Opinion - News Analysis

Seeking multilateral regional cooperation

Alexander Yakovenko

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is a new model of geopolitical integration.

THE SHANGHAI Cooperation Organisation (SCO) obviously occupies a special place among regional structures trying to implement the idea of multipolarity. Its predecessor until 2001, the Shanghai Five (comprising Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan), was initially set up to settle border issues under agreements on enhanced military trust, and mutual troop cuts in border areas. Over the years it has turned into a dynamic and influential international organisation. Uzbekistan joined it in 2001, while Mongolia, India, Pakistan, and Iran now have observer status.

Sri Lanka, Japan, ASEAN, the United States, and the European Union have shown interest in the SCO, which is only natural because it is an open partnership aimed at maintaining regional peace and stability, and at developing broad international cooperation.

Using the successful experience accumulated by the SCO members in resolving difficult and even dramatic political and military issues, the mutual trust forged in earlier years, a tradition of intercultural respect, dialogue, and a search for common avenues of progress — in other words, what is sometimes referred to as the Shanghai spirit — we have every right to expect common strategic achievement from our regional cooperation in diverse areas.

The SCO members began to realise when they were still the Shanghai Five that economic cooperation was a must for further progress. The first steps in this direction were taken in 1998. At their very first summit in September 2001, the SCO members signed a memo on the main goals and areas of regional economic cooperation, and on facilitating trade and investment. The SCO took a major step in this direction in 2003 by adopting a programme for multilateral trade and economic cooperation. In the long term (until 2020) this programme aims to create the most favourable conditions for mutual trade and investment, the best possible use of regional resources, and a gradual transition to free movement of goods, money, services, and technologies.

The discussion at the SCO summit in Bishkek in 2004 produced a specific plan of action consisting of 127 points, out of which only about a quarter were institutional and legal issues.

Cooperation in fuel, energy, and transport may bring great benefits. Potentially, the SCO members can pool their efforts in geological prospecting, and jointly develop Central Asia's vast resources. There are plans to implement major oil and gas projects on laying pipelines, for instance, from Central Asia to China's Xinjiang Uigur autonomous region, and stipulating a thorough reconstruction of Kyrgyzstan's pipeline network. Construction of a pipeline from Russia to China may be one of the projects of the century. It is not surprising that Russia's American partners are following these projects closely.

The SCO members are discussing the idea of a common transportation space. They are already working to upgrade auto-transport corridors, and studying possibilities of mapping out new itineraries, for instance, for trains from western China to Europe.

The strategic significance of new transport corridors that can create totally new possibilities in regional economies is obvious. There are reasons to believe that before long they will exert a beneficial influence not only in Central Asia but also in adjacent countries. Eventually, this avenue of development will be the most reliable and effective instrument for overcoming current problems that have engendered and will engender for a long time to come intercultural suspicion and mistrust, extremism, separatism, and terrorism.

In this context the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is a unique political opportunity, and a fundamentally new model of geopolitical integration. It embraces almost two thirds of mainland Eurasia, uniting countries with different civilisation backgrounds. Its magnitude and diversity of interests, its trans-regional status that bring many civilisations together are unprecedented. This new approach guarantees the future of the SCO.

(The writer is Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia.)

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