The Eurasian Economic Union – a sustainable alternative for the former soviet space?

ABSTRACT

Declared a priority of Moscow’s foreign policy, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) has enjoyed special attention from both Western and Russian specialists. However, the assessments by the two camps are often contradictory and do nothing but raise confusion about the prospects of ‘Putin’s pet project’.

Although it is too early to have enough economic data for an in-depth analysis, a comparison of the EAEU with similar integration projects could give us some reliable clues about its sustainability and real attractiveness for the former Soviet space.

Given its integration stage, the geographical proximity, the similarity of institutions, and the official discourse of Russian officials that suggests the modeling of the EAEU on the European Union (EU), we found it appropriate to make a comparison between the two economic structures. By assuming a neofunctionalist approach, we have focused on the following criteria: the decision process, the homogeneity of the member states, the duration of the economic integration, the national political regimes and the common monetary and linguistic policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Regional economic integration
• Eurasian Economic Union
• CIS
• Russian foreign policy
• former Soviet space

Acknowledgments

This paper was edited and finalized with the financial support of Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) Regensburg. From 11 till 26 February 2018, the author was visiting fellow at the IOS and affiliated with the research group ‘Frozen and Unfrozen Conflicts’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Izvestia used to be the newspaper of the Soviet government.

2. Vinokurov is the head of EAEU’s research center – Eurasian Development Bank Centre for Integration Studies.

3. ‘Dollarization’ refers to the phenomenon of using a foreign currency, usually the dollar but also the euro or any other reserve currency, for any of the three basic uses of money: unit of account, store of value, or medium of exchange. Thus, there can be financial dollarization – the use of foreign currency as a store of value or a unit of account for financial contracts; payments dollarization – the use of foreign currency as a means of payment; and real dollarization – the indexing, formally or de facto, of local wages or prices to the dollar (Ize 2013, 464).

Additional information

Funding

This paper was edited and finalized with the financial support of Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) Regensburg, Germany.