The opportunities of the Eurasian chessboard
- By Dan Steinbock
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail China.org.cn, September 13, 2013
After his first trip to Central Asia since assuming presidency, Xi Jinping attended the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
In the West, the SCO summit has been overshadowed by the international debate on Syria and chemical weapons. Nonetheless, the strategic and economic importance of the SCO has steadily increased and will become even more critical in the Xi era.
The grand chessboard
"Eurasia is the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played, and that struggle involves geostrategy - the strategic management of geopolitical interests," Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in "The Grand Chessboard" in 1997.
Only a year before the legendary U.S. geopolitical analyst published his classic treatise on Eurasian power, the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan founded a Eurasian political, economic and military organization called the Shanghai Five. After the inclusion of Uzbekistan in 2001, it was renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Until the early 2000s, the SCO focused primarily on deepening military trust and reducing military forces in border regions. It promotes cooperation against terrorism, separatism and extremism. There have been a number of SCO joint military exercises. In late 2007, the SCO signed a collective security treaty agreement to broaden cooperation in security, crime and drug trafficking.
Historically, the SCO was created only months before China became the member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in late 2001. The subsequent years saw a dramatic rise of China's economic power and prosperity. These gains are reflected in economic cooperation among the SCO member states. More recently, SCO activities have expanded into social and cultural areas as well.
At the same time, many nations have received observer status at the SCO summits, including Afghanistan, India, Iran, Mongolia, and Pakistan. The United States has applied for observer status in the SCO, but it was rejected in 2006. Then again, all observer states are located within Eurasia. Since 2008, the SCO has also gained a number of "dialogue partners," including Belarus, Sri Lanka and Turkey, a member of NATO.
Today, the SCO's six full members account for 60 percent of the land mass of Eurasia, which is home to a quarter of world population.
For half a millennium, world affairs were dominated by Eurasian powers and peoples who fought with one another for regional domination and reached out for global power. As Brzezinski argued, "now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained."
Unsurprisingly, many Western observers believe that the SCO was created, at least partly, to serve as a counterbalance to NATO and the United States. That view is likely to shift in the Xi era.
The role of Eurasian power
From the standpoint of China and the SCO, the world economy is at a crossroads. For half a decade, the growth prospects of major advanced economies have been driven by quantitative easing (QE) policies. The Federal Reserve's holdings in securities will amount to $4 trillion by the end of 2013.
In the next few months, the liquidity-driven growth will eclipse first in the U.S. and thereafter in Europe and Japan. As the past few months have demonstrated, no large emerging economy is immune to the negative impact of this huge shift. It will contribute to economic, political and strategic risks not just globally, but regionally as well.
During President Obama's first term, Washington initiated an extensive pivot from Europe and the Middle East to Asia. Since the leadership transition in China, President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have energized Chinese thinking about economic and foreign policies. As a result, U.S. rebalancing is now going hand in hand with Chinese recalibration in the region, including East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia - and Eurasia.
As the presence of the United States in Asia overall will gradually wane in relative terms, China's role is steadily increasing in the region. In the past decade, the U.S. role has been predicated on largely military and security concerns in the Middle East and South Asia, and it came with substantial defense assistance sweetened by aid packages. In contrast, Chinese rebalancing in Asia will be based increasingly on economic, trade and investment concerns.
Regarding the landmass of Eurasia as the center of global power, Brzezinski thought it was imperative that no Eurasian challenger should emerge capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of challenging America's global pre-eminence. But these threat scenarios were defined by fears associated with the Cold War, not by the realities of emerging multipolar order.
The rise of China and Asia, and the concomitant emergence of Eurasia and the SCO do not signal a challenge against America. Rather, it reflects the growing pre-eminence of several multipolar power centers worldwide. These future scenarios are defined by opportunities associated with the emerging multipolar world.
Dr Dan Steinbock is Research Director of International Business at the India, China and America Institute (USA) and a visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China). For more information, visit www.differencegroup.net
