Solving the Kaliningrad-Russia Transit Conundrum
Adam Harrison
Introduction: the Kaliningrad Conundrum
By September 2002, with enlargement just around the corner, the EU and Russia sat down to negotiate on the issue of transit of people between Kaliningrad oblast (administrative region) and Russia ‘proper’. On the table were a variety of solutions designed to resolve the singular matter of freedom of movement between the soon-to-be Baltic Sea exclave and Russia. One such solution was to install a high-speed train line across Lithuania. At talks in Brussels in 2002, Moscow’s Special Representative on the Kaliningrad problem, Dmitry Rogozin, unhappy with the rail speed that the EU deemed necessary, declared that the proposed 60-70 kilometres per hour would be more than enough to prevent migrants leaping from the moving train. Only three people, he said, would be able to manage this: James Bond, Batman and the Terminator.
This essay examines how the EU and Russia managed to move beyond discussion of train speeds and superhero rhetoric to reach a negotiated solution to the matter of Kaliningrad-Russia transit. It locates these negotiations within the broader web of issues and themes that affected their course and outcome. The Kaliningrad negotiations can be examined by looking at how the parties diagnosed the issue to resolve, defined a formula for resolution, and decided details of the agreement itself. The essay finds that the transit issue – a rather legalistic and technical matter – was not resolved using solely legal and technical means. Political concessions and compromise remained tools used by both the EU and Russia in pursuit of good relations, but also in the interests of winning broader assurances on migration – a promise of future visa-free travel for Moscow, and a readmission agreement for Brussels. Kaliningrad-specific matters such as socioeconomic development and cross-border trade were largely swallowed up in broader migration and security issues.
Pre-negotiation: Working out the Question
With the prospect of EU enlargement, it was clear that an answer would be needed to the ‘Kaliningrad question’. But what exactly was the question? In fact, what posed itself to the EU and Russia was always more of a collection of questions, inter-related matters of a practical and technical nature, but which were far-reaching in their implications for the EU-Russia relationship. This was the first major occasion on which the EU and Russia were obliged to negotiate extensively on legal-technical matters which were not mostly economic in nature. The three key themes which concern Kaliningrad are: socio-economic development of the oblast, the construction of an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) in the EU, and the principle of the freedom of movement of persons in the Schengen area and in the Russian Federation. All three could have formed part of the final negotiated package to the Kaliningrad question. However, it was freedom of movement and security matters which constituted the formula of the final agreement, with the development strand neglected.
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Development
Kaliningrad has long been known to suffer from a number of problems, including an “exceptionally high level of prostitution, drug trafficking, AIDS and organised crime” in the oblast. The European Union had long been a donor to Kaliningrad, but the EU did not have a concerted strategy towards the region within the framework of EU-Russia ties. Despite enlargement looming, there was no ‘pre-accession’ programme for Kaliningrad, and the EU-Russia Partnership and Cooperation Agreement itself focused only on EU-Russia relations, without mentioning any specific regions, even Kaliningrad, although a ‘Special Programme for the Kaliningrad Oblast’ was developed post-enlargement.
There had previously been signs that Moscow recognised the need to help the oblast escape the socio-economic doldrums it drifted in. Testament to this are the capital’s plans for Kaliningrad as a ‘pilot project’ for cooperation with the EU in its ‘Mid-term Russia-EU Strategy Paper’, which not only recognised the need for development, but placed the region firmly within the context of EU relations. Unfortunately, such pilot cooperation never emerged. Commenting on the subsequent transit negotiations, one analyst remarked that “many offers of turning the region into a more prosperous zone through special trade privileges or assistance by the EU were stalled in Moscow, apparently for fear of fuelling separatist tendencies”. This is despite the fact that Kaliningrad separatism is and was “virtually non-existent”. But, with development low on Moscow’s agenda, and the transit question becoming ever more urgent, socio-economic reform did not form part of the formula of negotiations.
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Enlargement presented a challenge to the EU in the form of the contradiction in the Union’s professed desire for new neighbours to share in the benefits of enlargement by ensuring borders did not serve to exclude. In fact, the encirclement by Schengen posed two problems for Kaliningrad. First, the loss of small cross-border trade into Lithuania and Poland, on which much of the local economy depended. Second, actual transit of persons between Kaliningrad and the rest of Russia. As will become clear, the final negotiated arrangement made provisions for the latter, but not the former. This too marked a sidelining of local development issues in favour of the more big ticket gains of facilitated travel for Russian citizens in general. For the EU’s part it did little to live up to its desire to avoid new dividing lines, nor to reconcile the tension between its emerging concepts of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Security’, to which this article now turns.
Security and Freedom of Movement of Persons
The prospect of Kaliningrad acting as a ‘Trojan Horse’ for Russian citizens to enter the Schengen Area illegally was an evident concern, particularly since the EU continued to harbour concerns about Russia, and Kaliningrad in particular, as a source of criminality and potential immigration impacting on the ‘Security’ plank of the emergent AFSJ. Potemkina notes that the EU’s view of Russia as a “potentially unstable regional power” raised the prospect that the Union’s internal and external goals come into conflict with each other, in terms of finding a satisfactory solution with Russia but also maintaining the integrity of the AFSJ. Meanwhile, the ‘Freedom’ plank of the AFSJ aimed at the freedom of movement of persons across the Schengen space. At the same time, however, the Russian Federation’s Constitution guaranteed freedom of movement to its citizens across the federal territory. Another conflict therefore emerges: that the Schengen visa requirements would require Russian citizens to obtain visas from a foreign authority to travel within their own country. The need to find a workable solution for freedom of movement of Russian citizens sat uncomfortably with the EU’s heavily securitised discourse of ‘illegal immigration’ (the only major international organisation to do so) and its transfer of control of the movement of persons to its external frontier. The impending negotiations therefore shone the spotlight on a number of issues that were tricky and still in a state of development themselves within the EU.
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