ABSTRACT
As globalization continues apace and lingering financial and economic crises threaten to deepen in the medium term, integration is becoming increasingly relevant and important across the world. States united by common economic interests and objectives are more successful in the global economy. They get an edge over competitors by removing obstacles to growth and coordinating strategies and development policies. For two decades, relations between Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries were marked by centrifugal forces and inertia. Now these independent nations recognize the power of economic integration to generate sustainable, high-quality economic growth and substantially improve the quality of life for their citizens. Eurasian integration, like other forms around the world, has a clear eco-
nomic rationale, but what sets it apart is its ideological foundation laid more than a century ago by Prince Nikolai Trubetskoi,1 whose ideas were further developed by Pyotr Savitsky, Georgy Vernadsky and Lev Gumilev. In their writings, they argued that Eurasian states share a cultural and historic environment, as well as an entrenched Eurasian political tradition and principles of governance. As such, economic integration in the post-Soviet space should be viewed as a logical, historically justified and economically viable process. Although Eurasian economic integration is following the general contours
of European integration under the European Union (EU), ultimately it is a unique process. To begin with, it is the first regional integration movement to reunite economies that were once part of a single country. Eurasian integration is also an unprecedented step for the participating countries, which, after centuries of getting used to life under the Russian Empire and later the USSR, are now willing to delegate some of their recently acquired sovereignty to a supranational authority. Both in terms of form and content, Eurasian integration stands apart. It is the first to be rooted in international law – in this case the World Trade Organization (WTO) – and guided by the pragmatic objective of making independent economies more competitive by ceding sovereign rights to regulate trade and economic relations to a supranational body with a uniquely democratic decision-making process based on genuine equality and unanimity.2
