Europe verses Eurasia: A Battle of Unions

This post may very well get me a following among conspiracy theorists…my lifelong dream J . Upon completing the below post on a potential Eurasian Union, I had another thought: “What if the purpose of a Eurasian Union is to compete with the European Union?

The European Union was the invention of governments throughout Western Europe to link together countries that had similar views and ideas about democratic governance and free market capitalism. Maybe a Eurasian Union would represent countries that share common views of autocratic governments and heavily controlled state capitalism, which are common throughout Eurasia.

 This would be a tremendous clash of governing cultures and could be seen as a challenge to the European Union. This could also be thought of as a modernized version of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations where East meets West for some sort of showdown.

Before anyone goes awakening the ghosts of the Cold War though, the world has changed dramatically since the days of World War II. Isolation is simply not an economic and cultural reality anymore. Russia is flush with oil and natural resources, but they have a ready and hungry base of customers within Europe.

It makes just as much logical sense for Russia to unite with its’ neighbors as it did for many of the members of the European Union, even if I personally believe that an Eurasian Union will be a mess. My main concern is how does Russia accomplish its’ goals in the Asian neighborhood?

Putin’s Eurasian Union

Current Russian Prime Minister and Future President Vladimir Putin has proposed something of a Eurasian Union that would contain Russia and states that formerly comprised the Soviet Union. I assume that any Eurasian Union would look similar to the European Union except with Russia as the dominant power.

 Putin made these remarks just days before a scheduled trip to China to sign a number of key trade agreements. I’d have to hear more about what Mr. Putin conceptualizes as a “Union” before I render a final judgment, but if he’s thinking of something like the European Union, the idea is a loser.

What if we have a Eurasian debt crisis like the one currently plaguing Europe? Russia is not so economically diverse that they could shoulder the load for large bailouts, meaning the heavy lifting would fall upon Russia, lets see how appealing a Union looks then.

 Furthermore, the region already has numerous problems with human trafficking and organized crime. Creating the kind of borderless society that the EU has would only seek to worsen these problems making it easier for Eurasia’s daughters to disappear into the seedy world of the global sex trade.

The only real advantage that I could see for Russia is a potential increase in influence among the former Soviet states, but even that could be marginal as one gets closer to China. The more I think about it, Russia would be merely the junior partner in any arrangement with China, which could be problematic given Russia’s tendency towards autocratic rule and desire to be the best country on the planet.

I see any Eurasian Union as a chaotic, fractionalized, mess and would plead with Mr. Putin “Just look at Europe.”