ABSTRACT
Eurasia has become something of a buzzword for all manner of attempts to define regional identities, integration projects and the relationship between “old” Europe and “new” Asia. Among the state actors talking Eurasia, the Putin regime in Russia has been the most active. For decades, Russian political discourse has flirted with the well-established Eurasianist worldview narratives advocated by certain Russian political actors, in which Russia’s central position in the Eurasian continent provides it with a unique role in the world, while the premier foreign policy project of third-term Putin was the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Most recently, the Russian political machine has begun promoting the notion of a Greater Eurasia arrangement, in which the EEU would operate as the institutional pivot in a transcontinental economic arrangement including the European Union and ASEAN. Against this background, this chapter investigates how the notion of Eurasia as a region, continent and abstract space operate within these Russian political discourses. It is argued that the notion of Eurasia functions as the conduit tying together a particular meta-geographical and scalar imaginary with more pragmatic attempts at instituting a political-economic spatial fix.
