LONDON: Very few Europeans know the EU has a “security strategy”. Adopted five years ago, the document contains threat assessments ranging from terrorism to nuclear proliferation and organised crime. There are also passages about the need for the EU’s neighbours to be well-governed so that problems don’t spill over into the area, but nothing very specific.

The original draft did not mention Russia once. Europe’s largest country was considered neither a threat nor an asset. The final version remedied that, touching on its role in helping to stabilise the Balkans. The prospect of a “strategic partnership” was held out as a mutual benefit.

How the mood has changed since 2003. Now, Russia is increasingly described in EU circles as “assertive” or “resurgent”. The war in August over South Ossetia gave a huge boost to the new conventional wisdom, with many analysts falling back on cold war metaphors and charging Moscow with reviving Brezhnev-era claims that its neighbours were only entitled to “limited sovereignty”. They overlooked the fact that Russia was responding after Georgia, with the backing of some elements in the Bush administration, had attacked people in the region who wanted Russia’s protection.

Others argued that the crisis was caused by the Bush people’s determination to treat Russia as a potential enemy. They aimed to expand Nato to the Caucasus as well as to countries (like Ukraine) where polls showed most people did not want it. They repudiated the anti-ballistic missile treaty with Russia and began to install components of an anti-Russian system in the Czech Republic, where it was also unpopular.

When Dmitri Medvedev said Moscow had “privileged interests” in some neighbouring countries, Washington called this intimidating, even though Russia’s new president had made no claims of a right to intervene. The full quote showed he was referring to ancient cultural and language ties, nothing more menacing than Britain’s claims to a “special relationship” with the US.

The Georgian war had one good side-effect. It started a public debate over the wisdom of Nato’s expansion and the scope of relations between Europe, Russia and the US. In April France and Germany had made history by publicly questioning US policy regarding Nato, and suggested Georgia and Ukraine were not yet ready to join. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy were also the ones who gave the EU a mediating role, rather than support the UK government’s one-sided backing for Georgia.

Now the debate about US policy on Russia – and whether Europe should follow it – needs further development. A first opportunity will come on Friday at an EU-Russia summit. Then in December, at their regular six-monthly meeting, EU leaders will have to decide whether to update their security strategy. The hope is that they will be ready for radical thinking on other “frozen conflicts” and to explore Medvedev’s ideas for a new European security treaty.

Under Putin and Medvedev, Russia’s domestic politics have taken an authoritarian turn. But it is more democratic than China, with whom the west has good relations. Seventeen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europe and Russia should recognise they need each other: the interests they share are more important than those that divide them.

The International Crisis Group has proposed a new European security structure with Nato at its core but allowing room for Russia and Europe to work together in other areas. EU specialist John Palmer, in a paper for the Sussex European Institute, proposes a “pan-European commonwealth”, with aspects of shared sovereignty and decision-making on agreed issues.

But first Georgia must be resolved. European foreign ministers made a welcome move on Monday by deciding to resume the talks with Russia, halted by the Ossetian war, for a new cooperation agreement. Second, Nato must use a summit next month to launch a review of relations with Russia and a delay in starting membership proceedings for Georgia and Ukraine until that is complete.

That will require another brave effort by Merkel and Sarkozy, the only EU leaders with the independence of mind to declare that European and US strategic interests often diverge. France and Germany must also urge President-elect Obama to drop his virulent language on Russia – which he has described as “increasingly autocratic and bellicose”.

When Medvedev said last week that Russia would counter the US missile system in central Europe by jamming and deploying its own missiles, it was a warning that Russia had lost patience with Bush’s provocations – and an invitation to Obama to show whether his proposals for efforts to cut nuclear arsenals and secure “loose nukes” were genuine. In effect Medvedev was saying: “You cannot undermine a country’s local security while simultaneously seeking to work with it on a global security agenda.”—Dawn/Guardian News Service