From community politics to the politicisation of community: the role of identity in Eurasian economic integration

ABSTRACT

This article shows how identity shapes the pathway of Eurasian economic integration. Applying a "flat ontology", the article traces the enabling and constraining effects of regime identities in Russia and Kazakhstan on the integration process within the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The empirical results show that Russia and Kazakhstan were able to reconcile the EAEU project with their very divergent regime identities during its institutionalisation. The Ukraine crisis changed this equilibrium as it amplified the differences in constructions of the post-Soviet regional order. This triggered a negative chain reaction, resulting in a fading of the shallow consensus on the EAEU.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian regionalism
• Eurasian Economic Union
• regime identity
• Russia
• Kazakhstan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Regina Heller is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg (IFSH). She has studied political science, Russian language and history at Mainz and Hamburg (Germany) as well as at Middlebury College/Vt. (USA). She works on norms in international relations, Russian domestic and foreign policy, and EU-Russia relations. Between 2014 and 2017, Regina Heller conducted a research project on the role of emotions and social status concerns in Russian foreign policy towards the West. Publications include: Russia’s Power Politics in Ukraine and Syria: Status-seeking between Identity, Opportunity and Costs, in: Europe-Asia Studies, published online 18 October 2018 (with Raquel M. Freire), DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2018.1521914; Defending Social Status – Why Russia’s Ukraine Policy is About More than Regional Leadership, in: Rising Powers Quarterly 3 (1) 2018, 137-115; Status and emotions in Russian foreign policy, Guest editor of the Communist and Post-Communist Studies Special Issue 47 (3-4) 2014 (with Reinhard Wolf and Tuomas Forsberg).

Notes

1 There are two different abbreviations for the Eurasian Economic Union in the literature – EAEU and EEU. EAEU is used throughout the text, but EEU occurs on several occasions in the quotations.

2 For an overview of the institutional design of the EAEU see Russel 2017.

3 Meaning that there is no ontological priority among the observable phenomena or objects.

4 For Deutsch (1954, 33), a security community is

a group which has become integrated, where integration is defined as the attainment of a sense of community, accompanied by formal or informal institutions or practices, sufficiently strong and widespread to assure peaceful change among members of a group with ›reasonable‹ certainty over a ‘long’ period of time.

5 Scholars have identified such effects as “authoritarian learning” through international cooperation, or “authoritarian diffusion”, which is a form of policy transfer through which “authoritarian regimes adopt survival strategies that are based upon the prior success and failures of other governments” (Hall and Ambrosio 2017, 143).

6 The issue of identity in Eurasian regional cooperation seems, in fact, one that is gaining momentum taken up from various sides and perspectives.

7 Even in the 1990s, the Russian political elite as well as public opinion were deeply divided over the question of what constitutes the Russian nation and state (Suny 2000, 148).

8 As formulated in the Foreign Policy Strategy of the Russian Federation 2013 (RF 2013).