Eurasia - a Region? (1/6)

Starting in the early 1990th the EU covered the whole post-Soviet region with one policy instrument, the Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States (TACIS). Since then, the EU policy has diversified into separate strands. Still, the debate is going on whether the EU’s policy towards the Eastern Neighbourhood and Central Asia needs to be more diversified. Before analysing the different policy instruments of the EU in chapter [X], this chapter discusses, whether Eurasia should be considered a region, to be addressed by a one-size-fits-all policy, or the countries should be better dealt with on a bilateral basis.

In the first section, we develop different dimensions of regional integration to answer the two following questions. What is regional integration? How can we measure it? We find five dimensions of regional integration: 

To examplify the different dimensions of regional integration, wie refer to the EU as the "gold standard" of projects of regional integration. Based on this discussion we briefly address the question, why the EU tends to also perceive other world regions as projects of regional integration. In the following four sections we discuss the for each dimension, whether we find regional integration in Eurasia or not. The section on the territorial dimension discusses what the term Eurasia means and what region it covers. The section on the "institutional dimension" provides an overview of existing projects of regional integration lead by Russia ot China. The section on the political dimension of regional integration reviews the relations of Russia and China as the two geopolitical actors active in the region with the other states of Eurasia. The economic dimension revisits the Soviet legacy of the Eurasian countries, which still has considerable influence on the countries economic activities as well as the more recent Chinese engament in the region. We conclude that the level of regional integration is low as the existing projects are lead by hegemonic intentions of China and Russia. The EU's and the US' influence is way to limited in the region to have comparable clout on the countries in the region.