Eurasian Regionalisms and Russian Foreign Policy

Mikhail A. Molchanov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409435341
• eBook ISBN: 9781317140047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Economics

Bridging foreign policy analysis and international political economy, this volume offers a new look at the problem of agency in comparative regional integration studies. It examines evolving regional integration projects in the Eurasian space, defined as the former Soviet Union countries and China, and the impact that Russian foreign policy has had on integration in the region. Mikhail Molchanov argues that new regionalism in Eurasia should be seen as a reactive response to contemporary challenges that these developing states face in the era of globalization. Regional integration in this part of the world treads the unknown waters and may not simply repeat the early steps in the evolution of the European Union. The question of a hegemonic leadership in particular, as exercised by a country that spearheads regional integration efforts, animates much of the discussion offered in the book. Moreover, Eurasian regionalisms are plural phenomena because of complementary and competing projects that engage the same, or partially overlapping, groups of countries. By combining foreign policy studies with an examination of the international political economy of regionalism in Eurasia the author furthers our understanding of new regionalism, both theoretically and empirically.

Chapter 1
Studying Regionalisms

This book aims to present a study of evolving regional integration projects in the postcommunist Eurasia, defined as the former Soviet space plus China, and the impact that the Russian foreign policy has on these projects. Thus, it seeks to address two subjects, and to establish a meaningful connection between the two topics – that of regionalism after communism and that of continuity and change in Russian foreign policy, specifically in Russia’s treatment of its immediate geographical neighbourhood.

Postcommunist regionalism is clearly something novel on more than one count. It may be included in the so-called “third wave” of regionalisms around the world, distinguished from both the first “wave,” which is usually associated with closed regional trade arrangements and import substitution strategies, and the “second wave,” sometimes referred to as “open regionalism,” which emphasized regional integration compatible with non-discriminatory trade liberalization and openness to the outsiders. In this scheme, the “third wave” represents a return to a selective, negotiated openness and resuscitation of traditional preferential trade agreements – the process that gained strength after the global financial crisis of 1997–98 (Bonapace 2005).

Alternatively, if we go deeper than the twentieth century, we may encounter “four waves of regionalism” (Mansfield and Milner 1999: 596). While the first wave emerged around mid-nineteenth century with the German Zollverein and was mostly confined to Europe, the second took place between the world wars, and the third, from the late 1950s to 1970s, had brought to the fore the European Economic Community and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), not to mention multiple trading blocs formed by developing countries. All of these “waves” were based on preferential trade arrangements. The most recent one appears at the end of the cold war and has been marked by the United States’ attempts to steer the process within a multilateral (GATT/WTO) framework.

There are also those who believe that there are only two – old and new – varieties of regionalism, with the latter propelled to life by the GATT apparent incapacity to resolve old-standing trade issues, as well as by the spectacular breakthrough of the Single European Market and the US conversion to regionalism (Matthews 2003). Most authors would agree that the new regionalism, whether it is found in the second, third, or fourth waves of regional integration efforts around the world, is characterized by one important feature: it is “no longer conceived of as an instrument that is primarily intended to support national development strategies and policies, but as a developmental option in itself, promoting competitiveness and the effective insertion of economies into the international economy,” which has become globally interconnected to an unprecedented degree (Abugattas 2004: 3).

Thus, this is a volume on new regionalism (NR) that seeks to apply emerging NR theories to contemporary challenges that regionalisms in Eurasia face in the era of globalization. Regionalist restructuring of the world has become a defining feature of both neoliberal globalization and the neo-statist, neo-protectionist reactions to it. Regionalism in Eurasia emerged in the early 1990s in the form of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), still centred on Russia as an internationally recognized legal successor to the Soviet Union. The CIS appeared as a relatively ineffective instrument of a “civilized divorce” between Soviet successor states, and was rightly criticized for that (Olcott, Aslund, and Garnett 1999). Alternative regional organizations were both promoted from outside and emerged as endogenous responses to Russia’s predominance in the CIS. While some of these alternative regionalisms (e.g., GUUAM) were studied more, others – like the Organization of Central Asian Cooperation or the Eurasian Economic Community – considerably less. Moreover, the role that major powers, both indigenous (Russia) and external to the post-Soviet region (China, USA) play in, alternatively, encouraging or dampening the development of competing regionalist projects here remains underexplored.

The book combines a study of new regionalism in Eurasia with a parallel exploration of the Russian foreign policy designs and the bilateral relations between key states constituting the region. Its scope is, of necessity, limited. Eurasian regionalisms are more than one. These are plural phenomena that arise out of complementary and competing projects that engage the same, or overlapping, groups of countries. The full complexity of the Eurasian “spaghetti bowl” of regionalist organizations, institutions, intentions and projects (cf. Bhagwati 1996) may be delineated and referenced, but cannot be exhausted within a single volume.

I address Eurasian regionalist projects as NR developments that emerged in response to neoliberal globalization and represent an adaptive reaction to it. The exact political-economic nature of this response with regards to countries in Central Asia and Eurasia required a deliberate examination, since existing studies more commonly apply historical, geopolitical, or the national economy lenses, rather than perspectives of international political economy (IPE). Where appropriate, I tried to make explicit connections to the ongoing debate on the merits of the new regionalism school in international political economy, as opposed to the structural realist and liberal institutionalist approaches. Another question to engage was that of relevance of NR studies for the European integration theory and vice versa. While the politics of envy and emulation of the successful EU experience did shape the rhetoric of the Eurasian integration and especially integration of the Russia-averse groupings of the former Soviet states (GUUAM), direct importation of the European integration theory presented significant challenges because of non-democratic and hybrid nature of the majority of the post-Soviet states.

Key Concepts and Terminology

The very question of regionalism in Eurasia is open to a debate that queries both its subject (regionalism) and its predicate (Eurasian). If regional integration is actually happening in that part of the world, says one group of critics, it must be treated as a subset of European integration – not Eurasian – and we must be properly discussing various Eurocentric moves of such countries as Ukraine, Moldova, or Georgia in the context of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP).

Indeed, the ENP studies literature is burgeoning, and Europe’s eastern neighbourhood is properly considered as a very special case that justifies the very policy’s emergence and evolution (Molchanov 2004, Sasse 2008). However, I would argue that European integration and Eurasian regionalism form two separate study objects. Not all countries of the former Soviet Union are eager to become parts of the extended European Union. Realistically, not many of them have had any chance of being considered under the best of circumstances. If regional cooperation efforts in the space extending from the Carpathian to the Pamir Mountains are the focus of our inquiry, an emphasis on the EU Eastern Neighbourhood Policy only distracts from that focus. After all, the ENP may well be considered an antipode of regional integration proper: it was designed to deal with the states that stay beyond the circle of the prospective EU applicants. The claim that regional integration processes to the east of Poland and Romania can only be valid if the goal is joining the expanded, federalizing Europe takes the agency away from countries of the former Soviet Union and moves it toward Euro-bureaucrats in Brussels. Saying nothing of scientific or ethical value of such a discourse, this is not what the present book is about.

Another group of critics might be questioning the very applicability of the term “regional integration” to a group of post-totalitarian states with dubious democratic credentials. According to this line of thought, only fully operational market economies presided over by the governments with impeccable liberal-democratic pedigrees can actually devise and implement what could be properly called a regional integration project. In order for a common regional market to come into existence, there should be functioning national markets first, and those can only function freely if the rule of law gets assured, on the national basis, by a democratically elected, legitimately operating government.

However, in real life numerous regional cooperation and integration schemes around the globe are being implemented, with varying degrees of success, by less than fully democratic governments that seat atop more or less intrusively regulated, distorted, imperfect, and only partially or selectively open economies. Authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes routinely deal with, and bow to, external demands and conditions advanced by the regional bodies of states that may well unite similarly imperfect governments and economies. On more than one occasion, the impositions on national sovereignty that a country would not take from the world’s great powers get accepted if they come from a regional body of peers. While leadership of an international rogue state, such as Burma or Syria, may get used to dismissing western sanctions as allegedly “neoimperialist” in nature, concerted regional pressure is hard to wave off with similar rhetoric. When the UN peacekeeping fails to command legitimacy or authority (e.g., in Africa), regional forces (e.g., African Union) more often than not can step in and do the job. More often than not, regional market works even when the global market remains rather a distant presence on the horizon.

Regionalization of the states lacking in both democratic legitimacy and open market orientation appears a stubborn fact of international relations. While the European-style pooling of sovereignty may be a far cry for most regionalisms around the world, region-based trade and policy coordination, good-neighbourly preferences, special rules and exceptions, and the creation of multilateral institutions “around which actors’ expectations converge” (Krasner 1982: 186) characterize the ongoing processes of regionalization far and wide. The collapse of the Soviet Union had simultaneously served as a start-up push for regionalization of the former Soviet space. Creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), together with its Interstate Economic Committee (from 1994–99), Inter-Parliamentary Assembly and a set of preferential trade agreements from the very beginning carried a promise of moving way beyond the initial stage of a civilized break-up and distribution of assets between the constituent republics of the former USSR. Could it be simply a Russian plot to resurrect Moscow’s waning influence – something akin to a new Union treaty that Mikhail Gorbachev failed to promulgate amidst the chaos of the last perestroika years? Such an explanation, and the whole idea of seeing the Soviet collapse through the lenses of postcolonial theory, rings shallow, as Belarus and the Central Asian states, Kazakhstan in particular, were backing the CIS project from the start and helping to drive it through its early years to no lesser degree than Russia itself. The very first customs union inside the CIS had been created in 1994 by Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Republics that were the largest net recipients of federal budgetary transfers under the Soviet rule clearly did not want to jump into the untested waters of national independence and self-reliance without some cushioning from former donors (cf. Orlowski 1995: 8).

Republics that were doing better than the Soviet national average and were less dependent on cash injections from the centre sought greener pastures elsewhere – such as in the European Union, where Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have ended up and which Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia also eyed for prospective membership. Russian democrats themselves and Russia’s first postcommunist government, where Euro-Atlantic voices were still heard loud and clear, dreamt of becoming a “normal state” (cf. Shleifer 2005) by shedding the former Soviet peripheries for good, rather than attempting to reintegrate them in any form or for any purpose. A smaller Russia was incessantly preached by western analysts and advisers, starting with President Carter’s national security adviser (and President Obama’s foreign policy adviser) Zbigniew Brzezinski.

If banding together of a select group of former Soviet republics stretching from Eastern Europe to Central and East Asia cannot be properly explained by either Russia’s “neoimperialism” theories or through the analogy of a bankruptcy liquidation sale, the question remains of what it was, exactly speaking. I think these processes are best grouped under the rubric of Eurasian regionalism, or Eurasian regionalisms (in plural), since there were really more than one anchor, more than one or two champions, or motors, of integration, and more than one direction that these regionalization moves could take. There was more than one process, or institutionally regularized interaction between participating states around which expectations converged, and there was a plethora of cases when expectations did not converge at all, yet the actors did not pull out of the process and continued participating in spite of all odds and their own best judgement. Hence, the regime theory may not provide an exhaustive explanation either. While the new and ad-hoc international regimes were indeed put in place to facilitate creation and functioning of the freshly minted state borders, to give but one example, the so-called “regionness” (Hettne and Söderbaum 2000) of the Eurasian geographic neighbourhood of former Soviet Union was almost pre-given by common histories and legacies of these states, the essential similarity of the political and economic challenges they faced, the shared Soviet/post-Soviet culture and a high degree of human and societal intermingling and interpenetration permeating all areas of life that mattered.

The very label of a “post-Soviet” denoted an identity that was neither national nor purely cultural or historical. The “Soviet man” was not a party myth, but a physical reality, which manifested itself with equal force in Moscow and Tashkent, Kiev and Almaty. The implosion of the multinational Union did not and could not erase this reality, or distil neat national components out of that ethnic cocktail that the USSR was, overnight. The post-Soviet label was a birthmark, but also an identity claim, and like any social identity claim, it pointed at the existing community and expressed a sense of belonging. While international regional institutions in the former Soviet space took almost two decades to shape up, the sense of a regional identity was there from the start.

Regions and Region Building

We have, therefore, something of a paradox. According to the established classification of the degree of regionness that students of new regionalism (NR) frequently employ, the constitution of a common regional identity comes rather late in the game. The region’s evolution normally starts with the stage of regional space, followed by regional economy (“regional complex”) and regional society (Hettne and Söderbaum 2000). However, it appears that the sense of a common regional identity may well precede and presage the formation of a region. The experience of living under the same regime for three generations shaped an ersatz nationality of a Soviet man, together with common social patterns of behaviour, political culture and a myth of shared destiny. While the later was dealt a serious blow with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it did not die out without a trace. The ideology of the Soviet family of nations proved false, yet left behind a foundation where the sense of regionness could grow. Moreover, most of the lands that formed the territory of the USSR had been under the Russian crown for centuries, and the Russian empire was rather unique in its propensity to coopt indigenous elites into its ruling structures. As a result, not only traditional elites but also populations at large of the conquered or annexed peripheries developed some sort of a common political identity as Russian imperial subjects and, typically for the select elites, participants in a common political project.

This brings us to the necessity of considering of what, specifically, the term “region” means in the context of the present study. The regions that both NR literature and, by now more traditional, European integration studies discuss are typically groupings of territorially adjacent states that come together, in several issue-areas, with the collective (group aggregate) solutions to political and economic problems of common interest. One way to do that, as students of the European integration noted, is by delegating some authority to the supranational level via the creation of decision-making and/or regulatory agencies equidistant from participating member states, yet acting in their presumed common interest. This “pooling of sovereignty” may result in certain restrictions on, or modifications of, the established powers and mandates of the national governments, hence, the much talked about voluntary curtailment of sovereignty that characterized “deepening” of the European integration process.

A parallel, yet different way to achieve same – regional – solutions across a spectrum of issue-areas is to move beyond the classic diplomacy-driven multilateralism and toward intergovernmental coordination of efforts in the format of the heads-of-state, ministerial and subministerial meetings. Issue areas in question may extend from trade to justice to police and security cooperation to propagation of shared norms, values and visions of international and regional orders. Intergovernmentalism is much preferred by new regionalisms worldwide precisely because it promises more of a protection for the national sovereignty, which developing countries are hesitant to share with anyone else.

Given the dire straits that several eurozone countries have been wading through since 2009, intergovernmentalism was to be expected to make a powerful comeback in the European Union as well. The five years of crisis in Europe pushed some members of the EU closer to the federalist ways and preferences of dealing with the crisis, while some others – the UK in particular – insisted on keeping the final say in the matters of policy with the representative institutions back home. According to some commentators, these developments “encourage ‘revisionism’ in regional studies as the established EU ‘model’ is devalued or discredited in a world of … the euro crisis” (Shaw 2011: 182). A more optimistic analysis will still see the EU as a “comparator” for most, if not all, comparative regionalist research, simply because regional integration in Europe has longer history and advanced further and closer to a confederate arrangement than anywhere else in the world. Be it as it may, intergovernmentalism does appear a better approach in situations where vast disparities in power and wealth feed substantial interstate disagreements and make compromises difficult.

Before we proceed any further, we need to clarify some basic concepts that will be constantly referenced in the book. First, the term “regionalism” has more than one accepted meaning. Eurasian regionalism has to do with the construction of what some scholars call a “macro” or “meso” region, to distinguish geographic neighbourhoods consisting of several contiguous states from “micro-regions” that these states can be broken into, or the cross-border regions that can extend from one state into another while covering but parts of their individual territories. The rise of micro-regions, commonly associated with the republics and oblasts, and, since 2000 – federal districts of the Russian Federation – is a different, albeit an equally instructive phenomenon (cf. Gel’man et al. 2005; Herrera 2007). Regionalization, when it comes to macro-regions (or interstate regional formations), is the process of both deliberate and the societies-driven, spontaneous creation of a region from a pre-existing group of states located in the same geographic neighbourhood. A region is a political-economic entity that is distinguished from a mere geographic neighbourhood (real or imagined) by ties of solidarity, the sense of a common regional identity and a plethora of social, political and economic transactions that set apart, or privilege participating states vis-à-vis each other over the rest of the world.

As Warleigh-Lack and Robinson (2011: 5–7) observed, region is, perhaps, a more difficult concept to define than regional integration or regional cooperation. While European studies specialists spilled lots of ink hair-splitting between “mere” cooperation and integration proper, this is of lesser relevance to the new regionalism approach (NRA). First, the ongoing wave of regionalisms around the world includes all shades of grey and runs the whole gamut of variations from elementary to the more advanced forms of cooperation on a regional basis. Second, a high degree of supranationalism achieved is no longer considered necessarily indicative of a more advanced stage of “regionness.” Third, regional institution building may pursue more or less explicit integration goals, or may be animated by an idea of cooperation in one or more issue areas. No matter if it is the former or the latter, NR studies will not disqualify either and will treat them all as manifestations of regionalist movements of various directions, speeds and intensity.

Recognition of common interests and desire to cooperate on the basis of a shared regional consciousness appear as the start and the foundation of all subsequent developments. From a NRA perspective, as long as participating subjects see themselves as belonging to the same region, reaffirm their regional identity and interact on that basis, the process of regionalization must have begun. There are various interpretations of the term “regionalization” as well. Most scholars see regionalism as a deliberate construction of a region by states and governments involved, while regionalization is interpreted as a bottom-up, spontaneous, societies-driven process (e.g., Gamble and Payne 2003, Fawcett 2004). Paul Evans (2005: 196) suggests that regionalization is “the expression of increased commercial and human transactions in a defined geographical space,” while regionalism is “the expression of a common sense of identity and destiny combined with the creation of institutions that ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Map of Eurasia
• 1 Studying Regionalisms
• 2 Regionalist Projects in Eurasia: From the CIS to the Eurasian Union
• 3 Russia’s Foreign Policy in the Shadow of the Empire
• 4 Russia and its Partners: Bilateralism, Globalization, Regionalism
• 5 Regionalism and Politics of Energy in Eurasia
• 6 The SCO and the Sino-Russian Relationship
• 7 Regionalism and Multivectorism in Eurasia: The Case of Ukraine
• Bibliography
• Index