Germany and Russia: The Trans-European Waltz
Germany and Russia: The Trans-European Waltz
By Uwe Klußmann, Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp
October 6, 2006
Irritated with the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin is turning his attention to Germany. But during a planned visit to Germany next week, Putin may discuss proposals with Angela Merkel that she is likely to reject -- including the idea of a European-Russian free trade zone.
The Russian political world has never had problems with women, historically speaking. Four Czarinas ruled Russia in the days of the monarchy, including Catherine II, a German who steered the Russian empire for 34 years. But in post-Soviet Russia, where women outnumber men by a figure of 11 million, women are almost completely absent from the political ranks.
"Having a woman occupy the country's highest office is currently about as unimaginable as having a Chechen in that position," says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociology professor. But that's not the only reason why patriarchal Russia has found it so difficult to deal with Angela Merkel, who became Germany's first female chancellor last year. Moscow is troubled by a new sense of seriousness that has characterized German-Russian relations since she first visited the Kremlin in mid-January. The Russian giant -- rich in treasure and resources, but with a sluggish economy -- also has ambitions in Europe that Merkel could frustrate.
From a Russian point of view, the world was brighter when the surly but jovial former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder still made regular visits to Moscow. Schröder enjoyed a close relationship with Putin, and Russians loved the flowery superlatives the German used to describe bilateral relations, which were in "first-class condition," according to Schröder, "breathtaking," and "hardly in need of improvement."
Merkel, on the other hand, met prominently with some of Putin's critics during her first official visit to Moscow. She'd already said that Germany did not share as many values with Russia as it did with America, and the comment, wrote the pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, "was a blow to Putin."
Chilly US-Russian relations
But the Russian president would like to forgive and forget. When he pays his first visit to Germany under the Merkel administration next Tuesday, he'll spend two days in Dresden, where he was once stationed as a KGB officer, and in Munich. The visit will be more than just a courtesy. Moscow needs the German chancellor, now more than ever.
One reason has to do with the cooling of relations between Russian and the United States. Almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the two powers are once again butting heads, this time in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe.
The Russians don't like the way Washington has latched on to the oil wells of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, or the ambitions of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. All four nations once belonged to the Russian empire and then to the Soviet Union.
The admission of the Baltic states into the Western defense alliance had also been traumatic for Moscow. After last week's presidential election in Estonia, all three countries are now being run by presidents who lived in North American exile during the Soviet era. But the worst setback for Putin came in July, when the Americans blocked Russian membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), which until then had been considered an easy play.
"It's now clear to us that they will never allow us to join the WTO," says Vyacheslav Nikonov, a political scientist with close ties to the Kremlin and a grandson of former dictator Josef Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. "Our response is to redirect our natural gas to Europe."
At a summit meeting with Merkel and French President Jacques Chirac at Compiègne outside Paris in September, Putin suggested that Russia might sell reserves from its Stockmann field near the Barents Sea, one of the world's largest known natural gas reserves -- to Europe, not the United States, as planned.
But there are complexities in Moscow's relationship to Europe. "When it comes down to it, they don't really want us either," Nikonov says, referring in part to quarrels over Russia's potential investment in the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Agency, or EADS.
Moscow-based Vneshtorgbank bought a 5.02-percent stake in EADS after its stock price declined, but the Russian bank's ambition to expand its ownership of the company has been resisted by EADS' management. The western Europeans are afraid of the Russians, Putin said in Compiègne, smiling maliciously, "because we are big and we are very rich." But despite Nikonov's advice that Russia turn away from the West, the Kremlin is making overtures to European countries, including France and, to a greater extent, Germany.
Dreams of "total European integration"
At a German-Russian summit in Siberia last April, Putin brimmed with friendly overtures to Merkel. In Compiègne, he stressed that gas from the Stockmann field would be useful to Berlin. "Do you know what it would mean to the German economy if deliveries from that field were guaranteed for 50 to 75 years?" he asked.
The Kremlin also made sure that Aeroflot, the Russian airline, ordered 22 planes from EADS' subsidiary Airbus -- even though the airline had been planning to buy only Boeings, from America. "If Airbus had completed its modification of the A 350," says Nikonov, referring to the new jumbo jet, "the relationship would have been even better for Europe."
In return, Moscow hopes that when Germany assumes the rotating European Union presidency in 2007, it will take steps toward a European-Russian free trade zone and a stronger energy partnership. It also hopes visa requirements for Russians will be relaxed.
There are grander visions. Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Titov even believes "that cooperation between Russia and Germany can become a locomotive for total European integration, just as the rapprochement between Germany and France after World War II promoted integration within the European Union." After a long period of development, "Europe" would then be a market of 700 million Europeans and Asians, with highways stretching from Berlin to Vladivostok and an economy fueled by synergy between western-European high tech and the massive oil and natural gas reserves of a re-energized Russia. If Moscow has its way, Europe could become a true rival to rising powers China and India in the geopolitical struggle of the 21st century.
The Russians can even count on support within Germany's foreign ministry. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- once Gerhard Schröder's aide -- recently announced "a new Ostpolitik," which is a deliberate reference to former Chancellor Willy Brandt's Cold-War policy of relaxing tensions with the East, or "change through rapprochement." One of Steinmeier's strategy documents even mentions "rapprochement through integration."
According to Steinmeier, Europe and Russia ought to become more integrated despite Russia's in foreign policy and the fact that it follows its "own, Russian path" on domestic policy. This path is "often asynchronous with that of the EU," Steinmeier admits.
Sure enough, according to a high-ranking staff member at the German Foreign Ministry, reactions in Merkel's office to Steinmeier's comment were "anything but friendly."
"There must be a mutual interest"
Merkel herself has advocated the Russian plan to bring gas from the Stockmann field to Europe, but she's been cool so far toward Russian demands for Europe to offer something in return.
Moscow expects its gas conglomerate, Gazprom, to be granted a greater say in the European energy market at the EU summit planned for next March, and it wants to acquire a larger stake in EADS -- which would allow the Russians to exert more influence on the group's corporate policies. The Kremlin even sees the possibility of military cooperation between EADS and Russian jet-fighter manufacturers. Putin may push the issue at a meeting with key industry officials in Munich next week.
Whereas Schröder invited the Russians to participate in EADS subsidiary Airbus in early 2005, Merkel has remained cautious. "There must be a mutual interest," she said at the summit in Compiègne, a comment the Russians interpreted as another setback.
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In the end, Russia wants more from Germany than Germany is willing to offer. Merkel will do business with Moscow, but she's focused her efforts on plans for a joint European-American economic zone. When it comes to Russia, she has remained true to the approach she announced when she came into office: less friendship, more partnership; less romanticism, more realism.
"In fact, it's always been that way," says Yuli Kvitsinsky, a former Soviet ambassador to Germany and now the deputy chairman of the International Affairs Committee in the Russian parliament. Germany, says Kvitsinsky, is behaving "like a bride who is constantly looking for a better bridegroom. And that bridegroom is currently America, once again." German-Russian relations, he adds, have yet to face an "endurance test." Kvitsinsky is still a member of the Communist Party. But even at the other end of the ideological spectrum, disappointment over Merkel has persisted since January. In a closed meeting, a high-ranking member of Putin's "One Russia" party recently complained about the German chancellor's repeated support for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the politically ambitious oil magnate Putin had convicted for tax evasion and sent to a Siberian prison camp.
In the future, Russia has no intention to take such lectures from abroad lying down -- not even from Angela Merkel.
http://tinyurl.com/yyatsr
New policy on Russia splits German leaders
By Judy Dempsey
International Herald Tribune
09 Oct. 2006
The German Foreign Ministry is preparing a new Ostpolitik, or policy toward the east, that aims to tighten ties between Russia and Europe just as President Vladimir Putin, who visits here next week, is under heightened international scrutiny on issues from energy to Georgia.
An internal paper prepared by the ministry, which is dominated by Social Democrats, advocates the adoption of this policy by the European Union during Germany's six-month presidency of the bloc, which begins Jan. 1.
While the paper is political in nature, the subtext is clearly energy and Europe's increasing dependence on Russia to meet its energy needs. It does not address the issue of human rights, a theme dear to Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was young in Communist East Germany at a time when the West was pursuing the original Ostpolitik under Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Merkel and her conservatives are skeptical of the new Ostpolitik, according to experts who advise her. They say Merkel wants a more evenhanded approach that takes into account the interests of Poland and the Baltic States, and not just Europe's ties to Russia.
"The view of the chancellery is that we have to take care of Poland, Ukraine and the immediate neighborhood," said Jörg Himmelreich, a regional expert in the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
The Foreign Ministry's paper, titled "The German EU Presidency: Russia, European Neighborhood Policy and Central Asia," states that "Russia will play a central role in the German EU presidency. Germany wants its chapter of close German-Russian relations to be brought into the wider development of a European-Russian partnership."
Gernot Erler, state secretary at the Foreign Ministry and a Russia expert, said the government hoped to achieve this goal through a new Ostpolitik based on "Annäherung durch Verflechtung" or "growing closer by interweaving." In the ministry's vision, this policy would actively engage Russia and the post-Soviet states to bring them closer to Europe.
"We aim at a comprehensive integrationist and forward-looking approach with clear signals that Russia is welcome in Europe," the paper states. The section on Russia highlights the energy ties between Russia and Europe that were strengthened by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, from 1998 to 2005. Russia, it says, "will remain a key partner for Germany and the EU."
Putin, who in the Soviet era worked as a KGB agent in Dresden, will arrive in that city Tuesday for a meeting of the Petersburg Circle, a regular German- Russian dialogue established five years ago to promote economic, cultural, social and youth links between the countries. According to Foreign Ministry officials, he has already been informed about the new paper and likes it.
But with energy at the center of Germany's relationship with Russia, some analysts say the new policy is shortsighted and dangerous.
"Germany is becoming increasingly dependent on Russia for its energy," said Professor Claudia Kempfert, an energy expert at the German Institute for Economic Research. "This dependence is dangerous, given how Putin is trying to push foreign investors out. Germany seems to be underestimating this danger." Other experts note that at a time when Russia is using the "environment weapon" to do battle with Western oil companies, it is uncertain whether a new Ostpolitik will lead to better relations.
"We don't have influence with Russia," said Roland Götz, a Russian expert at the government-financed German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "We cannot integrate Russia into NATO or the EU, because Russia does not want to be integrated. We have no levers. Germany has limited influence."
Merkel, who won support from the German public during the election campaign last year by promising a more critical approach toward Russia, has in the meantime become distracted by a difficult domestic reform agenda. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union, had no influence on the Foreign Ministry paper. Andreas Schokenhoff, a foreign policy expert for the Christian Democrats, said the party was preparing its own paper on Russia.
This has allowed the Russia dossier to be passed from the chancellery to the Foreign Ministry, where Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, now holds sway.
As chancellor, Schröder developed a personal friendship with Putin, once calling him an "impeccable democrat." On losing the election to Merkel last year, Schröder was immediately appointed to head a German-Russian gas consortium dominated by Gazprom, Russia's giant state-owned monopoly.
The fact that the Foreign Ministry is dominated by Social Democrats under the coalition's power-sharing arrangement with Merkel has allowed the party to revive - and update - its Ostpolitik, begun by Brandt in the early 1970s and continued by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt into the early 1980s.
"The Foreign Ministry is looking for a new agenda, a new Ostpolitik," said Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert at the German Council for Foreign Relations. "This new Ostpolitik is designed to kick-start a new process of cooperation with Russia and the post-Soviet states."
During the Brandt and Schmidt eras, when Germany was still divided, the Social Democrats' policy toward East Germany was based on "Wandel durch Annäherung," or "change through becoming closer." The idea was to establish economic, cultural and political ties with the Soviet Union and the rest of the Warsaw Pact, but particularly with East Germany, which Brandt recognized as a state in 1973. The human rights dimension played a secondary role, if any.
Now, the party is seeking to modernize the policy while cleaving to its fundamental idea.
"The EU should follow a modern interpretation of the proven concept, of change through rapprochement, which aims at new commitments, and even strong links with Russia," the Foreign Ministry paper states.
For some experts aligned with Merkel, such a policy is seriously flawed.
"The Social Democratic Party has a long tradition of promoting a policy toward Russia that is driven by a deep inclination to understand and to accept quickly Russia's deviation from Western models of democracy, human rights and civil society," Himmelreich said.
http://tinyurl.com/yydl4o
Putin to raise Russia's profile in Germany
By Douglas Busvine
MOSCOW, Oct 9 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin will raise Russia's profile in Germany in a two-day visit this week with a large sponsorship deal for one of the country's most popular soccer clubs.
Germany is Moscow's closest European partner and the largest export market in Europe for Russian oil and gas.
As well as deals in financial and infrastructure sectors, Russian state gas monopoly Gazprom will announce a deal to sponsor Bundesliga soccer club Schalke 04.
The club, which has a huge following in Germany's Ruhr industrial region, said it would unveil a 125-million-euro ($157.5 million) Russian sponsorship deal on Tuesday, the same day Putin is to visit the German city of Dresden.
Putin, meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the fifth time this year, will open a session of the "Petersburg dialogue" -- a debating forum designed to cement ties between Russian and German intellectuals -- being held in the Saxon capital.
Putin and former German leader Gerhard Schroeder had what Germans call a "man-to-man friendship", while Merkel, a fluent Russian speaker and the first chancellor from ex-communist east Germany, has talked more of partnership than friendship.
Since losing office last year, Schroeder has faced criticism for taking on a lucrative job as head of the Russian-led Baltic gas pipeline he helped start with Putin while chancellor.
Topping the agenda of talks between Putin and Merkel will be the forthcoming German presidencies of both the European Union and the Group of Eight, which Russia chaired for the first time this year and where energy security was top of the agenda.
"It is an enormously important meeting. There is an intensive debate going on in Germany about how to liberate itself from Russian gas," said Alexander Rahr, Russia programme director at the German Association for Foreign Policy.
German opposition politicians want Merkel to also bring up human rights issues following Saturday's murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was internationally famous for reporting abuses by troops in Russia's Chechnya province.
"The subject of whether the regime under Putin is ready to offer protection to journalists and human rights campaigners must be discussed," said Greens lawmaker Marieluise Beck.
Kremlin sources said the two leaders will also address areas of mutual concern including Iran, the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
GAS SECURITY
Germany was shaken when supplies of Siberian gas were disrupted at the beginning of this year when Gazprom cut gas to Ukraine in a pricing dispute.
Gazprom is building a gas pipeline in a joint venture with German utility E.ON and chemicals firm BASF that will ship Siberian gas to Germany starting in 2010. Dutch Gasunie will also take a 9 percent stake in the pipeline.
During Putin's Oct. 10-11 visit, business deals are expected to be signed establishing a partnership between Russia's Vnesheconombank and Germany's Dresdner Bank in the area of public-private partnership projects.
Germany's export credit agency will also open a credit line to Vnesheconombank to expand a terminal at Kaliningrad airport.
Germany accounts for almost 10 percent of Russia's foreign trade, but bilateral deals have been mostly medium size so far. German firms have not been involved in huge strategic deals in Russia with the exception of the Baltic pipeline.
Putin, attending Dresden's 800th anniversary celebrations, will be returning to the city where he was a KGB agent in the late 1980s. He will then travel on to Munich on Wednesday at the invitation of Bavarian state Premier Edmund Stoiber, and will also meet regional business leaders. (Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers in Berlin)
http://tinyurl.com/y9345a
By Uwe Klußmann, Christian Neef and Matthias Schepp
October 6, 2006
Irritated with the United States, Russian President Vladimir Putin is turning his attention to Germany. But during a planned visit to Germany next week, Putin may discuss proposals with Angela Merkel that she is likely to reject -- including the idea of a European-Russian free trade zone.
The Russian political world has never had problems with women, historically speaking. Four Czarinas ruled Russia in the days of the monarchy, including Catherine II, a German who steered the Russian empire for 34 years. But in post-Soviet Russia, where women outnumber men by a figure of 11 million, women are almost completely absent from the political ranks.
"Having a woman occupy the country's highest office is currently about as unimaginable as having a Chechen in that position," says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociology professor. But that's not the only reason why patriarchal Russia has found it so difficult to deal with Angela Merkel, who became Germany's first female chancellor last year. Moscow is troubled by a new sense of seriousness that has characterized German-Russian relations since she first visited the Kremlin in mid-January. The Russian giant -- rich in treasure and resources, but with a sluggish economy -- also has ambitions in Europe that Merkel could frustrate.
From a Russian point of view, the world was brighter when the surly but jovial former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder still made regular visits to Moscow. Schröder enjoyed a close relationship with Putin, and Russians loved the flowery superlatives the German used to describe bilateral relations, which were in "first-class condition," according to Schröder, "breathtaking," and "hardly in need of improvement."
Merkel, on the other hand, met prominently with some of Putin's critics during her first official visit to Moscow. She'd already said that Germany did not share as many values with Russia as it did with America, and the comment, wrote the pro-Kremlin tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, "was a blow to Putin."
Chilly US-Russian relations
But the Russian president would like to forgive and forget. When he pays his first visit to Germany under the Merkel administration next Tuesday, he'll spend two days in Dresden, where he was once stationed as a KGB officer, and in Munich. The visit will be more than just a courtesy. Moscow needs the German chancellor, now more than ever.
One reason has to do with the cooling of relations between Russian and the United States. Almost twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the two powers are once again butting heads, this time in Central Asia, the Caucasus and Eastern Europe.
The Russians don't like the way Washington has latched on to the oil wells of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, or the ambitions of Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. All four nations once belonged to the Russian empire and then to the Soviet Union.
The admission of the Baltic states into the Western defense alliance had also been traumatic for Moscow. After last week's presidential election in Estonia, all three countries are now being run by presidents who lived in North American exile during the Soviet era. But the worst setback for Putin came in July, when the Americans blocked Russian membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), which until then had been considered an easy play.
"It's now clear to us that they will never allow us to join the WTO," says Vyacheslav Nikonov, a political scientist with close ties to the Kremlin and a grandson of former dictator Josef Stalin's foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. "Our response is to redirect our natural gas to Europe."
At a summit meeting with Merkel and French President Jacques Chirac at Compiègne outside Paris in September, Putin suggested that Russia might sell reserves from its Stockmann field near the Barents Sea, one of the world's largest known natural gas reserves -- to Europe, not the United States, as planned.
But there are complexities in Moscow's relationship to Europe. "When it comes down to it, they don't really want us either," Nikonov says, referring in part to quarrels over Russia's potential investment in the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Agency, or EADS.
Moscow-based Vneshtorgbank bought a 5.02-percent stake in EADS after its stock price declined, but the Russian bank's ambition to expand its ownership of the company has been resisted by EADS' management. The western Europeans are afraid of the Russians, Putin said in Compiègne, smiling maliciously, "because we are big and we are very rich." But despite Nikonov's advice that Russia turn away from the West, the Kremlin is making overtures to European countries, including France and, to a greater extent, Germany.
Dreams of "total European integration"
At a German-Russian summit in Siberia last April, Putin brimmed with friendly overtures to Merkel. In Compiègne, he stressed that gas from the Stockmann field would be useful to Berlin. "Do you know what it would mean to the German economy if deliveries from that field were guaranteed for 50 to 75 years?" he asked.
The Kremlin also made sure that Aeroflot, the Russian airline, ordered 22 planes from EADS' subsidiary Airbus -- even though the airline had been planning to buy only Boeings, from America. "If Airbus had completed its modification of the A 350," says Nikonov, referring to the new jumbo jet, "the relationship would have been even better for Europe."
In return, Moscow hopes that when Germany assumes the rotating European Union presidency in 2007, it will take steps toward a European-Russian free trade zone and a stronger energy partnership. It also hopes visa requirements for Russians will be relaxed.
There are grander visions. Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Titov even believes "that cooperation between Russia and Germany can become a locomotive for total European integration, just as the rapprochement between Germany and France after World War II promoted integration within the European Union." After a long period of development, "Europe" would then be a market of 700 million Europeans and Asians, with highways stretching from Berlin to Vladivostok and an economy fueled by synergy between western-European high tech and the massive oil and natural gas reserves of a re-energized Russia. If Moscow has its way, Europe could become a true rival to rising powers China and India in the geopolitical struggle of the 21st century.
The Russians can even count on support within Germany's foreign ministry. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier -- once Gerhard Schröder's aide -- recently announced "a new Ostpolitik," which is a deliberate reference to former Chancellor Willy Brandt's Cold-War policy of relaxing tensions with the East, or "change through rapprochement." One of Steinmeier's strategy documents even mentions "rapprochement through integration."
According to Steinmeier, Europe and Russia ought to become more integrated despite Russia's in foreign policy and the fact that it follows its "own, Russian path" on domestic policy. This path is "often asynchronous with that of the EU," Steinmeier admits.
Sure enough, according to a high-ranking staff member at the German Foreign Ministry, reactions in Merkel's office to Steinmeier's comment were "anything but friendly."
"There must be a mutual interest"
Merkel herself has advocated the Russian plan to bring gas from the Stockmann field to Europe, but she's been cool so far toward Russian demands for Europe to offer something in return.
Moscow expects its gas conglomerate, Gazprom, to be granted a greater say in the European energy market at the EU summit planned for next March, and it wants to acquire a larger stake in EADS -- which would allow the Russians to exert more influence on the group's corporate policies. The Kremlin even sees the possibility of military cooperation between EADS and Russian jet-fighter manufacturers. Putin may push the issue at a meeting with key industry officials in Munich next week.
Whereas Schröder invited the Russians to participate in EADS subsidiary Airbus in early 2005, Merkel has remained cautious. "There must be a mutual interest," she said at the summit in Compiègne, a comment the Russians interpreted as another setback.
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In the end, Russia wants more from Germany than Germany is willing to offer. Merkel will do business with Moscow, but she's focused her efforts on plans for a joint European-American economic zone. When it comes to Russia, she has remained true to the approach she announced when she came into office: less friendship, more partnership; less romanticism, more realism.
"In fact, it's always been that way," says Yuli Kvitsinsky, a former Soviet ambassador to Germany and now the deputy chairman of the International Affairs Committee in the Russian parliament. Germany, says Kvitsinsky, is behaving "like a bride who is constantly looking for a better bridegroom. And that bridegroom is currently America, once again." German-Russian relations, he adds, have yet to face an "endurance test." Kvitsinsky is still a member of the Communist Party. But even at the other end of the ideological spectrum, disappointment over Merkel has persisted since January. In a closed meeting, a high-ranking member of Putin's "One Russia" party recently complained about the German chancellor's repeated support for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the politically ambitious oil magnate Putin had convicted for tax evasion and sent to a Siberian prison camp.
In the future, Russia has no intention to take such lectures from abroad lying down -- not even from Angela Merkel.
http://tinyurl.com/yyatsr
New policy on Russia splits German leaders
By Judy Dempsey
International Herald Tribune
09 Oct. 2006
The German Foreign Ministry is preparing a new Ostpolitik, or policy toward the east, that aims to tighten ties between Russia and Europe just as President Vladimir Putin, who visits here next week, is under heightened international scrutiny on issues from energy to Georgia.
An internal paper prepared by the ministry, which is dominated by Social Democrats, advocates the adoption of this policy by the European Union during Germany's six-month presidency of the bloc, which begins Jan. 1.
While the paper is political in nature, the subtext is clearly energy and Europe's increasing dependence on Russia to meet its energy needs. It does not address the issue of human rights, a theme dear to Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was young in Communist East Germany at a time when the West was pursuing the original Ostpolitik under Chancellor Willy Brandt.
Merkel and her conservatives are skeptical of the new Ostpolitik, according to experts who advise her. They say Merkel wants a more evenhanded approach that takes into account the interests of Poland and the Baltic States, and not just Europe's ties to Russia.
"The view of the chancellery is that we have to take care of Poland, Ukraine and the immediate neighborhood," said Jörg Himmelreich, a regional expert in the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
The Foreign Ministry's paper, titled "The German EU Presidency: Russia, European Neighborhood Policy and Central Asia," states that "Russia will play a central role in the German EU presidency. Germany wants its chapter of close German-Russian relations to be brought into the wider development of a European-Russian partnership."
Gernot Erler, state secretary at the Foreign Ministry and a Russia expert, said the government hoped to achieve this goal through a new Ostpolitik based on "Annäherung durch Verflechtung" or "growing closer by interweaving." In the ministry's vision, this policy would actively engage Russia and the post-Soviet states to bring them closer to Europe.
"We aim at a comprehensive integrationist and forward-looking approach with clear signals that Russia is welcome in Europe," the paper states. The section on Russia highlights the energy ties between Russia and Europe that were strengthened by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, from 1998 to 2005. Russia, it says, "will remain a key partner for Germany and the EU."
Putin, who in the Soviet era worked as a KGB agent in Dresden, will arrive in that city Tuesday for a meeting of the Petersburg Circle, a regular German- Russian dialogue established five years ago to promote economic, cultural, social and youth links between the countries. According to Foreign Ministry officials, he has already been informed about the new paper and likes it.
But with energy at the center of Germany's relationship with Russia, some analysts say the new policy is shortsighted and dangerous.
"Germany is becoming increasingly dependent on Russia for its energy," said Professor Claudia Kempfert, an energy expert at the German Institute for Economic Research. "This dependence is dangerous, given how Putin is trying to push foreign investors out. Germany seems to be underestimating this danger." Other experts note that at a time when Russia is using the "environment weapon" to do battle with Western oil companies, it is uncertain whether a new Ostpolitik will lead to better relations.
"We don't have influence with Russia," said Roland Götz, a Russian expert at the government-financed German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "We cannot integrate Russia into NATO or the EU, because Russia does not want to be integrated. We have no levers. Germany has limited influence."
Merkel, who won support from the German public during the election campaign last year by promising a more critical approach toward Russia, has in the meantime become distracted by a difficult domestic reform agenda. Her party, the Christian Democratic Union, had no influence on the Foreign Ministry paper. Andreas Schokenhoff, a foreign policy expert for the Christian Democrats, said the party was preparing its own paper on Russia.
This has allowed the Russia dossier to be passed from the chancellery to the Foreign Ministry, where Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a Social Democrat, now holds sway.
As chancellor, Schröder developed a personal friendship with Putin, once calling him an "impeccable democrat." On losing the election to Merkel last year, Schröder was immediately appointed to head a German-Russian gas consortium dominated by Gazprom, Russia's giant state-owned monopoly.
The fact that the Foreign Ministry is dominated by Social Democrats under the coalition's power-sharing arrangement with Merkel has allowed the party to revive - and update - its Ostpolitik, begun by Brandt in the early 1970s and continued by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt into the early 1980s.
"The Foreign Ministry is looking for a new agenda, a new Ostpolitik," said Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert at the German Council for Foreign Relations. "This new Ostpolitik is designed to kick-start a new process of cooperation with Russia and the post-Soviet states."
During the Brandt and Schmidt eras, when Germany was still divided, the Social Democrats' policy toward East Germany was based on "Wandel durch Annäherung," or "change through becoming closer." The idea was to establish economic, cultural and political ties with the Soviet Union and the rest of the Warsaw Pact, but particularly with East Germany, which Brandt recognized as a state in 1973. The human rights dimension played a secondary role, if any.
Now, the party is seeking to modernize the policy while cleaving to its fundamental idea.
"The EU should follow a modern interpretation of the proven concept, of change through rapprochement, which aims at new commitments, and even strong links with Russia," the Foreign Ministry paper states.
For some experts aligned with Merkel, such a policy is seriously flawed.
"The Social Democratic Party has a long tradition of promoting a policy toward Russia that is driven by a deep inclination to understand and to accept quickly Russia's deviation from Western models of democracy, human rights and civil society," Himmelreich said.
http://tinyurl.com/yydl4o
Putin to raise Russia's profile in Germany
By Douglas Busvine
MOSCOW, Oct 9 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin will raise Russia's profile in Germany in a two-day visit this week with a large sponsorship deal for one of the country's most popular soccer clubs.
Germany is Moscow's closest European partner and the largest export market in Europe for Russian oil and gas.
As well as deals in financial and infrastructure sectors, Russian state gas monopoly Gazprom will announce a deal to sponsor Bundesliga soccer club Schalke 04.
The club, which has a huge following in Germany's Ruhr industrial region, said it would unveil a 125-million-euro ($157.5 million) Russian sponsorship deal on Tuesday, the same day Putin is to visit the German city of Dresden.
Putin, meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel for the fifth time this year, will open a session of the "Petersburg dialogue" -- a debating forum designed to cement ties between Russian and German intellectuals -- being held in the Saxon capital.
Putin and former German leader Gerhard Schroeder had what Germans call a "man-to-man friendship", while Merkel, a fluent Russian speaker and the first chancellor from ex-communist east Germany, has talked more of partnership than friendship.
Since losing office last year, Schroeder has faced criticism for taking on a lucrative job as head of the Russian-led Baltic gas pipeline he helped start with Putin while chancellor.
Topping the agenda of talks between Putin and Merkel will be the forthcoming German presidencies of both the European Union and the Group of Eight, which Russia chaired for the first time this year and where energy security was top of the agenda.
"It is an enormously important meeting. There is an intensive debate going on in Germany about how to liberate itself from Russian gas," said Alexander Rahr, Russia programme director at the German Association for Foreign Policy.
German opposition politicians want Merkel to also bring up human rights issues following Saturday's murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya who was internationally famous for reporting abuses by troops in Russia's Chechnya province.
"The subject of whether the regime under Putin is ready to offer protection to journalists and human rights campaigners must be discussed," said Greens lawmaker Marieluise Beck.
Kremlin sources said the two leaders will also address areas of mutual concern including Iran, the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
GAS SECURITY
Germany was shaken when supplies of Siberian gas were disrupted at the beginning of this year when Gazprom cut gas to Ukraine in a pricing dispute.
Gazprom is building a gas pipeline in a joint venture with German utility E.ON and chemicals firm BASF that will ship Siberian gas to Germany starting in 2010. Dutch Gasunie will also take a 9 percent stake in the pipeline.
During Putin's Oct. 10-11 visit, business deals are expected to be signed establishing a partnership between Russia's Vnesheconombank and Germany's Dresdner Bank in the area of public-private partnership projects.
Germany's export credit agency will also open a credit line to Vnesheconombank to expand a terminal at Kaliningrad airport.
Germany accounts for almost 10 percent of Russia's foreign trade, but bilateral deals have been mostly medium size so far. German firms have not been involved in huge strategic deals in Russia with the exception of the Baltic pipeline.
Putin, attending Dresden's 800th anniversary celebrations, will be returning to the city where he was a KGB agent in the late 1980s. He will then travel on to Munich on Wednesday at the invitation of Bavarian state Premier Edmund Stoiber, and will also meet regional business leaders. (Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers in Berlin)
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bin66 - 13. Okt, 00:43
