Introduction: From greater Europe to greater Eurasia

Abstract

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). This Special Issue is a project of the `International Laboratory on International Order Studies and the New Regionalism’ of the Higher School of Economics. It examines four key issues. First, at the most abstract level, the collection looks at the profound shift in economic and political power from the West to the East. The definition of both terms—East and West—will be contextualized, but it is clear that we need profound study of political spatiality to provide deeper framing of the epochal move of the center of economic gravity to the East, and with it shifts in global power and the very terms in which power, influence, and status are assessed. The “West” as a political concept was devised during the Cold War, but it is now being disaggregated; while the “East” is taking on new political forms and becoming more assertive in expression. The new East is not necessarily commensurate with the West in political and order-making terms, and thus a new East-West rivalry has emerged, accompanied by continuing North-South contradictions. The ability of the ideology of globalization to smooth over these antinomies is weakening. Second, and rather more specifically, the early postCold War years were accompanied by the belief that Europe would at last be united and that some sort of pan-continental Greater European political identity would emerge. This was formulated by Mikhail Gorbachev as a Common European Home, but his conception of a transformed European international politics was immediately challenged by the idea of a “Europe whole and free” based on the Atlantic power system. In the end, the latter concept led to a process of the enlargement of an existing system, through the expansion of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union, rather than the transformation of European international relations. No stable inclusive peace order was established in Europe, and after 25 years of the cold peace, in 2014 some sort of new Cold War returned to the continent and to global politics. Third, over the same period Asia underwent a process of dramatic transformation, and today the challenge is to find an adequate political form for the rise of the East. China has sponsored the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), while the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other regional bodies have become more active. Global contestation is now the sharpest in this region, accompanied by a clash of integration and alignment projects. The idea of the Indo-Pacific Region (IPR) is explicitly sponsored by the United States as a way of reorienting regional relations in a way more favorable to its security and geoeconomic concerns. Fourth, and crucially, Russia has tried to find an adequate political form to ensure that the Eurasian heartland can maintain its own political subjectivity between the still powerful West and the rising East. This is why it advanced the idea of the Greater Eurasia Partnership (GEP) from 2016. Although the formulation remains vague and its territorial limits elastic, the idea nevertheless represents an important theoretical and political intervention. For some it is little more than compensation for Moscow’s failures in the West, taking up the idea of an earlier proclaimed “Pivot to Asia,” while for others it represents a fundamental and long-delayed assertion of a new political geography that would give substance to the idea of a multipolar world. How this fits in with major regional associations, above all the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the revitalized RIC (Russia, India, and China) triangle, as well as the broader BRICS grouping (with the addition of Brazil and South Africa) and other major regional actors such as Japan and South Korea, remains a matter of considerable controversy. The Special Issue will thus focus on the theoretical and empirical examination of global shifts in the post–Cold War era, including the way that Cold War thinking still shapes our understanding. At the same time, new regional concepts and challenges are emerging, above all the notion of a Greater Eurasia. Chinese thinkers are ambivalent about the term, but for Moscow it provides a project that can express its ambition to be a leading player in the East, commensurate with its great power status ambitions. Regional powers welcome the initiative to the degree that it can provide greater scope for traditional ideas of sovereignty and development, but it is also a matter of concern if it fails to take into account the divergent interests of regional players. Some of the authors are active proponents of the Greater Eurasian project. Drawing on English School theories, Introduction: From greater Europe to greater Eurasia 999907 ENS Journal of Eurasian StudiesKrickovic and Sakwa