Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 4 | Eurasia A New World Order?

While new challenges to international peace and security have emerged in recent years, many of the old ones have not dissipated, including the state of U.S.-Russian relations. One area of growing tensions is post-Soviet Eurasia—a region of geostrategic significance to both Russia and the United States, and a new emphasis of concern for Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The Birth of Eurasia
The fall of the Soviet Union a decade-and-a-half ago was sudden and swift. It came with little warning as Washington policymakers tried to come to terms with the realities of Europe transformed, Germany unified and the world moving at an unprecedented pace. They had to deal with ex-Soviet nuclear weapons scattered all over a country that was no more. They had to send home thousands of ex-Soviet troops stranded in newly free Eastern Europe—a home that often didn’t exist. The last thing they had time to think about was what to call the new countries and regions that emerged from the fragments of the Soviet empire.

At the State Department, where diplomacy is organized by region or continent, the European bureau had had the responsibility for relations with the Soviet Union. Notwithstanding the fact that the Soviet Union had been the biggest country in Asia, it also had been the biggest power in Europe, and Europe was where U.S.-Soviet relations were focused throughout the Cold War. With Russia still the biggest power in Europe (as well as Asia¹) even after the fall of the Soviet Union, it made sense to keep the European bureau in charge of U.S.-Russian relations.

With many important details of the Soviet divorce yet to be finalized, it made perfect sense, as well, to put the European bureau in charge of dealing with all the other former Soviet republics. Many of them are in Europe and the task of setting up relations with these new states could be coordinated more efficiently from one office at the State Department.

But not all of them are in Europe. Five—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan—are indisputably Asian. Three—Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia—claim solid European credentials, which are nonetheless disputed by some geographers who maintain that the southeastern boundary of Europe runs along the Caucasus ridge, thus relegating Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia to Asia. However, if Turkey can be in Europe, why not the latter three?

This fusion of geography and bureaucratic politics produced a new definition—Eurasia—which sidestepped the thorny issue of who does and who doesn’t belong to Europe and enabled the European bureau to keep its domain intact. Of course, the word Eurasia is not new and traditionally has described the great landmass, which includes both Europe and Asia. It is still in use.

The new Eurasia has been endowed with a far less precise meaning. For the past fifteen years, it has denoted those post-Soviet countries that are located either on the periphery or outside of Europe. Linked to Europe by their shared legacy with Russia, they were “grandfathered” into the continent when the USSR broke up, and the United States recognized them as sovereign, independent and equal heirs to the old empire. Recognition accorded to Russia was formally extended to all other former Soviet states.

However, it would be unfair and misleading to treat that decision as a matter of bureaucratic inertia or political correctness. Anyone retracing the origins of Eurasia has to take into account the atmosphere of the early 1990s with its high hopes for the novel phenomenon of globalization, the historic victory of democratic values and their universality and, as a result of modern technological advances, the growing irrelevance of boundaries—geographic, political, economic and intellectual. The fall of the Iron Curtain—the “mother of all boundaries”—became the symbol of a new world without boundaries.

In that atmosphere, what did it matter that the new concept of Eurasia lacked precise geographic boundaries? And when all ex-Soviet states in Europe and Asia lined up for membership in the OSCE—the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe—and pledged to observe its underlying principles of respect for democratic norms and human rights, it made good sense to bend geographic definitions for the sake of progress in Eurasia.

History and Geography Are Back
Progress, however, proved slow and often painful, once the new states of the new Eurasia confronted the challenges of independence. They also discovered that boundaries and geography still mattered.

Borders may have seemed irrelevant to students of globalization at the outset of the new and seamless world, but to the new states of Eurasia they mattered a great deal. Overnight, when the Soviet Union fell apart, the old internal administrative boundaries that had had so little meaning inside the old empire became international borders. Many, if not all of them had been drawn with little regard for ethnic or religious factors, as a result of 19th century imperial conquests or 20th century big-power diplomacy.

For example, Azerbaijan’s border with Iran is the product of the 1828 Turkmanchay treaty with Persia, which was signed after the latter’s defeat by Russia in the second Russo-Persian war of 1827-28.² Ukraine’s modern borders include Crimea, which until 1954 was a part of the Russian Federation, as well as Lviv, which before World War I was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, belonged to Poland between World Wars I and II, and became part of the USSR as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and Soviet victory in World War II.

Entire centuries’ worth of injustice and imperial domination were incorporated in these arbitrary lines drawn with little regard for local custom and pride. Righting the wrong meant restoring just borders.

Disputes over just borders began even before the Soviet Union broke up. Some escalated into full-fledged wars as two fundamental desires of nations—for self-determination and sovereignty—clashed. Few, if any of these newest members of the international community showed respect for the basic principles of the OSCE or democratic norms and values hailed by the international community as universal after the Cold War.

In the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh—part of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan—ethnic Armenians took up arms in pursuit of their independence from Azerbaijan and unification with the neighboring ex-Soviet republic of Armenia. Azerbaijan responded with force in defense of its sovereignty and territorial integrity. The war, which began in 1988 and ended with a cease-fire in 1994, resulted in thousands of deaths, hundreds of thousands of refugees, economic devastation and is currently stalemated.

When they joined the OSCE, both Armenia and Azerbaijan pledged to obey its founding principles, including commitment not to change borders by force. Since then, the Azeris have vowed to fight to the last drop of blood to restore its sovereignty and territorial integrity. The Armenians have pledged to do the same to keep Nagorno-Karabakh.

This conflict marked the first significant outbreak of hostilities in the new Eurasia, but it was certainly not the only one. In Moldova’s breakaway Transniestrian region, in Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as well as in Russia’s Chechnya, violence erupted as nations sought to fulfill their twin, but often mutually exclusive aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination. Active conflicts have been extinguished—with the exception of occasional skirmishes across cease-fire lines—but none have been resolved and all remain in a state of suspended animation.

Despite the euphoria associated with the fall of the Soviet Union elsewhere in the world, Russia’s withdrawal from Eurasia was traumatic for all involved. The glue that had held together the provinces of the old empire for so long was no more. Gone also was the sense of belonging to a greater whole—albeit discredited and often despised—a superpower that for a brief moment in history was second to none. In its place were left countries struggling with uncertain boundaries, unclear national identities, surrounded by hostile powers and lacking clear strategic orientation or ability to integrate into something new.

Next page: Much as they sought to free themselves from Russia and secure their independence, the states of the new Eurasia found it impossible to sever the links. Russia—the region’s biggest oil and gas producer—continued to supply energy to its former possessions, exercising con siderable leverage over them.

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¹ At over 12 million km2 bigger that than China at over 9 million km2.

² http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Turkmenchay