Carlo Frappi - Cooperation in Eurasia: Linking Identity, Security, and Development

2018 Ledizioni LediPublishing

Via Alamanni, 11 20141 Milano Italy

www.ledizioni.it

Cooperation in Eurasia. Linking Identity, Security, and Development

Edited by Carlo Frappi and Gulshan Pashayeva
First edition: March 2018

The opinions expressed herein are strictly personal and do not necessarily reflect the position of ISPI and SAM

Print ISBN 9788867057566

ePub ISBN 9788867057580

Pdf ISBN 9788867057573

DOI 10.14672/67057566

ISPI. Via Clerici, 5

20121, Milano

www.ispionline.it

Catalogue and reprints information: www.ledizioni.it

Table of Contents

Paolo Magri, Farhad Mammadov

Carlo Frappi, Gulshan Pashayeva

Part I - Cooperation and Competition at Multilateral Level

Enrico Fassi, Antonio Zotti

2.
Gulshan Pashayeva

3.
Orkhan Baghirov

Part II - The Super-National Level of Analysis

4.
Farhad Mammadov, Azad Garibov

5.
Serena Giusti

6.
Carlo Frappi

Foreword

The end of the Cold War seemed to mark a milestone in international relations: the end of history. In an increasingly globalised world, a new era of international cooperation built upon interdependence should have put an end to the logic of competition and confrontation of the bipolar system. Twenty-five years later, history proved such assumptions to be flawed. Quite on the contrary, power relations seem still to dominate international relations. The traditional factors of state security sovereignty and territorial integrity still ranks high in the agenda of political leaders. At the same time, the international system looks profoundly different from the one of the bipolar period as it is increasingly marked by fragmentation into highly differentiated yet interconnected regional and sub-regional arenas.

Against this backdrop, the volume Cooperation in Eurasia: Linking Identity, Security, and Development is a timely and useful tool to shed light on the drivers and on the rationale behind regional cooperation in Eurasia. In particular, it investigates and ponders the weight of identity issues, security perceptions, and economic development needs for interstate cooperation in the Eurasian context, by taking into account both supra-national frameworks and regional scenarios.

The volume is the result of the latest research project jointly carried out by the Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) and the Center for Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SAM), entering their 7th year of cooperation in 2018. It follows two previous research projects and publications focused respectively, on the EU Eastern Partnership (2012) and Caspian Sea regional dynamics (2014). Thanks to the contribution of a qualified research team, this volume aims at contributing to the debate concerning regionalization and area studies, while providing political and economic national decision makers with insights and inputs on the evolving dynamics shaping the Eurasian region.

Paolo Magri

ISPI Executive Vice-President and Director

Farhad Mammadov

SAM Director

Introduction

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the contextual end of the Cold War represented a major watershed in modern international relations, whose ramifications would affect world politics for decades. The shift to the post-bipolar international system gave rise to a series of complex, interconnected transition-related issues that have being manifesting on every level domestic, sub-regional, regional and systemic and across virtually every policy domain. The magnitude of the processes involved e.g. the state-building of post-communist countries, or the re-invention of Cold War era international and regional mechanisms for cooperation was such as to attract an attention from practitioners and experts that has not diminished after more than twenty-five years.

Besides its enormous purview, the systemic 1991 transformation was exceptional in that, unlike most post-conflict scenarios, it did not ensue from, nor afterwards implied, a major upheaval in the material conditions of the international system. This is not to play down the importance of aspects like security and economics in fact, they were at least as crucial as ideational factors in the transition towards the international systems new structure. Actually, the collapse of the Soviet Union may well be regarded as the effect of the incremental pressures put on the countrys economic and security systems by a combination of domestic decline and aggressive competition from abroad. What is argued here is that the material component did play a pivotal role, but for the most part in a cumulative manner. Certainly, a number of specific factors come to mind that have given momentum to this progressive effect e.g. the economic and political impact of the war in Afghanistan on the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, or the strain put on the Soviet armament system by the Reagan administrations second Cold War. Nevertheless, none of these circumstances seem to have dealt a proper deathblow to the Soviet system whose timing had hardly been predicted by anyone. After all, until the fall, a largely non-resistant population seemed to have come up with paradoxically efficient ways to cope with the flaws of the economic system. Analogously, the massive size of conventional and nuclear arsenals, combined with the blocs favorable geopolitical position, suggested the persistence of a strong material base. Thus, the sudden demise of a system that had hitherto relied on a somewhat stable if very suboptimal equilibrium indicates a relentless and undramatic shift in its structural premises. This continuity, at least in the short period, set the stage not only for the implosion of the Soviet power, but also the (apparently) smooth transition of the international liberal order from an eminently Western scope to a virtually global one.

Nevertheless, this cumulative effect could not have played out the way it did if it had not involved a corresponding adjustment in the ideational component of the international systems (and in the main actors) internal structure. The change in the economic and military domain that led to the end of the Cold War also happened through a major re-elaboration of the actors self-images, their perception by partners and interlocutors, and the way to conceive the international system as a whole. This identity challenge would in many cases help shape or even determine the foreign policy of the international actors of the time, engaged in the arduous task of coming to terms with a systemic transformation that had altered their very material foundations and overturned their ideological boundaries.

The present volume is premised on the assumption that the filter provided by ideational factors like identities and values does not make cooperation a more likely condition than competition in international politics. As the case studies will show, the significance of non-material aspects e.g. the self-image and the raison dtre of regional organisations like the EU, the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) or NATO, or the role (self)assigned to certain countries as federators does not rule out the (possibly dominant) role played by interests and selfish considerations in determining foreign policies priorities and strategies. Therefore, the work is going to focus on more traditional economic and security issues such as trade, infrastructures, border protection, ethno-territorial conflicts, etc. and will examine them also factoring in identity-related aspects as far as they may provide a finer rationale for the variations that can be observed in each actors behavior and to identify more accurately the cultural model e.g. enmity, rivalry, friendship, integration, merely systemic interaction that each bi/multilateral relation or system tends to inform.