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OLD AND NEW ALLIES AND EMERGING SECURITY DYNAMICS IN THE BLACK SEA AREA
2 Risks and threats to European security
3 A strategic approach
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I believe the Black Sea region has presently gained an unprecedented importance for advancing stability and security beyond the European continent and for overcoming former confrontational paradigms that defined its political and historic traditions. We should therefore analyze the geopolitical evolutions in Eastern Europe and the Black Sea area from three interconnected aspects: the strategic assets and opportunities of the region, the challenges and risks emerging from it and the new foundations for a transformed security approach towards the Black Sea.

 

I. Strategic assets and opportunities

Within the proposed evaluation of opportunities, challenges and policies, we should examine first some relevant geographical coordinates of this area. The Black Sea region includes the coastal waters of Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, the Russian Federation, Turkey and Ukraine and it is a space with densely populated shores of about 16 million inhabitants, significant natural resources and a tiny connection to the Mediterranean through the straits of Bosphorus and Dardanelles. Although it cannot be considered entirely an open sea, it is directly linked with important communication lines, through rivers (the Danube, Volga, Don) and land corridors that unite the Central Europe to Caucasus and Central Asia, and from North to South, the Baltic area to South Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.

The Black Sea strategic importance along the centuries lied in the role it played as a bridge and a frontier, a buffer zone and a transit one, between Europe and Asia. Moreover the Black Sea stood for a point of juncture between commercial routes and regions rich in energetic resources.

The “Great Game” in the Black Sea was shaped along its history by two types of core-policies: political-military containment and deterrence, and economic linkage between continents. Both of them have undergone dramatic changes during recent years with the enlargement of NATO and EU that practically transformed the Black Sea into a new and volatile border of the unified Europe.

The former classical containment policies were using this region as the limes – (in Latin “frontier”) between Europe and the Asian continent and as an asset for launching military campaigns for territorial expansion. Politically the argument of prevention and protection of frontiers has been used for example by the Roman emperor Traian in launching the attacks against the Parts’ tribes in the Middle East, the place where he was defeated and died being contemporary Tikrit. Since today’s conflicts have been to a large extent de-territorialized, both the political and military containments acquired new dimensions. Regional cooperative instruments have been created to build a common understanding among political elites and advance stability and cooperation beyond the European continent. Most known and oldest example is the Partnership for Peace, most recent evolutions included the creation of the Black Sea Forum and Black Sea Trust Fund to catalyze cooperation amongst Eastern European and Caucasus countries.

On the other side, geographical distances have changed. Missiles can reach far-away lands in a matter of hours. Therefore in military containment policies, the Black Sea has been transformed into a part of a broader defensive arc from Mediterranean to Caucasus, based on surveillance and early warning, information sharing and strategies for prevention of terrorism or arms proliferation. The example in this case is the Operation Active Endeavor launched by NATO in the Mediterranean after September 11 events. Another new debate is related to the importance of building a NATO missile defense system to defend Allied territories and populations from the threat raised by “rogue” states or international terrorist groups that might acquire WMD capabilities.

Going from containment to commerce, this region maintains a major role for the commercial flows from Asia to Europe and for the transportation routes connecting the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. A well known Romanian historian and diplomat, Gheorghe Bratianu spoke about the Black Sea as being the pivotal area for the international trade. If one follows on the map the former Greek, Venetians and Byzantine routes, one will find interesting similarities with current projects for Eurasian transportation and energetic infrastructure. Along the southern path, gas and oil projects are crossing the Black Sea from Caspian and Caucasus regions to Western Europe, from Georgia and Turkey to Romania and Bulgarian ports, to include the opportunities offered by European navigable rivers and the possible connections to the Mediterranean harbors. Across and around the Black Sea, the geopolitics of energy have gained a new significance with competing projects for transportation routes, from the NABUCCO to South Stream and the Blue Stream Pipeline.

Let’s now go to the second point of my “dialectic” presentation and evaluate what are the risks and challenges to European security that emerge from the Black Sea area.

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