By Dr Robert M. Cutler

09-01-01 It was recently announced that the GUUAM entente will aim at institutionalising itself as an international organization. GUUAM started out as a common understanding among Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova at the 1996 negotiations over Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE). In 1999, at the Washington celebrations of the 50th anniversary of NATO, Uzbekistan joined, adding another "U".
It cannot be emphasized enough that GUUAM is not an alliance, because an alliance requires a founding document that defines an enemy in either general or specific terms. However, it has already formally registered preliminary documents with the United Nations, a step that will accord it some rights in international forums, like any other intergovernmental organization.
The reasoning behind the grouping of the original GUAM countries after 1996 was a common perception of threats. This perceived commonality can only have been enhanced by the recent gathering of self-designated "foreign ministers" from the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and Tsinkhvali (South Ossetia) in Georgia, the Karabakh region in Azerbaijan and Transdnistria in Moldova. These "ministers" met in Tiraspol (Transdnistria's major city) and proclaimed their common solidarity and mutual support.
Then there is Uzbekistan, which seems like a bit of an odd addition to the collection. Moldova and Ukraine share a common border and a portion of the northern Black Sea shoreline. Georgia also has a Black Sea shoreline and cooperates in energy transport with Azerbaijan, which is not on the Black Sea but does have a Caspian Sea shoreline. Thus you could go from Azerbaijan across Georgia, across the Black Sea to Ukraine and then directly to Moldova. But Uzbekistan has no border with any of the four other GUUAM countries, nor any shoreline at all, even on the Caspian Sea.

On more than one occasion, representatives of the GUUAM countries have publicly suggested that Romania and Bulgaria join, as seemingly natural partners for the transport corridor on western coast of the Black Sea. This would appear to conflict with Ukraine's desire to play a transit role, although the last individual to endorse this suggestion was Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma. Of course, entering a free-trade agreement would complicate Romania's and Bulgaria's eventual accession to the European Union -- not necessarily politically but at a minimum in terms of the technical negotiations and arrangements required to make the transition.
A close reading of the public addresses of the GUUAM countries' ambassadors reveals a difference of emphasis among them. (Such addresses are often being given now to the same audiences, as the ambassadors appear jointly in forums. Consequently, it is not issues of audience-targeting that explain the variation among their points of view.) Thus, Ukraine and Moldova appear to see GUUAM as a "geo-economic" formation and the harmonization of trade legislation as the main task at present; Georgia, understandably, sees it as nothing less than a "strategic" formation.
Assuming that those attending the meeting of GUUAM representatives in Kyiv set for the spring of 2001 follow through on their expressed intention of adopting a common charter with some intergovernmental organs, GUUAM will become an international organization with its own secretariat and some other bodies but with no statutory supranational authority.
It is now projected that the GUUAM countries will develop bodies for coordinating foreign policy and economic relations as well as a "Public Consultative Council" and an as-yet unspecified forum for inter-parliamentary cooperation. This last will be important in the near future for harmonizing national legislation in view of the Free Trade Zone that the countries intend to establish.

The projected Free Trade Zone is the aspect of GUUAM (aside from its evident geo-strategic aspect) with the greatest potential significance for Caspian energy. As it includes Azerbaijan and Georgia, the GUUAM group continues to support the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline for taking Azerbaijani oil to market. As discussed by this author earlier, Ukraine is also seeking to become an integral component of the transportation corridor for Caspian energy resources to Europe. Of course, transportation is more than just energy.
Thus the fact that GUUAM is being taken seriously (at least as a geo-economic or "geo-commercial" formation) by the non-GUUAM members of the CIS is indicated by the recent proposal to China -- made jointly by Kazakhstan, Russia and Belarus -- to construct a Eurasian transport corridor from Shanghai through Xinjiang, Kazakhstan and Russia, terminating in the Central and Northern European transport networks.
It is entirely unclear who would pay the sum of $ 800 mm to $ 1 bn per year -- over a 10-year period -- needed to establish this transport system. Moreover, this project falls rather clearly outside the European Union's TRACECA (Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia) project.
GUUAM may in the end turn into a kind of Central European Initiative for the countries concerned, coordinating technical details of infrastructure projects with such international financial institutions as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). It may have other modalities as well.

A "GUUAM-US dialogue" has recently been initiated at the foreign-minister level, with discussions putatively to be held once every six months. This at least guarantees that energy transport questions will figure importantly in the proto-organization's future activities, although what coordination it will be able to provide that is not provided elsewhere is dubious.
If there are any real and autonomously generated effects on energy transport from the activities of the GUUAM group -- i.e., effects that do not duplicate efforts undertaken elsewhere -- then these will come through practical measures implemented in specific sectors. It is likely that any such success will require greater emphasis on inter-parliamentary cooperation than is present at the moment.

Robert M. Cutler was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science. He has worked in European and Eurasian affairs for 20 years, specializing in Euro-Caspian and post-Soviet energy. His management specialties include organizational analysis and design and organizational learning under complex systems of information and cross-cultural communication.