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| Emblem of the Eurasian Economic Union (Image: Wiki Commons) |
By Neil Thompson
Russia’s traditional dominance of Central Asia is being tested by China’s economic appeal.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin famously described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. A conservative Russian nationalist, Putin has lamented the break-up of the old Soviet Union, not because he regretted the disappearance of communism, but because of the severing of the numerous and deep economic, linguistic, social, and cultural connections that linked most of the fifteen constituent republics of the old USSR. It is these ties he is keen to recreate, albeit in a looser supranational union than the old federal structure which bound the fifteen national-homelands into one communist “state.”
This vision, if not exactly shared by a majority of the peoples living in the lands of the former Soviet Union, was received with some sympathy – at least until Ukraine’s easternmost Russian-speaking regions were roused to revolt by Russian intelligence operatives. For example, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev pushed hard for a customs union encompassing all of Soviet space for almost two decades without any Russian pressure to do so. His efforts recently culminated in the official launch in January of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), with Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russia as the founding members and ex-Soviet states such as Armenia being enticed to follow.
The three countries presently in the EEU are home to 173 million people and have a combined GDP of $2.4 trillion. But they all have high levels of corruption and state interference in the economy. With their inefficient bureaucracies and brittle authoritarian regimes it is an open question whether their squabbling governments can integrate Eurasia into a rules-based market economy. The organization is already suffering from a credibility gap in Europe, with Georgia, Ukraine and the Baltic States having already tilted towards the West, while Azerbaijan treads warily between the EU and Russia. Perhaps more surprisingly in view of their lower levels of economic development and greater geographic distance from the lucrative markets of the West, most of the Central Asian republics have held back as well. This leaves the EEU unlikely to attract many other ex-Soviet states, except for Kyrgyzstan and Armenia.
Read the full story at The Diplomat