Posted on 06/08/2002 7:17:54 AM PDT by Korth
Moscow dispatch
Russian sovereignty collides with EU enlargement and catches a forgotten Baltic city in the middle, writes Ian Traynor
The ancient seat of the kings of Prussia, the birthplace of Immanuel Kant, Josef Stalin's trophy territory in 1945; the Baltic pocket of Kaliningrad is rich in history.
Over the past decade the small region which is now Russia's westernmost outpost has been forgotten. It was once renowned for its amber. These days it is notorious for some of the highest HIV rates in Russia.
History is catching up with Kaliningrad and may be exacting a form of revenge as the imperative of the European Union's enlargement to the east collides with Russian sovereignty over an area with a negligible Russian past.
The problems of geography, freedom, and sovereignty, and of history's unfinished business are now concentrated on this small Baltic enclave of less than one million people.
Until 1945 Kaliningrad was Königsberg, the capital of German east Prussia. When Hitler and Stalin agreed to carve up eastern Europe between them in 1939 before going to war against each other two years later, the Red Army marched into the Baltic and seized the three states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
In 1945 as the Russians forged towards Berlin, Stalin added Königsberg to his western spoils and renamed it after a Soviet communist. Until 1991 Kaliningrad remained a massive Soviet garrison and a major naval base confronting the west from the westernmost tip of the Soviet Union.
But the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact collapsed. Poland to the south of Kaliningrad regained its independence. Lithuania to the east of the enclave did likewise, escaping the Soviet Union. Kaliningrad found itself marooned, cut off from Russia proper.
Things rubbed along reasonably. The Russians of Kaliningrad enjoyed visa-free travel across Lithuania and Poland to Russia or Belarus. Cross-border trading and smuggling boomed. Kaliningrad's cross-border traffic became some of the heaviest in Europe.
But now history is coming full circle. Russian influence in Kaliningrad is waning as fortress Europe brushes up against its borders, isolating the enclave even more completely from mainland Russia. Brussels insists there can be no exceptions to the stiff external border regime that prevails in the EU and that Poland's and Lithuania's accession in 2004 means that visa-free transit and travel for the isolated Russians cannot be countenanced.
The Russians are crying foul, insisting that Brussels must bear the political costs and responsibilities of the EU's expansion since the Kaliningrad conundrum is a direct result of the EU's growth. Tough, says Brussels. Kaliningrad is Russia's problem. Ask a Pole or a Lithuanian and they will simply reply that Russia is getting its comeuppance for seizing the Baltic in the first place - history's revenge.
At a summit of EU and Russian leaders last week in Moscow, both sides agreed to disagree and the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, whose wife Lyudmila is from Kaliningrad, issued his toughest statement yet on the issue, casting Kaliningraders' free travel demands as a matter of fundamental human rights.
Yesterday in Moscow, President Alexander Kwasniewski of Poland ruled out any concessions to the Russians. Another summit of Russian, Baltic, and Polish leaders in St Petersburg this weekend looks likely to reinforce the deadlock. Even if the Poles and the Lithuanians were of a mind to be more flexible on Kaliningrad, their hands are tied by Brussels which has vetoed any relaxation of the Schengen rules that allow freedom of movement within most of the EU and erect tight border and visa controls around the union's external frontiers.
"EU leaders are fond of talking about free movement of people, commodities, information, and capital within the EU. The same situation obtains in the Russian Federation," said Gleb Pavlovsky, a Kremlin propagandist. "Russia will not agree to curtailed sovereignty in the Kaliningrad region as a matter of principle."
The row is rich in historical resonances. The Russians want special transit "corridors" enabling Kaliningraders to travel in sealed trains for 160 miles across Lithuania. The Poles are allergic to any notion of corridors given that Hitler manipulated special German corridors to Danzig (Polish Gdansk) as a pretext for invading Poland in September 1939.
Moscow, in turn, likens Brussels' behaviour to that of Stalin in seeking to isolate Berlin from West Germany and western Europe in the cold war. The EU maintains there can be no breaches in the Schengen regime. Special trains across Lithuanian corridors, EU officials say, would mean creating a new Sangatte and Channel Tunnel scenario of the type exercising France and Britain.
And even if Kaliningraders were afforded special IDs and a special status (not likely), Moscow fears this would encourage secessionism within Russia and that other regions would seek to emulate the privileged pocket.
With elections permanently taking place somewhere within the EU and with illegal immigration, crime, and the rise of the far right the dominant topics of the day across the union, no EU government can afford any concessions on Kaliningrad, the officials argue.
Although Schengen is adduced as unbreachable, Poland and Lithuania, of course, will not be part of Schengen Europe for years when they are allowed into the EU as second class citizens in 2004.
It will be years before Poles and Lithuanians and the rest of the east Europeans are granted full rights and entitlements in the EU, including the key right of freedom of movement. So any Russians slipping into Fortress Europe via Poland or Lithuania would still need to penetrate border regimes further west.
Your idea is right on the mark, but still maybe a decade away . . . .
Remember the old saw about power corrupting and remember that today's EU was yesterdays defeated and fading europe.
These twits have built themselves a little empire. Until they step too far over the line, or until they simply implode back into their historic territories and associated animosities, they will grab every advantage to prove to themselves that they are a world power.
It's a lot like children finding themselves unsupervised at recess or finding the keys to daddy's car when the folks are at work....a large rush followed by a crash.
Don't spend too much time looking for rational diplomacy when the diplomats are exercising what they believe to be new found power.
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