Whenever a new non-Western alliance is formed somewhere in the world, Western commentators are quick to regard it as a threat to Western interests and security. Whereas the economic integration of the European Union and the military cooperation within NATO are considered to have significantly advanced peace and stability on both sides of the Atlantic, similar arrangements made independently of Western interference are dreaded. Such a view is a shortsighted one however and ignores how immensely the West stands to profit from the copycat behavior of the Rest.
Oftentimes, international cooperation outside of Europe and North America is pursued in defiance of perceived Western pressure. The South American Mercosur and Southeast Asia’s ASEAN are both free trade blocks structured on the European model, founded in part to strengthen their members’ ability to resist the demands of the IMF and the World Bank which for decades dictated economic policy to these nations. The irony is, of course, that once freed from the Washington Consensus, these same states in fact very much adopted free market capitalism, be it with some “softening” measures to fight poverty as it happens, very successfully, in Brazil for instance.
Other EU imitators are less resistant to the West. The Gulf Cooperative Council of Saudi Arabia and the others states of the Arabian peninsula is rather afraid of Iran while military, it continues to rely heavily on American support—and on Westerners buying its oil.
Until recently the most potent of anti-Western alliances appeared to be the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in which both China and Russia take part while India settled for an observer status. In spite of its stated goals, the SCO has failed to achieve much regional cooperation during the past several years however. China was able to use the platform to project its influence across the region while Russia remained reluctant to deepen its participation according to Alexander Cooley, writing for Foreign Affairs. “Subtle but key differences in the regional security priorities of the two countries have started to play out.”
Russia regards Central Asia as its “zone of privileged interests.” For the past two decades, Moscow has sought to embed the states of Central Asia in a system of Russia-controlled institutions—the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a mutual defense alliance; the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), a customs union; and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a loose federation of former Soviet countries. At the same time, it has actively worked to block Western actors such as NATO. China, in contrast, has been focused not so much on countering the West as on stabilizing its own western territory: the autonomous province of Xinjiang, which borders the Central Asian states.
At the time when the color revolutions swept across Eastern Europe, Beijing and Moscow found their agendas aligned: both dreaded Western-backed democratization in Central Asia. Russia showed its teeth to prevent further foreign involvement in its former satellite states while China pressed down hard on calls for reform in its hinterland.
The Sino-Russian split became apparent when the latter invaded Georgia in 2008. Just a few days after the EU-brokered cease-fire went into effect, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev asked the SCO to support the independence of the breakaway Georgian provinces which Russia claimed to defend. China and the other members refused. “After this diplomatic rebuke,” notes Cooley, “Moscow redoubled its efforts to promote the CSTO, an organization that includes the same Central Asian states but is safely in Russia’s pocket.”
Wary of China’s economic predominance, Russia subsequently sought to block many of its neighbor’s efforts to use the SCO to its own advance. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s proposal to create a SCO free trade area was met with Russian disapproval. Rather Moscow champions the existing EurAsEC which includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Belarus but not China.
The SCO then is weak and far from the aggressively anti-Western pact is appeared to be a few years ago. “As such,” writes Cooley, “it makes sense for the United States to work with the SCO to engage China and the Central Asian states on select Afghanistan issues.” Moreover, Western engagement with the SCO could undercut Russia’s ambitions to dominate the region once again.
As the world moves toward evermore multilateral cooperation, the West has not to be frightened. The United States will probably lose some of its status and influence, as Western Europe has, but it will remain the uncontested superpower for decades to come. More importantly, as the Latin American and Southeast Asian states have amply demonstrated, direct involvement in their development does not encourage them to do as the West did. Rather allowing these states to discover the advantages of free markets and shared security on their own is much more effective—and therefore, much more in the West’s own interest.
