Regions in Transition in the Former Soviet Area

Ideas and Institutions in the Making

Alessandra Russo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783319606231
• eBook ISBN: 9783319606248
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book aims to understand the "texture" of the post-Soviet region, where waves of de-integration and re-integration have been resonating at different times and through diverse manifestations over the last quarter of century. The post-Soviet states have been evolving in an embryonic system of states in their close neighbourhood, whose boundaries and rules of interactions are still in the making. However, one can already detect specific traits of regional governance, one of these being the presence of overlapping organisations and institutions.

It includes reflections on relations between state formation and region formation and a tentative conceptualisation of a post-colonial form of regionalism. The focus on small states, featuring different behaviours vis-à-vis regional organisations and regional imaginaries in their transitional and still unsettled state identities and foreign policy narratives, constitutes a further element of originality. This innovative volume is crucial reading for scholars and researchers of International Relations with a special interest in either the Former Soviet Space or Comparative Regionalism.

© The Author(s) 2018

Alessandra RussoRegions in Transition in the Former Soviet Areahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60624-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Alessandra Russo^{1, 2}

(1)

Sciences Po Bordeaux, Centre Emile Durkheim, Pessac, France

(2)

Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy

End Abstract

1 Walking on the Edge

The establishment and development of regional coordination, cooperation and integration initiatives in several parts of the world represents a key theme that has accompanied the International Relations theory in the past 20 years.

While the phenomena of regionalism and regionalisation certainly predate the end of the Cold War, research revolving around the “regionals ” ¹ received so much new impetus during the last two decades to give rise to a new scholarly field of “Comparative Regionalism ”. After having proceeded through different waves, studies on international regions and their formation have indeed begun to turn away from the European case to look at other regions as well.

Against this background, students of regionalism continue to be challenged by the ontological and epistemological liminality of the subject, characterised as it is by a precarious balance between Area Studies and International Relations. Academic debates over the meaning of “region” have not disbanded the “palpable unease amongst scholars” (Hameiri 2013, p. 317) when it comes to endeavours of conceptualisation. This is even more evident in the archipelago of Eurasian /Russian/East European/Slavic studies, which are in need new scientific foundations to reconsider the way knowledge about the “post-Soviet” is produced and organised. Whereas “region” can be thus conceived of as a post-Cold War aporia, the definition of the former Soviet space is no less contested and aporetic.

Over the last 20 years, whilst the objects of enquiry have been structurally reshaped, studies on post-Soviet regionalism have revived the “perennial contest between partisans of ‘nomothetic’ approaches […] and ‘idiographic’ approaches” (Kennedy 1997). In other words, the study of former Soviet space has been complicated not only by the crisis of Sovietology, but also by disciplinary cleavages. According to the terminology developed by Amitav Acharya (2006), “regionally-oriented disciplinarists” (primarily disciplinary scholars looking at regional phenomena, often comparatively) and “discipline-oriented regionalists” (primarily area specialists who have accepted and adopted theoretical frameworks from a particular discipline) rarely develop joint intellectual enterprises and often tend to reproduce a traditional division of intellectual labour that hinders a dialogue between data collection and their theoretically-informed analysis, between the mastering of primary sources and “alternative hermeneutics” (Kennedy 1997) on the one hand and the “quest for ‘law-like regularities’ transcending spatio-temporal confines” (Teti 2007) on the other.

While the evolving scholarship on regionalism in the former Soviet space is breathing new life into the discredited field of Sovietology, it is also reproducing an Area Studies approach that fails to highlight the potentiality of this case study as an instance of far-reaching phenomena. Considering the post-Soviet region through the lens of International Relations, instead, paves the way for the study of a formative process, i.e., how a region is structured through “creative fragmentation ”, ² changing territorialities and the political production of new overlapping and interweaving polities—intended as functionally and territorially defined political communities, characterised by their own spatial, institutional and ideational articulations. ³

Through this twist, and hanging my research agenda in a delicate balance between the case study and what it is an instance of, the book aims at displaying that the post-Soviet region has been and is being shaped by a particular process of mutual constitution of structures (i.e. regional institutions and identities) and agents (actors operating in the region, i.e. states). On the one hand, the assemblage of states previously part of the Soviet Union , having experienced alternate processes of de-integration and re-integration , are defined and redefined by political and cultural elites that recurrently refer to regional institutional schemes and normative orders; on the other hand, regional organisations (hereinafter also abbreviated as ROs) in the former Soviet space produce and reproduce certain policies and practices at the state level.

2 Regionals Unfolding in the Former Soviet Space

The plain observation of how the post-Soviet countries are interconnected results in identifying four typologies of regional interactions: (1) Intergovernmental linkages (state-led top-down regionalism); (2) Informal regionalisation (process of regional assemblages); (3) Shadow regionalism (transnational and trans-state linkages); (4) Regionalist projects driven by international actors.

Several regional organisations loosely bind together many-sided and patchy groups of post-Soviet countries (Table 1).

Table 1

Regional organizations in the post-Soviet space (author’s elaboration)

	Pan-Regional/Trans-Regional	Regional	Sub-Regional
Enlargement	Council of Europe Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe Economic Cooperation Organisation Organisation of Islamic Cooperation
Creation	Conference on Interactions and Confidence-building Measures in Asia (1992)	Commonwealth of Independent States (1991) Collective Security Treaty (1992)/Collective Security Treaty Organization (2002) Eurasian Economic Community (2001) Eurasian Economic Union (2015)	Central Asian Commonwealth (1991)/Central Asian Economic Union (1994)/Central Asian Economic Cooperation (1998)/Organization of Central Asian Cooperation (2002) Caspian Cooperation Organisation (1991—not implemented) Black Sea Economic Cooperation (1992)—Organisation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation (1999) Black Sea Naval Cooperation Task Group (2001) Shanghai Treaty (1996)/Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001) GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development (2001) Community of Democratic Choice (2005) Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States (2009) TAKM—Organization of the Eurasian Law Enforcement Agencies with Military Status (2013)

When the Soviet Union initiated its path towards dismemberment, the Commonwealth of Independent States had already been designed as a mechanism for managing the negative fallout of fragmentation . On 8 December 1991, the leaders of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine signed the Belovezh/Minsk Accords, through which they declared the termination of the 1922 Treaty on the Creation of the USSR and the foundation of the CIS. Although it was initially established as a “Slavic club”, the CIS became after few weeks a “Eurasian club”: the Protocol to the Agreement Establishing the CIS, which was proclaimed to be a constitutive integral part of the Minsk Agreement, extended membership to Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan ⁴ as peer co-founders (Kembayev 2009, p. 29).

Since its constitution, membership in the CIS has been considered a contentious political choice by several former Soviet states, although this did not prevent them from joining many other regional organisations, coalitions and alignments. The CIS has been criticised, protested and delegitimised at different moments—almost in rotation—by its members; and its death knell has been repeatedly tolled by national leaders, regional officials, policymakers and the media. In March 1997 the Institute of CIS Countries published a report titled “The CIS: the beginning of the end of the history”, where it was argued that disintegrative processes were becoming prevalent in the CIS and that integration had been endangered by geopolitical pluralism and multicentrism in the post-Soviet space. Shortly after the release of that report, the CIS Council of the Heads of State held in Chisinau in October 1997 was described as a “rehearsal for the CIS’s funeral” in which the “fraternal Presidents danced in unison” (Zatulin and Migranyan 1997). On 18 March 1998, Georgy Bovt declared in a headline in the newspaper Sevodnya that the “Commonwealth’s demise is just a matter of time”; furthermore, although for a time the “Chisinau crisis” seemed to have been trascended, the narrative of an imminent decease of the CIS persisted, to such an extent that the Commonwealth can undoubtedly be considered a zombie-organisation (Glumskov et al. 2003; Ratiani 2004; Melikova 2005; Dubnov 2005a, ⁵ 2005b; Gamlova and Mamedov 2011).

Against this funereal background, the architecture of the CIS has not been dismantled; on the contrary, it has become a comprehensive framework which, in turn, comprises a military pillar and an economic pillar. On the one hand, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation stemmed from the institutionalisation of the Tashkent Agreement, originally signed by Russia , Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in 1992, and Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Georgia in 1993. In 1999 Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan decided not to renew the treaty, thus only six countries formally agreed to create the CSTO. Uzbekistan re-joined the CSTO in 2005 but withdrew again in 2012.

On the other hand, the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) originated from the CIS Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia ; when it was established in 2000, it also included Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. ⁶ In 2005 Uzbekistan joined as well but suspended its participation in the EurAsEC’s governing bodies since 2008. ⁷

Alongside this set of “spaghetti-bowl” arrangements, it is important to also consider the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation . A loose multi-bilateral cooperation involving Russia, China and three Central Asian countries had already been initiated during the 1990s to reso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Region-Building in the Former Soviet Space
• 3. The Paradox of Russian Hegemony
• 4. Post-Soviet States and Post-Soviet Regions
• 5. The Inside-Out Facet: State Identity and Regional Imaginaries
• 6. The Outside-In Facet: Regional Models of Governance Transfer?
• 7. Conclusions
• Backmatter