WHEN the only tool you have is a hammer, then it is tempting to look for nails. Following the success of the European Union’s eastward expansion in 2004, it was tempting to apply the same approach to other candidate countries. The assumptions were that the public and the elites in each case supported membership, but would need a bit of help in overcoming entrenched interests and pockets of backwardness. Tough but friendly conditionality from the European Union would help apply pressure in the right places.

A hammer can, in the right circumstances, substitute for a screwdriver. You can bang a screw into a piece of wood in a way that serves the broader purpose, even if the result is not up to the highest standards. (I write as an enthusiastic and incompetent DIY-er). So the EU’s conditionality-based approach worked a lot less well with Romania and Bulgaria, but it did work in the end. Most people would agree that too little was done, particularly on organised crime and grand corruption in Bulgaria, and on the criminal-justice system in Romania. Most people would agree, though, that even being among the poorest and worst-run countries in the European Union, membership is better than the alternative, for them - and for the Union.

But using a hammer when you need a spanner is a mistake. And that is what the EU is increasingly doing with the countries of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. The public may (dimly and sceptically in some cases) like the idea of European integration. But in most of the capitals (Chisinau is the main exception, Tbilisi a partial and possible one) the people in charge do not yearn for their countries to be part of the European family. Their politicians do not want to become commissioners or MEPs. What they want is to stay in power and get rich (or even richer).

This is the fundamental flaw with the Eastern Partnership: it assumes that partnership countries are essentially like the previous membership cohort, just a bit poorer, more disadvantaged and farther away. The much-cited lack of appetite for expansion within the EU is a problem too, but a secondary one. If the EaP countries were well-run, prosperous and yearning to join Europe, the other worries would disappear. It is easy to forget how bizarre the idea of Polish or Baltic membership once seemed to some West Europeans, in the days of exotic and sinister populist politicians, now long forgotten (remember Stanisław Tymiński, Jüri Toomepuu and Joachim Siegerist? No, I thought not).

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