Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS-2022 FUTURE DYNAMICS IN ASIA , İstanbul, Türkiye, 14 - 15 Mayıs 2022, ss.8-10
The post-soviet Eurasian regionalism is unique among examples of regionalism, as it represents the reconfiguration of a disintegrated political and economic regional system. Despite this uniqueness of the region, the post-Soviet regional cooperation projects in Eurasia could not occupy a significant place in the regionalism literature until the mid-2000s, when the comparative regionalism studies have also made the various analyses which are not based on the theories and conceptualizations of the European experience reliable for the studies of regionalism. In this regard, the supranational customs union project, proposed in 2007 to deepen economic convergence in post-Soviet Eurasia, has made this political geography one of the most important areas for comparative regionalism studies. The use of the concept of supranationalism as a modality of regional cooperation has been seen, on the one hand, as a kind of manipulation of the liberal and democratic values of European Union economic integration, mainly due to the asymmetric material capacity and political dominance of Russia on the region which makes it difficult to implement supranationalism in a similar manner seen in the European union. On the other hand, it has led to the emergence of a vast regionalism literature that discusses the post-Soviet regional cooperation process in terms of facilitating global and regional dynamics and interactions, such as pragmatic regionalism, transcontinental regionalism, holding together regionalism, regulatory regionalism, developmental regionalism. The aim of this study is to show how regional cooperation initiatives and literature on regionalism have developed in the post-Soviet Eurasian space since the early 2000s as an instrument of interplay of international power relations. The conceptualization and institutional evolution of the cooperation process in post-Soviet Eurasia will be analysed in the context of the political and economic crises that have created both opportunities and challenges for the regionalism trend in the region since the early 2000s. In this regard, the crisis between Ukraine and Russia, from the colour revolutions in 2004 to the war in 2022, shows how the political, military, and economic competition between the West and Russia is played out through cooperation projects and as a part of region-building strategies. Moreover, if one considers the causal links between the political turmoil in Ukraine triggered by Yanukovych's refusal to sign a European Union Association Agreement and Russia's invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, it is striking that Western economic sanctions against Russia following Russia's occupation of Crimea are expected to be overcome by deepening cooperation between Russia and China. The convergence of the Russian-led Eurasian Union regionalism project and the Chinese government's "One Belt, One Road" project to strengthen the "regionalization " level in Eurasia provides important clues for understanding not only the instrumentalization of regionalism and regionalization concepts and initiatives in the international balance-of-power game but also the difficulties for the construction of a transcontinental regionalism in Eurasia.
Keywords: regionalism, Russia, Eurasian Union, supranationalism, balance of power