In May 2018, in Astana, Kazakhstan, the Eurasian Economic Union signed a trade and economic cooperation agreement with the People’s Republic of China, aiming for implementation in 2019. It was also in Astana, in September 2013, that Chinese president Xi Jinping first announced what would become the Belt and Road Initiative, and called for deepening regional economic cooperation in Eurasia in the context of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. What is happening here, and what are these associations that appear to be expanding even as the European Union frays around the edges (with Russian encouragement) and President Donald Trump canceled prospective U.S. participation in a 12-member Trans-Pacific Partnership as one of his first official acts? The articles in this issue of the Russian Social Science Review provide some of the background to these developments. Herewith, a guide to the players.
The Eurasian Economic Union, first proposed in 1994 by Kazakhstani president Nursultan Nazarbayev, evolved from a customs union (2010) to its current organizational form (2015) as an integrated single market joining Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, with Tajikistan and Moldova among others as prospective future members. Ukraine’s signature of an Association Agreement with the European Union (effective 2017) sealed that country’s ineligibility for participation in the EU’s Eurasian counterpart, an ongoing irritant for Russia.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, built on the basis of the original Shanghai Five group founded in 1996, is a political-economic-security alliance established in 2002–2003 by China and Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, joined in 2017 by India and Pakistan. Although there are plenty of tensions among the SCO’s member countries, and all are alert to any hints of political encroachment, the strains in relations with an unsteady West may be enhancing the appeal of the group’s mission of security cooperation.
Overlaying and extending far beyond these maps are the ambitions of China’s Belt and Road Initiative to create a China-centered trading network based on Chinese-financed infrastructure projects worldwide. Relatively low prices for petroleum and agricultural products, compounded by a U.S.-led sanctions regime against Russia, put that country as well as Kazakhstan in a weakened bargaining position vis-à-vis China; but the fact that China (which has its own problems with the United States) signed the May 2018 trade pact with the Eurasian Economic Union may underscore the bolstering effect of membership in the latter organization.
Meanwhile, a modified version of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (current members: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam) took effect on December 30, 2018.
—P.A.K.