The Georgian crisis revealed a deep split in the EU - By Lubo? Palata, Prague

The EU members from the former Soviet Bloc have long supported enlarging the Union eastward. The Baltic states, Poland and the Czech Republic were heavily involved in the South Caucasus even before the Georgian war. Now their initiatives have complicated EU policy in the region.

During the special summit of the European Council on Georgia, the Georgian delegation stayed in a hotel across the street from the European Commission building. As EU President, France had decided against irritating Russia and - as a part of its "balancing" policy - not to invite the Georgians to the summit.

The Georgians didn't need to feel sidelined: The Czech, Polish and Baltic diplomats flocked to their door. And Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek even found time for a meeting with his Georgian counterpart Zurab Nogaideli.

As it was planned, the summit should have wound up only with a strong rebuke to Russia for recognizing the independence of the Georgian separatist provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But after intense pressure from Poland, the Czech Republic and the Baltic countries and seconded in the effort by Great Britain and Sweden, the EU summit gave Moscow an ultimatum: Europe wouldn't launch "strategic partnership" negotiations with Russia until the Russian army withdrew from Georgia proper.

Another success of this "Club of Friends of Georgia," as Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg called it, was the article about sending EU observers to Georgia and organizing a donor's conference to reconstruct the Georgian infrastructure that Russia had heavily damaged. Evidently, the war in Georgia awakened an interest throughout the EU in its eastern neighbors, an interest that, quite logically, used to be rather peripheral for the former EU-15.

"The European Neighborhood Policy aims in two directions - southward and eastward. Both of these directions are equally important these days," said Christiane Hohmann, spokeswoman for Benita Ferrero-Waldner, European Commissioner for External Relations and European Neighborhood Policy. "After Georgia everything changed and the Union realized the significance of the eastern dimension of European Neighborhood."

This newly discovered interest of the European Union in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus translates, among other things, into the very first summit of "Eastern Partnership" - a kind of rival event to French President Nicolas Sarkozy's pet Mediterranean Union (MU) project, which is due to become reality in a couple of months.

Thanks to the joint initiative of Poland and Sweden who pushed through the Eastern Partnership, the EU is not entering the territory of Eastern Europe completely unprepared. Yet there are huge differences between the interest that Brussels and the old member states in particular have with Russia and that with the rest of the former Soviet Union.

There is also a significant difference between the Mediterranean Union and the Eastern Partnership. From the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea nobody, except Morocco, asks the European politicians about the prospect of joining the European club in the future. But Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia have been asking about their "European Union prospects" on every occasion and for quite a few years by now - even though the EU hasn't even officially started thinking about their admission yet.

For Poland, in particular, with its hundreds of years of history of control over the territory of modern Belarus, Ukraine and a great part of European Russia, the enlargement of the EU toward the east and the EU perspective of the post-Soviet space is the fundamental pillar of its foreign policy. According to Poland's president Lech Kaczyński, the admission of Ukraine into NATO and the EU is the "question of life" for Warsaw. For him, Georgia is a "brother nation."

The same is true for the Baltic countries, which haven't forgotten the recent Soviet and tsarist past they shared with now-independent states such as Georgia and Ukraine. The EU's Eastern Partnership will, therefore, be a focus of the Czech EU Presidency that starts in January 2009 when the torch is passed from Paris to Prague. Romania even regards Moldova as part of its rightful territory, with which it shares history, language and culture.

The Baltic countries, Poland and the Czech Republic were heavily involved in the southern Caucasus even before the Georgian war. The Czech Republic, for instance, imports about a quarter of its oil from Azerbaijan and has played a significant role in the rearmament of the Georgian military.

The EU's older members see eastern enlargement through a different lens. For Germany, the priority was and still is partnership with Russia. Apart from a short-lived interest in Georgia, German diplomacy has no substantial activity in the post-Soviet area that could contradict the interests of Moscow. And the rest of the Union hasn't seemed to fully recover from the "Big Bang" of absorbing 12 new members from eastern, central and southern Europe.

Sweden, orienting its foreign policy toward the Baltic states, and the UK with its strained relations with Russia are the only exceptions. France and Germany blocked the opening of the door for Ukraine and Georgia at the NATO summit in Bucharest while the U.S., Britain and the "new members" argued for the fast-track admission of Kiev and Tbilisi into this sort of political and security "prep school" for full-fledged EU membership.

On the other hand, new member countries such as Poland and the Czech Republic with their skepticism toward the Lisbon Treaty and further European integration as such have done a disservice to the European aspirations of their eastern neighbors. "The new EU members didn't convince the Union that they're more than a burden, yet they ask for further enlargement of the block of 27," said a high level official in Brussels privately. "No wonder they find so little understanding."

It is true that since the last wave of enlargement in 2004 the European Union has been struggling with enormous difficulties. Until these are overcome, the EU cannot hope to project influence beyond its borders. Meanwhile, the Georgian crisis has demonstrated that the larger world is not waiting for the EU to sort out its internal turmoil.