Reconciling the Silk Road Economic Belt and the Eurasian Economic Union in Central Asia: An Impossible Endeavor?

Abstract

The introduction of the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) in late 2013 as one of the two core components of China’s One Belt One Road has kick-started a flurry of infrastructure construction and transport connectivity projects throughout Central Asia as a means of linking East and West. Yet the wave of mass-scale projects along the “Silk Road” has brought Chinese influence right into Russia’s traditional backyard, raising the fascinating prospect of how the SREB and the Eurasian Economic Union will coexist in the same space. Despite Russian rhetoric expressing enthusiasm for the SREB following a state meeting between Putin and Xi in May 2015, few concrete, visible steps have been taken to this point to realize each leader’s stated goal to link the two platforms as a means of avoiding a potential clash of interests or outright conflict in the future. A core issue regarding the harmonization of these two platforms revolves around the fact that a significant mismatch in organizational designs and objectives exists, with China and Russia attempting to link an outward-looking, inclusive global campaign designed to break through trade barriers with an inward-looking, regionally exclusive project designed to boost trade and economic growth within the organization at the expense of non-member states outside the bloc’s borders. Additionally, the core objectives of each initiative expose sharp divergences in how each actor perceives modern foreign policy and the international system, with China placing economic and commercial interests over everything else and Russia adhering to a traditional state-centric notion of geopolitical thought geared towards maintaining a regional sphere of influence over its traditional domain. This paper will investigate the growing sense of competition between the SREB and the EAEU in addition to the actors behind these initiatives/organizations, beginning with separate explorations of each platform prior to examining areas of convergence and divergence between China and Russia in Central Asia. The paper rests on the concepts of geo-economics and postmodern geopolitics, resurrecting several theories that emerged around the turn of the millennium between the end of the Cold War and the War on Terror, arguing that globalization (with OBOR as the latest, most profound outgrowth of the concept) has tectonically shifted the way we perceive geopolitics in the 21 st century.