On November 18, 2011—only six weeks after the publication of Putin’s article in Izvestia—the presidents of Belarus, Russia, and Kazakhstan, acting as the “Founding Fathers”
of the future Eurasian Union, took the first concrete steps. In Moscow they signed
a treaty installing a “Eurasian Economic Commission.” This Commission, to be located
in Moscow, consisted of nine persons (three from each country), who were given the
title of federal minister.[9] The Commission was headed by a council consisting of the deputy prime ministers
of the three participating countries. In Moscow the three presidents also signed a
declaration on Eurasian economic integration, a road map that would lead to the Eurasian
Union.
However, in the speeches of the three presidents during the ceremony different accents
could already be heard. Although Russian president Medvedev reassured his colleagues
that “the decision making mechanism in the Commission’s framework absolutely excludes
the dominance of any one country over another,”[10] it was clear that the question of a possible loss of sovereignty was, indeed, in
the back of the minds of Russia’s two junior partners. During the ceremony president
Lukashenko reminded the audience that at home people were against this process. “One
could understand who were standing behind these people,” he said,[11] —a reference to secret foreign enemies that certainly would not have displeased
his Kremlin hosts. Lukashenko added: “But we overcame all this and clearly said: yes,
we will not lose any sovereignty, nobody is driving anyone anywhere. . . . Any question
can be brought to the level of the heads of government (the three of us) and only
by consensus can we make any decision.”[12] Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, spoke in the same vein. He was in
fact the auctor intellectualis of Putin’s new project, because in 1994 he had proposed the formation of a Eurasian
Union in a speech to students of Moscow University. At that point in time his proposal
fell on deaf ears. Yeltsin considered it an unpractical pipe dream. However, Nazarbayev’s
proposal met with more sympathy in Putin’s Russia, and when he relaunched his project
in 2004 he asked the Eurasianist Aleksandr Dugin to write a book on the subject. As
a result Eurasianism got a prominent place on the political agenda—not only in Kazakhstan,
but also in Russia. However—just as in Belarus—in Kazakhstan also not all shared this
enthusiasm for integration projects with Russia. “In March 2010,” wrote Laruelle,
“175 members of the Kazakh opposition parties, as well as non-governmental organizations
and people from the world of the media, signed an open letter to President Nazarbayev
asking him to pull out of the [Customs] Union.”[13] The opposition feared that deeper economic integration would cause not only political,
but also economic problems by opening up Kazakhstan to the competition of Russian
manufacturing and chemical industries, thereby reducing Kazakhstan to a market where
Russia could dump its goods. The opponents argued that economic integration with Russia
would hinder rather than promote the necessary modernization of the Kazakh industry.
This criticism of the opposition seemed to be confirmed, when, in 2011, Kazakhstan’s
exports to Russia and Belarus amounted to $7.5 billion, while imports from these countries
rose to almost $15.9 billion, causing a large trade deficit.[14] The higher external tariff barriers that were imposed on Kazakhstan also had a
negative effect on its trade with China.[15]
