H.E. Mr. Maxim V. Ryzhenkov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus
One initiative associated with Belarus has been attracting much interest recently. It is an idea to develop a Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the XXI Century. It was first voiced at the International Conference on Eurasian Security, held in Minsk in October 2023, when Belarus suggested to develop the Eurasian Charter “as a guidance for our own consolidation and common progressive development”.
The initiative did not emerge out of the blue. Rather, it was brought into existence by real geopolitical needs and aspirations arising from the ground. Moreover, it followed logically from another long-standing initiative of Belarus that called upon the world’s countries to recognize diversity of ways towards progressive development. That call was first made by President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko at the United Nations Summit in 2005.
The “diversity” initiative came up at a time of global uncertainty that resulted from the so-called Unipolar Moment with its concomitant unilateralism and disregard of international law. Therefore, through its initiative Belarus was seeking to contribute to efforts of other countries to forge a fair international order, in which nations would be able to live in peace and realize their aspirations.
Today’s world, however, is more uncertain than the one during the Unipolar Moment. As a matter of fact, it is even more unstable than the world that was in place four decades ago, because for all their ideological and geopolitical rivalry, the Soviet Union and the United States managed to co-exist in a kind of equilibrium that provided stability and predictability necessary for peace and development. But, the mess created at the time of the Unipolar Moment – wars, conflicts, grave violations of international law, massive human displacement – is still with us, due to the perpetuation of unilateral approaches by Western countries in their foreign policies.
Against this background, Belarus came forward with an idea to devise the Eurasia Charter. The initiative is grounded in Belarus’ many previous efforts besides the “diversity” initiative such as, among others, President Lukashenko’s recent call for a global security dialogue in a true spirit of San-Francisco. These initiatives all seek to make a contribution to making the world and, specifically, Eurasia, a safer and better place.
Many may wonder why the Charter’s idea is linked to the notions of “diversity’ and “multipolarity”. Simply put, it is basically the case because the two notions are the defining features of our time.
As a matter of fact, diversity has always been present in the world, but today its importance becomes increasingly evident with the rapid spread of ICTs, as people everywhere become aware of their civilizational differences. As a result, they demand greater respect for diversity, which has been threatened over the past few decades by policies of diktat, violence, sanctions, color revolutions and similar attempts by Western countries to impose some alien “pseudo-universal” forms of governance on indigenous institutions and ways of life.
As for multipolarity, there is ever growing consensus all around the world that multipolarity is already an objective reality. The demise of the Unipolar Moment inaugurated the emergence of multiple power centers – or poles – that define our international life. What is more, we are absolutely convinced of the need to strengthen multipolarity insofar as it is essential to effective multilateralism, whereby all countries could engage in win-win cooperation.
The idea has already been discussed in some international forums and triggered further interest. Importantly, the Presidents of Belarus and Russia voiced support to the idea in their public statements.
Belarus and Russia drafted their “preliminary views” on the Charter in a document titled “Common Vision of Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the XXI century”. In this 21-paragraph long document, the two countries outlined, among other points, how they viewed diversity and multipolarity, how they assessed Eurasia’s importance and its impact worldwide, and what they committed themselves to do to realize their vision.
Despite this Charter-related activities, Minsk cannot escape the feeling that our Eurasian partners would like to see greater clarity about the initiative, and, specifically, regarding its geopolitical rationale, objectives, process, etc. While the above mentioned “Common Vision” provides some clues to the above questions, we cannot help but agree that a more substantive and elaborate response is required indeed, particularly through the lens of evolving geopolitical developments in Eurasia.
Eurasia: Europe Finally Meets Asia or Distances from It?
The notion of Eurasia is in vogue nowadays. Indeed, it is a supercontinent that covers a very significant part of the globe and that is home to some 70 percent of the world’s population. Eurasia is a very diverse region in terms of civilizations, races, cultures, religions, values, countries, their political, economic and social systems, etc. Importantly, it is also the key driver of global economic development today insofar as it hosts the most dynamically growing countries and their vibrant regional economic blocks.
Yet until some decades ago, the notion of Eurasia was not so much in fashion. Indeed, until recently, such a notion would have been viewed as a paradox, because Eurasia was a continent containing essentially two separate worlds – Europe and Asia. While the border between Europe and Asia was always uncertain and illusory, the separation between the two regions was real, most certainly in political and temporal terms, but also, to a certain extent, in special terms as the two were rather poorly connected by physical infrastructure and cooperation mechanisms.
The political separation between Europe and Asia was established by West Europe’s predatory policies vis-à-vis Asia in the past, which sought to subjugate and pillage Asian nations. Interestingly, no significant change has occurred in European attitudes towards Asia since then as the current European Union still views Asia as both a challenger and danger to its own interests, while Asian nations have never seen Europe in a similar light.
For a number of ultimate and proximate factors Europe was able to gain a significant head start over Asia. One of the key factors among those was the Industrial Revolution, which enabled European countries to develop, modernize and subjugate Asia in a very fast way. Asia, meanwhile, as the conventional wisdom goes, kept to its “traditional ways”, missed the initial stages of the Industrial Revolution and was overrun by Europe militarily. As a result, the early XIX century saw a gap in development between Europe and Asia to emerge and to widen throughout the XIX and much of the XX century.
But, there was a hope that due to a rising nationalism in Asia and general technological development, Europe and Asia would meet at some point in a future. It all depended on when and how Asia would be able to catch up with Europe. The collapse of European empires in Asia after WWII was the first step in that direction. It was soon followed by the rise of some Asian countries, which began to work together in order to advance their common developmental priorities. The most prominent example is the establishment of ASEAN in 1967, a 10 Member State body today, which has been excelling in the implementation of its objectives for many decades.
The end of the Cold War and the onset of globalization accompanied by the rapid proliferation of free trade, knowledge, finance, investment and technology has been another powerful tailwind in Asia’s catch-up effort. Indeed, the outsourcing of manufacturing from advanced countries enabled many Asian states to run double-digit growth figures for decades and helped them lift hundreds of millions of their people out of poverty.
Moreover, in recent decades Europe and Asia became interconnected by a multitude of supply chains, transport corridors, air, land and sea traffic, banks, cultural exchanges, etc. These developments transformed Asia in a most dramatic and unrecognizable way. Likewise, these developments transformed Europe as well, because global trends in recent decades served to diminish its standing in the world while increasing its dependence on other powers in Eurasia.
The past three decades have also been marked by vigorous integration and development in the post-Soviet space. Some former Soviet states used European integration as a model for their own similar process, which the Europeans today prefer to disregard when they refuse interaction with the Eurasian Economic Union and other regional structures operating in the post-Soviet space. Sometimes it comes to absurdity on the part of some of their members as, for example, when one of Belarus’ Baltic neighbors deliberately set itself on a path of straining relations with China. All in all, the new integration structures that arose from the former Soviet Union fitted well into the growth of Asia and became part of the incipient Eurasian model of cooperation.
So, the gap in development that separated Europe and Asia for nearly two centuries has been steadily narrowing and today has become significantly less consequential than it used to be in the past. Therefore, these developments made it possible to start talking about Europe and Asia as one continent, as a whole and a unified structure and think from now on in terms of a uniform Eurasia stretching from Lisbon to Manila. One of the best and most effective manifestations of these new realities in Eurasia is China’s Belt and Road initiative, which, in an effort to revive the ancient Silk Road, connects dozens of countries in Asia and Europe so that all its participants share the fruits of economic development and prosperity. Belarus, like some other European countries, is also benefiting from this vital pan-continental initiative.
Due to the previous unequal development of Europe and Asia, nations and peoples in Eurasia generally have not been able to make full and efficient use of that immense potential for development that the continent’s enormous resources afforded. Nor have they ever enjoyed a continent-wide security under which they could have realized their development priorities. Instead, its security landscape has been consistently divided and fragmented, like, for instance under the CSCE/OSCE framework that will be discussed later in the article. As a consequence, hardly has any other continent witnessed so many armed conflicts and human suffering as Eurasia has.
So, Eurasia stands at present as a place of immense opportunities for its countries and peoples. The way to realize these opportunities is through comprehensive approaches that would account for Eurasia’s wholeness, uniqueness, complexity and diversity and that would also help consolidate and integrate the supercontinent in the interests of its inhabitants. Belarus believes that the above task can be realized by means of the Eurasian Charter for Diversity and Multipolarity in the XXI century.
But before laying out some specifics with regard to the Charter, it is worth reviewing some efforts undertaken in the past that sought to consolidate Eurasia or parts of the continent. Such an exercise should, in turn, help better grasp the rationale for the Charter and see ways to advance the initiative.
The CSCE/OSCE Experiment or the West’s Secret Instrument?
The past half a century has seen an interesting experiment in Eurasia that may be characterized as an attempt at consolidation, not of the entire continent, but just of some parts of it. It is the experiment with the functioning of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) followed by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Essentially, it was a Euro-centric or, if you will, a Euro-Atlantic experiment attesting to the separation of Europe and Asia existing five decades ago.
Initially, it was a pragmatic and mutually beneficial experiment that brought important positive results, most crucially, in reducing the threat of a nuclear and conventional war in Europe, establishing mechanisms for arms control, as well as nurturing trust and understanding between the parties.
Indeed, what lay at the core of the process was the belief in the possibility not just of reconciling the two ideological camps in Europe, but also of forging between them a pattern of pragmatic, predictable and trustworthy interaction. Then Soviet leadership deserves full credit for formulating the idea, which it began circulating in contacts with Western colleagues from around the mid-1960s with the suggestion to launch a relevant process.
The initiative found a responsive ear in the West’s decision-making circles a few years later, in the early 1970s, when the US came to embrace the politics of détente and when politicians with the “outside the box” mindset, like West Germany’s Willy Brandt, came to power in some key Western countries. So, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and the CSCE can be rightly called children of the détente.
In retrospect, it can be argued today that the Helsinki Final Act must be credited with two achievements. First, it set forth 10 pragmatic principles (the so-called Decalogue), formulated in a very balanced way that allowed the two camps to embrace them in their entirety. Second, the Act inaugurated a new understanding of the concept of security with its three baskets: the politico-military, the economic-ecological and the humanitarian that helped the two opposite sides stop viewing each other exclusively through a military and political lens.
The Decalogue of principles and a comprehensive concept of security produced a framework in the form of a conference that helped guide, maintain and normalize relations between the Participating States at a time of enmity and uncertainty prevalent during the Cold War. It was done through regular contacts, various kinds of exchanges, confidence-building measures, etc. As a result, the relations between the East and the West became to a certain extent predictable and normalized. Thus, it is fair to argue that the CSCE helped “manage” the Cold War and diminish the threat of a nuclear Armageddon.
This forward-looking initiative could have certainly outlasted the Cold War once it came to an end. Unfortunately, it did not live up to the high promises of that historical moment because a group of its members decided to advance its own selfish agenda at the expense of other participants.
So, the end of the Cold War put before the CSCE the question of adapting to the new realities. The early 1990s was a period of détente again, but of a different kind from the time when the CSCE was conceived. It was a period that may be called an incipient strategic partnership. Indeed, such a vision was embedded in a key CSCE document of that time, the 1990 Paris Charter.
As a result, the early 1990s were marked by the CSCE’s rebranding into the OSCE and the emergence of some new institutions – the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), the OSCE High Commissioner National Minorities and OSCE field missions. The OSCE began focusing, inter alia, on advancing democratization and good governance, human and minority rights, election monitoring as well as conflict prevention and resolution. As a result, these new OSCE institutions and field missions in particular fixated on the above sensitive political issues made the OSCE worse than its predecessor.
The missions made the OSCE different from other regional organizations, as they made the Organization “field-heavy” and ultimately set it on a path to irrelevance. The missions were established in Participating States, which allegedly experienced problems in their domestic development. But what is interesting is that the missions were set up exclusively in countries east of Vienna, never in countries of Western Europe given the impression that Western European countries had never experienced challenges with human rights, minority rights, etc. With this approach, the OSCE has essentially introduced a ranking among its Participating States, which did not exist under the CSCE.
In theory, the OSCE missions were supposed to help the hosting countries to implement various kinds of reforms. In practice, however, relying on the OSCE humanitarian mandate, the missions began interfering in internal affairs of the hosting Participating States in pursuit of the agendas and narratives favored by OSCE Western countries. So, what actually happened was that the OSCE began implementing the vision of other key Western institutions like NATO, EU, OECD. The OSCE thus became a biased international player, not a neutral regional organization that it was mandated to be.
Belarus was among those that had the misfortune of going through this scenario. Indeed, we agreed to receive an OSCE Mission in Minsk in 1998 with the mandate to consult and assist the government with democratization and development of national institutions. The Mission, meanwhile, evolved into a biased party as its head German Ambassador Hans-Georg Wieck engaged actively with the opposition in order to bring it to power in the 2001 Presidential election. Belarus had no choice other than to ask for Wieck’s recall. Some years later, we decided to close down the Mission altogether, seeing no added value in its work to our domestic development.
So, there is a paradoxical situation. The CSCE was able to address successfully the challenges of its time. What was remarkable about its success was that the CSCE managed to deliver in a highly tense international and regional environment. The OSCE, on its part, failed to successfully tackle the challenges of its time. And the failure is particular conspicuous given the fact that it occurred in a period of a seemingly benign international and regional environment.
Is the OSCE capable of changing itself for the better? We in Belarus doubt it very much. The OSCE has lost the advantage that was the key feature in the CSCE period – it ceased to be a forum for political dialogue and became instead a place for pollicization of discussion, a tool of pressure and influence used by some Participating States against others. No wonder, then, that the OSCE failed to live up to its recognition of the indivisibility of security in Europe as has been set forth in the Helsinki Final Act. As a consequence, the OSCE failed to prevent European security from unraveling over the past few decades, which resulted in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
It is necessary to acknowledge that the OSCE was essentially highjacked by its Western Participating States for the purpose of using the Organization as just another tool for encroaching into and forcing political change in those Participating States that refused to embrace Western “recipes” for their domestic development. What is more, the OSCE has, essentially, helped the West to expand NATO eastward, not least with its negative involvement in internal affairs of countries comprising the former Yugoslavia. These policies put the OSCE in identity crisis and deprived the Organization of a strategic orientation that would be shared by all of its Participating States. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that trust among the Participating States has been lost and that the Organization has been getting increasingly irrelevant.
Key Post-Cold War Strategies for Eurasia
While the CSCE/OSCE experiment represents a failed attempt to consolidate some parts of Eurasia, the immediate post-Cold War period has witnessed the emergence of some ideas and strategies to shape Eurasia in its entirety. Interestingly, some of the most influential and consequential of those ideas actually came from an outside power – the United States.
The end of the Cold War left the USA in the role of a sole global superpower. Therefore, the US was in search for a new strategic orientation, because its old one – containment that was suitable for the Cold War period – was not useful for a new era. The new strategic orientation was soon presented in a famous speech by former US President Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake in September 1993. The speech was titled “From Containment to Enlargement”.
Posited as a successor to the containment strategy, the enlargement strategy sought to expand the “world’s free community of market democracies”. In this, the strategy was clearly based on Francis Fukuyama’s famous thesis about the End of History, because it actually discarded the fact that the world was extremely diverse in political and socio-economic systems, as well as local cultures and traditions, but presumed instead that every country around the globe either wanted or had to be compelled to embrace so-called democracy and market economy.
For all its intents and purposes, Lake’s speech became a spiritual guidance for the US’ post-Cold War policies as the idea of enlargement drove NATO’s eastward expansion, interference in domestic affairs of many countries, attempts at forced “democratization” and “colour” revolutions that sparked numerous wars and conflicts. Therefore, it is thanks to the idea of enlargement that the world has come to see in the post- Cold War period many countries becoming destroyed and many societies getting uprooted, as well as dozens of millions of displaced people and many other related woes.
It is fair to say that the strategy was not specifically invented for the Eurasian region, but undoubtedly it was most diligently implemented in Eurasia, in places, among others, like the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, which were of overriding importance to the US in its long-standing effort to achieve dominance over the Eurasian continent. Seen in retrospect, the strategy also served the objective of anchoring Europe firmly and consistently in the US’ sphere of influence in Eurasia.
Like many other Eurasian countries, the Republic of Belarus has also found itself to be the target of this strategy.
Typically, it was most vigorously applied against us by its proponents during various elections, most recently during the Presidential election in 2020. Notwithstanding, all such attempts against Belarus miserably failed for the simple reason that the Belarusian people firmly stood behind its elected leadership and refused to be manipulated by external forces.
Another “contribution” to the external effort to consolidate Eurasia was made by former US President Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. In 1997, Foreign Affairs published his extremely provocative piece titled “A Geostrategy for Eurasia”.
The author’s key point was that America’s emergence as the sole global superpower forced it to develop and implement an integrated and comprehensive strategy for Eurasia in order to preserve its preponderant position in the world. With this, the American political thinker essentially admitted that US global primacy very much depended on developments occurring far away from the US shores.
Brzezinski viewed Eurasia as the world’s axial continent that exerted huge influence over other regions believing that a country dominant in Eurasia would automatically control the Middle East and Africa. Therefore, separate strategies for Europe and Asia would not suffice. Only an integrated and comprehensive American strategy could prevent a hostile coalition in Eurasia from taking shape that could challenge US’ global primacy. According to the American, the US must dominate and control Eurasia and perpetuate beyond a generation its decisive role as Eurasia’s arbitrator.
But how to achieve those goals? By establishing a transcontinental Eurasian security system with NATO at its core, because NATO entrenches American presence and influence in Eurasia. Europe, as Brzezinski viewed it, was a US bridgehead to Eurasia. America’s central goal was to continue to expand the democratic European bridgehead. As far as Russia was concerned, Brzezinski clearly saw it as a potential future rival due to its central position in the Eurasian continent. Hence, his “solution” for Russia was a loosely confederated state emerging in its place in the future consisting of a European Russia, a Siberian Russia, and a Far Eastern Russia.
With the benefit of hindsight, it can be safely stated that Brzezinski’s recipes have been rather diligently implemented by policymakers in his own country. Indeed, NATO enlargement happened exactly in those deliberate stages suggested by Brzezinski in his Foreign Affairs piece.
So, if Anthony Lake’s “Enlargement” idea was a spiritual guidance for US policies to shape Eurasia in its own interests, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s suggestions presented a practical guide for such policies. Needless to say, both proved to be extremely harmful for the supercontinent, its countries and its population.
But on one particular point in his piece Brzezinski appears to have been right, namely, in suggesting that “defining the substance and institutionalizing the form of a trans-Eurasian security system could become the major architectural initiative of the XXI century”.[1]
Need for Eurasian Order
So, as has been demonstrated in the previous sections, some attempts undertaken in the past 50 years to consolidate either parts of Eurasia or the entire supercontinent failed. Actually, they were doomed to go awry, because their key objective was to shape Eurasia or its parts in accordance with the wishes and visions of external rather than indigenous actors. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the external “recipes” failed to take root in an environment that was alien to them. It is true of both the CSCE/OSCE experiment and the post-Cold War US-driven politics in Eurasia.
In retrospect, however, it would be somewhat fair to suggest that these failures served a rather useful purpose of their own. Indeed, they proved to be useful in a sense that they helped many Eurasian states shake off the illusion that they would benefit from a purportedly benign US-led liberal global order and see instead the need to seek solutions to contemporary challenges primarily in their own backyard.
As a result, many Eurasian states began to coalesce around the need to resist the external pressure and to work together to advance their common cause in their own huge region. A strategic partnership between China and Russia, Eurasia’s key powers, was indispensable for propelling these indigenous dynamics as these two countries were the powerful drivers behind numerous initiatives and ideas that served to promote integration and consolidation of Eurasia.
Importantly, these developments in Eurasia have been taking place at a time when globalization began to decline in general. Indeed, the world has not become flat as American writer Thomas Friedman has famously predicted in his bestselling book (The World is Flat, 2005). Instead, the world has become a bumpy road in economic terms.
Indeed, economic globalization began to unravel in 2008 with the onset of the global economic and financial crisis, which exposed the nature of US-led unregulated and predatory capitalism with its adverse effects on the global economy. In the years following the crisis, it was becoming increasingly evident that economic globalization driven by that type of capitalism was not a “wave that lifted all boats”, as global inequality was steadily on the rise.
What is more, today it is not just developing countries that lost faith in economic globalization, it is also the traditional ardent proponents of globalization like the United States of America.
Indeed, this longtime champion of open markets and laissez-faire economics has been shunning its commitment to free trade and multilateral cooperation, it turns inward, it is keen to reindustrialize, it introduces sweeping tariffs on nearly all countries in the world, it talks about “decoupling and de-risking”, and it shapes its foreign policy around the interests of its own middle class.
So, if the USA is indeed about to turn inward and abandon its quest for global hegemony, that would certainly constitute a very positive development. Such a step would essentially mark a belated recognition of reality, namely, of the fact that the US-led liberal international order has been crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions and is being increasingly replaced by regional dynamics.
These developments were well anticipated a decade ago by the world’s foreign policy doyen Henry Kissinger in his book ““World Order” (2014). Two points from the book are particularly worth citing. First, Kissinger explained why a universal order is impossible, arguing that “no single society has ever had the power, no leadership had the resilience, and no faith had the dynamism to impose its writ enduringly throughout the world”.[2] This premise, in turn, led Kissinger to suggest the idea to “establish a concept of order within the various regions, and to relate these regional orders to one another”.[3]
We in Belarus cannot help but share the above Kissingerian idea that all regions need to establish their internal orders and work to connect them with each other.
This belief comes from our conviction that with the demise of the liberal international order the world will lack any hierarchical system with a single dominant center.
Eurasian Charter to Forge Eurasian Order
So, what Eurasia needs is a regional order, which would help Eurasian states steer clear of the present global disorder. But how to build it? Perhaps, Belarus’ idea to develop the Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the XXI Century may be timely and helpful in this regard. As we see it, the Charter can indeed provide a useful guidance to Eurasian states in their effort to establish Eurasian order and, given the importance of the supercontinent for the entire globe, to connect Eurasian order to orders in other regions.
Essentially, we view the Charter as a kind of a wholistic and coherent long-term geostrategy for our supercontinent in all its dimensions – security, economics, science, technology, culture, civilizational and some other aspects. As any strategic document it should build on some principles and elements. We foresee the following.
First and foremost, the Charter should be a constructive effort in that it would not be directed against any country or a group of states, nor would it strive for benefiting some countries at the expense of others. In that sense it would represent a drastic departure from the previous adversarial and confrontational strategies for Eurasia practiced in the past. Moreover, the Eurasian Charter should be based on the norms and principles of international law set forth in the United Nations Charter and other international legally binding documents.
Second, the Charter should be an indigenous effort, that is, an effort that involves only Eurasian countries, because indigenous actors know best their own interests, they can identify common objectives and means to achieve them and afterwards diligently realize their commonly devised commitments. The past is a good guidance here as it amply demonstrated that solutions for Eurasia invented and imposed by external actors did not and cannot take root in principle.
Third, the Charter should be a collective effort, meaning that it should be drafted and negotiated in a collective way by Eurasian states. We are absolutely convinced that each and every country in Eurasia must feel its ownership of this document and see its position and preferences reflected in the Charter. If that were to be the case, every state would then feel sufficient inducement to uphold the Charter’s provisions.
Fourth, the Charter should be an inclusive effort. It means that the negotiations should be open to all Eurasian states. The reason is straightforward – all of them should have a stake in a peaceful and prosperous supercontinent. At this moment in time, however, it appears doubtful that European NATO countries and its partners would be willing to engage in the work on the Charter. But these potential hold-outs should ask themselves where such a rejectionist stance would ultimately leave them in the context of rapidly evolving global and regional changes. Let us consider.
True, Europe presents a very successful experiment of integration and consolidation. In some respects, it is really close to becoming a United States of Europe, a notion that Victor Hugo famously invoked at the International Peace Congress in Paris in 1849. But the European experiment succeeded in the past because of some specific enabling environment like, above all, enormous wealth accumulated in Europe over centuries of exploitation of others, US security umbrella provided since WWII, free trade and ample access to cheap resources to its east. These factors have nearly all disappeared now. Instead, Europe is being flooded with challenges like, among others, massive migration from the Global South, loss of economic competitiveness, increased indebtedness, rising societal inequality, dysfunctional multiculturalism, rapidly ageing societies. Some of these challenges Europe generated itself by its own involvement in the pursuit of unilateral policies in violation of international law.
By the way, similar factors affect some advanced Eurasian countries in the eastern rim. So, both these groups will ultimately find themselves in a position of agents that would no longer be needed by the external player, which relied on them and backed their development in the past, but now turns inward.
Brussels’ machinery is currently refusing to engage with Eurasian integration entities allegedly out of its sense of superiority. But this sense of superiority is totally unjustified. As Samuel Huntington put it in his famous book [The Clash of Civilizations, 1996]: “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do”.[4]
So, Europe should put its complex of superiority aside and stop viewing others in Eurasia as a kind of modern-day barbarians. Instead, Europe and those advanced countries in East Asia would be well-advised to embrace the Eurasian concept insofar as it provides a way for them to address their mounting challenges. Just one example: the migration crisis affecting Europe can be successfully handled only through concerted efforts by both European and Eurasian countries.
Fifth, the Charter should be an engaging effort in a sense that the negotiating parties would solicit advise from relevant Eurasian regional organizations and integration entities like, among others, the Eurasian Economic Union, ASEAN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Commonwealth of Independent States, the League of Arab States, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia, the Union State of Belarus and Russia. It goes without saying that if Europe gets on board, the Western European institutions like the European Commission, the Council of Europe and some others would also be welcome to engage in the Charter process.
Sixth, the Charter should be a comprehensive effort. It means that in terms of substance the document should cover all areas of potential cooperation – security, economics, humanitarian issues, civilizational exchanges, etc. Naturally, however, the topic of Eurasian security should be of paramount importance in the Charter. The Charter should essentially help establish a new architecture of Eurasian security. This kind of pan-continental security is needed because previous attempts at security provision either under the CSCE/OSCE mantle or in the post-Cold War period failed, not least because they all sought to achieve security of some countries at the expense of others.
With this experience in mind, the principle of indivisible security should lie at the core of a new security architecture. The idea of indivisible security per se was present in the Helsinki Final Act, but not in the Decalogue of principles, only in a preambular part. This time around this principle should be put front and center in the Charter. Importantly, erecting a Eurasian security architecture would be vital for generating a new concept of global indivisible security given Eurasia’s central role in global affairs.
In economic terms, the Charter should help Eurasian states move away from Western-centric economic interdependence because it was weaponized by the West against its opponents and instead attempt to spur further economic integration and connectivity in Eurasia. Successful economic processes in Eurasia, in turn, could help revive the idea of fair economic globalization.
Seventh, the Charter should be a well-conceived procedural effort. It implies that Eurasian states negotiating the Charter’s text should have a clear understanding of their end game. We in Belarus believe that the process to develop the Eurasian Charter may in many respects look like the one that resulted five decades ago in the Helsinki Final Act. If so, the past process may serve the purpose of being a useful point of reference for planning the forthcoming negotiations on the Charter. In particular, we believe that it would make sense to replicate the rather successful experience of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe by setting up a similar conference that would cover the entire supercontinent.
Finally, the Charter should be a forward-looking effort. In our view, it should seek not only to establish principles whose implementation throughout the continent would bring about a safer, stabler and more prosperous Eurasia, but also to reach beyond the region with the view to seeking partnerships with other regions. The gist of such kind of thinking was well captured in the 2024 Annual Report of Russia’s Valdai Discussion Club: “Eurasia’s connection to the rest of the world is so deep that Eurasian processes will have a decisive impact on the other parts of the planet and on approaches to addressing crucial security and sustainability issues, such as food, energy, and the environment”.[5]
So, all in all, the Eurasian Charter of Diversity and Multipolarity in the XXI Century should help establish a system of pan-continental security that would enable the region’s stable and progressive development, which, in turn, would help shape a global system capable of addressing the planet’s complexity and diversity thereby transforming the globe into a better place for everyone.
We are convinced that with the idea of the Eurasian Charter we have chosen ourselves and suggested for other Eurasian countries a path in a right direction.
It is necessary to note that Belarus does not claim the prerogative of knowing alone how to turn matters for the better in Eurasia. As a matter of fact, we support any effort that aims to realize the above objective like, for instance, the idea to establish a Great Eurasian Partnership put forward by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in 2015. In the meantime, we are ready for the work lying ahead of us on the Charter and call upon our Eurasian partners to join this endeavor.
References
[1] Brzezinski, Z., 1997. A Geostrategy for Eurasia. Foreign Affairs, 76(5), p. 64.
[2] Kissinger, H., 2014. World Order. New York: Penguin Press. P. 105.
[3] Ibid. P. 371.
[4] Huntington, S., 2002. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Shuster. P. 51.
[5] The World from the Bottom Up or the Masterpieces of Eurasian Architecture. The Annual Report of the Valdai Discussion Club, November 2024. P. 6.
