Despite these warnings and despite the fact that “the Eurasian Union has only little
integration potential and has few attractions to offer the newly independent states,”[30] the Kremlin does not shy away from spending money—a lot of money—on this project.
While in 2009–2010 Russia still refused to transfer loans to Belarus when that country
failed to privatize and sell industrial companies to Russian companies, in late 2011
the situation had changed fundamentally. Russia began to provide billions of dollars
in oil and gas subsidies and allocated $10 billion for loans for a nuclear plant in
Belarus. It also paid $2.5 billion for the second half of Beltransgas shares. In addition,
it also signed on November 21, 2011, an agreement in Moscow on a loan for $1 billion.[31] The willingness of the Kremlin to subsidize Lukashenko’s rickety economy was a
clear sign of the political importance it attached to the Eurasian project.[32]
In fact, the Eurasian Union is for Moscow the ultimate integration effort, crowning and superseding all earlier integration efforts. The
Eurasian Union is not just some new integration project alongside the other existing integration projects created by Russia in recent years. The Eurasian
Union is something different. This new structure is like the crowning synthesis in
a Hegelian dialectic: it is not only the most complete realization of earlier Russian
attempts at integration, but—while keeping these other structures in place—it absorbs them over time. (Hegel calls this process aufheben, which means both “to preserve” as well as “to bring to a higher level.”) We can,
therefore, expect that the Eurasian Union will gradually take over functions from
other existing structures, such as the Russia-Belarus Union State, EurAsEc, the Customs
Union, and the CSTO. Belarusian President Lukashenko hinted at this when he declared
that the Russia-Belarus Union State may disappear if the project of the Eurasian Union
were to develop further.[33] This hidden function of the Eurasian Union, to replace and absorb already existing
integration structures, is also recognized by Uwe Halbach, a German expert who wrote
on the Eurasian Union that “a piece of integration theatre is being played out on
multiple stages and levels, which ultimately calls for an ‘integration of the integrations.’”[34]
The centerpiece of this intended “integration of the integrations” is, undoubtedly,
military integration. Putin did not mention this in his Izvestia article, but Ruslan Grinberg, director of the economic institute RAN, hinted at this
at the “Big Country” conference. Grinberg mentioned “the necessity to build supranational
structures, [also] partly, military.”[35] “The Eurasian Union is primarily an economic project accompanied by Russian efforts
toward integration within security policy areas,” wrote Uwe Halbach. “The main recipient
here is the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), an ‘alliance’ of seven
[now six, MHVH] CIS states.”[36] Halbach is right. This hidden ambition of the Kremlin, however, is not trumpeted
too loudly in order not to frighten away potential candidate members of the Eurasian
Union.
The Eurasian Union, this ultimate integration project of Russia and pet project of
Vladimir Putin, has to be taken seriously. It is the last product of the Kremlin’s
funnel strategy in which countries are invited to participate in an integration project on the basis
of a manifest agenda that is different from the Kremlin’s hidden agenda. The hidden
agenda behind the Eurasian Union is twofold. In the first place it is the creation—over
time—of a military arm of the Union, similar to the defunct Warsaw Pact. This military
arm (the CSTO) will reserve for itself the exclusive right to intervene militarily
in the post-Soviet space. Such an exclusive right of military intervention that excludes
the intervention of external powers (the United States, NATO, but also China) has
found its theoretical elaboration in the Grossraum (big space) theory of Carl Schmitt, which was already at the core of Medvedev’s proposal
for a pan-European security pact.[37] A Russian droit de regard over the post-Soviet space would further imply that Russia wants to introduce qualified
majority decision to replace the consensus rule of the CSTO (Article 12 of the CSTO
Charter) for substantive decisions on peacekeeping operations or interventions.
Bringing Ukraine Back into the Russian Orbit
