It is not surprising that these days – as tectonic shifts materialize
within the system of international relations, formerly uncontested
global authorities like the UN and the OSCE are sinking into serious
crises, and the whole architecture of the international law is crumbling
- the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional group whose
potential is seldom called into question, is passing through a phase of
protracted identity searches that threatens to turn chronic. While China
and Russia, the two SCO heavyweights with their original foreign-policy
programs, largely define the organization's integral agenda, the group
continues to lack an overarching concept, and divisions persist among
the SCO members over the objectives behind their alliance. The
multilateral part of the SCO internal mechanics appears particularly
fragile, plus the interactions between SCO and other global actors
obviously await a series of bold adjustments.
It is clear at the moment that many of the unbridged gaps between SCO
members are actually widening as the post-Soviet Central Asia is being
ripped apart under conflicting external influences. Neither the
political and military, nor the economic potentials of the cooperation
in the SCO framework have been fully unlocked so far, and the assessment
is fair that bilateral activities such as massive Chinese investments
in Tajikistan's infrastructures or the energy cooperation between Russia
and Kazakhstan actually constitute the prevalent form of transactions
under the nominally multilateral SCO umbrella.
Generally, the key function of the SCO should be to achieve synchronism
among its members on the basis of the values and principles which they,
in concert, suggest as the optimal foundations of the new world order.
In practice, the SCO should focus on regional stability which can only
be propped up by a combination of deep economic integration and sound
collective security arrangements.
The widening of the SCO, which is a prerequisite to its development,
will continue to stall unless the group convincingly spells out its
mission and conceptual basics. As of today, the plan to which the
organization subscribed – to go beyond reacting to external pressures
and to emerge as a player exerting a formative influence of the
geopolitical and geoeconomic space around it – mostly remains on paper.
The SCO boasts an impressive array of economic potentials but the
synergy between them hitherto remains almost untapped. The root cause of
the failure is that, as noted above, the majority of the interactions
within the group tend to be bilateral, even though – given enough
political will and sober economic reckoning – the SCO should be able to
climb the whole ladder of the economic integration from the
establishment of a free trade zone up to the creation of a common
economic space. A number of factors evidently favor seamless SCO
economic integration:
• The group's mechanisms of integration in the spheres of politics and
security should serve as solid guarantees of shared economic success.
• The SCO economies are in various regards complementary and
structurally open to efficient division of labor.
• The SCO as a whole sits on exceptional energy reserves.
• The SCO countries have considerable R&D and industrial capacities
along with skilled and relatively cheap labor.
The bigger economies – China and Russia – as well as their modestly
proportioned Central Asian peers similarly stand to benefit from
membership in the SCO ensemble by intelligently relaying resources and
reserves. For example, the Russian and Kazakh oil and gas sectors
together with the Tajik and Kyrgyz hydropower can supply China's energy
needs and, at the same time, draw confidence from being linked to the
ample and steadily growing Chinese energy market.
The security and economic stability of Russia and China will
increasingly depend on the pace of socioeconomic progress in the
neighboring countries and regions. Considering the territories and
population sizes of the SCO members, the group simply has to feel being a
candidate for a definitive role in building the present-day world
order.
Russia and China are not to any considerable extent economic rivals.
Neither of the two needs or has a chance to dominate the other
economically, meaning that both should have no problems reaching
compromises and therefore can play duo, putting to work their respective
competitive edges. Overall, the SCO offers to its members excellent
terms for cooperation, in part because neither of them is interested in
seeing others clash.
Few regional groupings compare to the SCO in terms of the internal
availability of the full production and consumption cycle. The admission
of Iran, India, Pakistan, and Mongolia as observers should make the SCO
even more self-sufficient. From this standpoint, Iran as a country with
giant energy reserves and handy transit infrastructures merits a
special invitation. Having Iran built into it would make the SCO a
holder of the lion's share of the Eurasian energy reserves, with the
political perks automatically added to the economic balance sheet.
The lingering Afghan crisis – and Washington's attempts to perpetuate
the US military presence in the country, to spread it from Afghanistan
to Central Asia, to cause the conflict to spill over to Pakistan, and to
eventually undermine Iran – altogether impose a heavy burden on the
international agenda. The SCO keenly needs an independent Afghan
settlement plan comprising a blueprint for the country's domestic
reconciliation, a list of shared priorities vis-a-vis Afghanistan, and a
set of realistic proposals for the Afghan economic reconstruction. A
healthy Afghan economy is what it takes to achieve progress in warding
off the threats of terrorism and drug trafficking currently related to
Afghanistan.
The US military presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia bears
an increasingly corrosive effect on wider Eurasian stability.
Rather than removing the threats it pledged to, Washington generated new
ones stemming from the escalation of geopolitical rivalries in Eurasia.
The US influence on the domestic policies of Central Asian republics
sends shock waves across the countries and the region as a whole.
Neither being a military bloc nor dreaming of becoming one, the SCO
does have to attend to it that its resolutions are not ignored
internationally. The declaration of the SCO July, 2005 Astana
summit stated lucidly that, given the completion of the active phase of
the operation in Afghanistan, the Western coalition countries which had
been admitted to the territories and infrastructures of the SCO members
to carry out the offensive were to finally roll out a deadline for the
lease. The SCO August 16, 2007 Bishkek summit declaration further
stressed that Central Asia's security and stability would be maintained
solely by the region's countries in the framework of its existing
regional groups.
Up to date, Russia is the only country to make at least some efforts to
define the contours of the Central Asian security architecture after
the expected 2014 relocations of the US forces in and outside of
Afghanistan. The intrigue around the lease to the US of the Manas air
base sited in the proximity of Bishkek provides a vivid example of the
lack of coherent response from the SCO to the pertinent range of
problems – the impression is that Russia is the only country that
genuinely feels concerned, while China prefers to wisely watch the round
of arm-wrestling between Moscow and Washington from a distance,
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan stay completely unperturbed, and Tajikistan
made hosting foreign military infrastructures its ordinary gamble.
From a wider perspective, the SCO zone of responsibility can and should
additionally extend over Afghanistan, South Asia, and the South
Caucasus, but so far the group has been known to implement a fairly
narrow-minded model of its own development, spontaneously building, with
the help of the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a kind of a
system of regional balance with NATO in Central Asia. The transformation
of the SCO into a regional security organization open to new partners –
but not into a military-political bloc – could prove a more productive
strategy. Ideally, security in Central Asia could be ensured via the
cooperation between countries whose strategic interests are harmonizable
and whose political involvement or, occasionally military presence in
neighboring republics could be seen as a traditional phenomenon in
Northern and Central Eurasia. The SCO has the basic capabilities to
parlay the model into reality.
The current geographic configuration of the SCO, however, leaves much
to be desired. Due to the fragmentary character of the group's
geopolitical space, it is unable to fully assume responsibility even for
the territories of its member and observer countries, least to come up
with a more ambitious agenda. The zones geopolitically outside of the
SCO orbit are the territories of the observer countries plus
Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, Iraq, South East Asia's
mainland, and, of course, Afghanistan and Turkey. There is no such thing
as vacuum in geopolitics, and if the SCO honestly intends to establish
itself as a viable global alternative, the Eurasian heartland should be
led to conform to a unified set of international laws and a common code
of conduct. The weakness of the UN and the OSCE must be read by the
region's countries as an opportunity to take charge and to regain
control.
The issue of the territorial span is not the only bump down the SCO
road to greater unity and clarity of strategic vision. Russia's and
China's input to the SCO conceptual and procedural foundations is of
great importance, but so are the contributions from other member
countries. Foreign policy swings written off as manifestations of a
pluralistic approach – e.g. Tajikistan's 2007-2009 clumsy moves to align
itself with Russia, the US, and Iran in a bundle – would in the long
run prove self-defeating for those whose behavior follows the bizarre
oscillating patterns. At the moment virtually every small country in
Eurasia, from Kazakhstan to Georgia, is more of a pawn than of a player
on the chessboard of global politics and has to adapt to the strategies
pursued by more powerful trendsetters. It must be bluntly taken into
account that only two countries – Russia and China – can be regarded as
such in the post-Soviet Central Asia.
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