AFTER 2014: THE END OF IMITATION?

The 2014 crisis in Ukraine marked a twofold change in the development of Russian foreign policy: from the complex search for partnership and occasional criticism of the West towards open confrontation. Therefore, seeking recognition by the West and copying Western institutions as a tool for enhancing legitimacy became less attractive.

Thus, the idea of a Eurasian EU should also be less interesting for the Russian leadership, which indeed seems to be the case. The EAEU treaty is already backing off in comparison with the CU on a number of signif-icant institutional issues (such as reducing the role of the EAEU Court).31 Although the member countries still formally reach the agreed milestones

of regional integration (such as the new Customs Code and the common market for medical products), the content of the new agreements is much more vague and implies a lower level of intergovernmental policy coor-dination.32 At the same time, the EAEU is slowly but surely disappearing from the rhetoric of the Russian leadership. In 2011, according to one of his programmatic newspaper articles published before the elections,33 Putin considered the Eurasian Union a crucial element of Russian foreign policy, also emphasising its potential to become part of a greater European

31 Dragneva 2016; Karliuk 2016; Kembayev 2016.

32 Vinokurov 2018.

33 Putin 2011.

project based on more intensive cooperation with the EU. In his 2018 ad-dress to the nation, however, he was much more eager to focus on Russia’s military capabilities, and barely mentioned the EAEU.34

At the same time, Russia seems to be returning to the domain of im-itational regionalism, although focusing on different blueprints – China rather than the EU. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative is based on very different premises than the EU approach: it is a flexible structure rather than a well-defined organisation and puts more effort into the implemen-tation of specific projects than into developing common norms and rules.

The idea that projects should take precedence over norms was already prominent in Russian rhetoric in 2014–2015.35 In 2014, Russia initiated negotiations between the CU (later the EAEU) and China on the interface between the EAEU and the Silk Road Economic Belt. These negotiations led to the establishment of a trade treaty in 2018, which nevertheless falls short of a free trade agreement and merely contains a number of trade-facilitation measures. At the same time, Russian rhetoric seems to refer more and more frequently to the rather opaque idea of a Great Eurasian Partnership – a flexible structure (not unlike the Belt and Road) connecting different countries of Eurasia. Given the current economic and political potential of Russia, as well as confrontation with the West, this Partnership is unlikely to be implemented, yet it features in the rhetoric of Russian leaders.36

None of the smaller Eurasian countries seem to follow Russia’s con-frontational approach towards the West. It would thus seem that they are unlikely to embrace the new type of Russian integration rhetoric (although interaction with China within the framework of the Belt and Road is important for many of them). At the same time, the current sit-uation in Eurasia hardly leaves any space for new integration projects in addition to the EAEU and the EU-led DCFTA. The only exception appears to be Central Asia, where there is some evidence of growing activism among member countries concerning a sub-regional integration initiative: even in this case, however, thus far there is no evidence of specific projects.

34 Putin 2018.

35 Libman et al 2016.

36 Tsvetov 2017.

4.5 CONCLUSION

In sum, Eurasian regionalism has been through three developmental phases. The predominance of imitational regimes in the 1990s aroused the interest of Eurasian countries in imitating the Eurasian EU to demonstrate that Eurasia was following global patterns – while at the same time pre-cluding it from becoming functional. Russia’s desire for the West to treat it as an equal and its concerns about the expansion of the ENP motivated the transition to a new approach in the 2000s. This was a form of regionalism that still mimicked the EU, so as to be recognised by the West, but which was based on a much higher level of functionality: not to be dismissed as irrelevant by potential Western partners and readily allowing Russia to forge binding relationships with the Eurasian countries. The success of the CU and the EAEU could be seen as a product of this phase of development.

Russia finally seems to have returned to integration rhetoric since 2014 and is now using China (and not the EU) as a benchmark.

Eurasian regionalism, itself a legacy of the Soviet past, was shaped throughout its development by various other real or ideational legacies of the USSR that explain the choices these countries made related to regional integration. Such legacies include the symmetric distribution of resources and bureaucratic capacity, the need to accommodate intensive economic and social ties between countries, the development of imitational regimes leading to imitational regionalism in the 1990s, and the return to Cold War thinking, which played an important role in how Russian elites shaped the country’s foreign policy in the 2000s.

We are not suggesting that the EAEU is likely to become powerless or to disappear in the years to come. On the contrary, the lack of political at-tention could be conducive to implementing low-level bureaucratic goals such as the harmonisation of standards. The EAEU has already achieved a substantial level of integration, and in the face of bureaucratic inertia is likely to stay at this level.

At the same time, we suggest that both of the goals post-Soviet (and in particular Russian) leaders pursued while supporting regionalism in Eurasia in its “EU-like” form, namely demonstrating an ability to follow the same path as the European nations (in the 1990s) and confirming Russia’s great power status (in the 2000s), are unlikely to have an influ-ence on Russian foreign policy in the future.

What does this analysis imply with regard to the main research ques-tion addressed in this volume, namely what remains of the Soviet Union almost thirty years after its collapse? First, the existence of the post-So-viet regional organisations indicates that Eurasia still, to some extent,

perceives itself and is perceived as a single region in world politics. The boundaries of this region are blurred, as several countries try to avoid being characterised as “Eurasian” (Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia) and limit their level of participation in Eurasian regionalism or remain out-side it.37 Second, Eurasian countries are still economically and socially linked. These linkages, unsurprisingly, weakened during the post-Soviet era, partly because of the imitational nature of Eurasian regionalism and partly as an unavoidable consequence of constructing new independent polities, but they have certainly not disappeared. Examples include the vibrant labour migration from Central Asia and Armenia to Russia, and the continuing vital role of Russian foreign direct investments in many Eurasian countries. In many cases the persistence of these ties is much more an outcome of bottom-up processes as economic and social actors maintain their contacts, than of the top-down process of formal interna-tional regional integration. In some cases, however, Eurasian regionalism as discussed in this chapter contributed to it as well: the visa-free regime between most of the CIS countries is conducive to labour migration, for example. In other cases, new economic ties emerged from the old legacies.

The political regimes currently in place in most Eurasian countries have evolved from the regimes that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union (although some countries departed – or attempted to de-part – from this tradition). At the same time, it should be borne in mind that Eurasia comprises countries that differ fundamentally in terms of economic development, history before incorporation into the Russian Empire or the USSR, and culture. This heterogeneity should lead naturally to very different trajectories of political and economic development.

37 Kazakhstan, on the other hand, highlights its status as a “Eurasian” country, although it focuses less on the post-Soviet Eurasia and more on its position in the middle of the Eurasian continent: the alternative for Kazakhstan would be to be perceived as part of the Islamic world or the Middle East, which does not appear to be attractive to its leadership.