Security in and Around the Black Sea: Is a Virtuous Circle Now Possible?

Recent events in and around the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean offer hope of a breakthrough in regional security. This does not mean that universal peace is at hand. Rather, these events show that the ice floes that have frozen long-standing regional conflicts and security rivalries in place can be melted and may indeed be melting. The events and trends create possibilities for several positive changes in and around the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean.

Their first impact is that they create possibilities for major advances in resolving existing conflicts. Progress in conflict resolution generates opportunities for providing stronger and more enduring structures of security throughout these areas. Second, this kind of progress also fosters opportunities for more resolute democratization, which may afford some control over the many uncontrolled and paramilitary forces now operating throughout these areas. The subjection of military forces that have been essentially out of control or predominant in local conflicts and states to civilian, democratic, and even to some degree international control is an essential condition of peace, security, and democratization, whether we are talking of Palestine, Ukraine, Turkey, or the Caucasus.¹ These positive trends in both conflict resolution and democratization create momentum for reinforcing and extending themselves either geographically or institutionally, with the aim of making their positive dynamism as irreversible as possible.

Third, these events and trends also provide opportunities and challenges to European security institutions like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and to specific governments, both local ones and the United States, to overcome the neglect or inattention to the area that has all too often characterized their relationship to the Black Sea agenda and governments and that has helped aggravate many threats to Eurasian security.² All too often, attention to local security challenges around the Black Sea, as in the Mediterranean, has been an afterthought, not a real policy.³

Several observers have noted this neglect and inattention. In 1999 Yannis Valinakis wrote,

until recently, Europe seems to have underestimated what is at stake in the rivalries that have developed in the 1990s in this part of the world, thus inadvertently contributing to the rise of an unstable security environment in this region. The strategic importance of the Black Sea region therefore demands greater and more sustained priority within Europe's foreign relations and the CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy); it calls for more planning and implementing a new, more proactive policy towards these areas; it calls for formulating its political role in the Black Sea area, to prevent or help resolving conflicts.⁴

Similarly, in 2002 R. Craig Nation of the US Army War College observed that

disappointments notwithstanding, the capacity to project forces into combat zones to enforce peace when diplomatic mechanisms fail, maintain peace in the wake of negotiated cease-fires, and ensure a safe and secure environment within which a process of postconflict peace-building can go forward remain vital attributes of any effort to contain and reverse a proliferation of low- and medium-intensity conflicts in the Adriatic-Caspian corridor. What the poor track record of the past decade makes clear is that the means to carry out these tasks effectively are not yet in place.⁵

However, the introduction of US and NATO forces into Afghanistan, Central Asia, and to a lesser degree the Caucasus, along with the new NATO emphasis on these areas and recent local changes, have triggered a process that could reverse Nation's pessimistic conclusion and offer the capabilities for achieving success in the security- and state-building process in and around the Black Sea. Indeed, NATO formally accepted the priority of the Caucasus and Central Asia in its future activities at its Istanbul summit of 2004, and the EU has also come increasingly to understand that the consolidation of stronger states and...