The SCO grew to 25 in June, and, significantly, it has grown to counter Western hegemony in the political and International financial system. Russia has been more concerned with using the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) than with laying the groundwork for its improvement over the 30 years of its history together. Over the past 30 years, Russia has viewed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) primarily as a platform, focusing more on utilising it than on strengthening the organisation.
In its rhetoric, if not its emphasis, its goal has been to remain influential in Central Asia at affordable costs, to never lose it altogether to China, and to establish a multipolar legitimacy in the face of a Western-led order that it sees as threatening. The platform has become more important in Moscow’s overall diplomatic bag. For the first 15 years of its existence, the SCO was a subordinate organisation of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). However, it has been one of the last places where Russia can take its place as a normal member of the international community, rather than an isolated pariah state, after 2014 and particularly after 2022. Russian multilateralism is a broader pattern: institutions are worth to Moscow primarily as means to ensure status and to prevent constraints, rarely as means for profound integration.
The Shanghai Five, which preceded the SCO in 1996, was born out of a technical issue: demarcating and demilitarising the old Sino-Soviet border with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Moscow’s policy at the time was in the process of recuperation from the collapse of the Soviet administrative structures, and it was not concerned with establishing a new supranational machinery, but more with preventing a vacuum. For Russia, it was beneficial but not imperative.
Russia’s focus in the post-Soviet era has been on its own post-Soviet arrangements, particularly the CSTO as a military alliance, rather than the SCO, which seems more of a bridge to China. This hierarchy was hardly changed following the SCO’s formalisation as an organisation with counter-terrorism ambitions in 2001. In the 2000s, Russia’s Central Asian policy shifted to bilateral basing agreements and the CSTO’s collective-defence clause, an agreement deliberately not in the SCO’s repertoire. What the CSTO could not have provided was a framework involving China, thereby offering a way to handle Beijing’s regional agenda without granting it sole authority over it.
A division of labour, not a partnership of equals
In the 2010s, a working division had emerged. After the 2018 Qingdao summit, as the International Institute for Strategic Studies stated, “Russia leads on politico-military affairs, communications and culture, whereas China leads on economic development, investment and infrastructure.
It was not an accident of comparative advantage; it was because Russia was not able to compete with China for capital, but Russia possessed cultural and military capabilities with which it could dominate a region with a Soviet-trained population: “Russian is relatively accessible” and “many Central Asian officers were trained in Russia”.So, Russia’s relevance to the SCO compelled it to justify its role in the “Peace Mission” joint exercises, in which Russia “typically takes the lead” because China is comparatively inexperienced in interoperability with military forces. The deal permitted Moscow to maintain a presence in the security field as Beijing became less economically significant.
The SCO was obviously never intended to be the real driver of Russia’s regional agenda, as its parallel institution-building reveals. The Eurasian Union proposed by Vladimir Putin in 2011 and realised as the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) in 2015 was a Russian-led alternative to Chinese-led economic integration and duplicated, rather than complemented, the SCO’s long-awaited free-trade aspirations. Russia and China “coordinating” the projects, didn’t use the SCO but rather, at best, a forum that “all SCO members” could attend, once the terms were agreed between the two countries. As the pattern suggests, when Russia controls the terms, it builds its own buildings and only joins the SCO as a cheap move.
Russia has been pushing for India’s SCO membership, which it secured along with Pakistan in 2017, as a strategy to reduce Chinese influence in the region, not as a sincere effort to strengthen regional order. The growth of the SCO, in which China backs Pakistan and Russia backs India, was also a point of difference between the two powers.
By 2018, both South Asian states were full-fledged members, and the SCO’s promotional numbers – that 80 per cent of Eurasia’s landmass, 43 per cent of the world’s population, a quarter of the global GDP proved useful not because they indicated a functional integration of the states under the club’s influence, but because they reduced the Chinese bloc’s share in the bloc. It is in keeping with what Marochkin and Bezborodov (2022) explain in their 2022 volume, edited by them, on the value of the SCO, which, as they state in their introduction, “is a new experience of reference within intergovernmental regional organisations which would be appropriate to a new international world of growing attempts to establish a unipolar world to the detriment of a multipolar one. The preface (in the authors’ native tongue) was written by scholars mostly at Russian universities and reflects official Russian discourse in the preface which speaks of mistrust between “world powers,” of a “crisis of the geopolitical paradigm,” and a “post-COVID world of turbulence and uncertainty” in which the SCO’s chief utility lies in proving that it is possible to live in a world without Western tutelage.
This symbolic function accounts for Russia’s lack of aspirations toward supranational authority within the SCO, unlike its rhetorical flirting, at times, with deeper integration within the EAEU, which is a tool in which Moscow has the edge. The organisation’s initial pledges of “mutual trust, mutual respect, equality… respect for diverse civilisations” are appropriate for Russia twice over: they preclude the organisation from permitting the outside world to examine its own policies and practices, and they set the SCO apart from the European Union model that the Kremlin has always considered to be a tool of Western value exportation.
The same is evident in Naarajärvi’s conceptual framework of new-regionalism, where the SCO is ranked low on “political integration” and Central Asian regionalisation is characterised by “tightly in the hands of the state administrations” (Naarajärvi 2012, 121), an aspect the researcher considers to be somewhat more old than new. For Russia, it is not a failure but the essence: inscribing itself as the centre of the forum will simultaneously shield the sovereignty of its rulers from external criticisms.
In this respect, Russian policy in the history of the SCO has always been that of a considered instrumentalism – with little investment where it had other options, with symbolic emphasis when it needed a stage, and with a constant opposition to any institutional depth that might limit its capacity for action. The SCO has become even more integral to Russia’s interests than ever before in its history, given the events of the last few years, including Western sanctions, its insistence on finding non-Western political forums, and now its need to rely on China as an economic partner of last resort.
Besides, the SCO has become more important to Russia than ever before in the last few years, as the West has imposed sanctions and sought alternative venues for diplomatic negotiations, and as Beijing has strengthened its influence within the SCO while Russia has weakened its own. The kernel of Russian multilateralism is a contradiction, and it is the easiest to spot. The contradiction of Russian multilateralism is the most obvious: institutions are more valuable to Moscow the more its role in fashioning them decreases. Rather than a keystone of Russian grand strategy, the SCO is a reflection of its limitations, and the more its only choice for posturing is this club, the more useful it is.
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