Twenty-Five Years Since The USSR Collapse

On December 8, 1991 Russia, Belarus and Ukraine stated that the USSR ceased to exist and signed an agreement on the creation of the CIS. Mikhail Gorbachev, the President of the Soviet Union, resigned on December 25, 1991. The Russian Federation assumed the USSR’s rights and obligations to become the recognized primary legal successor of the Soviet Union.

Each post-Soviet state was free to choose its own destiny but the need to cooperate and maintain mutually beneficial close economic ties was evident.

The creation of the Eurasian Customs Union was guaranteed by 3 different treaties signed in 1995, 1999 and 2007. The first treaty in 1995 guaranteeing its creation, the second in 1999 guaranteeing its formation, and the third in 2007 announced the establishment of a common customs territory and the formation of the customs union. Unlike the previous attempts to integrate, this initiative happened to be an evident success resulting in such practical steps as the introduction of common customs tariff, the adoption of the Customs Code in 2010, and the elimination of border controls in 2011.

January 2015 witnessed an important step towards further integration in Eurasia. The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) came into operation comprising Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. An organization with an integrated single market of 183 million people and a gross domestic product (GDP) of over $4 trillion (PPP) emerged on the world map to introduce the free movement of goods, capital, services and people. The development is a part of global trend. NAFTA, the EU, the Latin American Mercosur and the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), the ASEAN Economic Community in Asia Pacific and the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA) are the examples of integration projects bringing countries together and making them benefit from free trade areas (FTA).

The EAEU members adopt common microeconomic policies encompassing industry, agriculture, transport, energy, foreign trade investments, customs, technical regulation, competition and antitrust regulation. The plans include a single currency and greater integration. Structural homogeneity setting common technological targets is one the driving forces of the integration process. Soviet inheritance of the common electric power infrastructure, including nuclear energy sector, transport and communication networks, research and development systems fosters mutually beneficial technological cooperation.

The benefits include free trade and free movement of goods, capital, services and workforce. The interdependence of EAEU stakeholders lowers the probability of conflicts. The Eurasian project also protects its members from the side effects of globalization processes and helps to get profits from world trade. Nobody loses and everyone wins without any detriment to the interests of others.

The image of the EAEU in the West is controversial. Often the reason is low awareness of the project. Many view the EAEU as the revival of the old Soviet Union or an imperialist project. But the Union is based on the principles of equality among all members and lays out other postulates about integration, which are focused on economic interests and have nothing to do with ideology or politics.

The allegations that Moscow dominates the project are unfounded. Not a single EAEU document says anything about the dominance of Russia. After all, it was Kazakhstan that offered the idea of Eurasian integration in the 1990s. The organization boasts the system of subnational bodies set up to counterbalance national ambitions and prevent infringement on interests of individual members. The Russia’s goal is a stable and predictable environment along its borders. Addressing economic problems together is the best way to avoid instability.

True, the EAEU is opposed to Western hegemony and seeks an equal, rather than a dominant, place in the world community. However, the Union lacks any grounding in a political theory to legitimate its superiority and, outside the area of Eurasia; it is not expansionary in vision.

The Union’s members draw lessons looking at the EU going through hard times. They realize that in order to avoid the mistakes committed by the European Union with its bloated bureaucratic structure, the EAEU needs a balanced and flexible mechanism of decision-making.

Today the future of The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is uncertain while the EAEU is making strides to achieve further progress.

The integration within the framework of the EAEU bolsters global multipolarity. As Russian President Vladimir Putin put it, «…integrating with our neighbors is our absolute priority. The future Eurasian Economic Union, which we have declared and which we have discussed extensively as of late, is not just a collection of mutually beneficial agreements. The Eurasian Union is a project for maintaining the identity of nations in the historical Eurasian space in a new century and in a new world. Eurasian integration is a chance for the entire post-Soviet space to become an independent centre for global development, rather than remaining on the outskirts of Europe and Asia».

The EAEU can become a bridge to the Greater Europe – a common cooperative space together with the EU as part of the process leading to a broader continental integration «From Lisbon to Vladivostok» to benefit the West as well.

It is very important that the Eurasian integration targets not Europe only but also Asia. In late July, the EAEU ratified its first-ever free trade agreement with a country outside of the Union – Vietnam. Recently the EAEU has received around 40 proposals for free trade agreements (FTA). Many of them come from Asia-Pacific countries.

This year the Union has signed memoranda of cooperation with Cambodia and Singapore. During the Russian President’s visit to China in June, the EAEU signed a joint declaration on transition to the negotiation stage for development of the Agreement on Trade and Economic Cooperation between the Eurasian Economic Union (the EAEU) and the People’s Republic of China. Once signed, a cooperation deal with China will be a great leap forward.

Russia is interested in drawing all Asia Pacific countries, not only China, into projects to develop Siberia and the Russia’s Far East. For those unwilling to make a definitive choice between the US and China, Russia and the EAEU would become a truly independent center of power. In 2016, the process of rebalancing Russia’s Asian policy got underway with a sequence of milestone summits: the Russia-Japan Summit on May 6 (and another one slated for December 15) and the ASEAN-Russia Summit on May 19-20.

The idea of ASEAN and EAEU forming a free trade area was broached for the first time at the summit, while the talks about setting up free trade zones between the EAEU and specific ASEAN countries, such as Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia, and are already underway. The ASEAN-Russia Summit declaration mentions the need to explore ways for Russia to join the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).The idea to bring together the EAEU, ASEAN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the Silk Road Economic Belt is very promising.

Russia’s plans to expand the Eurasian integration to encompass China, India, Iran, ASEAN and the RCEP will lead to the creation of a major Euro-Asian political and economic arc to become the backbone of new world order at the time the US-led projects appear to have a slim chance to ever materialize while Brexit and multiple internal crises within the EU prove the European integration pattern has too many flaws.

The EAEU does not follow others. It seeks for its own recipes to become effective, unique and profitable for all members. As such, the project is a promising development to benefit all parties involved.

Originally published on 2016-12-08

Author: Andrei Akulov

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

READ MORE!

Why is Kosovo’s Rebellion Our War?

“What we are really talking about is a humanitarian disaster precipitated by the cold political calculus of an autocratic leader who has pursued a political strategy against his own citizens,” said U.S. Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander in Europe.Gen. Clark’s target was Slobodan Milosevic. Yet his words might have been used by another American general named Robert E. Lee, about another “autocratic leader” named Abraham Lincoln.The day Clark made his statement bolstering the case for air strikes in Kosovo, the fall issue of Independent Review arrived. In a piece on Lincoln, “micromanager of the war effort,” scholar Thomas DiLorenzo ...

Understanding the U.S. War State: The New Fundamentalism, “America is God”

Note: This article was original published by GR in May 2003“It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” - Hermann GoeringGenocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as progress and spreading civilisation.I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam ...

What is the Concert of Powers in International Relations?

After the first decade after the Cold War, it became obvious that an idea of global governance is going to be impossible primarily due to an aggressive US foreign policy as Washington intended to become the world hegemon and global policeman. A turning point in the post-Cold War IR became the Kosovo War of 1998−1999, which resulted in the NATO’s occupation of the south-western region of Serbia based on an idea of „Just War“,[1] but in practice for the creation of the mafia state of the Kosovar Muslim Albanians.[2] As a direct consequence of the NATO’s aggression on Serbia and ...

US-NATO Operations in Kosovo and Ukraine: Compare and Contrast

There have been at least two countries in Europe in recent history that undertook ‘anti-terrorist’ military operations against ‘separatists’, but got two very different reactions from the Western elite. The government of European country A launches what it calls an‘anti-terrorist’ military operation against ‘separatists’ in one part of the country. We see pictures on Western television of people’s homes being shelled and lots of people fleeing. The US and UK and other NATO powers fiercely condemn the actions of the government of country A and accuse it of carrying out ‘genocide’ and ’ethnic cleansing’ and say that there is an urgent ...

A Hybrid War to Break the Balkans?

In the spirit of the New Cold War and following on its success in snuffing out South Stream, the US has prioritized its efforts in obstructing Russia’s Balkan Stream pipeline, and for the most part, they’ve regretfully succeeded for the time being. The first challenge came from the May 2015 Color Revolution attempt in Macedonia, which thankfully was repulsed by the country’s patriotic citizenry. Next up on the destabilization agenda was the political turmoil that threatened to take hold of Greece in the run-up and aftermath of the austerity referendum, the idea being that if Tsipras were deposed, then Balkan ...

The Confrontation between Madrid and Barcelona

Disclaimer/Legal StatementThe website’s owner & editor-in-chief has no official position on any issue published at this website.The views of the authors presented at this website do not necessarily coincide with the opinion of the owner & editor-in-chief of the website.The contents of all material (articles, books, photos, videos…) are of sole responsibility of the authors.The owner & editor-in-chief of this website is not morally, scientifically or legally responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in the contents of all material found on this website.The owner & editor-in-chief of this website is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.No ...

Cold War Then, Cold War Now

The anti-Russian/anti-Soviet bias in the American media appears to have no limit. You would think that they would have enough self-awareness and enough journalistic integrity -– just enough -– to be concerned about their image. But it keeps on coming, piled higher and deeper.One of the latest cases in point is a review of a new biography of Mikhail Gorbachev in the New York Times Book Review (September 10). The review says that Gorbachev “was no hero to his own people” because he was “the destroyer of their empire”. This is how the New York Times avoids having to say anything positive about life ...

What is the European Union for?

After all the initial eu(ro)phoria and hopes placed upon the original concept of a non-aligned, social-democratic Euro-bloc, the reality has turned out somewhat differently. In a pamphlet written in 2011 – Europe: The Unfinished Project – I wrote: At the present time the EU project seems to be stuck in no-man’s land, unable to press ahead with full political integration, or retreat back into a northern European protectionist Deutschmark zone, and leaving the peripheral member states to the tender mercies of unfettered, globalized capitalism. However there seems to be a sufficient residue of the original EU idealism in the present stage of ...

On the Geo-politics of “European Army”

French president Macron’s call for the creation of a “European Army” and the implicit end of NATO alliance reflects the changing global order, the credit for which must, in the first place, go to the US president Trump, who, through his series of actions, has unwittingly done enough damage to the alliance to force the EU to wean away from the so-called western alliance and project itself as an independent player in the international arena. On the one hand, the concept of a “European army” affirms the growing distance between the US and its allies in Europe, and on the ...

Turkish Position at the “Southern Wing” of the NATO and Turkey’s Relations with the EU

The present-day Republic of Turkey is a legal successor state of the former Ottoman Empire (Sultanate). The Republic was founded and proclaimed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on October 29th, 1923 as a result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the lost WWI. A republican Turkey originally was based on the following six principles:Republicanism – Republic instead of a monarchical sultanate.Nationalism - An aggressive anti-minority policy within the state especially against the Kurds.Populism – It was attended in the atmosphere of the absence of a multiparty democracy to gather as much as popular support for the one-party political system.Statism ...

The Kosovo “Powder Keg”

While all eyes have been on the U.S. presidential campaign, such foreign-policy hot spots as Syria, Iran and Pakistan, and the increasingly frosty relations between the United States and China, a simmering problem in the Balkans threatens to come to a boil. The most serious clashes to date involving angry Serb inhabitants of the northern portion of Kosovo and international Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeeping personnel erupted on November 28. Thirty German and Austrian soldiers were injured, some by small-arms fire and Molotov cocktails, when KFOR troops tried to remove roadblocks that Serb residents had erected. Those barricades have been the most ...

Bismarck’s System of Continental Alliances

In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth. Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe? Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and ...

US Meddling in 1996 Russian Elections in Support of Boris Yeltsin

Americans are outraged by allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an intelligence service to hack email accounts of the Democratic National Committee. How inexpressibly heinous that one country, Russia, would try to influence elections in another sovereign country, in this case the United States! How unprecedented! How diabolical! How uniquely Russian!In response, the Obama administration has expelled Russian diplomats, hinted at economic sanctions, and promised further retaliation using America’s “world-class arsenal of cyber weapons.” (NYT Dec. 16, 2016) Obama’s Republican opponents, for their part, have demanded “rocks” instead of Obama’s “pebbles.”But does the USA meddle in the presidential elections ...

Greece in the Mediterranean Security System

With respect to Greece’s role in the Mediterranean security system, the multilateralist formula applied to the region including the Balkans as well as is the orienting principle for the Greek foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Since 1994, the opportunities for NATO’s and EU’s initiatives were more than apparent for Athens when Greece (wrongly) understood the Euro-Atlantic community as a fundamental security player for the extending the values of security and co-operation into this structurally unbalanced region. During the Cold War, the Greek policy-makers also found (wrongly) since 1952 that the US-led NATO offered allegedly excellent opportunities ...

The Strategy of the Intermarium

May 12 to 14 marks the 90th anniversary of the coup by Józef Piłsudski in Poland with which the Polish bourgeoisie tried to save its rule from the threat of socialist revolution. Today, he is being idealized by large sections of the Polish bourgeoisie and the US imperialist elite.In large measure, this is bound up with the increasing popularity of his conception of the Intermarium, a pro-imperialist alliance of right-wing nationalist regimes throughout Eastern Europe that was primarily directed against the Soviet Union. The resurgent interest in the Intermarium has been bound up with the increasing drive toward a new ...

There are Real Nazis in Power in Kiev

Most of former Ukraine is now (since 2014) occupied by nazis/fascists and rasists/extreme nationalists. In some cases they are disguised within other political parties but, make no mistake, their ideology does not change just because they change name or party organisation. As is well known, when the nazis made their coup in 2014 (directed and assisted by the CIA), the first "law" they forcefully passed through the rump and unconstitutional rest-parlament was the prohibition of the russian language (the majority language!) from all official institutions, schools, administration and so on. The second "law" they passed was the legalisation of the nazi ...

Disobedient Hungary: From the Soviet Union to the European Union

CNN recently discovered a paradox. How was it possible, they asked, that in 1989, Viktor Orban, at the time a Western-acclaimed liberal opposition leader, was calling for Soviet troops to leave Hungary, and now that he is Prime Minister, he is cozying up to Vladimir Putin? For the same reason, dummy. Orban wanted his country to be independent then, and he wants it to be independent now. In 1989, Hungary was a satellite of the Soviet Union. Whatever Hungarians wanted, they had to follow directives from Moscow and adhere to Soviet communist ideology. Today, Hungary is ordered to follow directives from Brussels and adhere ...

Contribution of US Capitalism to Nazi Germany’s War Economy

This past weekend saw Russians parading in celebration of the anniversary of their costly victory over Nazi Germany. Millions marched throughout Russia, holding photographs of their fallen family members in bittersweet remembrance. To this archival research peoples historian’s knowledge there was no public reminder that Hitler’s armed forces were built up by the West in open violation of the Versailles Treaty’s prohibitions in expectation of Hitler fulfilling his threats to invade the Soviet Union. There is simply no way impoverished Nazi Germany could have on its own built its Armed Forces up to number one military in the world during the ...

Rape and War: Bosnian Muslim Rapes at the Celebici Camp

War President of Bosnia-Herzegovina Alija Izetbegovic - author of jihadist "Islamic Declaration" in 1970 One of the most outrageous and heinous hoaxes and Hitlerian Big Lies perpetrated by the US and Western media during the Bosnian civil war of 1992-1995 was that Bosnian Serbs had used rape as an “instrument of war”. In order to discredit the Bosnian Serbs, they were accused of committing mass rapes against Bosnian Muslim women, in “rape camps” and “rape motels”. Even the United Nations commander in Bosnia, Canadian Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, a veteran of eight UN peacekeeping missions, was accused of committing rapes against Bosnian ...

“Responsibility To Protect” (R2P) was not Valid in Kosovo and isn’t Valid in Ukraine

The same arguments used to justify a western ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo in 1999 could be used to support a Russian intervention in Ukraine. This article originally appeared at Irrussianality Yesterday, I gave a talk on ‘The Folly of Military Intervention’ at McGill University. Afterwards, one of the students asked me a question about parallels between the wars in Kosovo in 1999 and Ukraine in 2014/15. As I answered, I found myself thinking about the scale of the humanitarian crises in both cases and what this means for supporters of so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’. In 1999, NATO aircraft bombed Yugoslavia for three months. The aim, ...