“What next?” you may ask. Well, next were evening cocktails, networking, the sharing of contacts and impressions of Brussels and the unforgettable phrase, “Your voice will be heard” from EU Commissioner for External Relations and ENP Benita Ferrero-Waldner in her concluding speech. The Forum may be over but many questions remained unanswered. How will it work over the next year? What will be its legal status? What status will the Forum’s recommendations have and how will its efforts be organized at the national level?

As one of the participants I have to admit that we did not find the answers to those questions. There was an intense conflict between EaP civil society representatives and the EU Forum organizers that lasted the entire event. Most of the EaP participants worked to formalize the Forum with a clear description of its functions and objectives and the rules by which it should operate at the national levels. But the concept of the EC anticipates the Forum becoming a platform for open and nation-free debates on how to resolve common problems facing the region.

One of our Polish colleagues said me during a coffee break, “You should change your way of thinking. When you work on common regional problems such as energy efficiency, you shouldn’t care who defends your interests—a Ukrainian or a Belarussian. We Poles have been in the EU for five years, but still find it difficult to get used to it. You will also come to this, but it takes time…” It sounded very persuasive. I immediately recalled the common principles and values of the EU, its “unity in diversity.” However, when I thought about it, I realized that Brussels did not take into account one very important thing. When a country joins the EU, it is supposed to have fulfilled a number of specific criteria and thus is more or less in sync with other EU members. Eastern Partnership countries, by contrast, differ substantially in their political and economic development and there are not actually that many common interests in the region at the moment.

This means that Ukraine, which has moved the furthest in the region in its relations with the EU, sees the Eastern Partnership mostly in its bilateral dimension. Ukraine is first in the region to negotiate an Association Agreement and accession into the Energy Community. Ukraine has a fragile but developing democracy and freedom of speech. So the questions advocated by the Ukrainian participants involved high-profile issues, such as visa-free travel to the EU. Meanwhile, participants from Belarus and Azerbaijan, whose governments have not yet developed much of a dialog with the EU, saw the Forum mostly as a place where they could draw the EU’s attention to the problems of democracy, human rights and freedom of speech. This explains both the relative skepticism of the Ukrainians regarding the Eastern Partnership and the hyperactivity of the Belarussians, who organized a fifth, unplanned, platform in the corridor and wrote up recommendations on the organizational structure of the Forum.

So, what next? The fate of the Forum’s recommendations was not clear to its participants. Yes, they will be presented at the ministerial meeting next month, and then, according to Ms Ferrero-Waldner, they “will feed into the work of the Eastern Partnership thematic platforms.” However, suggestions such as having a Steering Committee that will meet at least three times more during the next year and questions around financial issues have not found essential support on the part of the EU organizers. All that was said was that they would also be presented at the meeting on 8 December. It remained equally unclear whether the status of civil society participation at multilateral meetings will be changed. Currently, CS representatives are identified as ad hoc participants, meaning they can be invited only on a case-by-case basis and not regularly.

On the way back from Brussels, there was a feeling that neither the European Commission nor the Forum’s participants understood whether the Forum would become a voice of Eastern Partnership civil society that is heard or yet another excuse for a jaunt abroad for our countries CS representatives.

Europeans often say Ukraine should stop offering populist promises and start working. Well, let’s see if the EU is able to keep promises itself.