Global Europe

This week the EU’s Working Party on Eastern Europe and Central Asia (COEST) will hear a proposal by the Spanish Presidency to convene the first ministerial meeting between the EU and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Tashkent later in the year. Though the sentiment underpinning Spanish policymakers’ eagerness to cooperate with the SCO -- a regional organization comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan -- is understandable, institutionalizing such a forum now would seriously undermine both EU interests in Central Asia and its leverage over the SCO.

The Spanish proposal is founded on the faulty assumption that the SCO, in addition to its security cooperation, is acting as a public goods provider in Central Asia. Yet, upon closer inspection, the organization’s actual non-security achievements are very thin. For example, the SCO has yet to design and implement a single multilateral economic project in Central Asia (the current ADB-SCO CAREC highway project predates the SCO’s formation), while proposals to create a free trade zone, energy club and regional development bank all have been shelved.



Internal problems continue to plague the organization. Chief among them is the growing economic competition between its two largest members, Russia and China. The financial crisis has severely eroded Russia’s economic influence in Central Asia, while it has allowed China to accumulate energy assets in exchange for providing loans and investments to the Central Asian countries. Fearing Beijing’s growing economic ambition, Moscow has refused to support Beijing’s SCO economic initiatives, such as co-founding a $10 billion anti-crisis fund last year or creating a free economic area. Instead, Moscow has aggressively pushed the Central Asian states to work within the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) or, in the case of Astana, the recently formed Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, both of which exclude Beijing. Not surprisingly, China has grown increasingly frustrated with Russia’s competitive posture and reluctance to support its SCO agenda.

Moreover, the Central Asian states themselves simply refuse to implement Beijing’s proposed regional public goods initiatives. Despite regular Ministerial and Presidential level cooperative declarations on issues such as integrating regional infrastructure, telecommunications and power grids, the Central Asian states are hesitant to subject any sector in which domestic companies have ties to their ruling families to external competition. The SCO has also failed to address pressing common resource management issues, including the disputes over water rights that are now escalating tensions between Uzbekistan and its neighbors. In such an institutional and regional climate, it is difficult to imagine any meaningful Central Asian economic integration across Central Asia along the lines witnessed in the EU, in ASEAN or NAFTA.



Second, implementing the EU’s Central Asian priorities and strategy is still better served through bilateral meetings with the individual SCO members, rather than dealing with the SCO as a whole. The bilaterals allow Brussels to tailor specific strategies and priorities to the needs and responsiveness of the individual Central Asian states. They also allow progress in each Central Asian state to be measured relative to its neighbors, thus providing a key incentive for Central Asian governments to adhere to their commitments. Moreover, any SCO-related matters and issues of mutual concern can continue to be addressed pragmatically in the EU-China bilateral.



Some commentators have argued that the SCO could be a critical multilateral partner for stabilizing Afghanistan. Yet, as much as both the United States and Europe want a more “regional solution,” assigning the SCO such a role is remarkably premature. Neither Moscow nor Beijing has conclusively settled its internal policies regarding how actively to support ISAF efforts. As a result, the SCO actually lacks a consensus position on what to do about Afghanistan and, instead, can only periodically agree to increase its counter-narcotics and border security programmes.



Finally, EU engagement with the SCO at the ministerial level would essentially award the SCO its main foreign policy goal without obtaining anything in return. For the last year, the SCO Secretariat’s priority has been to secure partnership and recognition from established international actors and organizations, with the EU resting at the top of its list. However, there are a number of issues on which EU and SCO policy clash, including their respective attitudes towards ethnic minority rights, which regional groups should be regarded as “extremists,” and upholding regional commitments to international refugee law and the status of asylum seekers. Why not use the prospect of EU engagement to nudge the SCO towards bringing some of its policies more into line with EU and international norms?



We must certainly appreciate that the SCO is still a young organization and that, indeed, it will have some role to play in the future regional governance architecture of Central Asia. But there remains plenty of time to study the SCO’s activities and evaluate its actual achievements, without affording it the prized status of EU partnership at such a high level so soon. Engagement at this stage would be premature, not pragmatic, and would undercut, not enhance, Brussels’ own capacity to effectively implement all elements of its Central Asia strategy.