EU diplomacy humiliated

by Georgi Gotev

Isn’t it humiliating? Armenia and Azerbaijan, two countries in which the EU has invested considerable diplomatic efforts, have accepted Iranian mediation for peace talks. No Western countries will be at Tehran’s table, though Russia and Turkey will.

If talks are successful, the credit will therefore go to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, not European Council President Charles Michel, who has put many hours into mediation efforts between the two Central Asian countries.

The Iranian official news agency IRNA quoted Tehran’s foreign ministry as saying the countries wanted to talk about regional issues “without the interference of non-regional and Western countries”.

This development is not a huge surprise, given that the EU efforts to mediate between Armenia and Azerbaijan, two members of the EU’s Eastern Partnership, haven’t been convincing. EU countries have even asked the bloc’s diplomatic arm to come up with punitive sanctions should the situation deteriorate, but nothing ever materialised.

The Nagorno-Karabakh endgame came recently, with Azerbaijan – militarily far more powerful than Armenia – swiftly taking over the breakaway region, with almost all of the ethnic Armenian population of 120,000 fleeing the enclave to mainland Armenia.

Armenia felt betrayed by Russia, with which it had a defence agreement of sorts, and by the West, which didn’t put pressure on Azerbaijan, perhaps because it still needed Azeri gas.

Left without friends, Yerevan looked toward Iran.

Though Tehran has historically had a sour relationship with Baku, Azerbaijan accepts invitations for international mediation when Turkey, its regional big brother, is present.

Azerbaijan recently rejected EU-mediated talks precisely because Ankara wasn’t invited, but France was. Paris, in particular, posed an issue to Baku, which considers the country too biased in favour of Armenia.

Following the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, a sizeable chunk of the Armenian population resettled in France, forming one of the largest Armenian diasporas abroad. Half a million of today’s French citizens have Armenian origins, while Armenia itself has an estimated population of three million.

It’s a disgrace that Russia and Iran are playing the role of peace brokers in the EU’s neighbourhood, at a time when the Russian army plunders Ukraine, while Iran-supported Hezbollah is launching rockets at Israel from Lebanon.

But – would it be such a great surprise if Iran or Russia were to mediate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza tomorrow? Likewise, who would be surprised if Russia were to sideline the US and the West by spearheading a Middle East peace process in the aftermath of the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the Israeli reprisal on Gaza?

At a recent Belt and Road summit in Beijing, the leaders of Russia and China, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, met for three hours of talks that included “an in-depth exchange of views on the Palestinian-Israeli situation”, as China said.

Both Putin and Xi have sought to deepen ties with the Global South, seeing economic opportunities and possibly a way to counterbalance the diplomatic influence of the US and its allies. Putin has said that the developments since 7 October illustrate “the failure of United States policy in the Middle East”.

At a time when we could sadly agree that US diplomacy is handicapped, the EU is not offering a credible alternative. It either looks incoherent, sometimes because of national considerations, or it just mimics US policy, further alienating the West from the Global South.

The EU, created as a peace project, is in an advantageous position to be the number one peace broker in the world – especially at a time when the UN is often blocked by two of its Security Council permanent members.

Clearly, we are far from that, as the EU suffers setbacks even in its own neighbourhood, to name only the failure to normalise relations between Serbia and Kosovo despite more than 10 years of efforts.

May the Iranian-mediated peace talks of Armenia-Azerbaijan ring the alarm in the EU.

In the meantime, the only consolation for a humiliated EU is that Georgia, another country covered by the EU’s Eastern Partnership, refused at the last moment to participate in the talks hosted by Tehran.

*first published in: Euractiv.com