ABSTRACT
Eurasian integration has been one of the key foreign and economic policy goals of Putin’s third presidential term. Just before the United Russia party meeting at which his presidential candidacy was announced, an article was published in which he outlined Russia’s integration policy. It consisted of economic integration in the sphere of the former Soviet Union, a post-Cold War world Gaullist idea of Greater Europe and its multiple centres and Russia’s role and identity in Eurasian as a ‘European power in Asia, not a Eurasian power in Europe’ (Sakwa 2015: 18-19). The loose ideological background10 behind the Eurasian integration pro-
cess is Eurasianism, which can be interpreted as a civilisational world-view, or as a political justification of Russia’s foreign policy, or as economic policy in terms of a Custom Union and wider Eurasian economic cooperation comprising Chinese economic initiatives (Silk Road) and Russia’s initiatives to establish a common economic space from Lisbon to Vladivostok. The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is often mentioned as the founding father of the ideational justification of Eurasian integration because of his 1994 speeches referring to Lev Gumilev’s (1912-92) Eurasianist ideas. The establishment of the EEU consolidated the foreign policy framework that President Putin outlined with regard to Eurasian integration during his election campaign in 2012.11 In the EEU, answers to the questions of Russia as an imperial state versus a nation state, Russia as a Eurasian versus a European state, and Russia’s response to the challenges of globalisation in the frame of post-Cold War international relations are sought at a very practical level. The EEU’s political reasoning can be found in various sources. Richard
Sakwa (2015: 12-13) approaches the Eurasian Union in the framework of ‘regionalism’. He sees that regions are potentially becoming the successors to traditional nation-states and a way for them to response to the pressure of globalisation. He points out that there are three ‘dominant forms of regionalism in the world today – micro-regional economic integration, meso-regional political integration and macro-transcontinental security regionalism’. The EU represents micro-regional integration overlapping with both the mesopolitical regionalism of the Council of Europe (CoE), encompassing a
number of countries stretching through Europe to Asia. In security politics, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) embodies macro-regionalism. Sakwa claims that there is not only one normative form of regionalism, as we often see it from a Eurocentric perspective, drawing on the EU experience. He claims that ‘there are diverse forms of regionalism, each with its normative logic combining political, security, economic and identity dynamics’. The dynamics connected to Russia’s regional ambitions have also received
some attention at the official level from the presidents of both Kazakhstan and Belorussia, who have underlined that they favour economic integration but are hesitant to advance a political integration that would diminish the political sovereignty of their states. In his interview in Izvestiya (26 October 2011) President Nazarbayev emphasised his consistently repeated statement that Eurasian economic integration does not mean any restoration or reincarnation of the Soviet Union. This point of view was again restated by him and also President Lukashenko during the Ukrainian crisis. The Western reaction to President Putin’s initiative has for the most part considered it not just as a form of rational regional integration, but as a hegemonic power politics on a collision course with the interests of the West.12
