The Shanghai Cooperation Organization

Exploring New Horizons

Sergey Marochkin, Yury Bezborodov, Sergey Marochkin, Yury Bezborodov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000589528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Asiatische Politik

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is one of the most rapidly developing centres of the multipolar world, covering an enormous landmass including China, India, Russia and its southern Eurasian neighbours.

With both its eight member states and a growing group of observer states, the SCO's activities have expanded beyond its initial focus on security and stability to broader cooperation with the UN and other groupings such as the G20, BRICS, NATO and ASEAN. Bringing together large and disparate nation-states with often rival geostrategic agendas means that it not only faces substantial structural challenges but also has great potential. The contributors to this volume, representing a range of the states within the SCO, evaluate the possibilities for the Organization, and the challenges it faces in achieving them through a prism of legal regulation. They evaluate the bloc's prospects for economic, humanitarian, legal, trade, labour, migration, and environmental cooperation, as well as its more traditional concerns with security and defence. The authors, analyzing the quality of cooperation between states within the SCO, note the controversial character of this process: it demonstrates both efficiency and declarative and decorative nature of the SCO.

A valuable read for scholars and policy-makers with a focus on Eurasian cooperation, and processes of regionalism and universalism in international relationships.

1 Developing Eurasian space through regional cooperation Finding new ways

Sergey Marochkin and Yury Bezborodov

DOI: 10.4324/9781003170617-1

A feature of the first two decades of the new century and millennium is the simultaneous existence of opposing tendencies: universalism and regionalism. In this context, growing attempts to establish a unipolar world to the detriment of a multipolar one are obvious. Cooperation in solving the universal problems of mankind has sharply slowed down, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is in stagnation. The confrontation between states, especially large ones, has been growing and getting an extreme point. The states did not even address (did not approach to) the discussion and solution of common world global problems due to a high degree of mistrust, opposition, and ambitious aspirations.

Globalization seems to come to the past, the world is going through times of turbulence and uncertainty. The general trend in international relations is the moving from universal to group cooperation, the creation and development of regional and interregional unions, structures, organizations. The world needs more targeted and specialized interaction, insofar as in the current geopolitical situation regional cooperation can suggest better solutions for international issues. Thus, the predominant basis of modern international life is formed not by global, but bilateral and group interaction, development and integration are observed within regional structures. A significant increase in the number of regional interstate associations is obvious, and now virtually every country is included in at least one regional association.

From the beginning of 2020, mankind faced and has been surviving new unexpected global challenges – the pandemic of previously unknown COVID-19 virus covering almost all the world, and the economic crisis, which is not comparable in scales and effects with the previous ones. It can be assumed, with a certain degree of probability, that COVID-19 distracted states from the current international situation and prevented an international armed conflict on a local or even international scale. It seemed that the common for mankind misfortunes named earlier would force states to think about an overall fate and would push them to negotiations, discussions, and joint solutions to global problems. Obviously, nothing like this is happening. The ambitions of the “big world players” are gaining priority again, the competition for world influence and leadership has continued and is gathering momentum.

As a matter of the fact, challenging and changing times have come. The world is unlikely to return to the previous parameters of life and the paradigm of relationships. Future restructuring of the international order is getting quite possible. It will be associated with the weakening of some states and their associations’ role and the rising of new great powers and institutions. Along with this, a new reality is developing, which can replace the current one, and change the system of international relations. Former priorities – the fight against terrorism, the problem of nuclear parity and deterrence, persistent confrontation between major states can pass into secondary in comparison with the growing planetary threats hanging over all of humanity, such as a perpetual pandemic as a possible precursor of new biological catastrophes, climate shocks, disrupted ecology, natural disasters, global warming, dangerous climate change on the entire planet, almost stopped strategic arms control.

The “Asian world” (Asian countries) is becoming active in international life with accelerating rates. Its inclusion in international political and economic processes occurred in the middle of the 19th century. However, until the second half of the 20th century, most of the region’s countries had been under colonial or semi-colonial dependence on Western states, and some of them simply did not exist (for instance, Brunei, Malaysia, North Korea, Republic of Korea, etc.). The end of the Second World War, the dissolution of the colonial system, and the formation of a new structure of international relations contributed to the situation that Asia plays an increasingly significant role in the global political process. Nowadays the Asian – and more broadly Eurasian – region has a special geopolitical significance and potential because of the presence of large states, territorial extent, population, economic potential, political and ideological heterogeneity, and instability. Largely due to this, in the second half of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century, there has been the widening of the “Asian world” influence in the international arena. Therefore, non-Western regionalism receives growing interest and attention.

The Eurasian region is being built in different formats and directions at the macro, micro, and interregional levels. There is a search for ways and forms of regional and interregional cooperation (CIS, EAEC, EAEU, CSTO, Eurasian Customs Union). At the beginning of the new millennium, regionalization trends in the Eurasian region expectedly led to the creation of the SCO.

This Organization was established for a very specific and narrow range of goals and objectives of ensuring regional safety and stability. At the initial stage of its formation, the attitude to the Organization was controversial: while believers in advanced cooperation in Eurasian space exaggerated expectations of the high effectiveness of the SCO, opponents of it were skeptical about the mentioned possibilities. Some researchers consider an ambitious and well-timed Russian-Chinese project to unite the efforts of states under the SCO to fight “three forces of evil” as an attempt of creating a classic international political organization with obscure goals and with the desire to strengthen their own positions in the regional and international arenas.

Many experts (mainly Western ones) argue that the SCO is experiencing an internal crisis, while other experts (Chinese) suggest modifying the Organization’s traditional model and vector of development, moving away from the existing principle of consensus within the SCO and strengthening its economic component by developing trade facilitation mechanisms.

In recent years, there has been observed the growth of the SCO’s role and influence as a non-standard form of interregional cooperation of countries with different histories, civilization patterns, cultures, political systems, levels of economic development, and influence in the world. The Organization manifests departure from Eurocentric model of IOs. It has become the biggest regional organization in the world in terms of geographic coverage and population size. Comprising eight states, it has started the procedure of accepting Iran as a new member. Nowadays the SCO, to some extent, is one of the rapidly developing centers of the multipolar world. Its external relationship is growing due to cooperation with the UN and such associations as the G20, NATO, CSTO, ASEAN, and BRICS.

In new world conditions and having stepped over its 20th anniversary in 2021, the SCO is facing not only the possibility but also the necessity to intensify and expand its activities. The Organization encounters conceptual issues concerning further development and the need to update its Eurasian policy. The opportunities of other directions and fields for the SCO countries’ cooperation are relevant and not fully performed. It seems to be possible to widen the mandate of the SCO from pure security and strategic functions to issues of economic development, energy partnerships, scientific, humanitarian, labor, migrant, and cultural interactions. A new and promising area of the SCO regional strategy is finding common ground with two neighboring projects – the EAEU and the SREB. The creation of the Development Bank and the SCO Reserve Fund remains on the agenda, as well as alternative options, for example, integration of China’s bank capital into the Eurasian Development Bank.

Considering the aforementioned text, the analysis of the potential of the SCO may reveal new guidelines and forms of cooperation. This study aims to explore such perspectives and new possible horizons. It is based on and comes from the wide range of theoretical discourse and literature on SCO – Western, Russian, Chinese, etc. – with inevitable critical thinking and debate, and suggests a vision of the Organization’s untapped potential and new directions for development.

The majority of works published in Russia, China, and Kazakhstan consider the SCO as an organization that is in a constant mode of expectation of prompt responses and reactions from it to ongoing social crises, as well as active interaction at the international and national levels. The SCO is acquiring an increasingly declarative and decorative character in reality and in studies on it.

Many papers are focused on the relationships of individual states within the Organization, and primarily on the relations of the SCO locomotives – Russia and China. A review shows that most publications disclose a particular internal or external aspect of the Organization’s activities, and in most situations – the political ones: security, defense, prospects for multilateral cooperation with international structures, the SREB, Russia’s national interests in the SCO, etc. Teams of the books’ contributors mainly include researchers from one country (usually an SCO member). The noted features give these books a certain one-sided focus of research.

The conceptual specificity of the present volume lies in the team of contributors, scope of research, methodology, the main aim, and the structure and content. The theme of the book brings together a large range of established and young scholars from most SCO countries: Russia, Kazakhstan, China, India, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Moreover, co-authors in a majority of chapters are from different countries. Such international participation at the chapter level is to ensure conjunction of different points and approaches to the subject matter. The project involves representatives of various fields of knowledge – political science, international relations, international law, jurisprudence, history, finance, physics and mathematics, and economics.

In this study, we deliberately move aside the issues of “high” politics and geo-politics since enough books and articles are devoted to them. In addition to security and defense issues, which are key and initial for the Organization, we focus on economic, humanitarian, legal, trade, labor, migrant, and environmental (ecological) aspects. Therefore, the SCO activities, issues and assumed prospects are examined from different standpoints and provide a multidimensional overview of existing trends. All this inevitably widens a subject of research and is to provide the versatility of assessments.

The book reflects and manifests that the SCO shall be distinguished with the Western (Eurocentric) models of regionalism (in particular, see about this in Chapters 4 and 14). They come from the theories of regionalism well established in scientific discourse and discussion since the late 1980s. From the historic standpoint, there are the following approaches to regionalism: “old regionalism” (re-construction of the regions during the Cold War period); “new regionalism” (rethinking the role of regions after the end of the Cold War); and “comparative regionalism” – the term which includes a great variety of options for regional integration, also known as “non-European” regionalism. The methodology of examining the SCO issues bases on the theories of comparative regionalism. For this purpose, the authors review existing approaches employed by the SCO countries to establish regional security: “Post-Soviet” regionalism of Russia, “Asian” regionalism of China, and “virtual” regionalism of Central Asia countries (this brief overview of theories is by E. Mikhaylenko).

According to all mentioned earlier, the basic research methods are comparative analysis (comparative legal studies, comparative regionalism, comparative historical approach), social science methods, multidisciplinary approach, legal analysis, empirical observation, use of data of statistics and economics, and experts’ assessments. The research is carried out through the prism of legal regulation.

The main purpose and structure of the book are to show that the exploration of the SCO issues is carried out not in static (the current state of the Organization and its activities), but in dynamics: what the SCO was in the times of its creation, what it is now and how it works, what would be potentials of it in future. So, the book provides a comparative analysis of the initial and present level of interaction and cooperation within the SCO as well as suggests contours of new goals and tasks. Based on such an analysis it is to aim at exploring and searching future possibilities and horizons. This study proposes a range of possible directions for the development of cooperation and an assessment of the potentials for the SCO evolution from a coordination to an integration organization.

According to the dynamic approach to the study of the SCO, the book contains three parts. The first one called “Building a Basis: Roots and Grounds” offers an overview and characteristics of the initial foundations in building the Organization, although these foundations are also considered by the authors from the point of view of development and possible prospects. Chapter 2 is devoted to organizational and legal bases, the stag...