Eurasian Integration, Its Prospects and Possibilities

Abstract

The article describes various considerations in relation to the past, present, and future of the Eurasian integration process.

Keywords:

• Eurasian Economic Union
• Eastern partnership strategy
• integration process
• Central Asia countries

This article is the republished version of:

Eurasian Integration, Its Prospects and Possibilities

Notes

^1. In evaluating the Soviet Union's disintegration, a not-unknown American political scientist of Polish extraction wrote, “It was as if the geopoliticians’ ‘heartland’ had been suddenly yanked from the global map.” Declaring the current Russia an artificial and unstable formation and predicting its inevitable disintegration, he called Eurasia “the chief geopolitical prize [for America],” adding that “America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained” (Zbignev Bzhezinskii, Velikaia shakhmatnaia doska: glavenstvo Ameriki i ee geostrategicheskie imperativy [Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 2001], pp. 108–9 [English original: Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books, 1998), pp. 87, 30]).

^2. See, in part, A. Bykov, “Globalizatsiia i regionalizatsiia: rossiiskie interesy i perspektivy evraziiskoi integratsii,” Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal, 2001, no. 7; A. Bykov, “Istoricheskii shans Rossii—evraziiskaia integratsiia i transkontinental'naia kooperatsiia (k 15-letiiu raspada SSSR i obrazovaniia SNG),” Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal, 2006, nos. 5–6; A. Bykov, Postsovetskoe prostranstvo: Strategii integratsii i novye vyzovy globalizatsii (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 2009); A. Bykov, Geopoliticheskie aspekty evraziiskoi integratsii (Moscow: Institut ekonomiki RAN, 2012).

^3. For more, see L. Kosikova, “Rossiisko-ukrainskie torgovo-ekonomicheskie sviazi i novom regional'nom kontekcste,” Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal, 2013, no. 6, pp. 41–44.

^4. See V. Putin, “Novyi integratsionnyi proekt dlia Evrazii—budushchee, kotoroe roditsia segodnia,” Izvestiia, October 4, 2011.

^5. The reaction of Russia's “liberal opposition,” according to the author's estimate of the corresponding articles, is that adding together the potentials of the union's participants does not provide any quantitative change, since the union's GDP will exceed Russia's GDP by only 14.8 percent, and all the potential participants are poorer than Russia and will remain net importers of industrial goods and innovative production. The world's geoeconomic centers today are the United States, the EU, and China, each of which exceeds the potential union in most indicators, which means that the CES will be unlikely to succeed in “launching itself as a new global center.” Moreover, since any integration is effective only among democratic countries, the union will instead cause its members to continue lagging behind those of the EU and China, rather than helping to overcome that gap (see V. Inozemtsev, “Minusy integratsionnykh pliusov,” Izvestiia, November 2, 2011). In a later article, the same author and his coauthors (a Polish professor and adviser to the German chancellor) proceed from the following “factors.” In 2011, 45.5 percent of foreign trade turnover from CU countries occurred in the EU (48.0 percent of Russia's, 39.7 percent of Kazakhstan's, and 28.4 percent of Belarus's), and the CU's share of the EU's foreign trade managed only 9.7 percent, or €114 billion, €79 billion of which occurred in industrial equipment and complex industrial products. On the contrary, the CU's delivery of €185 billion to Europe from an overall sum of €234 billion came from energy resources and other raw commodities. Given the complementarity of the CU and EU turnover structures, all this creates a material foundation for creating a pan-European free trade zone with the participation of both the CU and EU (including Ukraine, which oscillates between them). Leaving the remaining Central Asian countries outside the framework of close cooperation, Russia would remove itself from the danger of getting bogged down in the name of geopolitical ambitions in Asia to the detriment of its main, European interests (see V. Inozemtsev, A. Olekhovskii, and Kh. Tel'chik, “Obshchaia Evropa,” Vedomosti, June 1, 2012).

^6. This turn-of-the-century formation of a “polycentric world” was distinctly recognized and highlighted in a number of materials in Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal in the first years of the new century. Other than the present author's above-mentioned, extensive publication “Globalizatsiia i regionalizatsiia: rossiiskie interesy i perspektivy evraziiskoi integratsii” in 2001, no. 7, we would also point out, for example, V. Kulikov, “Nyneshniaia model’ globalizatsii i Rossiia,” 2002, no. 10.—Ed. Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal.

^7. See the article by a former special adviser to the British government, A. Hammond, “Global Anxiety over the US Leadership Gap,” Moscow Times, March 13, 2013, p. 9.

^8. “SShA mogut peresmotret’ doctrinu ‘perezagruzki,’” Vedomosti.ru, December 7, 2012; available at www.vedomosti.ru/politics/news/6928281.

^9. Jeffrey Mankoff, the National Interest, April 19, 2012. The well-known American political scientist Anders Åslund (an adviser to the “first wave” of Russian reformers) is once again strongly bothered by Russia's interests. He reports that the new plan dooms Russia (along with Belarus and Kazakhstan) to international isolation at a prohibitively high price to the Kremlin, since no one would agree to enter that kind of union, and Russia's strong dependence on the West is unavoidable (see A. Oslund [Åslund], “Putin's Eurasian Illusions,” Moscow Times, June 21, 2012.

^10. See, for example, “The European Customs Union: Friend or Foe of the EU?” Carnegie Europe, 2012.

^11. Quoted in “Putin: evropeiskaia i evraziiskaia integratsiia mogut dopolniat’ drug druga,” Ria.ru, December 24, 2013; available at http://ria.ru/politics/20131224/986129234.html.

^12. See Sergio Men, “The Customs Union: A View from Asia,” World Finance Review, September 2012.

^13. See “Zapadnye politologi raskhodiatsia vo mneniiakh, mozhet li Rossiia vnov’ stat’ SSSR,” Izvestiia, December 27, 2013, p. 7.

^14. See Rossiiskaia gazeta, December 5, 2013, p. 12.

^15. It would be worth nothing that Azerbaijan and Georgia negotiated with Turkey within the framework of the so-called Trabzon Declaration on cooperation in constructing a Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway line, linking the three countries and bypassing the ex-Soviet railway network, and thus creating the conditions for a new Silk Road from Europe to Asia through the Caspian and Central Asia. All this was viewed, according to Georgian sources, as a major step in forming a military and political union among the three countries, essentially in opposition to both Russia and Armenia, and creating, together with a planned gas pipeline, a southern corridor for export of Central Asia's and Azerbaijan's energy exports to Europe (see “Azerbaidzhan, Gruziia i Turtsiia vstali na obshchii put’ soobshcheniia,” Kommersant”, March 29, 2012). [From the editor of Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal: a number of the topics indicated by the author concerning the post-Soviet republics of the South Caucasus (and Turkey), their mutual relationships and relations with Russia, have been discussed at length in recent issues of Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal: A. Pylin, “Ekonomika postsovetskoi Gruzii: tendentsii i problemy,” 2013, nos. 1–2; L. Vardomskii, “Nezavisimaia Armeniia v poiskakh modeli ekonomicheskogo razvitiia,” 2013, no. 2; A. Pylin, “Postsovetskii Azerbaidzhan: etapy, tendentsii i perpsektivy ekonomicheskogo razvitiia,” 2013, no. 4.]

^16. See A. Golts, “Russia Needs the West in Central Asia,” Moscow Times, September 6, 2011.

^17. See “Mirovoe tormozhenie,” Vedomosti, April 17, 2013, p. 4.

^18. See “MVF ponizil prognoz po rostu mirovoi ekonomiki”; available at http://lenta.ru/news/2013/10/08/outlook.

^19. See “Rossiiskaia ekonomika-2013: vse normal'no, padaiu”; available at http://ria.ru/economy/20131227/986835383.html.

^20. [From the editor of Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal: see the fifteen publications listed in this article as well as others in Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal's series of materials from the Center for Post-Soviet Research at the Institute of Economics, Russian Academy of Sciences, which are devoted to specific ex-Soviet republics (the series begins in 2012, no. 5).]

^21. The creation of the EAES and EAEU primarily suggests the economic convergence of CIS countries and can hardly turn Russia into a new superpower in the foreseeable future. In general, it only had this ability twice in its history: (a) in the period between its victory in the War of 1812 to its defeat in the Crimean War in 1856, and (b) from its 1945 victory in World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

^22. S.Iu. Glaz'ev, V.I. Chushkin, and S.P. Tkachuk, Evropeiskii Soiuz i Evraziiskoe ekonomicheskoe soobshchestvo: skhodstvo i razlichie protsessov integratsionnogo stroitel'stva (Moscow: VIKOR-MEDIA, 2013), pp. 235–36. [From the editor of Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal: see the introduction to this monograph in Rossiiskii ekonomicheskii zhurnal, 2013, no. 3.]