CIS INTEGRATION IN THE GLOBAL AND REGIONAL CONTEXT
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Sergei PIROZHKOV
Sergei Pirozhkov, Member, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, D.Sc. (Econ.), professor, Director, National Institute of International Security at the Council for National Security and Defense of Ukraine
Leading analysts and experts believe that globalization of world economy has already passed the point of non-return yet we are still waiting for definitive answers to many questions about the key principles and mechanisms important to the process’ quality and axiology. Everybody seems to accept that globalization is fraught with unprecedented historic possibilities and unprecedented threats.
Globalization promises wider mutual dependence and political and economic integration, deeper transnational interaction in the financial and industrial spheres as a qualitatively new basis of worldwide cooperation. There are obvious positive sides: more economic contacts among states; better access to latest economic, scientific, and technological advances, unprecedented flow of capitals which might lead to more equal development levels of the regions.
Those who fail to accept globalization are convinced that it perpetuates unequal distribution of wealth and different levels of human rights protection, widens the gap between the rich and poor countries, creates new threats and challenges such as an absence of stability, uncontrolled and more active international organized crime which is already seeping across national borders.
In the first place, globalization is a trend toward greater economic interdependence because of increased movement of goods, services, and capital across the borders, intensified information and technological exchange. In fact, today, the situation around the globe determines siting of productive forces in the world economic expanse while economic ups and downs are spreading worldwide. New information technologies, coordinated liberalization of markets of goods, services, and finances have intensified economic processes and decreased, to a great extent, the level of economic freedom for the less developed countries.
The new system of international relations is determined by powerful regional coalitions with common economic, cultural, and civilizational interests.
Strengthening European integration is revealing a trend toward single, and renovated, European civilization. European integration is one of the key elements of world globalization; it also carries on modernization of Western civilization as an integral process.
One of the most important results of this is a potentially stronger Greater Europe that in future will be able to influence global processes single-handedly as the United States is doing; its influence will be especially felt outside the “united Europe” boundaries in the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres.
There is a growing number of experts who are convinced that the idea of Greater Europe can become a reality outside the boundaries of the extended European Union if a new superstructure is set in place to unite EU, Russia, Ukraine, other CIS members into a so-called European confederation. I believe that this will settle the problem of united Europe’s new frontiers and add new dimension to the CIS future.
At the same time one should not underestimate certain propositions and conclusions offered by Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Vassili Sredin in his report CIS and World Economy: Prospects and Problems. He has pointed out that globalization is piling up problems and risks for Russia and the CIS: their economic potential is inadequately developed while their national, economic, administrative, and legal systems do not meet globalization requirements. The deputy minister concluded that as far as these countries are concerned integration into world economy would perpetuate the second-rate economic model and loss of development resources. No economic growth could be expected.1
There is an opinion that the United States and other world leaders have armed themselves with globalization as an instrument of struggle against their rivals. Japan was the first of the developed countries to fall victim to these efforts.2 The results of the 1998 financial crisis prompted experts from the majority of the CIS members to look for ways to neutralize globalization’s negative aspects.
While the general negative aspects of globalization in the financial sphere are clear to all technological globalization which is a result of the former is frequently ignored. In 1992, the CIS countries had to adopt an inferior model of the VAT which forced them to export raw materials and semiprocessed raw materials. This led to one of the worse effects of globalization on the post-Soviet states: flight of capital. Experts assess the amount of refugee capital in foreign (mainly offshore) banks as over $100 billion.
What does the Unites States the leader of globalization think about this? On 8 December, 2000 the White House published its report A Foreign Policy for the Global Age (Based on the Principles of Clinton’s Foreign Policy) which said: “As the first president who has understood the connections of the global economy and its connection to our prosperity, President Clinton has led the United States toward its greatest expansion in world trade in history—from $4 to 6.6 trillion a year, opened markets for U.S. exports abroad and created American jobs through nearly 300 other free and fair trade agreements, contributing to the longest economic expansion in our history.”3 This gives food for thought, doesn’t it?
This explains why international forums across the world spend much time discussing advantages and disadvantages of globalization and the ways to bridle the process. The new independent states have to protect their still feeble economies against the ups and downs of the world economic and financial situation. At the same time they have to create the best possible conditions to use the fruits of globalization, of which integration into the global telecommunication systems is most important.
Today, the world has acquired a fundamentally new reality that gave it a new architecture and development philosophy. Here I have in mind information society with a higher than ever before production activity brought about by the rapid development of information technologies. The metatechnologies (MT) which are information technologies of a new generation have created a new type of worker and removed any possibility of rivalry with MT creators.
Communication technologies when further developed will allow to trace down all electronic mail across the world. Specialists believe that today partial computer processing of mail is possible; in the foreseeable future the total amount of mail will be traced in the Internet and processed. The MT also include the corporate management technologies: when applied in countries with the conditions different from those to which the corporate technologies have been adjusted they lower the borrowers’ competitiveness.
There is an opinion that the brain-washing technologies are the most dangerous among MT since they require constant adaptation to the conditions of borrowing countries and constant renovation. Without this mass consciousness will become uncontrollable. This is how a stable dependence on intellectual technological injections from abroad is created. Digital and other innovations in the information and communication technologies caused a sort of a revolution that is changing the style and methods of work, studies, communication, and leisure. This revolution helps boost economic growth and social advance in individual regions and the world as a whole.
Indeed, many countries are using electronic means to boost labor productivity, join world markets, cut down R&D period and establish closer ties with clients. Experts say that by 2003 the volume of electronic trade in the world will top $1.8 trillion.
Today, the Internet helps resolve social problems in the sphere of education, health protection and more open and more efficient management and administration.
Regrettably the CIS members are not yet completely involved in the worldwide web: their net systems are too limited for that.
CIS members should pool forces to tap the “digital revolution” potential in the interests of all of them; together they can improve access to information and communication technologies, create nets to enable even the smallest of enterprises to reach the market and sell its products across the world. It is becoming abundantly clear that the Internet potentials and possibilities are shaping the regional development systems.
The United States is using with relish the concept of digital diplomacy. To emulate it we can offer a term of digital integration, another way to describe the role of new information technologies when switching to a higher regional cooperation level.
I believe that digital integration in the CIS may create a firm foundation for further integration and add impact to stalling economic integration.
To discuss what regional integration has in store for the CIS members at the turn of the millennium we have to define the term “economic integration.” After the Kishinev summit the President of the Russian Federation sent out a letter to the CIS heads of state that contained six questions, including “What do you think about the future of integration within the CIS?”
In Ukraine the answers were prepared by several departments and ministries. When the draft reached the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry the term “integration” (at that time reserved for European integration) was replaced with “cooperation.” The final variant read: to the question “What do you think about the future of integration within the CIS?” we can say “By economic cooperation we mean, etc., etc.”
I regret to say that the talk in two different languages is still going on. There is any number of officials and bureaucrats in the CIS structures who think that the terms “economic cooperation” and “economic integration” are interchangeable.
To my mind these are two different concepts. Each and every CIS state is constantly expanding its system of economic cooperation with other countries of the world. Much has been done during nine years of independence yet this is not integration.
Economic integration is a qualitatively higher cooperation stage when the production process in different countries reaches organic coordination while the countries involved preserve their sovereignties. They continue working in market conditions yet a special role belongs to interstate cooperation and exchange.
From this it follows that the share of mutual exchange of commodities among the countries in their total foreign trade turnover serves a quantitative description of integration. Real integration is reached when the turnover is dominated by an exchange among them. So far, integration in the CIS has not reached these qualitative criteria.
Certain Russian economists want qualitative indices in the role of criteria. They believe that the production and technological, cultural, and spiritual closeness inherited from the Soviet Union is an important factor of integration. In this sense the integration process within the CIS is, in fact, a process of reintegration.4
One finds it hard to buy this. In the Soviet Union the entire economic structure was based on non-equivalent relations. Today, when the countries want to preserve their sovereignty and act according to the market economic criteria their economic relations should proceed from the principle of equivalence.
The national economies in the CIS countries changed a lot due to privatization: it is mainly economic entities that determine main economic processes in the world. This is true of the CIS members despite the state structures’ contradictory and often inconsistent policies.
We can admit that the obstacles national departments (the RF Customs Committee, and others) erected on the road toward integration were the product of the newly independent states’ efforts to set up an efficient system of state government.
At the same time, the closest future of regional integration depends very much on the intensifying fight for control over the strategic economic entities between the new economic and political elites in the CIS countries both in their own states and in closest neighbors.
Today new trends born by restructuring the national economies on the larger part of post-Soviet expanse can be clearly seen: no one can say that the interests of the economic entities are identical to those of the state. This is obvious in the spheres of integration relations and investments. In the latter the fact that the economic entities were not interested in investing money in enterprises despite an objectively needed high level of economic activity caused an investment flop. As a result the national economies lost a great deal of their competitiveness.
From this it follows that regional economic integration cannot be reduced to mechanisms that would remove obstacles to efficient economic cooperation. Integration policies should aim, first and foremost, at setting up mechanisms of coordinating the national interests with those of economic entities.
This alone would create a context for harmonizing long-term economic interests of the CIS members and setting up a coordinating integration structure. From this it follows that reintegration is a wrong and methodologically incorrect term that cannot be applied to the complicated and fundamentally new macroeconomic tasks.
One should recognize that the Russian Federation alone is moving consistently toward harmonizing the interests of economic entities and the nation. This was graphically illustrated by the signal meeting of the RF Security Council of 15 December, 1999 that gathered all prominent Russian politicians, “On the Current Key Political Tasks of the Russian Federation in Relations with the CIS States.”
Russia is working toward strengthening the role of the state in ensuring and defending the interests of the Russian economic entities abroad. “What we have inherited from the Soviet Union, in particular the natural monopolies in energy, transport, and communications should be and will be the skeleton of Russia’s relations with the CIS countries. We should not pretend that we do not know that. Russia has only one priority in its relations with the CIS members—the national interests of our country” (V. Putin).
At the same sitting Foreign Minister of Russia Igor Ivanov explained that in the middle term economic integration within the CIS would proceed in the interests of the largest Russian corporations: “We have to overcome certain alienation between Russia’s foreign policy and the Russian economic entities, the main vehicle of the country’s economic interests.”
The Russian leaders have achieved certain progress: in September 2000 there was established an Interdepartmental Commission of the RF Security Council for the CIS Problems that includes representatives from Gazprom, EES Rossii, and Transneft, the largest joint-stock companies.
The skyrocketing debts of former Soviet republics to Russia for supplies of energy (today they have reached at least $10 billion) add the “debt aftertaste” to the prospects of integration within the CIS at the dawn of the new century. Russian corporations enjoy priority in privatizing the strategic economic objects of certain CIS countries by way of repaying their debts.
Russia is realizing its political aims on the post-Soviet territory through integrating the CIS power structures under a pretext of anti-terrorist struggle and the need to fight extremism and organized crime.
Some of those who represent their countries do not suspect that through the system of cooperation treaties among the Commonwealth’s structures they are indirectly participating in what its power and military-political bodies do. This does not correspond to what Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia Vassili Sredin said in the report quoted above: “The Commonwealth’s makeup in the twenty-first century will greatly depend on whether or not we are able to organize cooperation among the CIS members which would meet their common interests and individual interests of each of them.”
On the whole the CIS model at the beginning of the new century is a sad sight that does not fit the main goals of the Program of CIS Development for the Period up to 2005 adopted earlier this year by the highest CIS bodies. Its preamble says that cooperation among the CIS countries will proceed on the mutually advantageous basis in the format of all interested states.
In October 2000 the Eurasian Economic Community was set up to create a new form of regional integration in the CIS. The main efforts are spent on building up a new security architecture across the entire post-Soviet expanse which is the task of EurAsEC, the Collective Security Treaty and other political and power structures of the CIS that can be mutually complementing. As the process deepens it will add potential risks of increased regional instability and transfer interstate tension to the groups of states in the process of formation.
Experts mostly agree that the institutional foundations of EurAsEC as a promising mechanism of solving Russia’s foreign political tasks across the post-Soviet territory are obviously adequate. It is equally clear that the CIS as a structure with identical horizontal ties has no future.
One can even say that the birth of EurAsEC will lighten the integration pressure on the CIS and the Russia-Belarus alliance, which may become evident in the nearest future.
Interstate talks within the CIS touch upon a limited range of subjects normally dominated by a wider cooperation of the Customs Union members in the sphere of financial, industrial, trade, and economic operations. It should be added that the integration political context of EurAsEC differs from that of the Customs Union because the former is not limited by economics and can extend to politics and the tasks of defense. The latter is developing into a priority in international relations that are shaping into a new format.
According to the logic and methodology of contemporary scientific approaches the changing principles and conditions of interstate relations are revealing their new elements, the “new regionalism” typical of international relations at the turn of the twenty-first century being one of them. According to the Swedish professor Björn Hetne the new regionalism, as distinct from old regionalism, has more dimensions which include among others a wide range of trade, financial, social, political, military, environmental, etc. ones.
Russia possesses a mighty economic potential, therefore it can develop without looking back at its CIS partners. Kazakhstan is rich in raw materials yet it needs access to the West to reach Western markets. Belarus which is economically oriented toward the post-Soviet markets has to reach the East. On top of this Belarus’ geopolitical importance for Russia cannot be overestimated: Russia needs its transit possibilities. Kyrgyzstan has not yet fully developed economically yet it joined WTO; Tajikistan is constantly at war, which has already destroyed its economy.
From this it follows that the above-mentioned countries’ membership in the EurAsEC is more pragmatic than in the Customs Union: it is not limited to economics and extends to the political and military spheres. According to its rules the new alliance has preserved the Customs Union’s structures: the State Council, Integration Committee, and the Inter-parliamentary Assembly. Voting is based on the shares each of the members invests in the community and its economic potential. According to S. Prikhodko, the Deputy Head of the Administration of the President of Russia, the signing of the Treaty on Setting Up the EurAsEC should be regarded as “the first step toward a more comprehensible and efficient system of the five countries’ interaction in the economic sphere based on the principles similar to those of the former European Economic Community.”
In fact, the mechanism of voting according to shares in the European Union is based on a different principle: it proceeds from the population strength and its share in the total number of people in all members. One may say that the new voting principle is a procedural instrument of Russia’s political influence in EurAsEC. It has supplied Moscow with a completely legitimate possibility to impose its rules on the partners.
To look into the future of regional integration within the CIS one has to recognize that the time of post-Soviet romanticism in bilateral and multilateral interstate relations that bred an illusion of equal political and economic possibilities has passed never to return.
Obviously, this principle and the dependence of the country’s political weight on its economic possibilities will affect bilateral and multilateral relations in the CIS in the new century.
According to the treaty that created the Eurasian Economic Community its Integration Committee will be situated in Moscow and Almaty; the Inter-parliamentary Assembly will have its home in St. Petersburg while the Court of Justice will sit in Minsk. Clearly, there are plans to extend the new community’s political sphere to the CIS format.
To a certain extent the final documents of the Bishkek meeting of heads of state members of the Collective Security Treaty gave an idea of the future of integration within the CIS. They have outlined the rules, functions, and tasks of the coalition armed forces set up in the members’ interests, which can be translated as a new stage of their military integration.
What is more, the very presence within the CIS of groups of states that are actively taking shape and follow different political trends raises the question of the level and nature of their future relations. The relations between the EurAsEC and the GUUAM should not proceed from the desire of any of the sides to dominate in the system of international transport corridors and trans-regional cooperation—and this is very important.
The GUUAM set up three years ago by three countries as a consultative group is acquiring features of a new geopolitical reality, which has already started to affect international relations across the post-Soviet expanse. Some people think that this international alliance will exert an even greater influence on the prospects and nature of a Eurasian system of stability, transport, and other communications.
Today, there is lingering skepticism about the group’s present and foreseeable future yet nobody is bold enough to deny that it is kept together by a wide range of shared problems in economy and interstate relations.
Today, there are contradictory views on the GUUAM’s status, future, and structure ranging from “a common interests club” to an independent and influential international organization with rules and coordinating structures of its own. On 23 February, 2001 President of Moldova Petr Luchinski said in his interview to the ICTV Ukrainian TV channel that GUUAM should not be transformed into another political organization complete with adequate structures. He said, in particular: “GUUAM was set up as a consultative structure. At its early period the leaders discussed economic problems and the collective Treaty on Limiting Strategic Armaments. There is no need today to turn this mechanism into an independent organization.”
Uzbekistan is convinced that GUUAM should limit itself to economic problems yet the South Caucasian countries want a wider sphere of action including political cooperation and collective security.
I believe that consolidated efforts of the GUUAM countries will allow them to fully realize their national interests and promote equal relations with the members of CIS and other international alliances. During the Millennium Summit held in September 2000 in the UN Headquarters in New York Ukraine started a process of turning GUUAM into a regional international organization with clear aims and functions. This is expected to create new relations with the CIS, NATO, OSCE, EU and other international structures. Ukraine proceeded from a possibility that the GUUAM countries may become part of contemporary civilizational space and join in the international division of labor. This will also allow the GUUAM members to become more effectively included in the global processes of modernization of social and economic relations and to speed up democratic changes.
The GUUAM was intended for strengthening subregional and regional stability of its members without any military obligations of allies or the principle of collective security and defense. This met the members’ interests to the fullest and allowed them to neutralize, to a certain degree, the efforts of certain regional countries that do not want the GUUAM to turn into an international organization.
I think that the GUUAM should take into account Russia’s perception of it. There are any number of prominent Russian politicians who accept the GUUAM as a regional structure of economic cooperation that does not threaten Russia—at the same time they firmly object to its transformation into a military-political alliance.
I am convinced that the Russian Federation could have accepted this new role if it took into account that the GUUAM would be able to protect its southern frontiers. Indeed, Russia and the GUUAM members are prepared to fight terrorism, drug traffic and illegal arms trade; cooperation will enable Russia to look at the GUUAM as a buffer zone against international terrorists. Finally, the GUUAM has created conditions for predictable and non-confrontational policies of its members in relation to Russia.
This says that closer relations among the GUUAM members will help deal efficiently with certain urgent problems.
First, it will become possible to develop the fuel and energy and transport complex, and certain industrial branches of the GUUAM members. This is directly related to the pipeline projects of moving oil from Azerbaijan (and, in future, from Kazakhstan) along the Baku-Supsa-Odessa-Brody-Adamova Zastava-Gdansk route which the majority of the countries accept as economically profitable. According to experts from Azerbaijan to move one ton of oil along this route will be cheaper by $5 than moving the same amount of oil from Baku to Novorossiisk and further on to the European markets.
Rumania and Bulgaria are two rivals of Ukraine when it comes to transporting oil from Poti (Supsa), yet they have not completed the pipeline infrastructure across their territories. Much will depend on whether Ukraine can promptly finish the oil terminal in Iuzhniy and the Odessa-Brody line.
In connection with this it is extremely important for the executive and legislative powers to work energetically together and invite to the common effort other Ukrainian and Polish structures to look for adequate investments for the project’s concluding stages.
Indeed, if they manage to transport considerable amounts of oil and gas across Ukraine and Eastern Europe to the European markets a large number of countries will acquire energy security. This is true also of the transit countries of which Ukraine is one.
Second, through closer relations among the GUUAM countries Ukraine stands a chance to improve its political and economic situation, contribute to the GUUAM members’ integration into the world community, increase its own regional weight, extend perspective export outlets by setting up a multilevel cooperation system with the Caspian and Black Sea states.
Today, the GUUAM countries have already pooled their efforts to develop international transport routes that would tie together Europe, the Caucasus, and Asia (the TRACECA project), which will also tap Ukraine’s potentials as a transit state.
On the whole there are plans to create a regional zone of economic cooperation as an organic component part of the international division of labor. The South Caucasian countries, China and Central Asia are displaying a no mean interest in the contemporary variant of the Great Silk Road of antiquity.
Its practical realization calls for a free trade zone of the GUUAM countries as part of the free trade zone discussed by the CIS summit in June 2000.
Ukraine is busy creating a favorable economic context to attract freight transit from Asia to Europe, which also includes oil from Kazakhstan; it is building highways on the corresponding stretches of international transport corridors and offers wider services of its maritime ports. The Odessa-Poti-Batumi ferry has been functioning for several years now.
To move the TRACECA project further the countries involved should act according to one plan where retooling of transport, modernization of technologies (including those used for border crossing), safe movement of cargoes and their delivery on time are concerned. On top of this they should follow coordinated customs and tariff policies.
Certain industrial sectors hold promise of deeper economic cooperation and integration; the same can be said about transport, scientific and technical potential, recreation, and international tourism.
To realize their potentials the branches need all-round support of the Ukrainian government and local self-administrations. In fact, this strategy is emerging as that of a great international importance that will strengthen Ukraine’s prestige in the region and facilitate the GUUAM’s inclusion in the European integration processes.
Third, the developments in the region call for a more efficient regional stability system. One has to admit that certain negative trends and processes are interfering with the region’s economic advance and are a direct menace to international and regional stability. Nearly each of the countries has its share of conflicts (Abkhazia, Karabakh, the Dniester Region, Chechnia) which produce similar results: forced migrants, illegal armed trade, rising crime, and international terrorism.
We have to bear in mind that the region has for its neighbors old and new nuclear powers or those which are consistently working to acquire nuclear weapons and delivery means. On the whole there is a threatening “security vacuum” which can be removed only if all the interested countries and international security structures pool their efforts.
In July 2000, experts from Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia who attended an international conference on the GUUAM in Yalta agreed that stability in the Caucasus require a discontinuation of the Karabakh conflict and that Ukraine could have played a more important role.
The conference decided that a system of regional stability according to the Russian (“The Caucasian Four”) or the Armenian (“Stability Pact for the Caucasus”) project stands no chances to be realized in the context of contradictory positions of the outside centers of power, Russia and the United States in particular.
I believe that the situation there is further complicated by the fact that if the Moscow plan prevails the West will not be prepared to abandon its interests for the sake of greater Russian presence in the region. Moscow, in its turn, will never agree to withdraw its troops from Armenia, their presence being presupposed in the draft Stability Pact (signed jointly by Armenia and Russia).
It seems that further cooperation among the GUUAM members in peacekeeping in the context of creating a regional security system is connected, first and foremost, with the Partnership for Peace program.
I am deeply convinced that the GUUAM has a potential of a stability factor in the region if it develops into an international organization and is included in the European system of security and cooperation.
From this it follows that we are at a crossroads: either the GUUAM countries will opt for deeper cooperation or they will prefer to remain in a shapeless structure with no stabilizing weight in the region and no possibility to organize real economic cooperation. To a great extent the choice will determine the region’s historic, economic, and political future.
It is advisable to counter possible high risks with methodological approaches to harmonizing positions within regional integration processes in the CIS, EurAsEC and GUUAM members. This calls for an analysis of all forms of correlation of the processes of globalization and regionalism.
The new world order has not defined an optimal balance between the problems created by them. Different scientific schools differ over interpreting the phenomenon of contemporary regionalism. The realists describe the international system as “anarchic” and, therefore, dominated by egotistic interests of large states. The institutionalists believe that effective institutes (all sorts of regional blocs and alliances) can remedy the “anarchy.”
Those who favor a cognitive approach look at regionalism as a kind of social reflection based on the currently dominating (and able to change in the course of mutual adjustment) idea of identity and territorial community. The fairly popular in Western Europe “emerging regionalism” or “region building” conception is an indirect response to this approach.
The attempts to translate into life the model of transnational regions are a compromise between regionalism and globalization. Trans-regional cooperation may emerge out of common efforts of states, interstate corporate coalitions, transnational region building, etc.
A system of collective relationships established to protect common economic interests within the GUUAM is an example of this cooperation model.
Institutionalization of the GUUAM can be translated as a response to the Customs Union set up in 1995 (the countries that happen to disagree with the general line were doomed to an integration quagmire of sorts), and as a result of attempting to balance the state dominating in the region and to reach a certain balance-out of forces. It seems that EurAsEC also resulted from the need to strengthen the geopolitical positions of states in post-Soviet expanse.
This adds additional weight to the CIS in its general format as a factor of regional stability; the mechanisms of the Commonwealth of Independent States correspond to the functional nature of the platform of corporate stability and security across the post-Soviet territory in the twenty-first century.
This poses new tasks of “region building” within the CIS: new mechanisms of regional stability designed to create conditions conducive to cooperation between individual CIS members and among regional structures such as the EurAsEC, GUUAM, Asian Economic Community, etc.
It should be said that the Ukrainian attitude to multisided development within the CIS rejects those of the procedures that create possibilities and combinations of transnational alliances, GUUAM and EurAsEC, to be used for a corporate potential of alliances within the CIS.
Ukraine should revise its shop-soiled ideas and stereotypes about the priority of bilateral relations and direct dialogs over interstate conferences in addressing common problems. Kiev should change its stand on a possible status of a subject of international law for the CIS and on setting up adequate economic supra-state structures and Ukraine’s full-blooded involvement in their functioning.
By way of conclusion one may offer a surmise: in the short-term perspective the CIS’ most important role will manifest itself in creating favorable conditions for cooperation among regional groups, such as EurAsEC and GUUAM. This, in turn, will help set up mechanisms of regional stability.
When and if these aims are secured we shall be able to look further, to regional and trans-regional integration and Russia’s and Belarus’ active involvement in shaping a European Confederation which will join the processes of global integration of the third millennium.
1 See: Tendentsii razvitia natsional’noi ekonomiki Rossii v srednesrochnoi i dolgosrochnoi perspektive, ed. by A. Beloussov, Moscow, 1999, p. 12.
2 See: Praktika globalizatsii: igry i pravila novoi epokhi, ed. by M. Deliagin, Moscow, 2000, p. 340.
3 A Foreign Policy for the Global Age (Based on the Principles of Clinton’s Foreign Policy), Washington File; Date: 20001208.
4 See: V. Ivanter, F. Klotsvog, Podkhody k nauchnomu obosnovaniu integratsionnykh protsessov, Institut narodnokhoziastvennogo prognozirovania RAN, Moscow, 1998, p. 17.