ABSTRACT
This book is about the enormous space between the European core and China. It is about its potential for both the creation of wealth and peripheral degradation, for both cooperation and – as events in Ukraine from 2013 onward have demonstrated – conflict, for both further economic integration and new barriers between neighbours. It is about one of the very few ‘last frontiers’ for economic expansion on a truly massive scale. Eurasia is quickly transforming into an increasingly interconnected economic and – to a limited extent – political space and a concept that is becoming the main focus of civilian and military strategic planners for years to come. As Dmitry Trenin has argued, ‘Within Eurasia, we see how the weight and role of key components of the world’s largest region is changing’.1 Thus, quite naturally, it involves the clash of many national and international interests. The recent revival of approaching international relations in predominantly geopolitical terms leads many, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, to think that ‘A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions’.2
