signing of the historic
Partnership announcement. The coronavirus pandemic that has stopped all air travel in a petrified
Europe and imposed a strict moratorium on public events is not the only reason for this. The thing
is, the Partnership is no longer worth mentioning in either the West or East.
Jose Barroso,
Former President of the European Commission, has been working for the USA's Goldman Sachs for a long
time; his move to the private sector was scandalous and prompted a special investigation by the
European Union. Dmitry Medvedev left the office of Russian President less than two years after the
Partnership was launched and, since January 2020, following his appointment as Deputy Chair of
Russia's Security Council, he is no longer involved in matters of international economic
cooperation. Today, neither of these men apparently sees the Partnership for Modernization as one of
their principal political achievements. Quite possibly, many of those who worked in some way on
preparing the Partnership today feel a little bit awkward: how naïve and gullible we were ten years
ago if we could discuss such a document in earnest!
It is hard to believe today that, just
ten years ago, such in-depth cooperation between Brussels and Moscow could have been discussed as a
practical matter. It is equally hard to believe that, in November 2010, the President of Russia
attended the Russia–EU summit in Lisbon and discussed the practical prospects for partnership
relations between Moscow and NATO based on delineating areas of responsibility for maintaining
global security.
History has amended the plans of the Rostov-on-Don summit's participants
as it saw fit. The second decade of the 21st century was a time of trial for both Russia and the EU.
Both parties are emerging from this decade with a heavy burden of new and unforeseen problems;
acutely exacerbated bilateral relations make this burden all the heavier. Neither the East nor the
West of Europe is any longer suffused with the cheerful historical optimism of ten years ago.
Given the radically new circumstances, is it worth remembering the events of ten years ago?
Apparently it is, at least to understand what went wrong, why great expectations gave way to bitter
disappointments, why, instead of an upswing, everything that had been achieved collapsed. These
recollections are necessary at least for us to be able to assess the prospect for Russia-EU
interactions in the third decade of the 21st century realistically.
Some believe
(especially in Europe, but there are also some proponents in Russia) that, as regards implementing
the Partnership for Modernization, everything went well between Moscow and Brussels up until the
events in Crimea and Donbass in the spring and summer of 2014. Had there been no 2014 crisis, we
would have been reaping the rich harvest of a decade of a mutually advantageous partnership and
would have been building tremendous plans for the future.
The tragic events of 2014 did,
indeed, draw a bold line under a long stretch of Russia–EU relations, as well as nullifying the
Partnership's prospects. Yet it would be a mistake to reduce all the problems to a single, if
extremely acute, crisis. Had everything been going well with the Partnership (and the plans
envisioned a new framework agreement following hard on the heels of the Partnership), the 2014
crisis is unlikely to have taken place. The parties would have had enough common sense and specific
economic stimuli not to cross the line that separated us from a rapid and irreversible exacerbation
of relations. And, if the line was, indeed, irreversibly crossed (be it in January, March or July
2014), this would have meant that, by 2014, the parties already had no particular expectations
concerning the Partnership for Modernization achieving its full fruition or some positive
breakthroughs taking place in bilateral relations in general. In other words, the four years of
joint work within the Partnership's framework did not perform their role of a deterrent that, under
other circumstances, the parties might have hoped for.