Eurasian Integration - The View from Within

Piotr Dutkiewicz, Richard Sakwa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317572831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

As Eurasia and the adjacent territories become more important to the world, there is increasing interest from international powers, accompanied by attempts to give institutional form to traditional economic and security links within the region. This book includes a range of substantive work from scholars based in the region, offering contrasting perspectives on the process of Eurasian integration and its place in the world. Chapters consider economic, political, social and security developments, with notable studies of the major countries involved in the development of the Eurasian Economic Union. The work also examines the connections between the region and China, greater Asia and the European Union. It outlines the varying dynamics, with populations growing in Central Asia while at best stagnant elsewhere. The book discusses the increasing strategic significance of the region and explores how the new post-Soviet states are growing in national cohesion and political self-confidence. Above all, the book examines the concept of 'Eurasia', outlining the debates about the concept and how various aspects of the legacy of 'Eurasianism' contribute to contemporary plans for integration. The book argues that although regional integration is very much a popular idea in our age, with the potential for economic benefits and increased international influence, in practice contemporary projects for Eurasian integration have been highly ambiguous and contested. Nevertheless, significant steps have been taken towards the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union. The book analyses developments to date, noting the achievements as well as the challenges.

1 Challenges of Eurasian integration

Richard Sakwa

The idea of Eurasia is back! The concept had effectively disappeared in the Soviet Union, apart from within some narrow intellectual circles, but then made an astonishingly swift recovery as soon as the Soviet system collapsed. At first considered as little more than an esoteric idea advanced by marginalized elements of the traditionalist intelligentsia, Eurasia is now emerging both as a specific form of regional integration as well as the heart of a notion of autochthonous development of a significant proportion of the globe. This chapter will examine the resonance of the idea in contemporary Russia and assess the plans to give it institutional form. Many of the dilemmas facing Eurasian integration are common to regionalism in general, but there are some that are unique to the post-Soviet space. Contemporary ‘Eurasianism’ takes three forms: the attempt to give institutional form to an assumed economic and political community; ideational debates about development and Russia’s place in the world; and ideological assertions about civilizational identity and models of the future that are wider than Russia and fit into larger developments towards a multipolar world community. Some of these issues will be raised in this chapter, while others will be explored in other contributions. The key point is that pragmatic attempts to achieve a certain degree of Eurasian integration is embedded in much larger discourses, plans and narratives, and it is certainly far from easy to disentangle the various elements.

Dynamics of contemporary regionalism

Regionalism is one of the foundational processes of our time. Across the world, states are coming together in various forms of trading blocs, customs unions and other types of association.¹ The ‘new regionalism’ asserts that regions can become the natural successor to traditional forms of the nation-state, which appears indeed to be too small to do the big things, and possibly too big to do the small things. The three forms of regionalism are predominant in the world today – micro-regional economic integration, meso-regional political integration and macro-transcontinental security regionalism. Each has its own dynamic and rationale, and interacts with the others to create a multi-plane reality. Thus, for example, the micro-regional integration within the European Union (EU) overlaps with both the meso-political regionalism of the Council of Europe (CoE), encompassing a broader swath of countries across the continent and into Asia, and the security macro-regionalism embodied by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Each is based on logics of internationalization derived from certain perceived imperatives, not always compatible with the others. A number of normative models of integration are now available, relativizing the experience of the EU, something which for so long has been taken as paradigmatic. There are diverse forms of regionalism, each with its normative logic combining political, security, economic and identity dynamics.

Micro-regional economic integration is driven by the view that by removing restrictions on the cross-frontier movement of goods, services, capital and labour between contiguous countries, the prosperity of all is enhanced. This certainly has been the dynamic at work in the EU since the beginning, but with added intensity since the adoption of the Single European Act in 1986. Across the Atlantic, the creation of the micro-regional North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) from 1 January 1994, which removed barriers to trade and investment, was intensely controversial and still does not include the free movement of labour. As with most free trade agreements signed within the framework of the World Trade Organization (WTO), agriculture remains a particularly controversial issue. In Latin America the economic and political agreement that gave rise to Mercosur (the Southern Common Market) in 1991 has now become a full customs union. Regional integration lags behind in Asia, although there is a plethora of bodies that provide economic coordination between the states. As we shall see in other chapters, the Eurasian integration that is the subject of this book has an expansive dynamic. It is focused most intensely at present on three post-Soviet states (Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia), and there are some potential new member states (the list of applicant states at present includes Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, while Tajikistan has voiced interest but has shelved its application). Ukraine was long considered essential to make Eurasian economic integration work as a genuinely broad-based multilateral body, but following the Ukrainian revolution of 2014 its participation is highly doubtful. At the same time, ideas of meso-regional political integration and macro-transcontinental security regionalism are also in play, encompassing not only Central Asia but also China, South Korea and possibly some other states.

Although the micro-regional form of integration is primarily economic, there is also a political element that creates new forms of transnational solidarity between the member states. This has been taken the furthest in the EU, and in part this is natural as the EU since its inception has always been driven by more than purely economic factors. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) from 1950 sought to ensure that the economic resources for a renewed conflict between France and Germany would no longer be available, and from the first this attempt to transcend the logic of war by deepening the rapprochement between its member states provided the impetus for ‘ever closer union’ that was set to culminate in the creation of a fully federal state. In the end, however, political and security regionalism were instantiated primarily not through the EU but in complementary bodies, notably the CoE and NATO, thus ultimately reducing the EU to its economic core, despite continuing attempts to strengthen its political and security dimensions. Indeed, the EU’s lack of fully fledged multi-functionality has reduced its ability to act coherently in international politics, and may in the end provoke its implosion to its original primarily economic functions.

The effective merger between the EU as a regional political actor, although with a weakly defined security identity and deficient agency capacity, and the Euro-Atlantic security community was one of the factors precipitating the Ukrainian crisis in 2014. The ‘Gaullist heresy’ of a single security community from the Atlantic to the Pacific was trumped by an Atlanticist orientation that effectively set itself in opposition to Eurasian integration and broader aspirations for a multi-polar ‘greater European’ space. I will return to this issue below.

Transcontinental macro-regionalism tends to be driven primarily by political factors, reinforced by a dense network of institutions of international economic governance, notably the WTO, buttressed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Bretton Woods agencies (the International Monetary Fund – IMF – and the World Bank). The creation of NATO in 1949 acted as the other half of the containment strategy embedded in the Marshall Plan. Today, the idea of a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has recently been given a new impetus, above all by the British, as part of an obvious stratagem to dilute the integrative impulse of the EU. This bi-continentalism exposes the exhaustion of plans for deeper integration within the EU, and reveals the shift away from a focus on greater Europe to an abstract globalism that has enormous implications for European, and indeed Eurasian, integration. The development of mega-integration projects on both sides of Russia pose some fundamental questions about the existing pattern of relations, and certainly threaten further to marginalize Russia. To the West, TTIP proposes a free trade zone for America and Western Europe, with regulatory convergence that may well dilute some of Europe’s existing high standards. Although negotiations will undoubtedly be fraught and success is far from guaranteed, the plan underlines the exhaustion of classic ‘greater Europe’ continentalism: the turn to the West represents a shift away from the East. To the other side, the American-sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) seeks to bring together Japan, South Korea and various other South-East Asian countries, thus limiting Russia’s opportunities in the region. Since the signing of the strategic treaty with China in 2001 Russia has focused on a ‘China plus’ approach: giving priority to relations with China, but also improving bilateral relations with a swath of countries in the region. The development of TPP would force Russia closer to China as its room for manoeuvre is circumscribed.

The development of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is another example of macro-regional integration, and is now taking more substantial organizational form. Although it lacks a permanent secretariat, it does have the makings of an organizational structure. The Eurasian Development Bank, established by Russia and Kazakhstan in 2006 as a regional development bank, works alongside comparable institutions, notably the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), to fund strategic projects and to provide technical expertise and data for countries in the region. Equally, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has been rather more formalized with a secretariat in Shanghai, but while it is labelled a mutual security organization, its fundamental purpose is to calibrate the rise of China and to regulate relations between the great and small powers in a vast region from Russia to Asia. Not surprisingly, China regards the development of Eurasian integration with a degree of concern, above all as a putative project to rival the SCO, which effectively strengthens China’s position in Central Asia. The surge in macro-transcontinental regionalism is an attempt to find mediating institutions in a world lacking the stable bipolarity and accustomed practices of the Cold War period.

The foundations of Eurasian regionalism

The starting point of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in December 1991 was very different from that of the EU. The latter sought to bring together states that had long been adversaries, whereas in Eurasia the states historically had been part of the same political community. Much of the shared Soviet legacy has been retained, with, for example, a massive trade in goods and services with Ukraine, worth US$55.5 billion in 2012, visa-free travel and free movement of labour, an integrated gas transit and power system and intense military-industrial cooperation. In this context, while Western European integration was perceived as something novel and progressive, integrative projects in Eurasia are inevitably associated with a backward looking and retrogressive agenda; the attempt to recreate something that was lost. One of the fundamental challenges of contemporary Eurasian integration is to free itself of the taint of the past and to position itself as an equally progressive and rational programme of mutually beneficial deep cooperation.

The CIS ultimately brought together 12 of the 15 former Soviet states (all with the exception of the three Baltic republics), with the aim of establishing some sort of successor to prevent the immediate rupture of previous Soviet ties, with incalculably damaging effects. The CIS provided the framework for a wide range of functional services, including transport, social welfare and phytosanitary standards, and above all visa-free travel and labour migration for its members. The CIS was then buttressed by security cooperation between a select group which signed the Tashkent Collective Security Treaty (CST) agreements in 1992, which in due course allowed the creation of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) in May 1999, the Charter of which was adopted at the Chisinau summit on 7 October 2002. The CSTO at that time united Armenia, Belarus, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, while Uzbekistan has periodically joined and left.

On the economic side, deeper cooperation for a long time lagged behind. An agreement of 14 March 1992 evolved into the Customs Union of 1994, promising free trade between Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, with Tajikistan joining in January 1999. On 26 February 1999 Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan signed a treaty to establish a Customs Union and Single Economic Space, providing the framework for the free movement of goods, capital, services and people. By contrast with the EU’s Single European Act of 1986, this treaty neither specified a timeframe nor created an instrument to push through its objectives. To overcome these problems, on 10 October 2000 these same countries signed a treaty strengthening their existing customs union to foster ‘Eurasian economic integration’, and at the Minsk summit in 2001 the Customs Union was transformed into the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC). The aim was to establish a free trade and unified customs system, and to coordinate relations with the WTO. A number of institutions were to promote these goals, including its highest body, an Interstate Council consisting of the participant countries’ presidents, an Integration Committee, a Parliamentary Assembly, a Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) Arbitration Court, together with a permanent secretariat to service the organization. A system of weighted votes based on contributions to the common budget was introduced, giving Russia a clear predominance with a 40 per cent share in voting and financial rights, followed by Kazakhstan with 20 per cent, and the rest shared out among the other members. Ukraine and Moldova gained observer status in 2002.

In 2005 EurAsEC merged with the Central Asian Cooperation Organisation, created in 2002 encompassing all of Central Asia except Turkmenistan, one of the few integration efforts in the region that excluded Russia.² The merger highlighted the failure of autonomous Central Asian sub-regional integration. Uzbekistan joined EurAsEC in 2006 and left in 2008, a move that is typical of the country’s erratic course under President Islam Karimov. The six members of EurAsEC cover 94 per cent of CIS territory, 73 per cent of the population, 88 per cent of CIS gross domestic product (GDP), and their mutual trade rose from $29 billion in 2001 to $94 billion in 2007.³

Finally, we come to the endeavour that is at the heart of this book. On 25 January 2008 Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed a tripartite customs union consisting of nine trade agreements covering tariffs, anti-dumping strategies and taxation issues. In summer 2009 agreements were signed to create the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU), formally launched on 1 January 2010, with most barriers removed by July. In the next stage, a Single Economic Space came into effect on 1 January 2012, and by 1 January 2015 the two were to combine to create the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).⁴ A union treaty was signed in 2014 that determined the shape of the future union – the development of what in due course is anticipated to become a fully fledged Eurasian Union (EaU), with its own acquis covering technical, labour, mobility and other norms which would, like the EU, improve economic governance throughout the region. The three states cover about three-quarters of the post-Soviet region and have a combined market of 175 million and a total GDP of around $2.3 trillion, compared to the EU’s GDP of $16.6 trillion.

It was initially anticipated that the three other members of EurAsEC (Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) would join as equal members, although their reluctance to sign the documents in 2008 signalled the problems to come.⁵ A number of important issues were to be resolved before a genuine customs union could be established, including the competencies of the planned Commission and the rules of membership, especially since the three founding members made no secret of their view that Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were too undeveloped and poor to contribute much to the customs union. A World Bank report in 2013 suggested that Russia had gained the most from the ECU, since Belarus and Kazakhstan had been forced to accept the higher Russian import tariffs. Already by late 2013 the Eurasian Commission, based in Moscow, employed over 800 people, governed by a nine-member board. The Commission negotiated with the group rather than with the Russian government. Building on the Soviet legacy, it focused on the free movement of goods, but was already in advance of NAFTA in ensuring the free movement of labour as well. Although the Commission acts as a supranational body t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction: Eu–Ru–Asian integration?
• 1. Challenges of Eurasian integration
• 2. Eurasianism as a ‘philosophy of nation’
• 3. Eurasianism as an idea, civilizational concept and integration challenge
• 4. Eurasian economic union: achievements and prospects
• 5. Russia and the Eurasian union
• 6. Kazakhstan and Eurasian integration
• 7. Belarus between the EU and Eurasian Economic Union
• 8. Ukraine: between Europe and Eurasia
• 9. Ukraine: between Eurasia and Europe
• 10. The EU and the Eurasian Economic Union: between partnership and threat?
• 11. Europeanization and the Eurasian Economic Union
• 12. Central Asia: from peripherality to centrality
• 13. Eurasian perspectives on regionalism: Central Asia and beyond
• 14. Turkey: rising power or emerging dream?
• 15. The historic development of Eurasia’s regional structure
• 16. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, China and Eurasian integration
• 17. The Eurasian moment in global politics: a comparative analysis of great power strategies for regional integration
• 18. Eurasia: the burden of responsibility
• Index