Authoritarian Regionalism in the World of International Organizations: Global Perspectives and the Eurasian Enigma 9780198839040

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A U T H O R I TA RI A N R E GI O N A L I S M I N T H E W O R L D OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

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Authoritarian Regionalism in the World of International Organizations Global Perspectives and the Eurasian Enigma

A N A S T A S S I A V. O B Y D E N K O V A AND ALEXANDER LIBMAN

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Anastassia V. Obydenkova and Alexander Libman 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018966643 ISBN 978–0–19–883904–0 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgments While working on this book, we have received substantial feedback from a number of scholars. The authors are very grateful to John Pevehouse, Rawi Abdelal, Philippe Schmitter, Henry Hale, Alexander Cooley, Christina Davis, Randall Stone, Mark Beissinger, Leonardo Morlino, Oisín Tansey, Andrew Moravcsik, John Ikenberry, Grigore Pop-Eleches, Robert Orttung, Elise Giuliano, Timothy J. Colton, Margarita M. Balmaceda, Vladimir Gel’man, Steven Levitsky, Neil MacFarlane, Andrew Konitzer, Carlos Closa, Kathryn Stoner, and Larry Diamond for their comments on various drafts, chapters, and ideas presented in this book. All mistakes are, of course, the sole responsibility of the authors. Anastassia V. Obydenkova is especially grateful to Larry Diamond, Alexander Cooley, Andrew Konitzer, Alexandra Vacroux, Robert Orttung, Carlos Closa, Randall Stone, and Roy Allison for organization of guest-speaker events and their invitation to discuss this project at the University of Stanford, Columbia University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard University, George Washington University, the Institute of Public Goods and Policies of Spanish National Research Council, University of Rochester, and Oxford University; and she thanks Elise Giuliano, Neil MacFarlane and Joshua Tucker, Timothy J. Colton and Francis Fukuyama for being insightful and very helpful discussants at these events. The authors also presented this book and benefited from the excellent feedback of participants at a number of other guest-speaker events at the University of Helsinki, Free University of Berlin, the Stockholm School of Economics, University of Lyon (France), and Princeton University. Anastassia V. Obydenkova is grateful to the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University for granting her the position of Kathryn W. and Shelby Cullom Davis Senior Research Scholar and to the research fellows and visitors of 2015–16 for the creative enthusiastic environment and excellent comments on this book, specifically to Jaclyn A. Kerr, Lyudmila Petrova, Nadia Boyadjieva, Jillian Porter, Inna Melnykovska, Halit Dundar Akarca, Alexander Diener, and Brandon Schechter. The various chapters of the book were presented at the conferences of the American Political Science Association, the European Consortium of Political Research, the International Political Science Association, the European Political Science Association, the International Studies Association, the German Association for Political Science, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Post-Communist Working Group at Faculty of Arts and

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Acknowledgments

Science of Harvard University, and the Fung Global Seminars at Princeton University. The authors are grateful to James Disley and Oxford Academic Editing for their excellent assistance with the language editing and proofreading of the manuscript and to three anonymous reviewers of this book for their great feedback and suggestions. Alexander Libman appreciates the financial support of the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. Anastassia V. Obydenkova is grateful for support and funding for this project received from the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard University and from the Institute for International and Regional Studies of Princeton University.

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Contents List of Figures List of Tables Acronyms

1. Introduction 1.1. Authoritarian Regionalism throughout the World and in Post-Soviet Eurasia 1.2. The Contribution of the Book 1.3. Sequence of Chapters

2. Regionalism and Political Regimes 2.1. The Comparative Regionalism Perspective 2.1.1. Regional organizations and non-democratic members 2.1.2. Globalization, regional organizations, and non-democracies 2.1.3. Imperialism and non-democratic regional organizations 2.2. Authoritarian Cooperation Perspective 2.2.1. From democratic Kantian peace to a “new” autocratic peace? 2.2.2. The mystery of modern non-democracies: who are they? 2.2.3. How do political regimes matter for regionalism and . . . do they? 2.3. External Influences and Political Regimes 2.3.1. International dimension of regime transition 2.3.2. Autocracy promotion and diffusion perspective

3. Authoritarian Regionalism 3.1. Definition 3.2. Authoritarian Regional Organizations, Political Regimes, and Membership 3.3. Power Distribution 3.4. Political Impact of Authoritarian Regionalism 3.4.1. Why NDROs? 3.4.2. Tools of authoritarian regionalism 3.4.3. Limits of authoritarian regionalism 3.4.4. Actorness of autocratic regional organizations 3.4.5. NDROs and the tenure of autocrats 3.5. Heterogeneity of Membership and Governance Structure

4. Studying Non-Democratic Regional Organizations: Methodological Issues 4.1. Mixed Methods Strategy: Concurrent versus Sequential Design 4.2. Empirical Definitions

xi xiii xv 1 3 6 9 11 11 11 14 16 18 18 20 24 26 26 28 34 35 36 43 44 45 47 50 53 55 59 66 66 70

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Contents 4.3. The Dataset 4.4. Conclusion

5. Membership and Governance 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.5.

Preliminary Analysis Indicators Results: Membership Results: Governance Conclusion

6. Impact on World Politics and Economy 6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5.

Empirical Approach and Indicators Empirical Results Non-Democratic Regional Organizations and Democratization NDROs and the Survival of Political Leaders Conclusion

7. Past Non-Dependency in the Twenty-first Century 7.1. Early Years: Ideological and Colonial Non-democratic Regional Organizations 7.2. Large-N Analysis: NDROs During and After the Cold War 7.3. Were DROs and NDROs Always Different?

8. The Enigma of Eurasian Regionalism 8.1. 8.2. 8.3. 8.4. 8.5.

A Brief History of Eurasian Regionalism Historical Legacies and Eurasian Regionalism The Limiting Factor Frozen Conflicts and Border Disputes Conclusion

9. Political Regionalism: The CIS 9.1. 9.2. 9.3. 9.4. 9.5.

Heterogeneity and Power Asymmetry in the CIS Governance Effects of the CIS: Economic Area Effects of the CIS: Security Effects of the CIS: Politics 9.5.1. Methodology of the analysis 9.5.2. Results 9.5.3. Support for autocratic consolidation and electoral monitoring 9.5.4. The case of CIS-EMO 9.5.5. Autocratic Self-selection 9.6. Conclusion

10. Economic Regionalism: The EAEU 10.1. Development and Expansion 10.2. Governance 10.3. Relations to Other Regional Organizations

73 74 76 76 81 83 89 91 93 93 94 98 100 106 107 108 111 117 120 121 125 130 139 142 144 144 148 150 153 155 155 159 162 166 172 177 179 180 184 189

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Contents 10.4. Heterogeneity of Membership and Hegemony 10.5. Official and Unofficial Goals 10.6. Outcomes 10.6.1. Economic integration 10.6.2. Democracy 10.6.3. Qualitative evidence: three main mechanisms 10.6.4. Qualitative evidence: Russian foreign policy and political regimes 10.7. Conclusion

11. Security Regionalism: The SCO 11.1. 11.2. 11.3. 11.4. 11.5. 11.6. 11.7. 11.8. 11.9. 11.10.

11.11.

Development and Expansion Governance Structure Membership The Motivations and Goals behind the Collaboration of India and Pakistan Hegemony and the SCO The Official and Unofficial Goals of the SCO Allies or Rivals? Cooperation with Other International Organizations Failed Multilateralism or Successful Bilateralism? Impact on Political Regimes 11.10.1. Large-N evidence 11.10.2. Honor among thieves: SCO and trust-building among autocracies Conclusion

12. Conclusion 12.1. Autocratic Regionalism as a Phenomenon and its Impact 12.1.1. Non-democratic regional organizations as a new type of regionalism 12.1.2. Democratic vs. non-democratic regional organizations: how different are they? 12.1.3. The importance and implications of the NDRO as a new type 12.2. The Eurasian Enigma 12.2.1. Post-Soviet Eurasia as a hub of authoritarian regionalism 12.2.2. Autocracy diffusion in Eurasia 12.2.3. What can we learn from post-Soviet Eurasia? 12.3. World-wide Implications 12.4. Agenda for Future Research

Appendices References Index

ix 190 192 194 194 197 201 206 218 219 219 220 222 225 228 230 232 234 236 239 239 242 254 256 256 256 257 261 264 264 266 268 269 271 273 287 315

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List of Figures 5.1. Distribution of the average Polity IV score of the ROs

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5.2. Member countries of NDROs according to the average Polity IV index

78

5.3. Distribution of political regimes of the leading countries of ROs according to Polity IV

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5.4. Member countries of NDROs according to the Polity IV index of the leading country

80

6.1. Political regime of the leader and of the members of the RO (Polity IV)

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6.2. Kaplan–Meier survival function for authoritarian leaders of countries belonging and not belonging to NDROs

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7.1. Average Polity IV score of a member of a regional organization and of a country in the world, 1975–2005

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7.2. Average Polity IV score of the leading country of a regonal organization, 1975–2005

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7.3. Share of NDROs according to political regime of an average country and of the leading country, 1975–2005 8.1. Share of respondents supporting the EAEU, 2012–2017 8.2. Share of Soviet republics in the total exports and imports of goods from Russia, 1991

115 130

9.1. Economic and political heterogeneity of CIS countries

132 135 139 143 146

9.2. Number of the CIS decisions accepted by the CIS states, 1991–2010

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9.3. The causal logic of the link between authoritarianism and CIS participation

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8.3. Energy subsidies from Russia to Belarus, bln. US$ 8.4. The logic of the limiting factor in the post-Soviet trade 8.5. Specific features of the Eurasian regionalism

10.1. Kernel density of FH scores for the EAEU and non-EAEU countries

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10.2. Causal link between the EAEU and the authoritarian consolidation

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11.1. Kaplan–Meier survival estimates for the sample of twenty-six post-Soviet presidents, 2000–2016

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11.2. Causal mechanisms of the SCO impact on the duration of tenure of autocrats

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List of Figures

A.1. Distribution of the average Freedom House scores of the ROs A.2. Distribution of political regimes of the leading countries of ROs according to Freedom House

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A.3. Share of democratic and non-democratic ROs in our sample

279 280

A.4. Political regime of the leader and of the members of the RO (Freedom House)

280

A.5. Average Freedom House score of a member of a regional organization and of a country in the world, 1975–2005

281

A.6. Average Freedom House and Polity IV score of the leading country of the RO, 1975–2005 A.7. Share of NDROs according to different criteria, 1975–2005

281 282

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List of Tables 2.1. Summary of the key conclusions from the three streams of literature surveyed 3.1. Political impact of authoritarian regionalism: possible mechanisms 3.2. Democratic vs. authoritarian regionalism 3.3. Main hypotheses 5.1. NDROs and the heterogeneity of members 5.2. NDROs and the governance of regional organizations 6.1. Economic and political effects of NDROs

32 59 64 64 84 89 95

6.2. Effect of NDRO membership on the duration of the rule of authoritarian 105 leaders, 1950–2015 7.1. Changes in the characteristics of the NDRO over time, NDRO defined through the average democracy score of its member countries 7.2. Changes in the characteristics of the NDRO over time, NDRO defined through the democracy score of its leader

117

8.2. Dependence of the CIS countries on migration to Russia

118 131 136

9.1. Determinants of the number of acts of the CIS unconditionally accepted by individual member states, 1991–2010, dep.var.: number of acts accepted, OLS

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9.2. Activities of the EMO up to 2015 and dynamic of political regimes in post-Soviet states

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8.1. Historical factors and Eurasian regionalism

10.1. Impact of political regimes (FH) on membership in the EAEU, 2000–2015, two-way FE 10.2. Impact of political regimes (FH) on membership in the EurAsEC, 2000–2015, two-way FE 10.3. Russian foreign policy, autocracy promotion, and the EAEU 11.1. Political regimes of member states in 2015 11.2. Main religions of actual and potential member states 11.3. Military expenditure of the two hegemons, 2014 11.4. Technological component of the two leading states, 2014 11.5. Economic power of the two hegemons, 2014 11.6. Unofficial goals of the two hegemons of the SCO and the issue of their compatibility 11.7. Cox hazard regressions, survival of post-Soviet presidents, 2000–2016 11.8. National causes of tenure versus hypothetical international impact

199 200 214 221 224 228 229 229 233 241 243

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List of Tables

12.1. Impact of regionalism 12.2. Political impact of Eurasian NDROs A.1. Impact of the type of RO on regime heterogeneity, OLS A.2. Impact of the type of RO on religious heterogeneity, OLS A.3. Impact of the type of RO on income heterogeneity, OLS A.4. Impact of the type of RO on power asymmetry, OLS A.5. Effect of the type of RO on governance structure, logit A.6. Impact of the type of RO on trade integration, OLS A.7. Impact of the type of RO on integration in the area of FDI, OLS A.8. Impact of the type of RO on integration in the area of migration, OLS A.9. Impact of the type of RO on the likelihood of conflicts, logit A.10. Determinants of the number of acts of the CIS unconditionally accepted by individual member states, 1991–2010, dep.var.: number of acts accepted, negative binomial estimations

261 266 273 273 274 274 275 276 276 277 277

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Acronyms AIIB

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

ALBA

Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—Peoples’ Trade Treaty

APEC

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation

ASEAN

Association of Southeast Asian Nations

BRICS

Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa

BSEC

Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation

CAEC

Central Asian Economic Cooperation

CARICOM

Caribbean Community

CBSS

Council of the Baltic Sea States

CEMAC

Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa

CES

Common Economic Space

CINC

composite index of national capabilities

CIS

Commonwealth of Independent States

COMECON

Council for Mutual Economic Assistance

CSTO

Collective Security Treaty Organization

DCFTA

Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement

DR-CAFTA

Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement

DRO

democratic regional organization

EAEU

Eurasian Economic Union

ECCAS

Economic Community of Central African States

ECO

Economic Cooperation Organization

ECOWAS

Economic Community of West African States

EDB

Eurasian Development Bank

EEC

European Economic Communities

EFSD

Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development

EFTA

European Free Trade Association

EMO

Electoral Monitoring Organization

EU

European Union

EurAsEC

Eurasian Economic Community

FDI

foreign direct investments

FH

Freedom House

FIGO

formal intergovernmental organization

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Acronyms

GAFTA

Greater Arab Free Trade Agreement

GCC

Gulf Cooperation Council

GUAM

regional organization including Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova

IAC

International Aviation Committee

IGAD

Intergovernmental Authority on Development

IIMDD

International Institute for Monitoring Democracy Development, Parliamentarism and Suffrage Protection of Citizens

IMF

International Monetary Fund

IO

international organization

IPA

Interparliamentary Assembly

LAIA

Latin American Integration Association

LAS

League of Arab States

NAFTA

North American Free Trade Agreement

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NDRO

non-democratic regional organization

NGO

non-governmental organization

OAPEC

Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries

OAS

Organization of American States

ODA

official development aid

OLS

ordinary least squares

OSCE

Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

RO

regional organization

SAARC

South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation

SACU

Southern African Customs Union

SADC

Southern African Development Community

SCO

Shanghai Cooperation Organization

TACIS

Technical Assistance for the Commonwealth of Independent States

US

United States

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

WRD

World Religions Database

WTO

World Trade Organization

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1 Introduction In December 2007, the Russian Federation elected the State Duma—for the second time after Vladimir Putin became president of the country. The elections, far from being free and fair, were characterized by a further important feature previously unknown to Russia—substantial restrictions on the access of international observers. Having ignored most of the recommendations made by observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) after their monitoring of the previous election campaign, Russia decided to eliminate the possibility of a new wave of criticism by simply preventing the observers from participating in Russian elections. While the OSCE rules require an invitation to observers to be issued three months before election day, Russia sent out the invitation only a month before the elections, and also imposed restrictions on the number of observers. As a result, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the OSCE refused to send its monitors to Russia. The lack of international observers was heavily criticized by both international actors and the Russian opposition. There were, however, those who wholeheartedly approved of the decision of the Russian government. Mikhail Krotov, the Secretary General of the Interparliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), an organization at that time consisting of twelve former Soviet Union republics (all the former Soviet republics, except the Baltic states), declared in an interview in November 2007 that the Western reaction was caused not by the violation of international norms by Russia, but by the fact that Russia “again claimed to be a sovereign country, which has to be treated as equal, also in the area of international [electoral] monitoring. And it turned out to be an unpleasant surprise for the West.” Krotov went on to declare the monitoring standards of the OSCE obsolete, claiming that they were based on double standards and direct political pressure, in contrast to those of the CIS.¹ The CIS Interparliamentary Assembly did send its observers to the Russian ¹ http://iacis.ru/pressroom/news/tavricheskiy_dvorets/zaokeanskie_kritiki_propoveduyut_ ustarevshie_vzglyadyi_na_monitoring_vyiborov__intervyu_generalnogo_sekretarya_soveta_ mpa_sng_mihaila_krotova/, accessed July 24, 2018.

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Regionalism in the World of International Organizations

elections and published its conclusion on 2 December 2007 (before the vote count was concluded). The Assembly found no problems with the implementation of the elections and gave Russian electoral law high praise. This was at odds with the conclusions of the representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, who issued a statement strongly criticizing the Russian elections.² This difference in how the Russian elections were treated is but one example of an important trend that has to be taken into account when analyzing the democratization process in various parts of the world. Over the last two decades, political science scholarship has accumulated substantial evidence on the ability of international organizations (IOs) and regional organizations (ROs) to strengthen the democratization process in their member states and even to do so among non-members. Regional organizations can provide incentives to comply with democratic norms (e.g. if the latter are required in order to obtain membership or if their absence can lead to temporary or permanent suspension of membership) and offer democratic countries aid, support, and advice. However, they can also function as commitment devices for countries that are resolutely pursuing the goal of democratization, and even in some cases use military force in cases of coups threatening democracy in their member states. The European Union’s (EU) external democracy promotion has been acknowledged as the major example of this logic; yet some other regional organizations also play an important role in this respect (Pevehouse 2005). Our book’s main argument is that this evidence was primarily generated by studying regional organizations mostly consisting of democratic member states and with democratic leading countries. At the same time, a large number of regional organizations world-wide were either established by non-democracies or are at least centered around a non-democratic leading state. Research on these organizations has been rather limited so far. This is primarily the case because the literature has focused on organizations which evidently achieve a high level of economic and political integration and policy coordination. Regional organizations of democratic states meet this requirement much more often than those of non-democratic states (Mansfield et al. 2002). However, even if an organization does not achieve the goals officially declared in its mandate, it may have a profound impact on regime consolidation. This is the reason why this book engages the new phenomenon of authoritarian regionalism. As Cooley (2005, p. 56) remarks om this topic: Across Eurasia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, new regional organizations are flourishing. Yet their political agendas seem to be drifting away from

² http://www.vibory.ru/Regs/GD/part-11.htm, accessed July 24, 2018; http://kommersant.ru/ doc/817834, accessed July 24, 2018.

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Introduction

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reaffirming democratic principles, and may even be veering toward new practices that serve to shield their authoritarian members from outside criticism of what they do at home.

Yet there are numerous gaps in our knowledge of how these new organizations work and what their impacts of their policy are. We show that non-democratic regional organizations (NDROs) differ substantially from the democratic regional organizations (DROs) in their modus of operation. We also show that NDROs are capable of exercising an impact on regime transition among their member states, even if they fail to achieve the goal of economic or political integration, and because of that they deserve scholarly attention.

1.1. AUTHORITARIAN REGIONALISM THROUGHOUT THE WORLD AND IN POST-SOVIET EURASIA The phenomenon of authoritarian regionalism is a global one: one finds NDROs in different parts of the world. At the same time, in some regions the presence of NDROs is more pronounced than in others. The aim of this book is thus to provide evidence on the features characterizing NDROs worldwide and differentiating them from DROs, but also to unpack the specific mechanisms through which NDROs exercise their influence. The last goal will be achieved by looking at a particular region—post-Soviet Eurasia. This region is comprised of twelve former Soviet republics, which became independent in 1991 (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan). The focus on Eurasia is important from both a scientific and a policy perspective. From a scientific perspective, Eurasia is the part of the world where, as we will show in what follows, NDROs are particularly prolific in number and differentiated in scope and objectives; a large number of NDROs provides ample opportunity for comparative analysis. The region features a large number of regional organizations, each with a different membership, design, and performance record. There are two major international authoritarian actors in this region (Russia is the core actor, with China an important outsider³), along with a number of important democratic actors (most notably, the EU). This makes it possible to perform a comparative analysis of how different NDROs affect the regime transition trajectories in their member states (or fail to do so) and discuss the reasons for these differences. ³ China is defined as an “outsider” because of the particular definition of Eurasia we use, i.e., as a region composed of all the former Soviet Union states (with the exceptions of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia). China does not belong to this set, but it plays an important role in the region.

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Furthermore, Eurasia provides an important example of how democratic development has been inverted and turned into autocratic consolidation. While in the early 1990s there were hopes for democratic development in the post-Soviet world, over time, only a few countries managed to pass the threshold to weak and unstable democracies. The majority of the Eurasian countries turned into consolidated autocracies, regressing from the (sometimes rather modest) achievements they demonstrated in the 1990s. For instance, Russia transitioned from a hybrid regime (possibly even a weak non-consolidated democracy) in the 1990s to a consolidated autocracy in the 2010s. This phenomenon was unexpected after the wave of democratization in the 1990s, and it requires careful analysis. Thus, the region allows us to test an interesting dynamic aspect of the evolution of the NDROs. From the policy perspective, the resurgence of Russian foreign policy activism and even imperialism in the 2010s, going hand in hand with the development of NDROs such as the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), makes an understanding of the functioning and role of these NDROs crucial. This important insight will, first, lead to an understanding of Russian influence on the development of post-Soviet Eurasian countries and, second, enable the US and the EU to devise an appropriate response. The discussion in the EU on the possibility of cooperation between the EU and the EAEU, which started almost immediately after the Crimean crisis in 2014 and continued well into 2017–18, or different views on the EU and US ability to interact with SCO in Central Asia demonstrate how important the topic is for decision-makers. Eurasia attracts considerable attention due to its ongoing international crises (such as the conflict around Ukraine), which are unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future. In sum, Eurasia appears to be a suitable laboratory for our investigation and will allow us to obtain results that will be relevant outside this particular group of countries. At the same time (and it is important to stress this), Eurasia is not the only part of the world where NDROs are present. Therefore, the aim of the book is to combine broad (quantitative) analysis of a large sample of NDROs from different world regions with our in-depth study of three Eurasian NDROs. The latter analysis is aimed at unpacking the causal mechanisms allowing NDROs to affect the regime transition trajectories of their members (to the extent that they are indeed able to do so). We have selected three NDROs in Eurasia for more detailed study, and we evaluate differences in their design and outcomes: the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Eurasian Economic Unions, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Here, however, we believe it is important to briefly mention other examples of NDROs, which also call for detailed analysis (for which, possibly, the insights into the NDROs studied closely in this book could also be of value). The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) can be seen to be one of these cases.

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Introduction

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The organization comprises six conservative Arab monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar) and officially pursues the goal of deeper economic integration of its member countries. However, economic affairs are but one aspect of the GCC’s functions. For us, the most important example of its role is its position during the Arab Spring in 2011. For example, after mass protests started in Bahrain in February, the GCC began a military intervention, which eventually helped the incumbent to stabilize his position. The GCC also provided various forms of economic assistance and support to some of the autocracies in the region (and even invited Jordan to join the organization during the Arab Spring). The extent of cooperation of the GCC countries changes considerably over time and, in fact, as of 2017 is much weaker than previously because of the conflict between Qatar and Saudi Arabia. However, this organization has shown that in some cases NDROs use drastic measures (including military power) to support other autocracies.⁴ Yet another example of an important NDRO is the Bolivarian Alliance for the People’s of Our America (ALBA). It was founded in 2004 by Cuba and Venezuela and now includes eleven states of Latin America. ALBA belongs to (as we will show in what follows) a relatively rare group of NDROs in the modern world which have a very strong ideological foundation. Being based on the idea of Bolivarian Socialism, ALBA claims to reject each and every element of what typically constitutes a regional integration initiative. The common economic space of the People’s Trade Agreement (Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos), established by ALBA members in 2006, ought to be an alternative to a free trade area (e.g. the agreement envisages that the member countries provide specific support to their domestic companies, limit dependence on food supply from other countries, protect their most important economic sectors, and replace multinationals by state-led national projects, etc.). Practically, the organization supports authoritarian tendencies in the region through two mechanisms: redistribution of resources (in particular, oil at subsidized prices from Venezuela to other countries of the region) and rhetoric providing legitimacy to autocrats. Again, ALBA’s performance changes over time: the decline of oil prices and the catastrophic economic policy of Venezuela make it less able to provide aid to other countries. Nevertheless, ALBA should not be seen as a unique phenomenon: it stands in a long tradition of Latin American regional organizations with a strong ⁴ While for the GCC, it would be impossible without very careful analysis of the empirical evidence accumulated by the literature devoted to Middle East regionalism and authoritarianism, which we only touch upon in this book. On the role of the GCC as a regime-boosting institution see Colombo 2012a; Kamrava 2012; Haimerl 2013; Steinberg 2014; Fawcett 2015, 2016; Odinius and Kuntz 2015. Yom (2018) offers a detailed analysis of the limits of the GCC as a case of authoritarian regionalism. Colombo (2012b) confronts GCC activities aiming to support authoritarian regimes in some countries and undermine the incumbents in others.

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anti-American stance (Sabatini 2014), which in some cases also provided a high level of support to authoritarian tendencies in its member states.⁵ The cases of post-Soviet Eurasia, as well as of the GCC and of the ALBA, show that authoritarian regionalism is indeed a welcome instrument for authoritarian powers (such as Russia, Venezuela, or Saudi Arabia) either to explicitly support authoritarian consolidation or at least to counteract external democratic influences (see also Kneuer et al. 2018). Yet the argument of our book goes beyond saying that authoritarian leading countries use NDROs for supporting authoritarian regimes. We argue that for smaller authoritarian states (such as Belarus or Tajikistan in post-Soviet Eurasia) NDROs can be even more important, and thus in many cases it is precisely these smaller countries that are the driving force behind the establishment of authoritarian clubs. Again, this matter requires close investigation.

1.2. THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE BOOK While the importance of these NDROs seems evident, their actual functioning and their internal and external implications have not yet been explicitly and systematically addressed. Furthermore, the dissonance between regional organizations established by democracies and those established by autocracies, although empirically obvious, has not been approached theoretically. Traditional theories of regionalism were designed to analyze regional organizations composed of democracies (e.g. the EU). Such theories, therefore, could potentially fail to explain “authoritarian regionalism,” that is, the phenomenon of regional organizations set up by non-democracies. Analysis of non-democratic regional organizations world-wide, including their internal and external implications, is therefore relevant from both scientific and policy perspectives. How do these new organizations interrelate and interact with the outside world? How do they counteract and confront the danger of democratization in their own member states and in neighboring states? How and why do the political regimes, the economic development, and the cultures of their member states matter in the foundation and development of these organizations? This book aims to address these questions by developing a new theory of NDROs and by using a mixed methods strategy, combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis, to test it. The quantitative analysis uses a large dataset of all regional organizations world-wide, for the post-World War II period, with the aim of defining historical trends in the development and modification ⁵ Similarly to the GCC, for more detailed analysis of ALBA we refer to D’Anieri (2014) and De la Torre (2017).

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of regionalism over the last seven decades (1940s–2010s). Qualitative analysis refines and develops the argument by looking at the case of post-Soviet Eurasia. Regional organizations are defined as international organizations that include only countries located in geographic proximity to one another (typically, those sharing common borders); such organizations do not aspire to expand their membership beyond a self-defined “region” (e.g. Europe, postSoviet Eurasia, the Arab Middle East).⁶ In the empirical research, we exclude military alliances, which are typically studied in a different strand of the literature, and focus on multi-purpose and economic organizations. This is because, first, most active recent NDROs present themselves as economic or multi-purpose organizations, though they may actually serve a different set of goals (such as the GCC, the ALBA, or the CIS), and second, because we are particularly interested in the non-coercive tools with which NDROs affect their members’ politics and societies. These tools are, again, especially important today, when the use of coercion has become less popular (although not impossible, as the actions of the GCC in Bahrain show). After performing the large-N analysis of a world-wide sample of regional organizations, the book proceeds with detailed investigations of selected case studies from Eurasia. The case studies also follow a mixed methods design: they include both in-depth investigation of particular causal mechanisms and econometric analysis, and were designed to capture the specifics of the institutional design of each of the regional organizations. In the world-wide analysis, our main focus is on cross-sectional variation: we look at a large sample of regional organizations and investigate how the membership, governance, and policy outcomes of democratic international organizations differ from non-democratic ones. We repeat this exercise for several time periods, looking at how the differences between democratic and non-democratic organizations have changed over time. In the case study analysis, we use panel data analysis and survival analysis, focusing on how the political regimes of individual countries or the length of the rule of leaders are correlated with these countries’ membership in the organizations we investigate and the extent of their involvement in the regional organizations’ activity. The world-wide large-N analysis is based on a hand-picked dataset developed by a research team including one of the co-authors of the study (Vinokurov et al. 2014); this dataset includes detailed information on numerous regional organizations. The dataset is particularly relevant here as it includes numerous quantitative indicators on each of the international organizations derived from official statistical records (such as those of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)) and analysis of the documents of the ⁶ The standard way of defining regional organizations is based on (a) geographic proximity and (b) reference to particular regions in the founding documents of the international organizations. Geographic proximity refers to common borders and the absence of large distances.

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international organizations. As such, the dataset is unique in its coverage and level of detail. The large-N component of the case study analysis is based on various databases that the authors have collected: they combine standard sources (IMF, the World Bank, Polity IV, Freedom House, etc.) with the unique databases of particular regional organizations (e.g. the CIS Legal Acts Database). The analysis of NDROs will be conducted from two perspectives: the regional organizations’ origins and their policy consequences. The first perspective aims to explain (through analyses of the goals/objectives of the foundation of international organizations) why this type of organization was founded. The second perspective is related to literature on the diffusion of the regimes; it looks at regional organizations as an independent variable and explains their impact on the regimes of its member states and of the states beyond their borders. The second perspective also looks at the governance structure and admission criteria of the NDROs, as opposed to the decisionmaking of DROs. Therefore, a further contribution of the book is to demonstrate the potential dual nature of NDROs, related to their economic and political dimensions. In the economic arena, they create new rent-seeking opportunities for their member states and neighboring states. In the political arena, they strengthen authoritarian regimes. In summary, the book investigates the role of NDROs and builds on the international relations, international security, and comparative politics literatures. The book engages in this interdisciplinary dialog and aims to contribute to studies of regionalism, political regimes, and regional organizations world-wide. There are two main findings of the book. First, NDROs indeed differ from DROs in several important respects concerning both their governance and membership. We find that NDROs more often use governance mechanisms that allow informal interaction among the leaders rather than rely on bureaucratic institutions. We also find that NDROs are more heterogeneous in terms of their membership than DROs: they include both rich and poor countries, countries of different cultures, and even are more likely to include countries with different (in this case, democratic) regimes. The second major difference is that NDROs do have an impact on the political development of their members. In the book’s novel analysis of the effect of NDRO membership on the survival of autocratic rulers, we find that autocrats running countries which belong to at least one NDRO, in the last seventy years, have systematically managed to stay in power for longer periods of time than authoritarian leaders of countries which did not belong to an NDRO. The small-N analysis illustrates the particular tools and mechanisms NDROs use to support authoritarian regimes among their members.⁷ ⁷ We have to point out that not all NDROs promote or diffuse autocracy. In Eurasia, we find much stronger evidence of the autocracy promotion exercised by the CIS or the SCO than by the EAEU, where it appears to be indirect at best.

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Therefore, NDROs are characterized by an interesting combination of features. On the one hand, to extract economic and security benefits, they need to enlarge their membership. This makes them behave pragmatically and accept more politically, economically, and culturally heterogeneous countries than DROs would do (DROs have to take into account the preferences of the population dissatisfied with strong heterogeneity and the higher costs of consensus-finding, which will be even higher in cases of high heterogeneity). On the other hand, non-democratic regimes use NDROs to strengthen the regimes of the member states or at least prevent democratization (fearing the diffusion of the democratization processes into their own domestic politics). Thus, NDROs try to become more heterogeneous (to increase rents) and less heterogeneous (to stabilize regimes) at the same time. We also show that NDROs are not necessarily created by a single strong state: in fact, while some NDROs are more likely to be established by a powerful hegemon, others are groups of states of roughly similar power.

1.3. SEQUENCE OF CHAPTERS The book has twelve chapters, organized in accordance with our research goals and objectives. This first chapter is the introduction. The second chapter reviews the existing literature that is relevant for our analysis. It shows how the book fits into several strands of extant research, which potentially enrich each other, but still leave important lacunae for further analysis. Chapter 3 develops the key elements of the theory, which will then be tested throughout the book. Chapter 4 presents our methodological approach. The next three chapters focus on large-N world-wide analysis. Chapters 5 and 6 look at the contemporary development of NDROs; these two chapters investigate whether NDROs differ from DROs in terms of membership, governance, and policy outcomes, both economic and political. Chapter 7 provides a historical overview of the evolution of NDROs since World War II. The next four chapters focus on particular cases of NDROs in Eurasia and serve a double purpose. First, as is customary in mixed methods research, they specify the causal mechanisms explaining the large-N observations of Chapters 5 and 6. Second, and even more importantly, they look at a particularly crucial topic that is difficult to study using large-N data—the link between NDROs and autocratic consolidation in their member countries. In the world-wide large-N analysis, one of our key goals was to identify the universe of NDROs empirically, through the characteristics of their members (rather than by working with a preselected and possibly biased set of organizations ex ante referred to as non-democratic or illiberal). However, precisely because of this empirical definition, the question of whether NDROs affect the

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political regimes of their members becomes circular: most members of NDROs are non-democracies according to the definition of NDROs. In the case study chapters, however, we follow a different approach: we look at three notable regional organizations and study how the regimes of the members of these bodies changed over time. By combining quantitative analysis (panel data, survival analysis) with qualitative investigation of the causal mechanisms of autocratic consolidation, we are able to provide numerous novel insights into the effect of NDROs on the political regimes of their members. Specifically, Chapter 8 looks at the development of regionalism in Eurasia and provides background information for understanding its evolution and logic. Chapters 9 through 11 discuss one Eurasian organization each. Finally, the last chapter summarizes the results of the investigation. Three Eurasian NDROs we study have distinct objectives—politics (CIS), economy (EAEU), and security (SCO). This variation in goals and institutional designs, along with these NDROs’ very similar (to a large extent, overlapping) memberships, is instrumental in tracing the causal links between the NDROs’ functioning and the regime transition trajectories of their members and of other countries they influence, as it reduces the omitted heterogeneity (always problematic if NDROs from different parts of the world are being compared). Moreover, some of the NDROs of the region (especially the CIS) allow us, by their institutional design, to implement original and unusual large-N research strategies (in the case of the CIS, one can distinguish between different levels of participation in this regional organization rather than treat the membership as a binary variable). For Eurasia, data availability is much better than for most other regions with NDRO proliferation (the Middle East and Africa); this is an outcome of the Soviet legacy, which created relatively strong and well-functioning statistical services in the member countries. This is yet another reason for us to focus on this part of the world. Some of the analysis of the book builds upon the previous work of the co-authors (Libman and Obydenkova 2013a, 2018a, 2018b); however, in each case, the findings reported in individual journal articles were substantially revised and adjusted before inclusion in this book. More generally, the manuscript can be seen as a logical continuation of previous work by the co-authors studying both regional organizations in post-Soviet Eurasia and the external influences on regime transition, both autocratic and democratic. At the same time, this volume offers the first book-length treatment of the phenomenon of the authoritarian regionalism; we therefore hope that it might trigger further scholarly debate on this important topic.

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2 Regionalism and Political Regimes The focus of this book—the origin, the functioning, and the effects of non-democratic regional organizations (NDROs)—draws from a number of theoretical perspectives. First, the book relates to the growing literature on comparative regionalism, singling out a specific sub-type of regional organization, which, so far, has received insufficient attention in the extant research. Second, the book builds on yet another literature on the international cooperation of autocracies, which we augment by studying the role NDROs play in this context. Third, our book speaks to the literature concerning the external impacts on political regimes (the international dimension of democratization), including insights from studies on autocracy promotion and diffusion which have attracted substantial attention in the recent decade.

2.1. THE COMPARATIVE REGIONALISM PERSPECTIVE

2.1.1. Regional organizations and non-democratic members The 2000s and the 2010s have witnessed a surge of empirical and theoretical research in the area of comparative regionalism. Unlike previous work, which either focused on the rather unique experience of the EU (see also discussion in Closa and Casini 2016; Closa and Kochenov 2016) or investigated regional organizations as part of area studies research programs, contemporary research explicitly aims to compare varieties of regionalism emerging in different parts of the world and to understand the driving forces behind their similarities and divergences (Garnaut and Drysdale 1994; Fawcet and Hurrell 1995; Hettne and Söderbaum 2000; Obydenkova 2006; Telo 2007; Cooley and Spruyt 2009; Shaw et al. 2011; Van Langenhove 2011; Obydenkova and Swenden 2013; Söderbaum, 2015; Börzel and Risse 2016). In particular, the existing research highlights two important features. On the one hand, regionalisms in Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, or Europe are indeed strikingly different (Fawn 2009). First, there are differences in the

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extent to which governmental actors play a role in the development of regionalism. The New Regionalism approach in particular highlights the crucial role of non-governmental actors in the emergence of regions (Hettne and Söderbaum 1998). Second, even if one limits the scope of research only to formal intergovernmental regional organizations (Vogly et al. 2008), one still has to acknowledge a multitude of goals and the functions they implement (Obydenkova 2010; Vinokurov and Libman 2017). On the other hand, however, variations in the formal design of regional organizations are much smaller than the variations in their actual impact and implications. Since the 1960s, the majority of regional organizations have “download[ed] the global script” and imitated the EU to some extent (Jupille et al. 2013).¹ Beyond the façade of EU-like structures, there are numerous functions that regional organizations can actually perform. One of the most important findings of the existing comparative regionalism literature is that these functions are in many cases affected by the political regimes of the member states, because of the changing preferences of domestic coalitions and incentives for decision-makers (Solingen 2015). While the literature, to our knowledge, has not yet examined NDROs as a specific subtype of regional organizations, numerous studies on regionalism in different parts of the world have highlighted how authoritarianism shaped the tasks of the regional organizations there. Acharya’s (2001) seminal work on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) provides important insights from this point of view. Generally, Acharya (2016) argues that for many developing countries, having recently obtained independence, membership in a regional organization could be a tool to raise their status in the international community. Regionalism is thus not about constraining sovereignty (as is the case with the EU) but about strengthening it. The case of the ASEAN, which until the 1990s was dominated by non-democratic countries, indicates two important features of this organization: strict adherence to the norm of non-interference in the affairs of others (an element of what sometimes is referred to as the ASEAN Way, see Acharya 1997; Almonte 1997) and primarily elite-level interaction and socialization.² Acharya shows that ASEAN contributed to the emergence of a security community in Southeast Asia with a particular set of norms and values; thus, it enhanced regional stability, at the same time stabilizing political regimes in the member countries. Acharya (2003) shows that democratization in the main ASEAN countries became a factor in the transformation of the organization to a more inclusive one. ¹ Before that, however, there was more variation in the formal design of the regional organizations. ² Acharya and Johnston (2009) point out that the formal institutions in the ASEAN hid a highly elaborated and basically informal set of interactions at the elite level; and Acharya (2011) highlights the issue of the “entrapment” of epistemic communities unable to offer criticism or dissenting opinion on regionalism in the autocratic ASEAN states.

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In a similar way, Söderbaum (2004a) examines different functions performed by regional organizations in Africa which strikingly deviate from their formal mandates. On the one hand, weak states with authoritarian rule in Africa use regional organizations (such as the Southern African Development Community, SADC) with “highly formalized and to some extent ritualized” decision making (Söderbaum 2004a, p. 427) to improve the status of their governments. Formalization is necessary, on the one hand, to ensure that the organizations are perceived as functioning and important (and thus can contribute to the status of their members) and, on the other hand, to prevent the organizations actually exercising any policy influence, thereby keeping the sovereignty of their members fully intact. Söderbaum (2004b, 2007) shows that from this point of view regional organizations in Africa frequently become tools of “regime-boosting,” even allowing their member states to escape, to some extent, the pressure of international (democratizing) forces. In addition to that, however, one needs to consider a further important dimension of regionalism: that of rent-seeking. Regionalist projects can be created primarily to ensure the access of politicians to attractive rents (e.g. through large infrastructural projects).³ In the case of Africa, formal organizations coexist with what Söderbaum (2004a) refers to as “shadow regionalism”: informal networks spanning the borders of the formal states. These networks are also involved in the generation and redistribution of rents (see also Grant and Söderbaum 2003). Research on Latin America also echoes the idea of a “ceremonial regionalism” (Montecinos 1996) pursued by the member countries. In Latin America, however, this combines the regional integration rhetoric with strong criticism of the US, which then becomes essential for the identitybuilding of regionalist projects (Sabatini 2014). Another important aspect highlighted in the comparative regionalism studies is the role of the external environment (including the general organization of the world politics), which favors certain types of regional organization and discourages others (Telo 2012). Telo (2017), for instance, discusses several generations of regionalism affected by the global history context, and specifically identifies “authoritarian / hierarchical” regionalism as the main form of regional arrangement in the 1930s–1940s. Telo’s main focus is not on the political regimes of the member states (although some hierarchical regionalism projects have been pioneered by the authoritarian countries such as Japan and Germany during World War II or the USSR, others are created by democracies in their colonial empires) but rather on the fundamental inequality of power and the highly protectionist and discriminatory nature of these ³ The importance of regionalism for rent-seeking is a central point in the research of Gray (2018), who studies regional organizations with limited or no policy impact and suggests that these structures’ existence is due to the ability of the bureaucrats of national governments and secretariats to extract personal benefits from the regional organizations.

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projects. Hancock (2009) uses the concept of “plutocratic regionalism” to describe these highly asymmetric arrangements and finds some examples in the post-World War II world (e.g. the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) until the end of apartheid). She points out that the creation of plutocratic regionalist organizations depends on whether the elites of the leading state perceive them as acceptable (which was the case for the SACU until the end of the 1980s and was not the case for the same organization after South Africa’s democratization, see Chapter 7); it seems plausible that these perceptions also depend on the nature of political regimes (and in particular the difference between autocracies and democracies). From this point of view, there are several insights in the comparative regionalism literature which are important for our subsequent investigation. First, analyzing regional organizations requires going beyond their official mandates and looking at the heterogeneity of functions they can perform. For us, a crucial function of the NDROs will be associated with the consolidation of authoritarian regimes, which we will explore in what follows. Second, the available evidence indicates that the political regimes of the member states are a relevant factor determining the functioning and tasks of a regional organization. In particular, non-democratic regimes seem to benefit from the ability of regional organizations to increase their international status, as it was the case for ASEAN before the democratization of its key members in the 1990s or for African regime-boosting regionalism. At the same time, the extant research on comparative regionalism points out two possible designs that regional organizations with non-democratic members could prefer: structures based on strict non-interference and informal interaction among the elites (ASEAN, SADC) or structures based on hierarchy and major power asymmetry (hierarchical regionalism). Both of these insights will matter for the formulation of hypotheses, which we will present in what follows.

2.1.2. Globalization, regional organizations, and non-democracies Our discussion so far has focused on the ability of regional organizations to contribute to region-building and regional cooperation among their member countries. Understanding NDROs, however, requires an extension of this perspective: we need to take into account that regional organizations are frequently created for the purpose of affecting the global governance and the global political economy rather than to enhance cooperation among countries. Here, several perspectives are possible. On one hand, regional organizations can be seen as “a means to help achieve the globalist project” (Gamble and Payne 1996, p. 252, see also Hook and Kearns 1999). On the other hand (and for our book this perspective appears to be more important), regional organizations can

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be seen as means of actively re-shaping the global economy and politics. Authoritarian states could be particularly interested in designing regional (as well as global) organizations for this purpose: in this case, they act as revisionist powers to the post-Cold War political order. Eurasian regionalism, which is at the center of this book, has actually been studied from this point of view, though with different normative conclusions (Lane 2016; Johnson and Köstem 2016). Are regional organizations indeed an effective tool for the goal of redesigning the global order? As we will show in what follows, in Russia at least there seems to be a firm belief among both politicians and epistemic communities that this is actually the case. However, to accept this argument we need to understand a specific mechanism through which regionalism can provide a global appeal to the ambitions of authoritarian countries. This mechanism can be related to what Davis and Pratt (2017) frame as the “forces of attraction” argument.⁴ According to this approach, strong states, while making decisions about which countries to admit to their regional organizations, often focus not on economic cooperation benefits, but on purely geopolitical concerns, even though the goal of the organization is an economic one. The reasons for this are that, first, economic organizations allow the pooling of forces and of resources, making the bargaining coalition led by the strong state more powerful and, second, economic organizations serve as redistribution mechanisms, where hegemons provide side-payments to smaller states in exchange for remaining part of the geopolitical coalition. Essentially, regionalism serves as a tool to stabilize a coalition in global bargaining: we will show how this logic matters in the Eurasia case as well. Alternatively regionalism can appeal to the ambitions of authoritarian countries because regional organizations can serve as tools for legitimacy provision: not only by increasing the status of non-democratic regimes (as discussed in sub-section 2.1.1) but also by presenting the international agenda promoted by these regimes as generally more acceptable. Thus, one of the main gains from the existence of the ALBA for the Venezuelan government under Chavez was that the organization legitimized the idea of “Bolivarian socialism” in Latin America (Gürkan 2010; De La Torre 2017). In the same way, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (with the accompanying institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), see Vieira 2018) functions as a tool legitimizing Chinese foreign (economic) policy as a multilateral project (Godehardt 2016) (we acknowledge that the Belt and Road Initiative is not a regional organization and thus should be discussed in the context of this book only with substantial caveats). Multilateralism allows the initiatives of autocrats to be presented as having received broader popular support and augments the status of hegemonic power.

⁴ See also Davis (2009); Davis and Wilf (2017).

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For us, therefore, it is important to acknowledge that by creating an NDRO, powerful authoritarian states may focus on geopolitical security concerns, that is, on a global rather than a domestic agenda; the changes in their involvement in global politics (like those experienced by Russia since the start of the twenty-first century) will therefore substantially influence their interest to the NDROs and the tasks NDROs actually undertake.

2.1.3. Imperialism and non-democratic regional organizations While the existing literature on regionalism does acknowledge the possibility that regional organizations emerge as a result of coercion and external pressure (Telo 2017), most of it concentrates on regionalism as an outcome of bargaining between countries. In fact, even international hierarchy can be seen as the result of interaction among rational actors and as a tool that maintains peace and security (Lake 2009a, 2009b).⁵ Yet in many cases what appears to be a regional organization is in fact the outcome of brute force (or at least of economic pressure) pulling countries together in a vastly unequal arrangement. We will discuss some of the most pronounced examples of this type of regionalism (e.g. the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, COMECON, which will be discussed in Chapter 7) in the subsequent analysis. From this point of view, we need to take into account yet another branch of the literature which could be relevant for our studies: that on empires and imperialism. Tavares (2004) explicitly links empires to the contemporary regionalism research (dubbing them “military regionalism”) because of their ability to ensure the economic integration of vast spaces. What can we learn for our project from the extremely diverse and broad literature on this topic? To start with, imperialism should not necessarily be equated to authoritarianism. European colonial empires were in many cases established by countries that were relatively advanced in terms of democratization for that era or were even consolidated democracies in the modern sense of the word, such as France or the UK: the collapse of colonialism was not an outcome of democratization in the metropolitan center. Yet the existence of a democratic regime in the center did not translate into democratization in the colonies (though some countries, like France, occasionally embraced this rhetoric, e.g. during the French Union era of 1946–56). On the contrary, in many cases it was democratic European states that directly established brutal oppressive regimes in their colonies or at least tolerated the existence of these regimes for example

⁵ On hierarchy in international relations see also Cooley (2003, 2005).

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as Belgium did in case of the Congo Free State in the mid-nineteenth century). However, there does exist literature which argues that at least some forms of colonialism were conducive for the establishment of consolidated democratic regimes after the collapse of colonial empires (Olsson 2009; Paine 2018), although in the newly independent states democracy turned out to be particularly fragile (Denk and Anckar 2014). Different colonial empires had different effects on the subsequent democratization (Bernhard et al. 2004; Lankina and Getachew 2012). The extent to which empires are able to shape the political development of their subordinated territories is of course much greater than for any NDRO we will investigate in this book. While NDROs, and regional organizations in general, also engage in the transfer of governance institutions (Börzel and van Hüllen 2015), they are much more constrained than empires were. Empires could shape the governance systems of the territories subordinated to them and support mass resettlement of the population (even the COMECON had less leeway in dealing with the domestic affairs of its members than the empires had). One case, which is potentially more interesting for us, is that of empires which relied heavily on indirect rule, that is, which kept some level of local autonomy in the subordinated territories (the British colonial empire was frequently seen as an example of this form; on indirect rule see Gerring et al. 2011). Hypothetically, one could claim that indirect rule could have provided more opportunity for the development of democratic traditions.⁶ Cappelen and Sorens (2018) argue that it is indirect rule combined with the pre-colonial traditions of centralized government that increases the state capacity of post-colonial polities—one of the most crucial issues they face. At the same time, the survival of pre-colonial statehood could become an impediment to democratization while blocking the installation of governing institutions from the metropolitan states (Hariri 2012); Lange (2004) suggests that indirect rule could be negatively associated with post-colonial development. Indirect rule in itself can be highly heterogeneous (Naseemullah and Staniland 2014). Summing up, unlike research on regional organizations, which typically looks at the contemporary democratization and how it is influenced by the membership of the regional organization, research on imperialism mostly focuses on the long-term consequences of colonial rule for democratic development. Here, the results are ambiguous and depend upon the particular model of colonial rule, as well as regional, cultural, and historical specificity.

⁶ In settler colonies, these traditions could have been imported from the metropolitan state, as indeed happened in the British colonial empire.

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2.2. AUTHORITARIAN COOPERATION PERSPEC TIVE Under what conditions are autocracies able to successfully cooperate with each other? Are autocracies more likely to cooperate with other autocracies than with democratic regimes? Here, two literatures will guide our investigation. The first looks at the ability of autocracies to cooperate with autocracies and can be subsumed under the title of an “autocratic peace.” The second looks at the credibility of authoritarian regimes and asks how it constrains their ability to engage in international cooperation.

2.2.1. From democratic Kantian peace to a “new” autocratic peace? The discussion of autocratic peace is, to some extent, a mirror image of the extremely well developed and elaborated research on democratic peace. Democratic peace theory builds on the general belief that democracies are less likely to initiate or contribute to conflict between themselves, as compared to non-democracies. Starting from the eighteenth-century work of Immanuel Kant on “perpetual peace,” numerous studies have developed this approach further and applied it to studies of various aspects of international relations. Since that time, the theory of democratic peace has become one of the most discussed and developed theories in international relations and has been applied to explain various trends in world politics (Mansfield and Snyder 1995, p. 790; Savun and Tirone, 2011), and subjected to empirical scrutiny in a large number of studies. The empirical findings of “democratic peace” studies are often explained, first, through the costs associated with conflict and the damage that can be done to otherwise beneficial commerce. Pragmatic logic and the economic benefits of commerce therefore decrease instances of costly military conflicts among democratic trade-partners and member states in international organizations. The logic of pragmatism and benefits explains the behavior of democracies in searching to increase commerce (sometimes through joint membership in international organizations) and eliminate or reduce high-cost conflicts. Second, apart from pragmatism, there is also idea- and value-related discussion. Joint membership and commerce provide for communication channels and personal links that radically decrease conflict,⁷ augmenting mutual trust and understanding. Third, democracy is associated with a responsibility to the electorate and the freedom of mass media as well as the balance of power. It is difficult to justify the expense of war, and both financial and human costs are ⁷ Deutsch (1969), for example, was one of the first scholars to indicate the importance of common borders in providing numerous communication channels.

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evaluated by an electorate that has power over political leaders during elections (Fearon 1994). The mass media, in turn, tends to provide critical evaluation of governmental choices and thus influences public opinion. These institutional restrictions offer reasons why democracies search for joint membership and commerce with states that are also democracies, at the same time focusing on the role of democracy in such aspects of international relations as foreign trade and international environmental commitments (see also Russett et al. 1998; Oneal and Russett 2001; King and Zeng 2001; Heagerty et al. 2002; Schultz 2002; Mousseau et al. 2003; Oneal et al. 2003; Obydenkova and Salahodjaev 2016; 2017b). Although, within the family of the democracies, there are various types of democratic systems, some studies indicate that democracies are more homogenous as a type of political system when compared to the non-democratic regimes of the twentieth century. Increasing commerce implies an increase in economic interdependence between states. Democracy would therefore engender a higher level of trust for a state with similar values and principles (this state would also face the same institutional limitations, responsibility to an electorate, and the critics of a free mass media, etc.). This explains why a democracy would only cooperate intensively with another democracy (in terms of developing economic interdependence and joint membership in international organizations): both democratic states have a lower probability of initiating military conflict against each other as both face the same internal institutional restrictions. Should we expect the logic of the perpetual peace theory to work for nondemocracies? If a state is not a democracy, would it seek for joint membership in international organizations and for commerce with another nondemocracy due to pragmatism, economic benefit, and to minimize the probability of costly conflict? Peceny et al. (2002) suggest that this is indeed the case: non-democracies should be less likely to engage in military confrontation than countries from mixed regime dyads. Oren and Hays (1997) draw a similar conclusion for the Socialist countries, and Weart (1994) argues that a similar mechanism worked for the Medieval oligarchic republics. Finally, Lai and Reiter (2000) suggest that similarity of political regime should make it easier for autocracies to establish alliances with each other. A similar argument should also apply to cooperation within an NDRO framework: fundamentally, it is an extension of the homophily argument very popular in sociology (McPherson et al. 2001), which suggests that similarity should encourage cooperation. The argument of the “autocratic peace” theory, however, calls for an important question. Democratic peace is based on the assumption that all types of democracy are homogenous in terms of internal institutional constrains, the freedom of the mass media, the balance of power, the responsibility to the electorate on the part of political leaders, etc. Pecency et al. (2002)

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distinguished several internal aspects that potentially drive cooperation among similar regimes: institutional restrictions; transparency; strength (war-fighting capability); and shared values. The homogeneity of democracies as political regimes is thus an important driving factor of cooperation among democratic state-actors in international politics. In contrast, non-democratic regimes are much more heterogeneous. Paraphrasing the well-known quote of the Polish mathematician Stanislav Ulam, talking about non-democracies is, in some sense, similar to talking about non-elephant animals (quoted in Campbell et al. 1985): the distinction between two non-democracies can be enormous. The very notion of “non-democracy” suggests that we look at regimes, which are not democratic, that is, do not satisfy the catalog of criteria one applies to democratic regimes. While this catalog differs depending on the concept of democracy (e.g. procedural and liberal), and there has been a broad literature looking at the boundaries of what can still be called “democracy” (Bollen 1993; Collier and Levitsky 1997; Merkel 2004), the regimes included in the non-democratic group cover a broad spectrum of the ways polity can organized (Glasius 2018a). For example, the lack of free and fair elections (the key element of the procedural democracy definition) characterized a wide range of different decision-making mechanisms (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005). Moreover, non-democracies may develop, modify, and transform themselves radically over time: the non-democracies of the Cold War in the twentieth century are not necessarily of the same type as the non-democratic regimes in the twenty-first century. This brings us to the next key question: which regimes and characteristics constitute the family of modern nondemocracies?

2.2.2. The mystery of modern non-democracies: who are they? Modern non-democratic states present a real challenge to studies of political regimes—they are new exotic animals in an otherwise well-known zoo of political regimes. Until the end of the Cold War, the world was relatively simple in terms of political regimes: it was divided into Western democracies and Eastern authoritarian regimes (be that the cult of personality or singleparty rule). Following the seminal typology by Geddes (1999), Peceny et al. (2002) distinguished three types within dictatorial regimes: military, singleparty based, and one-leader (personality) regimes. This distinction certainly matters for the period they studied—that is, the second half of twentieth century, the post-World War II period and the Cold War.⁸

⁸ Pecency et al. (2002) analyze the period 1945–94.

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The post-Cold War period witnessed the disappearance of socialism and most of the military regimes in Southern Europe, part of Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as some transformations into democracies, hybrid regimes, or newly emerged modern autocracies.⁹ Since the early 1990s, the distinction between democracy and all other political regimes became much more complicated for a number of reasons. The fall of communism marked an unconditional acceptance of democracy, rule of law, human rights, and all other associated values, norms, and practices, as normative ideas by most states of the world. Modern non-democratic states adjusted to this change by imitating constitutions, statuses, and even learned to fake (relatively well) democratic practices. Not only did they establish elections but also accommodated new international missions of electoral observers.¹⁰ As a result of such an imitation of democracy on the part of nondemocratic states and the growing number of these new polities (neither traditional totalitarian regimes nor democracies), scholars and politicians are searching for colorful names to describe these newly emerged creatures, calling them hybrid regimes, semi-autocracy, semi-democracy, weak democracies, or electoral autocracies (e.g. Levitsky and Way 2010). Therefore, the line between democracy and the modern non-democratic state became blurred. There are many debates on the nature of modern autocracies, various types of political regimes, fluctuating levels of democracy in a state and its implications for internal (domestic, national) politics, life satisfaction, and public policy, among other issues (e.g. Schedler 2006; Obydenkova et al. 2016; Obydenkova and Salohodjaev 2017a). While speaking of modern autocracies, scholars tend to define them in a broad and encompassing way “as a general term for all forms of non-democratic regimes” (Croissant and Wurster 2013, p. 14). Many of modern autocracies of the twenty-first century are indeed very different from their predecessors of the twentieth century—most of them combine elements of democratic institutions with authoritarian practices— the combination that has been described as “electoral autocracy” (Schedler 2006) or “competitive autocracy” (Levitsky and Way 2010). Scholars also distinguished between “competitive” and “full” autocracies (e.g. China) and even introduced a more nuanced distinction between “hegemonic” and “competitive” authoritarian regimes (Howard and Roessler 2006). The post-Soviet regimes are often described as “competitive autocracies” and defined as “civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vi-à-vis their opponents. Such regimes are competitive in that opposition parties use democratic ⁹ For the sequence of regime transitions throughout, see Huntington (1991). ¹⁰ The example would be numerous missions of electoral observers established under the auspices of the CIS that will be analyzed in Chapter 9 of this book.

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institutions to contest seriously for power, but they are not democratic because the playing field is heavily skewed in favour of incumbents”; “Competitive authoritarianism is a hybrid regime type, with important characteristics of both democracy and authoritarianism” (Levitsky and Way 2010, p. 5). However, this book also takes into account so-called full autocracies (e.g. China). Full autocracy is defined as “a regime in which no viable channels exist for opposition to contest legally for executive power”; “closed regimes in which national-level democratic institutions do not exist (e.g. China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia) and hegemonic regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist on paper but are reduced to façade status in practice” (Levitsky and Way 2010, p. 7). Given the main focus of this book, this project accounts for both full autocracies and competitive autocracies as a type of hybrid regime and we will refer to them throughout the book as “autocracies” or “nondemocracies.” Our joint endeavor focuses on this challenging family of modern non-democracy and uses the notion of “non-democracy” to account for all regimes encompassing so-called hybrid regimes as well as actual autocracies. Furthermore, some important studies have raised the question of how different types of autocracies are transferred into different outcomes in terms of their economic growth, quality of government, or stability—that is, questioning their internal (national) implications (e.g. Hadenius and Teorell 2007). However, the question concerning how different types of autocracies are transferred into different external (international) outcomes has not yet been systematically studied. Hence, the book makes the first steps toward exploring the hypothetical possibility that different types of autocratic regimes interact differently with the outside world and toward considering both full and competitive types of autocracies (as defined above). Hybrid regimes represent a gray zone in political regime studies: they have significant flexibility to adjust to becoming democracies and autocracies as well as to imitate them (depending on economic and other pragmatic needs). These regimes are more dynamic and the level of democratic elements fluctuates within their political system, society, and economic system. They are also more sensitive to external economic shocks, which are often paralleled by internal financial crises and issues related to the well-being of their populations. The mass media within this group of non-democracies are subject to a mixed system of control by national leaders. Overall, previous studies have demonstrated that the international behavior of hybrid regime states is very different from that of consolidated regimes (be these autocracies or democracies). Nevertheless, hybrid regimes are a relatively new phenomenon for studies of modern non-democracies and belong to the family of non-democracies. One of the key elements in any discussion of the ability of autocracies to cooperate with each other is therefore the issue of ideological similarity. In these terms, autocracies are not only strikingly different from each other, but

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they also exhibit substantial evolution over time. The changes in the international system that took place after the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, the fall of communism in the 1980s, and the rejection of MarxismLeninism as an ideology have led to an almost universal acceptance of democratic values, norms, and principles in national politics. Many of the modern non-democratic regimes (both autocracies and hybrid regimes) which emerged in the 1990s have learned to use a democratic vocabulary, incorporating terms such as “free and fair elections,” in their constitutions. Modern non-democracies make an effort to create an image of democracy in the eyes of the national population and international actors. Until the late 2010s, there was a solid exception to this modified modern family of nondemocracies that have all adjusted to new changes and challenges in the international system. Some parts of the Islamic world, which traditionally stand where they were in the twentieth century in terms of ideology and values, are firmly opposed to democracy as a set of norms guiding the political system (though the changes in this part of the world should not be under-estimated—however, this book does not examine the Islamic world closely enough to make more detailed conclusions). When it comes to other parts of the world—some of the Middle East, post-Soviet Eurasia, Latin America, and some African countries—many states try to improve their democratic image even if this consists of purely ink-on-paper decorative additions to constitutions and public statements. In fact, even during the Cold War period (the second half of the twentieth century), the role of ideology and shared values was questioned. Studies on non-democracies of the twentieth century conclude that neither military dictatorial regimes nor personalist (cult-based) regimes were ideological: most “military regimes proclaim [themselves] to be technocratic and apolitical rather than ideological” and “personalistic regimes lack a common ideology,” while “the cult of the leader rather than ideology dominates” in the politics of the Cold War era (Peceny et al. 2002, pp. 19–20). In contrast, single-party dictatorial regimes of that period could be considered united by the ideology of communism. However, this ideological foundation collapsed in the late 1980s, initiating the formation of very different entities at both national and international level. Any strongly developed ideology that penetrates the society and politics of a state—be that Marxism-Leninism, socialism, or Islamic fundamentalism, regardless of historical period—can be both a binding factor and create a dividing line between states as international actors sharing this ideology. That is, when ideology becomes the central focus of a certain political universe, it is likely to initiate disputes and potential conflicts over ideological purity among the states (Peceny et al. 2002). For example, the USSR and communist China went different ways in the twentieth century, to the extent that China was pictured as an enemy and a threat to the USSR. Accusations of deviation from

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the “true” Socialist ideology have, generally speaking, been frequent in the communist bloc. An important point is needed here: the actual reasons for splits among non-democracies with a shared ideology most often have nothing to do with an interpretation of ideology, but merely serve as justification for the conflict. However, in some cases, a different ideological interpretation may be a genuine cause for conflict among non-democracies. Non-democratic states with a strong ideology “attempt to derive their legitimacy from identification with an ideological corpus” and if the ideology is challenged, it may pose an actual threat and undermine the stability of the regime (Linz 1975, p. 197; quoted in Peceny et al. 2002, p. 20). Thus, the role of ideology seems to remain ambiguous over the Cold War period as well as in the twenty-first century: it can serve as a binding factor (communism in the twentieth century) and can contribute to conflicts among states with the same ideological background that deviate in their interpretation of a given ideology over time. Similarly, in the Islamic world, while religious commonality unites countries in some cases, in others it contributes to conflict. The conflict between the Sunni Gulf monarchies and Shia Iran, which escalated in early 2016, is a good example of this (besides the theological divisions of Islam, different views on political Islam present in the Middle East frequently divide countries more than they unite them). Therefore, among modern non-democracies, we distinguish the type without a normative power (in terms of conditionality or ideology) and yet another type with extremely strong ideological commitments. This is one of the most important issues that demonstrate how modern non-democracies differ from the non-democratic regimes of the Cold War period. In terms of our book, we expect the extent of ideological commitment of the regimes to impact their ability to cooperate with each other and, ultimately, the functioning of the NDROs. Finally, Owen (2005) indicates that the extent to which regimes with similar ideologies are likely to cooperate depends on the presence of other competing ideologies: this bridges the authoritarian cooperation perspective with the third perspective on which we base our theory, that of autocracy promotion and diffusion.

2.2.3. How do political regimes matter for regionalism and . . . do they? Do political regimes actually matter in establishing or joining a regional organization? While a democratic regime is intuitively a desirable characteristic in a potential member state, it is still important to consider explicitly why and how political regime matters. Any form of international cooperation requires the partners’ ability to provide credible commitments for their actions. Starting from the seminal

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work of Fearon (1994), a widespread claim in the political science literature suggests that authoritarian leaders should find it more difficult to commit to upholding their promises should the external environment change (Gaubatz 1996). This is due to a number of factors. First, the electorate (informed by independent mass media) is likely to punish democratic leaders for lying; in non-democracies, this mechanism is absent.¹¹ Fearon’s audience costs argument has spurred a huge literature investigating both the extent to which people are likely to punish this sort of behavior and the reasons why people punish politicians who do not keep their promises, not only vis-à-vis their constituency, but also vis-à-vis other countries.¹² Second, in democracies the costs of removing leaders from office are low, and if there are benefits from international cooperation for the general public, reneging on international commitments is likely to cause leaders to lose office (McGillvray and Smith 2008). Third, the decisions of the democratic leaders are constrained by a multitude of domestic institutions, which make significant policy changes very difficult and thus increase the probability that the necessary consensus for not upholding international commitments will be never reached.¹³ For example, in democracies, dissatisfied domestic groups can challenge a policy change in a court of law, which is clearly impossible in a non-democracy. Moreover, in a non-democratic state, the mass media is controlled by the government and serves to justify any governmental decision (be that in national or international politics), thus manipulating public opinion and misrepresenting reality (Mickiewicz 2008; Obydenkova 2008; Rose et al. 2011; Obydenkova and Arpino 2018). From all these arguments, it follows that once democracies manage to commit to certain policies (which is inevitable if they want to establish a regional organization), they will keep these promises. Autocracies demonstrate a higher likelihood to change their commitments, which, in turn, should reduce the willingness of other states to cooperate with them, as long as the sunk costs of cooperation are sufficiently high. That is, for example, if implementing an NDRO requires substantial internal policy changes; if the NDRO leads to increasing dependence on foreign trade with a certain state; if the NDRO limits the foreign policy options of the autocrats, the willingness of partners to join the organization should go down. One should therefore expect NDROs to focus on issues which are less costly for the regimes and where the need for credible commitment is lower. This is yet another reason why authoritarian countries could be more likely to use NDROs primarily as a ¹¹ See, however, the work of Weeks (2008) on autocratic audience costs, suggesting that the leaders of authoritarian states are typically not as unconstrained as the argument suggests. ¹² See Ashworth and Ramsay (2009) and Bueno de Mesquita and Smith (2012) for a survey of the literature. ¹³ On the other hand, populist pressure could actually increase the probability that democracies will take extreme positions in international relations.

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tool to increase their international status and legitimacy, at the same time fiercely avoiding any restrictions on their sovereignty. However, not all autocracies are identical in terms of the credibility of their commitments. First, as Mattes and Rodrigues (2014) have shown, the extent to which authoritarian regimes are unable to provide credible commitments differs for single-party, personalist, and military regimes and is conditional on the extent of accountability, transparency, and political constraints on the leadership existing in these regimes. Thus, autocracies can have a better predisposition to cooperate with some states rather than with others (see also Ishiyama et al. 2008). Second, Mazumder (2017) argues that as autocracies become more central in the networks of preferential trade agreements (i.e. the transparency of their foreign policy increases), the extent to which they exercise cooperative behavior also goes up. In this way, a low credibility of commitment still it does not mean that cooperation among autocracies is impossible. For us, it is instead a reason to look at the specific patterns and goals of cooperation authoritarian regimes select while creating NDROs—the authoritarian cooperation perspective echoes the comparative regionalism perspective in calling for a more careful examination of the actual objectives of the NDROs beyond any official façade of their mandates. Finally, as we will argue in what follows, under certain conditions, a lack of credibility can actually encourage countries to join an NDRO, as it reduces the risks associated with manipulative behavior of the leading states.

2.3. EXTERNAL INFLUENCES AND P OLITICAL REGIMES

2.3.1. International dimension of regime transition The fact that external factors play a substantial role in regimes has only recently received recognition in the scholarly literature. Disentangling this internal–external nexus and exploring its mechanisms is a challenging task that has spurred a number of important studies on the international dimension of democracy, regional and geographical diffusion, usually and mostly associated with the impact of the EU on democratization in its neighborhood and beyond, and the literature on the international dimension of democratization (Whitehead 1996, 2001; Kopstein and Reilly 2000; Levitsky and Way 2005; Simmons et al. 2006; Obydenkova 2007; 2012a; 2012b; Wright 2009; Morlino et al. 2011; Morlino 2011; Börzel and Risse 2012a, 2012b; Börzel and Solingen 2014; Tansey 2016a). This rich literature on regionalism mostly discussed one perspective: the impact of membership in an international organization on democratization

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and the consolidation of democracy (Pevehouse 2002a, 2002b). This literature argues that there is a positive correlation between membership in an international organization and democracy: democracies are more likely to join international organizations (Mansfield and Pevehouse 2006). The reason is that international organizations act as credible commitment devices for nascent democracies, particularly if they implement strong conditions of membership (e.g. in the EU). In contrast, the capacity of external factors to exercise a negative influence on democratic transitions has received only limited attention. The focus of the existing literature is clear if one takes into account the enormous role played by some democratic actors (such as the EU) in shaping the paths of regime transition for candidate-states and neighboring countries (Morlino and Sadurski 2010). Nevertheless, the non-democratic actors and their impact on political regimes have received far less attention. Some very recent studies have concentrated on creating conceptual frameworks for this phenomenon (Burnell and Schlumberger 2010; Ambrosio 2010; Whitehead 2014, 2018; Börzel 2015; Kästner 2015; Obydenkova and Libman 2015a; von Soest 2015; Tansey 2016b); have considered specific aspects of the external influences of autocracies, such as international coalitions (e.g. Allison 2008, 2013; Collins 2009; Cameron and Orenstein 2012; Ishiyama 2018) or have looked at mutual learning among regimes (e.g. Hale 2005b; Herd 2005; Heydemann and Leenders 2011; Kubicek 2011; Hall and Ambrosio 2017). However, the existing evidence is still extremely limited and often contradictory, and all studies explicitly acknowledge the need for further, detailed examination of the conceptual and especially the empirical levels regarding the external impact of autocratic actors and their regional organizations. In other words, if the EU (composed of democracies) could be shown to have had a democratizing impact on its neighborhood, is it possible that a regional organization (composed of autocracies) could have had an impact on autocratization? Apart from studies on the impact of regional organizations on political regimes, there is another collection of related analysis on the influence of external factors such as foreign trade. Similar to the studies on the impact of regionalism, studies on foreign trade traditionally focused on democracyreinforcing impacts. This is not surprising given the traditional approach of Kantian peace literature. Starting from the eighteenth century, numerous “democratic peace” studies have sought to explain international political and economic cooperation among democracies and their impact on decreasing wars, on membership of international organizations, and foreign commerce (Kant 1991; 2003; Oneal and Russett 1999). However, very few studies so far have focused on a new phenomenon of “authoritarian peace”—international cooperation among modern autocracies in the twenty–first century and its impact. Under what circumstances do modern non-democratic regimes imitate the behavior of democracies through establishing their own regional

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organizations and through developing foreign trade among autocracies? More importantly: what is the impact of this strategy on the political regimes of member states, on the region, and on wars? While these questions have been addressed with regard to democracies (in “democratic peace” studies), it has yet to be raised for modern autocracies. The literature on how economic development and growth affects democratization is large and examines various facets of this issue. However, one of the most contradictory features of these studies involves the role of international economic ties (foreign trade and foreign investments). The political science literature has argued that trade can promote democracy (e.g. LopezCordoba and Meissner 2008). However, more careful consideration of the available theoretical and empirical evidence has challenged these conclusions (Milner and Mukherjee 2009). A few recent studies have analyzed the negative impact of specific patterns of foreign trade on democratization (Obydenkova and Libman 2012; Libman and Obydenkova 2014). Thus, it is extremely important to study how and why external factors (e.g. regional organizations and/or foreign trade) could become a factor exercising negative influences on democratization prospects. To capture such topics, this book is explicitly constructed in an interdisciplinary fashion that bridges comparative regionalism and political regimes.

2.3.2. Autocracy promotion and diffusion perspective The 2010s have witnessed a surge in research activity on the foreign policy of non-democratic countries which has had the intention of preventing democratization or supporting the survival of friendly autocratic regimes in other countries (autocracy promotion). There has also been an increase in research into the unintentional effects of autocracies on neighboring countries that has lead to authoritarian consolidation there (autocracy diffusion).¹⁴ This literature typically focuses on the activity of so-called “gravity centers of authoritarian rule” (Kneuer and Demmelhuber 2016) such as Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, or Saudi Arabia, which (intentionally and unintentionally) affect the political development in their neighboring countries, and has produced numerous ¹⁴ The debate over using “regime transition” as an appropriate term has played an important role in our main case study, post-Soviet Eurasia, but has also done so elsewhere (Carothers 2002). The term “regime transition” is generally applied to the first decade after a state’s independence (here 1991–mid-2000s), and the current regimes are no longer referred to as “regimes in transition” (there is more discussion of regime consolidation). However, given that our main research period covers the 1990s and mid-2000s, we generally refer to any regime dynamics in this period as “regime transition.” The term “regime transition” allows us to account for transitions to autocracy, semi-autocracy, or semi-democracy. Overall, “regime transition” is much broader than other current terms.

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empirical investigations on this topic (e.g. Tolstrup 2009; Ambrosio 2006, 2009; Silitski 2010; Vanderhill 2012, 2014; Melnykovska et al. 2012; D’Anieri 2014; Bader 2015a, 2015b; Sharshenova and Crawford 2017; Allison 2017; Cooley 2013, 2015; for a literature review see Yakouchyk 2018a). The growing research on autocracy promotion and diffusion also triggered a number of important theoretical debates, which are relevant for our study as well. First, and most fundamentally, is “autocracy promotion,” that is, the conscious support of authoritarian regimes in other countries, really an accurate description of what authoritarian states are doing (e.g. Tansey 2016c)? While there is evidence of the interventions of autocracies in the politics of their neighbors, it is possible that they are driven not by the desire to “promote authoritarianism” but rather by geopolitical concerns or economic interests. Is it justified to talk about “autocracy promotion” in such cases? Might authoritarian regimes support democratic transition in their neighboring countries if it increases their leverage (Obydenkova and Libman 2014; Kuntz and Odinius 2015)? Second, what are the motives for autocracy promotion, even if it is exercised? The literature indicates several considerations which could make the consolidation of authoritarian regimes abroad attractive for autocratic governments: rent-seeking interests (Bader et al. 2010) or fear of the democratic diffusion from other countries (Jackson 2010). Third, how effective are the interventions of authoritarian regimes associated with autocracy promotion (Way 2015, 2016; Brownlee 2017)? Are they really able to change the trajectory of regime transition, or are they merely reinforcing existing trends towards authoritarianism, perhaps driven by domestic dynamics (Buzogany 2017), or would it be possible to have an unexpected pro-democratic effect (Delcour and Wolczuk 2015)? Can autocracy promotion or diffusion affect established democracies (Chou et al. 2017)? And fourth, how are the promotion of autocracy (if it happens) and democratic diffusion related to each other (e.g. Obydenkova and Libman 2015b; Lankina et al. 2016b)?¹⁵ The literature on autocracy promotion frequently mentions regional organizations created by non-democracies, for example, in post-Soviet Eurasia (Allison 2007, 2008, 2010; Cameron and Orenstein 2012). However, it pays far less attention to the specifics of exactly what the contribution of the regional organizations could be. Some autocracies are powerful enough to exercise their influence through bilateral relations: in fact, without a complex multilateral framework, it could potentially be even easier for them to encourage their neighbors to support the trajectory toward a transition to an authoritarian regime. In fact, some countries (such as Iran) do not use regional ¹⁵ Furthermore, some recent scholarship suggested that generally analyzing autocracy within the boundaries of a single nation state may be misleading, as authoritarian rule always affects certain populations abroad, e.g. migrants, and this in turn matters for domestic political stability. See Dalmasso et al. 2017; Glasius 2018b.

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organizations in this context; the Economic Cooperation Organization it participates in is a defunct bureaucratic structure with no policy relevance (on Iran and autocracy promotion see, e.g., Baracani and Di Quirico 2013).¹⁶ Thus, an important question emerges: should the regional organizations be considered as relevant for autocracy promotion or diffusion? Another equally important question is the extent of the actorness of regional organizations. In the case of the EU, it became commonplace in the literature to see the organization itself as an actor of democracy promotion (Pevehouse 2016; Obydenkova 2007, 2012a). Can NDROs therefore be seen as actors reinforcing authoritarian trends or they are merely (convenient) tools in the hands of autocracies? To our knowledge, there exists no empirical and very limited theoretical discussion of the second question (which we will therefore explicitly address while formulating our hypotheses in Chapter 3). The first question, however, has received some attention, and we will therefore summarize the typical arguments present in the literature. Essentially, there are three functions associated with the stabilization of authoritarian regimes that the literature ascribes to regional organizations; we list these in what follows, in no particular order. The first function echoes the argument we have already mentioned while discussing comparative regionalism studies (Section 2.1): NDROs can serve as convenient platforms to increase the legitimacy of their members in international relations. Here, the literature on autocracy promotion and diffusion is very close to the literatures we have already discussed. The question remains, however, as to how the institutional design, operation, and rhetoric of NDROs are accountable for the increasing legitimacy of their members. Is any NDRO capable of achieving this effect? Which tools have to be used for this purpose? Is a common ideology (Bank 2017; Weyland 2017) a necessary prerequisite for achieving this objective? The second function focuses on economic and political cooperation in NDROs. While no actual cooperation in the relevant policy domain is needed for legitimacy, economic cooperation creates several additional benefits for participating regimes. First, as Ambrosio (2014) points out, by opening up internal borders for commerce, NDROs reduce the pressure on participating countries to adapt to the demands of the DROs, which would otherwise remain their only viable economic partners (see also Schmotz and Tansey (2018) on the role of the regional authoritarian links and regime survival). Cooley and Heathershaw (2017) similarly show how involvement in the global

¹⁶ Besides, in our subsequent analysis Iran does not appear to be the leading country of this organization from the point of view of the formal indicators we apply; the leader seems to be Turkey.

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networks of financial flows serves the interests of autocratic leaders in Central Asia.¹⁷ Second, Stoddard (2015) suggests that NDROs can serve as tools of economic protectionism, allowing authoritarian leaders to maintain control over the key economic sectors. However, why are NDROs an attractive tool through which economic assistance from one country to another can be provided? And can the NDROs achieve viable economic cooperation at all given the lack of credibility of their authoritarian members? The third function goes even further and suggests that the political cooperation of NDROs aims at combatting dissent and opposition. Peceny et al. (2002), in fact, suggested a similar point, arguing that for right-wing autocracies during the Cold War era an attractive reason for cooperation was to fight communist insurgents. Collins (2009) also sees cooperation in the security sphere as an important objective of Central Asian states, and Galeotti (2016) even speaks of an “RepressIntern” with a set of autocracies regularly exchanging information about opposition activists. Again, the same question applies: why do autocracies need regional organizations to achieve this goal? A number of more recent papers offer a more nuanced investigation of this puzzle. Thus, Davies (2018) looks at regional organizations, which are not explicitly anti-democratic (i.e. which take a clear and coherent stance against democratic changes in their members), but still mostly comprise authoritarian states. Though these organizations do not explicitly encourage an authoritarian path, they still increase the chances of survival of hybrid political regimes because of the extensive network of linkages these regimes become embedded in and from which they can benefit (the argument is similar to that of reducing pressure on non-democratic regimes through making economic cooperation more feasible). Stoddard (2017) looks at non-democratic members of regional organizations in democratizing regions and shows that regional cooperation can be exploited by these autocracies to enhance a regime’s chances of survival. If these findings are true for the impact of membership in democratic regional organizations, then the impact on autocracy of membership in nondemocratic organizations should be even more pronounced. An extremely important but fundamentally under-researched topic is the role NDROs play in terms of the diffusion of authoritarian norms and practices. The problem with studying this topic is one typically present in diffusion studies: it is very difficult to identify the causal mechanisms leading some countries to take over norms and practices from others. For example, NDROs could become forums for the exchange of ideas and for socialization among the elites of authoritarian countries: but how can one prove that there is a causal link between the information exchange and the imposition of similar power preservation practices? Furthermore, if opening up borders

¹⁷ See also Heathershaw and Cooley (2015).

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Table 2.1. Summary of the key conclusions from the three streams of literature surveyed Literature

Key sub-literatures

Main arguments

Comparative regionalism (link to the studies of empires and imperialism)

Comparative regionalism and cooperation within regional organizations; regional organizations and global politics and economy

Traditional (democratic) regional organizations are marked by homogenous member states (homogeneity of political regimes—democracies; of economic development; of respect for human rights, etc.) Democratic regional organizations use formal institutions to organize the interaction of the member states Preference for informal, elite-based interaction in ROs with predominantly authoritarian members Use of ROs as legitimation tools for regimes (regime-boosting) with predominantly authoritarian members Use of ROs as influence tools on global arena (forces of attraction, legitimacy) with predominantly authoritarian members

International cooperation and political regimes

External influence on political regimes

Democratic peace

Democracies cooperate with each other, developing foreign trade, and international alliances within international organizations and ROs

Autocratic peace Credibility of commitments

Ideology as an ambiguous factor for the cooperation of autocracies Low credibility of commitments as a limitation for the cooperation of autocracies (but cooperation is still possible)

International dimension of democratization

EU’s democratizing impact on its neighborhood and beyond

Autocracy promotion and diffusion

NDROs could play a role in both processes, but the specific mechanisms and the reasons for using NDROs are not entirely clear

between member countries of NDROs encourages trade, this trade could also become a factor of diffusion for authoritarian practices (Obydenkova and Libman 2012). But how important is this mechanism in the variety of regional organizations created by non-democracies? From this discussion, several important conclusions follow. First, NDROs could potentially play a role as institutions supporting their members’ trajectory to an authoritarian transition. Second, however, it is essential to formulate predictions as to why autocracies use NDROs (instead of bilateral relations),

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which mechanisms allow NDROs to exercise their influence, and which conditions make NDROs effective tools for affecting regime transition or consolidation (or, on the contrary, under which conditions these effects are absent). This is what we will attempt to discuss while developing the hypotheses guiding our study in Chapter 3. Table 2.1 summarizes the key insights of the surveyed literature that is relevant for our investigation. Departing from the discussion above of existing studies, Chapter 3 introduces a new theory of authoritarian regionalism, its challenges, and puzzles.

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3 Authoritarian Regionalism As Chapter 2 demonstrates, existing studies have focused almost exclusively on regional organizations established by democracies and democracyreinforcing external factors such as, for example, membership and trade (Pevehouse 2002a, 2002b; Bartolini 2005; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2006). However, recent decades have observed a growing number of regional organizations created by autocracies (e.g. Russia and China) acting as leading states in international organization—the phenomenon we call “authoritarian regionalism.” Authoritarian regionalism refers to the regional organizations that are created by strong autocracies either acting as leading states or constituting the core membership: the Eurasian Economic Union, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which were partly discussed in the introduction. Membership in such regional organizations can become a mechanism of autocratic consolidation in member states and beyond. These organizations can also become tools of external autocratic influences on regime change. At the same time, this type of organization can lack the ability to create credible commitments (unlike organizations set up by democracies) and may be even more susceptible to the problems of informal governance. However, the differences between regional organizations of democracies and those of autocracies have not yet been given a direct focus. Also, the impact of membership in non-democratic international organizations (NDROs) on the regime dynamics of member states has still to be raised in the literature. This book addresses directly, first, the difference between democratic and autocratic regional organizations (thus, identifying a new typology in regionalism studies) and, second, the impact of international organizations founded by autocracies, their mechanisms and channels of influence on political regimes of their member and neighboring states. The combination of these two approaches outlines the theory of authoritarian regionalism that we elaborate in this chapter and text empirically in the rest of the book. This chapter proceeds to develop theory of “authoritarian regionalism.”

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3 . 1. D EF I N I T I O N As a first step, we need to introduce a working definition of an NDRO which will guide our empirical investigation. Our book is innovative as an attempt to systematically treat it as phenomenon. Yet, if one looks at the literature, one can spot three possible concepts which are potentially relevant for us. First, there exists a set of studies which look at what they refer to as the democratization of regional organizations (e.g. studies of European integration—see Featherstone 1994; Majone 1998; Crombez 2003; Follesdal 2006; or in the comparative regionalism literature—see Dahl 1999, Finizio et al. 2014). This research looks at whether the decision-making mechanisms in regional organizations are organized in a way that allows the public substantial influence on decision outcomes or whether regional organizations are dominated by executive bureaucracies or elites. Second, Telo’s (2017) concept of authoritarian, or hierarchical, regionalism, looks at whether regional organizations are based on unequal power relations between the dominant country and other states, which are forced to accept, for example, restrictive trade relations with no opportunity to participate in the decisions of the regional organization. Many of these hierarchical regional organizations were created by autocracies, but some came out of the colonial era. Third, while the autocracy promotion and diffusion literature does not contain a well-defined concept of an NDRO, some studies surveyed in Chapter 2 refer to regional organizations as institutions which could be associated with autocracy promotion.¹ In this context, they are separated from the regional organizations, which, while created by autocracies, do not serve this goal. While these definitions are extremely important in guiding significant areas of research, for this book we opted for a different concept of an NDRO: we define NDROs as organizations primarily comprised of authoritarian member states (or at least having an authoritarian core country). Our concept of NDROs is not tied to a specific governance mechanism or policy effect—it is tied to the domestic politics of the member states. The goal of our study is to understand whether these organizations are different from those populated primarily by democracies. We want to investigate, in cases where nondemocracies create regional organizations, whether these institutions function differently and have different policy outcomes. For instance, are regional organizations created by non-democracies supportive of the consolidation of authoritarian regimes? Even if this goal is not explicitly declared by the organization (today, such a clear declaration to support a particular regime type is very rare, as will be shown in what follows), and even if governments do not pursue an open goal of strengthening certain regimes, NDROs could still ¹ For example, Libman (2007) and Allison (2008) in this context refer to the concept of “protective integration.”

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have an impact on regime transition trajectories—albeit an indirect and complex one (Chapter 10 provides an example of this complexity). In the same way, does the predominance of authoritarian regimes in a regional organization always lead to a hierarchical power structure? Stated otherwise, our definition is driven by a willingness to understand the effects of authoritarian regimes of the member states on the functioning and outcomes of the regional organizations they create. By using this definition, we of course have to recognize a number of important caveats. First, the universe of NDROs according to our concept will be diverse and include organizations created with different goals and objectives. This is, however, precisely the goal of our investigation—to see whether the non-democratic nature of the regimes of the member states can indeed to some extent serve as a common denominator explaining some common features of the regimes. Second, as we have mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2, nondemocracies themselves are highly heterogeneous: this should be taken into account when trying to understand the functioning of the NDROs. Finally, there are several ways in which the concept introduced above can be operationalized empirically: we will discuss them in the methodology of the book in Chapter 4.

3.2. AUTHORITARIAN REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS, POLITICAL REGIMES, AND MEMBERSHIP What is the link between political regimes and NDRO membership?² Fundamentally, this link can go in two directions. On the one hand, NDROs (i.e. regional organizations where the majority of members, including the most powerful ones, are already non-democratic) might be attractive to non-democratic outsiders to regional organization. On the other hand, as the literature in Chapter 2 points out, regional organization might have an impact on political regimes (e.g. the EU composed of democracies has an external pro-democratizing impact). Similar to this logic, a regional organization composed of non-democracies and led by an autocracy may have impact reinforcing the authoritarian trajectory of the political regimes of its members (Hancock and Libman 2016). These two channels are interconnected (as the case of the EU demonstrated). For the sake of conceptual clarity, we will first present arguments suggesting a particular direction of the causal link, and this

² This section is partly based on Libman and Obydenkova (2013a). Reprinted with the permission of Springer. “Informal Governance and Participation in Non-Democratic International Organizations.” Review of International Organizations 8: 221–43. 2013.

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will guide the empirical analysis of the subsequent chapters. We start with the first causal link: NDROs attract non-democratic members. There exists a large and influential literature looking at the link between democracy and membership in international organizations (Pevehouse 2002a, 2002b, 2005; Li and Resnick 2003; Dai 2005; Mansfield and Pevehouse 2006, 2008; Snidal and Thompson 2003; Cortez 2012), including regional organizations in particular (Remmer 1998; Cameron 2007). One of the main claims of this body of literature is that international organizations are meant to reinforce democratization in the case of a state undergoing regime transition. Therefore, membership and democratization are meant to be mutually selfreinforcing (Pevehouse 2002a, 2002b, 2005; Poast and Urpelainen 2013, 2015, 2018; Morlino and Sadurski 2010): democratizing states join international organizations and the international organizations ensure that the states stay on the democratic path (e.g. the-stick-and-the-carrot mechanism in the EU’s enlargement to Central Europe). Some studies have examined the factors that push states to seek membership of an international organization and have concluded that democratization is an important impetus for seeking such membership (Mansfield and Pevehouse 2006; Cameron 2007) or for forming new international organizations (Poast and Urpelainen 2013). The main logic underlying this effect is that membership in international organizations is used as a device to ensure the credibility of the commitments of individual states (Vreeland 2008; Dreher and Voigt 2011). By becoming member of an international organization, a country constrains its foreign and domestic policy options (making reversal to authoritarianism costlier) and also provides a credible signal to its population (and to other important actors, such foreign investors, see Fernandez and Portes 1998; Fang and Owen 2011) about its commitment. However, the strength of this pro-democratizing impact of regional organization could be debated, as, for example, the developments in Poland and in Hungary in the 2010s demonstrate: EU membership does not necessarily prevent the at least partial reversal to populism and authoritarian practices. For us, a more fundamental concern expressed by Mansfield and Pevehouse (2006, p. 137) is more important: this democracy-reinforcing impact holds true only “if the organization is composed primarily of democratic members” [emphasis added]. Following this logic of democracy-dominated international organization having a democracy-reinforcing impact, can we establish a similar hypothesis about NDROs? Do autocracy-dominated international organization have an autocracy-reinforcing impact? To address this intriguing question, we need to inquire into the main reason why international organizations can serve as commitment devices. The literature typically focuses on the formal rules and regulations within international organizations, which are difficult to change and force all countries to adhere to them. But this formal governance analysis represents only one side of the story. A powerful argument by Stone (2011) suggests that we also need to look

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at informal governance within the international organizations. In addition to the formal set of rules, there also exist informal rules that provide “exceptional access to decision-making for powerful states when their core interests are affected” (Stone 2011, p. 31). In other words, leading states in regional organizations have the opportunity to override a policy that member states would have otherwise chosen. This phenomenon is referred to as manipulation. The presence of this phenomenon leads regional organizations to suffer from a time-consistency problem. Member states decide to join an organization or select their level of participation in awareness of the fact that by doing so, they can later be subjected to manipulation by the leading state when the costs of exiting the regional organization may be too high for them to avoid following the leading state’s policy. This is a fundamental problem all international organizations face, as long as they are characterized by a power asymmetry: there is a member which has substantially more resources and can exercise stronger impact on how the international organization operates than other members. The extent to which this power asymmetry is present is of course unequal for different international organizations: we will return to this question in what follows (Section 3.3). For now we focus on an NDRO where a leading state with substantial power resources actually exists: among the Eurasian regional organizations (our small-N case study), as we will show in what follows, this asymmetry is indeed the case with the dominant role of the Russian Federation. Based on arguments presented above (informal governance, i.e. manipulation, and credibility of informal rules), we can now assess the specifics of the NDROs. In a nutshell, we argue that for non-democracies, joining NDROs is a more attractive option than for democracies. This is due to two features of the NDROs: first, they are much less likely to serve as commitment devices than regional organizations composed of democracies (or with a democracy as a leading state). Second, NDROs are much more susceptible to manipulation. These features of NDROs can be caused by two sets of factors. First, the lower credibility of NDROs and the higher propensity of their leading state to manipulate can be driven by the lack of internal restrictions on and transparency of the decision-making of politicians and bureaucrats in the leading state (essentially, it follows from the argument about low credibility of commitment of autocracies we presented in Section 2.2.3). Second, both specific features of NDROs can be caused by the fact that the bureaucrats and politicians of nondemocratic member states either mimic the decision-making practices they use within their own countries while making decisions within the regional organization, or are at least expected to do so by other actors. More importantly, a non-democratic state is usually much less welcome, if welcome at all, to join a reputable democratic regional organization (e. g. European-located autocracy Belarus was never considered as a candidate state for membership in the EU). Such a non-democracy is thus left with no choice but to consider

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membership in an organization where democracy is neither a prerequisite for nor a condition of membership. We suggest that autocracies are more likely to join regional organizations characterized by these features than are democracies. Why do we expect NDROs to have low credibility as commitment devices? First, it is not clear why organizations composed of states with a low level of credibility should be perceived as devices ensuring the credibility of commitments made by member states. In fact, it is likely that the lack of credibility of the individual regimes will affect the perception of the regional organization itself by the public, foreign investors, and businesses, and ultimately by the member states themselves. Second, the lack of internal restrictions and transparency reduces the credibility of NDROs. The decision making of DROs is subject to public scrutiny and social control either directly (if there are some forms of direct public representation on the supranational level, such as the European Parliament) or indirectly (i.e. public reactions to how decisions are made by national governments and parliaments regarding the issues of regional organizations). In NDROs, this control is likely to be absent or very weak. Third, as previously mentioned, decisions in NDROs are made by bureaucrats and politicians from non-democratic states who are likely to imitate the practices they have observed in their home countries, either consciously (because they are part of the domestic hierarchy merely sent to represent the nation’s interests in the regional organization) or unconsciously (as this is the type of behavior they are used to and familiar with). Hence, there is no reason to expect these bureaucrats and politicians to be more capable in keeping to commitments than their domestic counterparts. Certainly, NDROs could be capable of overcoming the lack of credible commitments under certain conditions. First, there are cases of regional organizations created by non-democratic states but with the strong involvement of external partners that ensure credibility and support the training of the ROs’ bureaucratic staff (such as the Central Asian Regional Economic Cooperation, which was established with the strong support of international donors such as the World Bank; see Linn and Pidufala 2008). Second, even in cases in which there is no direct involvement of international donors, such actors still may be active in offering partial support. Shams (2003) documents that many regional organizations in Africa recruit candidates for their staff that possess a Western education and training. In the most prominent cases of NDROs (such as those in the post-Soviet Eurasia we study in this book), the role of external donors is limited. At the same time, the leading state of the NDRO—being a non-democracy with low credibility of commitments itself—is certainly more likely to engage in manipulation. In addition to the fundamental issues presented above, another set of arguments suggests, again, that bureaucrats and politicians from the leading country should be more inclined to decide to manipulate

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because they mimic domestic practices. First, non-democracies are generally more likely to use informal governance mechanisms in internal politics. Gel’man (2012, p. 139), with regard to the Russian cases, focuses specifically on the subversive informal governance, which he describes as a “formal façade, which covers an informal core of a shadow economy, clientelism and corruption.” Again, as with Stone’s argument, the understanding here is that two sets of rules exist, one formal and the other informal, that govern decision making, but in the case of non-democracies, the informal rules become so powerful that they entirely dominate the “formal façade.” If politicians from the leading country behave in the same way in the international arena, manipulation should occur more frequently. Second, domestic politics in non-democracies is typically less tolerant of even limited divisions of or restrictions on the power of the incumbent. Unlike democracies, which are based on a division of power, in non-democracies restrictions on a leader’s power can be perceived as a sign of weakness by any hidden opponents. Therefore, a non-democratic leader should overrule decisions that appear to restrict their power more often than would a democratic leader. In the case of non-democratic states participating in a DRO, the latter also encounters the problem of lower credibility among some of its members. The solution to this problem is to impose high costs if non-democratic states violate their agreements, in other words to replace internal restrictions by external restrictions (Lake 2009c). This is exactly the reason why DROs can serve as credible commitment devices for non-democracies. By joining a DRO, such states send a costly signal that they are committed to the respective policy (e.g. economic reforms or investor protection). For example, the organization can cease to provide financial support to, or impose trade restrictions on, its member or applicant if the latter ignores the commitments it originally made. These mechanisms, however, cannot prevent manipulation by the leading state, especially if the power asymmetry is substantial, so that the costs of manipulation imposed by other states on the leading state are low. In this case, only internal restrictions could function, and external restrictions are absent or substantially weaker. Since these internal restrictions are very weak in nondemocracies, NDROs are more likely to become subject to manipulation. The lack of credibility and the propensity of the leading state to engage in manipulation in NDROs are mutually reinforcing. This situation arises first because NDROs appear to be less credible since their leading states tend to be manipulative. It is hardly possible to use an organization as a commitment device if its agenda is manipulated by the leading state to a much greater extent than in DROs. Second, because the credibility of NDROs is low, the costs of manipulation for the leading state are lower as well (there are no high expectations associated with the leader’s credibility from the very beginning, so the loss of credibility that flows from manipulation is also not substantial). To conclude, all the factors that make the participation of a country in a DRO

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puzzling are exacerbated in the case of NDROs. The political regime (the level of democratization) is likely to affect the intensity of participation in NDROs. Based on these considerations, however, we are able to derive predictions concerning the willingness of non-democracies to join an NDRO (or to increase the level of participation in the organization; we will discuss this distinction in our empirical analysis, for which it will be highly impossible). From this point of view, it is helpful to distinguish between what we refer to as “ordinary times,” when the leading state does not have strong inclinations to exercise its manipulative power, and “crises,” when manipulation occurs. First, we consider the costs and benefits of “ordinary times” and focus on those of credible commitments. An international organization “helps leaders in democratizing states credibly commit to maintain domestic reforms and reduces the ability of future leaders to roll back reforms” (Mansfield and Pevehouse 2008, p. 271). This argument explains why democratizing states and nascent democracies could be more interested in participating in international organizations than states with no intention to democratize. In the case of DROs, the benefits for democratizing states, as suggested by previous research, appear to dominate, hence the empirically observed positive correlation between democratization and regional organization membership. In an NDRO, the benefits described above are absent. A democratizing state cannot credibly signal its intent to democratize by joining such regional organizations. It does not mean that there are no other benefits in “ordinary times” associated with membership or higher levels of participation in organizations, for example, access to larger markets or subsidies. The latter, however, are equally relevant for countries with different political regimes (ceteris paribus, access to other regional and international organizations). Hence, while these benefits can explain why individual countries decide to join the regional organization in the first place, they yield no predictions as to whether democratization should correlate with the level of participation.³ Furthermore, the decision not to join or to lower the level of participation in a regional organization can be observed by other regional organizations or by the market (e.g. investors or capital market for public debt). The question arises whether this decision would affect the reputation of a country. In cases involving DROs, it certainly does. If a regional organization is a device ensuring the credibility of commitments, the decision not to join may, in fact, strengthen the suspicion that the country will disregard its commitments in the future. Participation in an NDRO does not signal credibility and hence the only reason why the reputation of a country could suffer is that it, generally speaking, disregarded its commitments to a regional organization and thus ³ This applies as long as the factors determining the benefits and costs of “ordinary times” have no impact on the trajectory of regime transition itself, as our discussion of the possible use of economic openness for stabilizing authoritarian regimes suggests.

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shows that it is likely to break its promises. However, the opposite could also be true. The decision to lower the level of participation in an NDRO can be perceived by outsiders as a signal that the country has decided to strengthen its efforts towards democratization and is ready to disregard the economic gains from membership in an NDRO for this purpose and to rely solely on possible support from DROs with much higher reform agenda requirements. Second, we consider the costs states have to incur if they join an NDRO and are subsequently subjected to manipulation by the leading state. These costs are particularly high for states which are particularly weak as opposed to the leading state. The extent of this power asymmetry is driven by the exit options of smaller states. Exit options can, in turn, be associated with multiple factors, such as economic autonomy or geographical location. However, they are also related to the nature of the political regime—from the previous discussion in this section, it follows that non-democracies have greater exit options because they find it, ceteris paribus, easier to exit the regional organization due to the lack of internal restrictions (audience costs, multiple veto players, etc.). In NDROs, the propensity of the leading state to manipulate is higher, which makes exit options more important. Hence, combined with absent gains from credible commitments, we can hypothesize that in NDROs, the positive relationship described for DROs and the level of democratization within individual countries is reversed: the level of participation is likely to be higher for non-democracies. In addition, non-democracies might find it easier to adjust their decisionmaking style to how decisions are made by the leading state and, hence, to anticipate the extent of manipulation by the leading state and plan possible responses to it, which means that communities composed of countries with similar regimes should exhibit lower information asymmetry, again supporting our conjecture (this is the version of the homophily argument presented by Peceny et al. 2002). Third, we consider access to alternative international organizations. Here, several arguments should be mentioned. First, as the arguments of the comparative regionalism literature suggest, NDROs are less likely to impose an explicit agenda supporting democratization on their members, as do many DROs. Second, DROs (such as the EU) sometimes impose severe restrictions on their membership, making it more difficult for non-democratic countries to join; NDROs do not impose such restrictions. From this point of view, again, it looks as if non-democratic countries are more likely to join NDROs.⁴

⁴ Note that Remmer (1998), in a study of a regional organization with less advanced democratization (Mercosur), finds much less evidence of a mutually reinforcing effect of democratization and regional cooperation than other papers. However, Mercosur is still not an NDRO in the sense of this book, although democratic regimes among its members are fragile.

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Thus, we come to the following conclusion: NDROs are more attractive for non-democracies to join because (a) their political regime gives them larger exist options if the leading state engages in manipulation; (b) their decisionmaking is more like that of other countries in the NDRO and makes them better able to predict the risks of manipulation, and (c) they have fewer alternative options. Therefore, in a nutshell, there should be a positive association between the authoritarian regime and the membership (or, if it is unequal for different regional organization countries, the extent of participation) in an NDRO.

3.3. POWER DISTRIBUTION Introducing the costs of manipulation argument into our analysis, we are able to make yet another prediction concerning the governance of NDROs—that of power distribution. The issue of manipulation is particularly threatening for NDRO members as long as the power asymmetry between the leading state and other states is particularly large. In this case, the influence of the leading state is very strong, the possible costs the leading state has to incur in cases of manipulation are relatively insignificant and thus one has to expect that it is highly probable that manipulation will occur. As a result, smaller states will try to avoid joining an organization with very large power asymmetries. One should instead expect there to be a relatively equal power distribution among members of an NDROs. There is an alternative to this situation, however. In some cases, NDROs come into existence not as a voluntarily decision of the member states but as an outcome of pressure from the leading country, using the establishment of the NDRO as a tool to ensure its dominance in what it perceives to be a sphere of its crucial interests. For the Eurasian examples, which we will explore in detail in the second part of the book, this type of outcome is not unusual: Armenia, for example, joined the Customs Union (the predecessor organization to the Eurasian Economic Union) because of significant pressure from Russia. This pressure is more likely to succeed if the power asymmetry between the leading country and the target country is extremely large: then the latter has no chance to defend itself against the former. This should give rise to another type of NDRO: one based on (direct or implicit) coercion (i.e. what Telo (2017) refers to as “hierarchical regionalism”). Based on this, one can formulate the following hypotheses. First, NDROs can be divided into two different categories in terms of the power distribution: a case when the hegemony is present (already studied to some extent in the literature) and a case where countries have roughly similar power, or, more precisely, exhibit low dependence on each other. If the countries are

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characterized by the “intermediate” level of power asymmetry, non-democracies are unlikely to create a regional organization since they should be strongly concerned about the risks of dependence. An example of hegemonic power distribution is, for instance, COMECON; the Eurasian cases we will investigate in what follows also probably belong to this group. When the balance shifts towards an “intermediate” case, regional organizations and even informal alliances of authoritarian states should become weaker (this happened, for example, with the USSR and China after Stalin’s death: China’s power was growing; and with Belarus and Russia after Putin came to power and the Russian regime was consolidated). The balance of power thus presents a very strong factor distinguishing between the two stable types of NDRO.⁵ Does it mean, however, that we will never observe NDROs with an “intermediate” power distribution? While these organizations should be relatively less likely to be present, they are still possible, if the regional organization manages to introduce an institutional design restricting the fears of manipulation, but at the same time allowing the countries to benefit from the NDRO (in line with the arguments presented above). Because of the extremely high risks of manipulation and because of the fundamentally informal, elite-based nature of authoritarian politics, the precautions taken by the designers of the NDRO to reduce the risk of manipulation should be substantial. In the case of the SCO we will discuss in the subsequent chapters, an organization which represents a rare example of a regional organization with two authoritarian leading states, the result is achieved by excluding the most problematic areas from cooperation (e.g. Chinese attempts to create a free trade area within the SCO or a common financial institution such as an SCO bank have been systematically blocked by Russia). In some cases, even more radical design options are used (e.g. for the CIS, which we will discuss in what follows). Hence, our fundamental predictions appear to be the following. First, a typical NDRO should either have roughly equal membership (avoiding the risk of manipulation) or be based on coercion by the leading member. Second, intermediate NDROs can also emerge, but only if they manage to find an institutional design that precludes the risk of manipulation (most likely, by reducing the scope of cooperation within the NDRO).

3.4. POLITICAL IMPACT OF AUTHORITARIAN REGIONALISM Now we proceed to the other side of the link between democracy and NDRO membership: the effect NDRO exercises on the politics of its ⁵ See research on power preponderance theory in Genna and Hiro (2004).

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member states.⁶ Here, we will attempt to answer three questions. First, why are NDROs used by authoritarian states as tools to affect the regime transition trajectories of other countries? Second, which specific instruments do NDROs apply for this purpose? And third, can we actually expect NDROs to have any actorness in exercising the function we have described?

3.4.1. Why NDROs? China, Venezuela, Russia, and Saudi Arabia are among modern examples of regional powers frequently sponsoring regional organizations. Russia, for example, has gained a reputation as being a leader of numerous regional organizations in post-Soviet Eurasia. Similarly, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia rely on their own regional organizations to support fellow autocracies. At the same time, as already mentioned, Iran does not sponsor a regional organization. China is a member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and one of the dominant countries of the SCO; however, none of these organizations can really be seen as “China-dominated” (as opposed to the Eurasian regional organizations, ALBA and GCC). The lack of any China-led organizations may be associated with a specific approach China uses in international relations, relying less on formal intergovernmental structures and more on informal ties (such as in the modern Belt and Road Initiative), or with the inability of China to promote its own regional initiatives—such as the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership as an alternative to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The support for China from authoritarian regimes such as those in Myanmar or North Korea seems to rely more on bilateral ties than on formal international organizations. Clearly, the difference in the extent to which non-democratic powers create NDROs reflects both different policy preferences and feasibility levels for establishing a regional organization. For Iran, this may be due to its difficult relations with its Arab neighbors because of the religious (Shia vs. Sunni Islam) and political (Islamic republic vs. secular dictatorships and traditional monarchies) differences. China, which is viewed with suspicion by most other nations in East and Southeast Asia, would find it much more difficult to create a regional organization than would other authoritarian leading states. However, it also prompts a more fundamental question: what are the benefits of establishing a regional organization for autocratic countries aiming to support authoritarian rule abroad? Why does this particular strategy pay off? As our subsequent analysis will show, NDROs do not always simplify the task of supporting authoritarian regimes for the leading autocracy: occasionally they ⁶ Some of the arguments of this section are outlined in Libman and Obydenkova (2018a).

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create the need to coordinate decisions with numerous other actors may constrain the authoritarian leading countries to some extent. Still, there are three important benefits NDROs can produce for powerful autocracies. The first is associated with the legitimation of cooperation between autocracies. We have already mentioned (following the work in comparative regionalism literature) that legitimacy provision is an important task of NDROs (and we will discuss possible mechanisms in what follows). Here, however, we refer to both legitimation of regimes themselves (as a by-product) and legitimation of the interaction between regimes (as a primary goal). Because of the way the “global script” of modern world politics is organized, regional organizations are seen as legitimate forms of cooperation between countries. Starting from the 1960s, regional organizations, in general, and the EU, in particular, became an important phenomenon worldwide and the subject of a growing theoretical framework for regional organizations composed of democracies (e.g. Schmitter 1970, 1971, 2004).⁷ Thus, if autocracies create a regional organization, imitating the EU, and use it to channel financial support to friendly regimes, this is more likely to be seen as an acceptable format for cooperation. In a nutshell, NDROs benefit from the general (favorable) view on regionalism in the modern world, which is in turn derived from the (relative) success of the EU. This may explain why in post-Soviet Eurasia, where the sheer geographic proximity to the EU makes its normative power very strong, we observe such a proliferation of NDROs which use the rhetoric of economic cooperation, but in many cases focus on autocracy promotion and diffusion. In the case of the Eurasian regional organizations, for example, as we will show in what follows, the benefits of copying the EU are especially appealing. Eurasian ROs, in fact, fit the general logic of electoral authoritarianism (i.e. a system, where authoritarian rule is combined with regular elections and where opposition exists, but does not have a chance of coming to power). This is predominant in this part of the world, and it relies on its imitation of democratic practices and institutions.⁸ The establishment of a regional organization is somewhat similar to introducing a clause into an autocratic constitution on conducting “free and fair elections”—it provides legitimacy to the authoritarian government by relying on a domestically and internationally acknowledged yardstick (Schedler 2002). Yet another reason is associated with the way regional organizations are perceived by the powerful authoritarian states. There are two discourses about ⁷ The crisis of 2008, as with the preceding crises, while it had a negative effect on the global perception of the EU, did not fundamentally change it. See Morlino and Quaranta (2016); Molrino and Raniolo (2017); Obydenkova and Arpino (2018). ⁸ See the discussion on “what democracy is and is not” in Schmitter and Karl (1991); on “real existing democracies” (Schmitter 2010, 2015); on democratization, see Whitehead (2002) and Morlino (1998).

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regionalism present in the modern world (both reflecting some of the aspects of the functions regional organizations implement to some extent, which we have discussed in the first section of this chapter). Regionalism can be seen as a factor constraining the autonomy of governments or as a tool to increase the power of leading states in the global arena. Empirical analysis of the Eurasian NDROs, which we will pursue in the subsequent part of the book, clearly shows that the latter logic dominates in the Russian epistemic communities and political elites: they see regionalism as a factor increasing the power of Russia globally, in fact, as a necessary prerequisite for Russia to maintain the status of a global player (comparable to other countries, which—supposedly— also “manage” their own regional organizations). Stated otherwise, the proliferation of NDROs can be an outcome of discourses rather than the actual benefits governments extract from their existence. Finally, NDROs can be convenient tools facilitating authoritarian learning. We have already mentioned that one of the key elements of how authoritarian regimes support each other is the exchange of information and socialization leading to mutual acceptance of authoritarian practices. This information exchange is extremely difficult to observe empirically; but it is also very difficult to create the conditions under which this information exchange could happen. NDROs organize regular summits and meetings of leaders and bureaucrats at different levels—while these summits were possible without a formal organizational structure, the existence of the latter makes their regular implementation more likely. In some sense, one can see NDROs as focal points of authoritarian communication, creating institutional preconditions for both formal and informal dialogue among authoritarian leaders. For example, the CIS, while extremely unsuccessful in almost all the policy tasks it has assumed, has succeeded in at least one important function—it manages to bring the majority of post-Soviet leaders together annually, in locations where both formal and informal dialog between them is possible, and thus where authoritarian learning can flourish.

3.4.2. Tools of authoritarian regionalism The particular contribution of authoritarian regionalism to the promotion of autocracy depends on the level of cooperation achieved in regional organizations. Even organizations with no substantial policy coordination can serve a purpose in the eyes of autocratic leaders, but more extensive cooperation can provide access to additional instruments of autocracy promotion. NDROs can affect politics in both their member states and in other countries they are closely tied to (e.g. if they impose consolidated economic sanctions against those countries). Our focus is on the effects of NDROs on their members; for non-members, many of the mechanisms are similar.

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To start with, references to regionalism can be used to increase the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes (and the most successful autocrats can easily blame the poor performance of regional organizations on foreign partners or on the opposition). For example, Alexander Lukashenka’s regime in Belarus transformed regional integration in Eurasia into one of the main elements of its ideology. This, of course, assumes that the population also embraces regionalism. This does seem to be the case in Eurasia: in Belarus, according to surveys, about 60 percent of the population support Eurasian regionalism (we will engage in more detailed discussion of this topic in Chapters 8, 9, and 10). By using a rhetoric of integration, authoritarian leaders base their legitimacy on the feeling of nostalgia for the Soviet Union widespread in many of the countries of the region (Mendelson and Gerber 2005). The effectiveness of this approach is occasionally questionable: it is unable to stifle the protests of those who, while even hypothetically supportive of regionalism, are dissatisfied with its inability to improve their lives or who do not believe the blame-shifting games of the government that are used to explain the slow process of regional integration. Thus, the widespread pro-integrationist rhetoric did not save the Belarusian government from the protests of entrepreneurs in February 2016, when Belarus introduced new requirements concerning the import of goods from other EAEU states.⁹ But in many cases prointegrationist rhetoric does increase the legitimacy of an authoritarian regime. In the case of more advanced regional cooperation, authoritarian regionalism can be used as an instrument for the redistribution of resources, allowing the leading country of the group—the regional “paymaster”—to support friendly regimes. The Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development (EFSD), funded primarily by Russia, has been used to provide grants to Belarus and Tajikistan during times of trouble; these have strengthened the authoritarian leadership of these states. Similarly, China used the SCO to announce financial assistance programs to the post-Soviet countries during the global economic crisis—during the Yekaterinburg summit of 2009, it offered a US$10 billion support program to the smaller SCO members.¹⁰ There may be even more sophisticated forms of cooperation. In the CIS, for example, there exists successful cooperation between the security services of Russia and those of its authoritarian neighbors. The ability of this cooperation to combat actual threats—for example, the radicalization of migrant communities from Central Asia in Russia, which became visible after the terrorist attack in St. Petersburg in 2017—is questionable, but the use of this cooperation to prosecute opposition is very real. In 2012, for example, several Tajikistani opposition activists were arrested in Moscow and subsequently extradited to their home country. ⁹ https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2016/02/29_a_8100455.shtml, accessed July 20, 2018. ¹⁰ https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2009/06/16_a_3211415.shtml, accessed July 20, 2018.

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Finally, the way in which authoritarian countries are able to engage in more systematic economic or political cooperation (by, for example, creating a free trade area or a customs union) offers additional tools for preserving their stability. For example, since the early 1990s the CIS has managed to maintain a liberal migration regime, allowing hundreds of thousands of workers from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia, and Moldova to obtain access to the Russian labor market. Authoritarian leaders benefit from this arrangement because, first, the flow of remittances from Russia improves the domestic economic situation and thus pacifies the population, and second, because migration within an NDRO does not generate “political remittances” (if migrants move to democratic countries, their exposure to democratic values and practices could make them more inclined to support democratization in their home countries, but for migrants to non-democratic countries these effects should be absent). We will discuss this issue in Chapter 9. Summing up, NDROs, at least potentially, represent a fruitful way of supporting autocracy. This does not mean, of course, that they are always used for this purpose, and even if they are, that they are used successfully. But there are specific benefits which an authoritarian regime can extract by using this tool; this may explain why numerous authoritarian countries have in fact engaged in creating and supporting NDROs. This leads us to the following hypothesis: Membership in a non-democratic regional organization increases the likelihood of authoritarian consolidation in a country. The analysis of this book directly addresses the issue of the impact of nondemocratic regional organizations on the political regimes of the member states, on trade liberalization, and on migration. Apart from testing the hypothetical impact on political regimes worldwide, we also look into the specific hypothetical causal mechanisms behind this impact in case studies of the CIS, the EAEU, and the SCO, as described below. The hypothetical causal mechanisms of the impact on political regimes include: 1) rhetoric support for the anti-democratic practices of the member states (SCO and CIS); 2) electoral monitoring, endorsing autocratic practices, providing legitimacy through approval of fraudulent elections, violations of electoral procedures, and non-transparency of elections (CIS); 3) provision of economic benefits to the member states—economic benefits contribute to the economic stability of non-democracies, thus preventing the possibility of public protests (several organizations); 4) a change in the behavior of the leading state because of the perceived danger of democratic diffusion from the EU eastward and competition for the geopolitical sphere of interest (EAEU); 5) trust-building between authoritarian leaders (SCO).

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Thus, in testing the general hypotheses on the negative impact of the membership in an NDRO on democracy in member states, we also look into five different specific causal channels. It is important to highlight that these causal mechanisms are not exhaustive. For example, another potential causal mechanism of the impact of membership on political regimes can be derived from the literature on limiting factors (Libman and Obydenkova 2014; Obydenkova and Libman 2015b). The term ‘limiting factor’ refers to the situation that occurs when a polity (be that a state or a region) has a highly localized source that is crucial for the economic development of this polity. Capturing this single source of economic development and, by implication, gaining control over the entire economic development of a state is relatively easy. In its turn, total control over economic development leads to consolidation of an autocratic regime. While some instances of a limiting factor mechanism were studied in the case of international trade, its implication for studies of regionalism might shed more light on the causal impact of autocratic regional organizations on political regimes in the states (Chapter 8 will look into this in detail). Limiting factors can be seen as a moderator, making the impact of some of the mechanisms of the consolidation of authoritarian rule associated with NDROs more pronounced. In sum, it is a safe assumption that each regional organization has its own strategy and mechanisms to endorse non-democratic practices. The format of this book allows for an in-depth investigation of general trends in the impact of NDROs and using three case studies, in addition to a study of the geographic type of Eurasian regionalism, to uncover the causal mechanisms behind this impact.

3.4.3. Limits of authoritarian regionalism At the same time, however, authoritarian leaders may have reasons to be cautious when using authoritarian regionalism to stabilize their regimes. In particular, they have to deal with two major dilemmas, which we discuss in what follows. Cooperation vs. loss of control: Regional integration in general leaves participating countries with a fundamental dilemma. By joining a regional organization, the countries may be forced to accept certain limits on their autonomous policy making. This is a difficult decision for any country to take, but for autocracies it is especially painful. First, as we have already described in great detail in Chapter 2, autocracies are notorious for having very low levels of credibility of commitment in international relations. Thus, by entering into an alliance with another (possibly stronger) authoritarian country or group of autocracies, there is always a

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risk that the foreign partner will use the emerging dependence to intervene in the domestic politics of the joining state. The commitment of autocracies to promoting autocracy abroad is not absolute: in many cases, they may even encourage opposition to the regimes of their partners if they see foreign policy benefits in it. In some cases, they could even agree to support democratization in a neighboring country if a friendlier government comes to power as a result. Any authoritarian regime has to take the risks of these “non-cooperative” actions of fellow autocrats abroad into account. Although our previous discussion has suggested that non-democracies are generally less sensible to the risks associated with manipulation, they are not entirely immune from these risks, especially if dependence on the (non-democratic) leading state becomes very high. This certainly matters for their willingness to participate in NDROs, even if these organizations can be helpful for stabilizing authoritarian regimes. One can put forward numerous examples supporting this argument from the experience of post-Soviet Eurasia. Russia, for example, to some extent endorsed the democratic revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 which put an end to the regime of Kurmanbek Bakiev (see Chapter 10). In this case, the risks for the Russian regime were minimal (Kyrgyzstan was unlikely to have a strong galvanizing effect on the Russian opposition) and the new (indeed, more democratic) government turned out to be more malleable by Russia. Another case is the Russian attitude toward Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine. While the revolution resulted in Russian military intervention, Russia had previously failed to show unambiguous commitment to supporting the consolidation of Yanukovych’s regime. On the contrary, during the trial of pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko (which was of great importance for establishing pro-Russian Yanukovych’s control over Ukraine), Russia sided de facto with the Western countries, even criticizing Yanukovych for human rights violations (Obydenkova and Libman 2014). This is because, in this particular scenario, Russia had strong economic interests in Ukraine which the trial of Tymoshenko could have jeopardized. In some cases, however, Russia finds itself in a position where its authoritarian partners offer it insufficient support. This has been the case for both of Russia’s wars in Eurasia in the last decade: the 2008 five-day war against Georgia and the 2014 hidden intervention in Donbass (Ukraine) did not receive even rhetorical support from the summits of the CIS and the SCO, or from the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO, the military alliance of several post-Soviet states also headed by Russia), although Russia exercised its best efforts to obtain this. Further, after the summer of 2014 Russia attempted to introduce customs duties against Ukrainian imports, thus punishing the country for signing its Association Agreement with the EU; Russia attempted to implement this decision within the framework of the Customs Union (the predecessor organization of the EAEU, which has sole decision-making authority for the trade policy-related matters of its

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members). However, Kazakhstan and Belarus blocked this decision—they were partly unwilling to engage in Russia’s geopolitical games, and had economic interests of their own (trade between Belarus and Ukraine increased dramatically, paralleling the equal decline of Russia–Ukraine trade during the crisis) (see Chapter 10). Second, by agreeing to cede some of their authority to a supranational institution, authoritarian leaders may send the wrong signal to their own elites and bureaucracies. Autocracies generally rely on full control over their political and economic decisions. Even a limited reduction of this control may be seen as a sign of weakness and, as a result, reduce the loyalty of the bureaucrats, further limiting the power of the regime (Gehlbach and Simpser 2015). Certainly, the sub-group of “institutionalized autocracies” does allow for some forms of restrictions on the power of the incumbent (e.g. in form of term limits or the distribution of key positions among influential members of the elite). These restrictions, however, are an outcome of the lengthy process of competition for power; imposing new restrictions could weaken some of the elite groups and strengthen other groups, possibly distorting the entire equilibrium of power in the authoritarian system. This dilemma is an important factor limiting the ability of autocratic countries to exploit NDROs to safeguard their regimes. As a result, NDROs rarely exhibit the harmonious coexistence of individual countries as member states of the same organization. On the contrary, autocratic rulers engage in complex maneuvers, on the one hand attempting to harvest the possible effects of cooperation for their regimes, but, on the other, preventing even a minimal loss of control. Relations between Belarus and Russia since the start of the twenty-first century provide an excellent example of this permanent conflict. In many cases, authoritarian regimes limit themselves to creating regional organizations with mostly rhetorical activities (such as the CIS) and exclude more substantial cooperation; while this could produce some benefits for them, the costs, as shown above, may be perceived as being too high. Regime stability vs. economic gains: The discussion has demonstrated another important contradiction authoritarian regimes face. On the one hand, they can use NDROs as a tool to enhance the stability of their regimes. On the other, however, they can still benefit from traditional forms of cooperation, which, in turn, also translate into higher regime stability—for example, open markets generate rents, which can then be distributed among regime supporters to increase their loyalty. These two approaches, however, dictate a somewhat different approach to the selection of members for an NDRO. Democracies, as mentioned, are typically reluctant to admit nondemocracies into their regional organizations: in the EU, democratization is a necessary prerequisite for membership, and in the Organization of American States or Commonwealth of Nations, countries’ membership can be suspended if a state violates constitutional procedures and human rights.

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In addition to the normative reasons, there is a strong pragmatic argument in favor of this approach: non-democracies’ poor credibility in terms of commitments makes it more difficult to advance an integration agenda. For autocracies, however, two different approaches can be observed. On the one hand, they can be reluctant to admit democratic members, since in this case some of the benefits for regime stability already described will be absent. For example, these democracies may be less consistent in following the rhetoric of authoritarian regionalism, and their internal political pluralism precludes the effective cooperation of security services and the monitoring of migrants. On the other hand, however, cooperation within regional organizations between autocracies and democracies could increase economic gains, and increase the reputation of a regional organization established by and sponsored by an autocracy. The last argument was at the core of our conjectures in the first section of this chapter. The presence of a small group of democratic member states within a regional organization does not necessarily pose a risk for the ability of authoritarian countries to use their regional organizations to stabilize their regimes. If the power asymmetry is substantial, the democratic countries are unlikely to have a strong influence and are more likely to adopt some of the practices of their powerful authoritarian neighbors. Russia has no reason to expect disloyalty from the much weaker Kyrgyzstan which is economically and politically dependent on Russia, although it is much more democratic than Russia. In this situation, Russia has no problems with Kyrgystan being an active member of Russia-led regional organizations. In fact, in 2014–16 Kyrgyzstan even discussed the adoption of an act on “foreign agents”, similar to an act in Russia, which would massively restrict the rights of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the country. Although the Kyrgyzstani parliament eventually voted against the law, the situation clearly shows that democracies in NDROs can adopt non-democratic practices over time.

3.4.4. Actorness of autocratic regional organizations The mechanisms we have provided still leave an important question unanswered: do NDROs possess their own actorness, or should they be seen as agents of authoritarian leading states? This research question is particularly difficult to answer empirically, because of the already mentioned gap between the formal mandates and the informal activity of NDROs associated with autocracy promotion: it means that decisions associated with the autocracy promotion activities of NDROs are not public and cannot be observed by researchers (on the contrary, we will see the rhetoric of NDROs, which will occasionally use the language of democracy). Still, some conjectures can be made.

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The fact that in authoritarian regimes the concentration of power is very high and even a limited delegation of power is risky, would imply that the actorness of NDROs should be very low. However, as long as the secretariats and governing bodies of NDROs are populated by the bureaucrats of the authoritarian countries, there are good reasons to expect that they will avoid any attempt to deviate from the mainline suggested by the political leadership. A truly independent supranational bureaucracy is very rare even in DROs (Hooghe et al. 2017); in NDROs the authoritarian leaders will definitely not permit the development of an independent supranational bureaucracy and the bureaucrats will not dare to try to gain more autonomy from the national leaders. Our book, in fact, provides an empirical opportunity for studying this issue, as we look at the EAEU, which officially embraces the goal of creating a supranational governance mechanism (the Eurasian Economic Commission)—but which achieves this objective to only a limited extend (see Chapter 10). From this point of view, NDROs are (important) tools of the consolidation of authoritarian regimes and not independent players. This does not make them irrelevant for the empirical investigation though—on the contrary, the frequency with which (some of the) autocracies use NDROs for autocracy promotion suggests that a detailed study of NDROs is definitely warranted. However, even with this important argument about the limited actorness of the NDROs, we need to make two further caveats. First, the fact that the NDROs are not independent does not automatically mean that they are fully dominated by the leading country. In Eurasia, for example, it is frequently not Russia, but Belarus and Kazakhstan which drive the regional integration initiatives (Libman and Vinokurov 2012c). Thus, there is a difference between NDROs as tools of specific countries (Russia, China, Venezuela, etc.) and NDROs as coalitions of autocrats (Furman 2004; Libman 2007), which are actively promoted by their (sometimes smaller) members and where each regime extracts benefits from being in the NDRO. The second perspective allows us a number of interesting remarks: for instance, the NDROs could potentially remain stable even if the resources of the leading state decline (because smaller states will still try to benefit from it); if there are differences in the variety of authoritarian regimes between the leading state and the smaller state, the NDRO’s ideology (if any) could reflect the position of the smaller states. Coalitions of autocrats are likely to be more stable than organizations created and sustained by one single dominant power. Second, while the NDRO’s bureaucracy is of course unwilling and unable to emancipate itself from the authoritarian leadership, it may try to free itself from the within-state authoritarian bureaucracy: officials of NDROs may try to prove (in the eyes of the leaders) that they are more useful (and loyal) than domestic bureaucrats. If that is the case, the establishment of NDROs becomes an important issue of bureaucratic politics in the authoritarian regimes, which

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may be important for regime stability and development. This bureaucratic competition can have varying effects on the extent to which NDROs are engaged in autocracy promotion. Their bureaucracy may try to show excessive zeal (among the three cases we study, an example might be seen in some of the CIS bureaucrats, who use rhetoric which goes much further than that of the official Russian government). Alternatively, bureaucrats may try to distance themselves from the “toxic” political topics, presenting themselves as pure technocrats (the EAEU is a possible example of this). Summing up, it would be prudent to say that NDROs are not independent actors on the same level as authoritarian states themselves. However, they are more than “puppets” of the leadership of the leading countries. Their activity may be a result of the interaction of numerous authoritarian states with different ideologies (and interests); and their bureaucrats may be engaged in political competition with domestic bureaucracies and trying to prove their value for the authoritarian leadership.

3.4.5. NDROs and the tenure of autocrats Our discussion so far has focused on the effect NDROs could potentially have on the political regimes of the member states. In addition to that, however, we want to ask a further question, which explores a more nuanced effect NDROs have on the politics of their members: do NDROs also increase the duration of tenure of authoritarian leaders? This question is, on the one hand, highly relevant for democratization studies. There are some rare autocracies which put restrictions on the tenure of their leaders and establish a system of peaceful power succession. The Mexican Institutional-Revolutionary Party regime was the most prominent example of this (Sanderson 1983); the system of succession created in the postMao People’s Republic of China has also been seen as an example of a similar system (Wang and Vangeli 2016), although since 2017 it appears likely that this system will be discontinued in the future. In general, however, authoritarian leaders try to stay in power for life. There are two reasons for this. First, intuitively, it fits the general desire of a politician to prolong his rule and to have a longer period of time to implement his desired policies or extract rents. If we assume that politicians are motivated by the material and immaterial rents of high office, then the longer they are in the office, the more rents they can extract. And even if their goal is to implement a certain change in society (e.g. to ensure the success of particular policies), in most cases, a longer period of rule is the desired goal to actually ensure the policy change happens.¹¹ ¹¹ The only group of politicians explicitly not desiring longer rule could be those who, for some reason, are ideologically committed to certain democratic values. George Washington’s

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Democratic leaders try to prolong their stay in power as well (and in parliamentary democracies without term limits can achieve astonishing results in this respect), but they are limited by the system of political competition— authoritarian leaders are not. Second, in autocracies, leaving power to a successor creates major risks for an authoritarian ruler: not being bound by any form of the rule of law, a successor can easily expropriate the assets of his predecessor or even prosecute him. It is very difficult to create guarantees for retired politicians in non-democracies—and, understanding this, they do not want to retire. Obviously, autocrats have to leave office at some point: few by choice, most because of public pressure, coups, or revolutions or simply because of mistakes they make (Treisman 2017). A change of authoritarian leader is, of course, not a guarantee of a democratic succession. On the contrary, in many cases autocracies are followed by other autocracies, occasionally more ruthless and powerful than their predecessor. Thus, the Romanov empire in Russia was succeeded by the communist regime, and the Arab Spring turned out to represent only a short interruption in authoritarian rule in Egypt. However, the moment when the autocracy fails creates, in the language of path dependence research (Pierson 2000), a “critical juncture” where experimentation with new forms of social and political organization and, eventually, a transition to democracy is possible. While these experiments frequently turn out to be unsuccessful, there are even fewer examples of authoritarian regimes which voluntarily democratize with the existing leader in power. Finally, it is important to recognize that the main goal of authoritarian rulers is rarely to support the “authoritarian regime” as such and it is much more likely to be to prolong their own stay in power. There are only very few cases of NDROs which protect certain forms of authoritarian rule at the expense of individual autocrats (these are primarily messianic ideological entities, which, as argued above, are rare in the modern world).¹² Most other NDROs protect the incumbents at any cost and are used by incumbents instrumentally to secure their power. Thus, if we observe longer tenure of autocrats in countries belonging to NDROs, we can interpret this as evidence that autocrats can indeed achieve their goal of consolidating their individual

example of such self-restraint among politicians is, however, very unusual. In contrast, in many cases, leaders who came to power even genuinely willing to institute democratic rule are likely over time to start equating democracy with the “rule of democrats” (i.e. themselves) and seek a longer tenure (sometimes at the cost of democracy proper). Russian examples from the early 1990s are highly illuminating in this respect; see Gel’man 2015. ¹² The COMECON was a singular example where countries intervened (using military force) in their neighboring states in order to prevent disloyalty to Moscow’s supremacy and to the communist regime which could have resulted in a leadership change (as occurred in Czechoslovakia).

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power through the NDRO (but we cannot claim that without the NDRO democratization would happen—possibly, we would merely observe a transition of power to another autocrat). Summing up, the analysis of the effect of NDROs on tenure duration is both relevant for democratization theory (as a change of incumbent creates opportunities for the onset of regime transition) and important in terms of understanding the political effect of NDROs (as incumbents use NDROs to extend their tenure as the singular most important political objective they have). There exists a substantial literature looking at the tenure of autocrats, its duration and its determinants. Gandhi and Przeworski (2007) and Magaloni (2008) highlight the importance of political institutions of cooptation for ensuring that possible opponents of the current leader also enjoy some benefits from the regime. Bueno de Mesquita and Silverson (1995) argue that the tenure duration of authoritarian rulers is less affected by international conflicts than that of democratic leaders. Bak and Moon (2016) argue that the inflow of foreign direct investment reduces the probability of dissent by the elites and increases the survival chances of the leader (one of the mechanisms linking NDRO to leader survival discussed in Chapter 6 functions in a similar way). Svolik (2009) looks at the long-term interaction between elites and rulers in autocracies and thus differentiates between contested and established dictatorships with different consequences for the tenure duration of the rulers. Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2002) look at the policy choice consequences for the survival of leaders. Frantz and Stein (2017) suggest that creating functioning succession rules could serve as a tool protecting dictators from coups. We consider membership in an NDRO as yet another factor, which could potentially have implications for the dictator’s tenure, and discuss it in what follows. Why should NDROs matter for the survival of authoritarian leaders? We propose three hypothetical mechanisms, which should prolong the tenure duration of autocrats, who belong to NDROs. First, NDROs can provide these leaders access to valuable resources, which can be used to pacify the population and coopt elites. Second, NDROs’ function as legitimacy providers puts pressure on domestic opposition—democratic and non-democratic alike—as it is much more difficult for the opposition to withstand the rhetorical attacks of the regime. Third, NDROs reduce the willingness of elites to attempt a coup against the incumbent leader, since a coup could be followed by intervention by the NDRO (from sanctions to military intervention). One can see that the first two mechanisms are very similar to those of autocracy promotion we identified in Section 3.4, focusing not on regimes, but on support for individual leaders. The third mechanism is novel for this sub-section. In what follows, we briefly discuss these arguments one by one.

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The redistribution mechanism is probably the most obvious: NDROs are, as mentioned already, frequently used as redistribution machines with smaller states obtaining resources from the larger ones. Leaders use these resources to strengthen their power both through buying off elites and the population and by providing more resources for repression (Wintrobe 2000). As a result, they manage to consolidate their control over the country and weaken possible rivals. Because NDROs, as it will be argued in what follows, are typically based on informal personal interaction among the leaders, it is plausible to suggest that it is the leaders who will be in control of resources and can use them even against other members of the elite. The legitimacy mechanism, again, is intuitive. Regional organizations’ approval of particular leaders (e.g. invitations to summits, public contacts, etc.) can be crucial for the legitimization of particular leaders: opponents of the incumbents will lack this rhetorical support from the NDROs and hence that legitimacy. The personalist governance of many NDROs will allow the leaders to present themselves as recognized and respected by their peers or (in case regionalism is very popular in the country) as the only guardians of regional unity. Again, not only the regime in general, but also the leader personally gains from the interaction in the NDRO. The third mechanism is present in a subset of NDROs, where military interventions or effective embargos against a country, where a coup has taken place, are likely (e.g. the Gulf Cooperation Council). In this case, incumbents can assume that, in the event of a coup, they will receive support from other countries of the NDRO. Of course, this support is not guaranteed (and is conditional on, e.g., political relations between the country and other members of the NDRO, especially its leading state). However, it should still discourage the elite, who could plan a potential coup, from implementing it. In this respect, paradoxically, NDROs can serve as commitment devices— not for the political leaders to implement economic or political reforms, but for other elite members, who know that they could suffer negative repercussions in case the current leader loses her office. Foreign powers can back the leader even if she appears to be politically unreliable, to prevent the spread of similar coups to their own country or to prevent a change of the foreign policy allegiance of a country (which could happen if one autocrat is replaced by another). One can see that these three mechanisms should increase the survival chances of a non-democratic leader who runs a country belonging to an NDRO, as opposed to a country which is not part of an NDRO. Based on these considerations, we expect that in the subset of authoritarian countries, those which join NDROs will have leaders with longer tenure than those which do not join. We will provide some empirical results testing this hypothesis in what follows. Table 3.1 summarizes the main mechanisms and factors associated with NDROs’ influence on national political regimes.

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Table 3.1. Political impact of authoritarian regionalism: possible mechanisms Mechanisms

Description and examples

Autocracy promotion, including – Political support

ROs as legitimization tools for non-democratic regimes (e.g. electoral mission of observers, rhetoric support, endorsement of practices); ROs as influence tools in the global arena (formation of regional alliances); exchange of information between security services, etc.

– Economic support

Economic benefits of regionalism sustain nondemocracies; contribute to the economic survival of existing regimes; prevent social appraisal and revolution

– Military support

Military interventions on behalf of the ruling autocrat

Autocracy diffusion

Politicians: Diffusion of information, values norms, and principles across borders, learning from fellow autocracies; Learning is associated with a preference for informal, elite-based interaction within regional organizations Society: social diffusion of values take place through migration. Should migration be open with democracies, it would revolutionize society and development of civil society. Migration across autocracies helps to prevent it and increase the self-sustaining of dyads of non-democracies

Moderator: Limiting factor

Economic development depends on only one sector; capturing this sector guarantees control of the economy and an increased probability of development and consolidation of autocracy

Differentiated effect on the politics of authoritarian regimes: Survival of leaders

Increased tenure of autocrats is a by-product of membership

3.5. HETEROGENEITY OF MEMBERSHIP AND G OVERNANCE S TRUCTURE The final set of hypotheses concern the governance and membership of NDROs. In particular, they are related to how the decision making in NDROs is organized, and which country characteristics (in addition to political regimes) move countries to join NDROs. Modern DROs normally highlight the importance of democratic principles and values as the very minimum requirements of accession to membership in regional clubs of consolidated democracies. In some cases, such as the EU, this condition and normative power is highly significant in the acceptance or rejection of applications for membership. In other cases, the role of norms

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and values or of the conditions of membership per se can be determined as moderate, though there is a rhetorical commitment to it. However, as the previous discussion shows, NDROs are strikingly different from DROs because they exhibit two extremes in terms of normative power and conditionality: strong ideology or no normative framework at all (neither conditionality). Examples of the first extreme include communism and Marxism-Leninism in the USSR; the ideology of fascism in the Axis powers during World War II; the ideology of conservative Islamic monarchies in the GCC; the Chavez version of socialism in ALBA; and the ideology of pan-Asianism in the Japan-led East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere of World War II (see also Chapter 7). At the same time, some modern regional organizations are marked by the absence of normative power and conditionality. Among examples at this extreme are the CIS, the EAEU, the SCO, and numerous other China-led and Russia-led organizations, though they occasionally manage to develop a discourse which can be applied by their members and non-members for legitimacy purposes— but this discourse refers not to a particular separate ideology, but more to the reinterpretation of “standard” topics such as democracy or sovereignty.¹³ China officially adheres to the communist ideology, but this is not the rhetorical basis for its international politics, which instead highlights the pragmatism and the goals of economic prosperity. Similarly, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, when ideology became more important for Putin’s Russia, it would be too simplistic to characterize it as an ideologically biased regime: Putin occasionally draws from a very diverse set of ideologies when it suits him but does not attempt to develop a systematic ideology he always adheres to (e.g. Laruelle 2013). The lack of ideological commitment should result in two main effects. First, given the absence of conditionality and normative power in a modern NDRO, the number of member states can be expected to be higher in organizations comprised of non-ideological autocracies. Second, a lack of ideology in numerous modern regional organizations should lead to greater heterogeneity of their member states along the political, cultural, or economic dimensions. Most of the democratic organizations are marked by member states that share a culture or even religion (e.g. the EU is combined of only Christian states). In contrast, as long as the ideological commitment is non-existent, cultural and religious similarity is not an issue at all for the formation and development of NDROs. For example, the CIS incorporates both Christian and Muslim states. Interestingly, cooperation is even stronger between Christian Russia

¹³ Allison (2003), for example, offers an analysis of how Russia discursively reinterprets the issue of military interventions and the differences in this respect existing between Russia and the West. The topic of normative differences between different organizations in the post-Soviet space is discussed, for instance, by Lewis (2012); Russo and Gawrich (2017).

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and Muslim Kazakhstan than between religiously homogenous states such as Christian Belarus and Russia, or Ukraine and Russia. More generally, studies on democratic regionalism stipulate that homogenous cultures and similar institutions provide an excellent background or precondition for successful development regionalism and promote it (Feng and Genna 2003; Capanelli et al. 2009). One of the reasons for such a tendency is the higher level of trust and understanding among states with a similar culture and religious heritage. In contrast to democracies, in autocracies it is easier to manipulate public opinion by controlling of the mass media. Manipulation can drive public opinion in the direction needed by the state’s leader so that people support the decisions made concerning the choice of international allies. For example, with the expansion of a DRO such as the EU, the debates on the inclusion of Turkey as a member were deadlocked by, among other factors, discussions surrounding the acceptability of having a non-Christian member state in the EU; public opinion mattered in this discussion. When it comes to non-democratic states, public opinion does not matter and can be easily manipulated by state-controlled mass media to justify government decision making. This might lead to the inclusion of very heterogeneous (in cultural and religious terms) states even including historically rival and hostile religions, such as Christianity and Islam. Therefore, the member states of an NDRO are more heterogeneous in terms of their culture, economic development, power, and even political regime than the member states of a DRO. Kaoutzanis et al. (2016) show that democracies have strong incentives to create regional organizations with strict access rules, which should lead to higher homogeneity. A similar argument can be made about economic heterogeneity. Here, a helpful basis for our discussion is the tradition in political economics and constitutional political economy of viewing regional organizations as clubs, a view which can be traced back to James Buchanan (e.g. Buchanan and Faith 1987). The key element of this literature focuses on two aspects determining the membership and governance of a regional organization: the heterogeneity of preferences and the presence of transfer and redistribution schemes. Redistribution schemes reinforce the existence of the regional organization (Le Breton and Weber 2003; the simplest example of this redistribution is the “regional paymaster” function, as introduced by Mattli 1999). The nondemocratic nature of some regional organizations does have an effect on its membership from this perspective: Alesina and Spolaore (1997, 2003) point out that the lack of public accountability (and hence of the need to fully take preference heterogeneity into account) results in the emergence of larger polities. They further argue that democracy leads to fragmentation: this is because decision makers have to take into account the heterogeneity of preferences in the population and thus smaller polities find it more difficult to agree on common policies (in autocracies, the preferences of the public

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would be ignored and a common decision would be based on the interests of the elite). This argument is relevant for understanding the functioning of economically heterogeneous regional organizations, for which the redistribution scheme is likely to be the key element of institutional design as well as the point of major debate among (potential) members. In a regional organization composed of democracies, the creation of a redistribution scheme within an organization is likely to cause massive disapproval in the richer states, but the lack of a redistribution scheme will make poorer states less interested in joining (the debates the EU has experiences since the euro crisis are cases in point). Redistribution is therefore only feasible if the income differences between countries are limited: otherwise, agreeing on sufficiently large transfers will be impossible and the DRO will collapse or not come into existence at all. In NDROs, the population of the richer states will not be involved in any discussion about redistribution, as the decisions will be made at the elite level; in the same way, if the elites the poorer states agree to join, it will be enough to establish an organization. As the comparative regionalism discussion pointed out, it is elite-level socialization which is crucial for the establishment of common norms and values in an NDRO. Political leadership can thus ignore the public’s demands and either engage in extremely broad and costly redistribution (if, e.g., the regime of the leading state sees it as necessary for protecting its geopolitical dominance) or accept regional organizations even if no redistribution occurs, but where other benefits (such as the support of friendly regimes) make membership beneficial. Furthermore, economic heterogeneity leads to preference heterogeneity and thus calls for different economic policies: it will be a reason of major disputes in DROs but may cause less debate in NDROs. We acknowledge that in ideological NDROs this heterogeneity of membership is likely to be smaller. COMECON was unable to admit countries which did not firmly implement Socialist central planning (they would not be able to cooperate within the institutional structures COMECON created). But in the modern world, ideological NDROs (as we will show in the empirical part of our investigation) are much less frequent, and hence we expect the large-N results to be driven by non-ideological NDROs; in Eurasia, all three of our empirical case studies are clearly non-ideological. Generally, our main conjectures can be summarized as follows: • Modern autocracies are likely to be of two types: strong ideology or no ideology at all. • Member states of regional organizations established or dominated by non-democracies may welcome not only other non-democratic states but also democracies pragmatically seeking the economic benefits of membership. Thus, membership of such a regional organization is likely to be heterogeneous in terms of political regime.

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• NDROs are likely to have more culturally and religiously heterogeneous member states. Given that non-democracies have very limited or no accountability to the population and public opinion is not important, they are likely to join regional organizations even when states have conflictual religions (countries espousing Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, or Judaism do not tend to become member states of the same regional organizations established and dominated by democracies). • Similarly, we expect NDROs to be more heterogeneous in terms of economic development (motivation for membership in what is officially an economic regional organization can be a cover for geopolitical security issues—this regional organization might be more willing to accept an economically weak non-democratic state in exchange of geopolitical security in the region).¹⁴ • Given that NDROs do not have conditions for membership, they are likely to have a higher number of member states than democratic regional clubs. The democratic organizations are more restrictive and selective in their admission of new member states (e.g. their preference for democratizing states in their stricter accession rules, see Kaoutzanis et al. 2016). The hypothesis is that an NDRO has a higher number of member states. In addition, we also expect NDROs to differ from DROs in terms of governance structure. We have already suggested that there is a large literature indicating the predominance of informal, elite-based decision-making mechanisms in regional organizations primarily comprised of non-democracies. Furthermore, in most non-democracies a powerful national executive exists that controls political, economic, and development decisions as well as the parliament (while the latter, along with a judicial branch, is often an imitation of a democratic balance of power but actually lacks real power). Thus, it is reasonable to conjecture that this would affect the governance structure of a regional organization made up of non-democracies. A national autocrat would show a preference for a council of heads of states and governments as a decision-making body in a regional organization. Hence, NDROs are not likely to develop parliamentary assemblies, or if these assemblies are present, they will not play a significant role in the decision-making process. Table 3.2 summarizes the main differences between DROs and NDROs that we would expect to find based on the discussion in this chapter.

¹⁴ However, it is important to highlight that the same logic can be also found in non-regional organizations led by democracy: security concerns might dominate economic benefits (Davis and Pratt 2017). In contrast to an international organization, in a regional organization of democracies, political regime and economic homogeneity are important issues (Morlino and Sadurski 2010).

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Table 3.2. Democratic vs. authoritarian regionalism Criteria of distinction between types

Differences between types of regionalism Democratic regional IO

Autocratic regional IO

Political regimes of members

Homogenous (only democracies)

Heterogeneous (mixed political regimes)

Economic development of members

Homogenous

Heterogeneous

Religion of members

Homogenous

Heterogeneous

Power distribution

Leading state, but no clear hegemon

Hierarchical (with a hegemon) Equal distribution

Governance

Through broad array of bodies (leaders, bureaucracies and parliaments)

Through the direct interaction of leaders

Conditionality Size: Number of members

Present Less numerous

Absent More numerous

Table 3.3. Main hypotheses Risk of manipulation and low credibility of commitments NDROs are likely to attract non-democratic members NDROs are likely to be of two types: extreme power concentration (coercive regionalism) or roughly equal allocation of power; exceptions should have specific institutional structure or narrow scope reducing the risks of manipulation Autocracy promotion and diffusion NDROs can be used to strengthen the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in their members (and possibly non-members), but with caveats NDROs will have limited actorness and will primarily serve as tools of autocracy promotion by authoritarian leading states Non-ideological nature and informal governance in modern autocracies NDROs will be more heterogeneous in terms of economic development and the culture of their membership than DROs NDROs are more likely to use governance tools allowing for direct interaction of leaders rather than other tools

To summarize, the discussion has suggested that regional organizations can be used as tools of autocracy promotion or, at the very least, of the stabilization of authoritarian rule. However, in the absence of ideological commitments, autocracies might behave pragmatically and be driven by economic benefits or geopolitical security. As the result of their pragmatism, regional organizations may admit a more heterogeneous group of countries than democracies would do. This presents two different functions of autocratic regional clubs: a pragmatic approach (aiming to extract economic or security rents through

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membership) and offering support to fellow authoritarian regimes. Moreover, pragmatism dictates that the presence of democratic member states in an otherwise autocratic regional organization somehow augments this organization in terms of its international legitimacy. In individual NDROs, one of these approaches is likely to be relatively more important: and our analysis indeed will provide examples of NDROs which are highly tolerant of democratic change in some of their smaller members for pragmatic reasons and of NDROs with a strong focus on autocracy promotion. Table 3.3 provides a brief summary of the main hypotheses of our study. In the remaining part of the book, we intend to test these first using large-N data for a sample of regional organizations world-wide and then in a number of in-depth case studies. Chapter 4 discusses our methodology and provides a more detailed description of our approach.

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4 Studying Non-Democratic Regional Organizations: Methodological Issues This chapter provides methodological guidance for the book and navigates the reader through our research strategy. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods employed throughout the book expands our knowledge about the newly identified phenomenon of authoritarian regionalism. However, how do the qualitative and quantitative components of analysis fit together? The chapter consists of three sections. First, we discuss the reasons for using a mixed methods research design, how it informs our study, and the advantages of concurrent design employed in the book. Second, we focus on the quantitative part of our investigation and briefly present the empirical concept underlying our research. Third, we present the main sources of data we apply in our study.

4.1. MIXED METHODS STRATEGY: CONCURRENT VERSUS SEQUENTIAL DESIGN Combining quantitative and qualitative methods of investigation became an attractive trend in the modern political science, as well as in other social sciences (Taschakkori and Teddie 2010; Small 2011; Creswell and Creswell 2017). While this combination can pursue a variety of purposes, two objectives are particularly important. First, using qualitative methods one is able to study more closely the causal mechanisms associated with the effects identified through statistical analysis (Lieberman 2005). Second, qualitative and quantitative methods can be used for triangulation, verifying the conclusions made with one of the methodological approaches by looking at the results of another (Howe 2012). The concept of “triangulation” comes from geometry and navigation, where it refers to creating a network of fixed points, which can be used to determine the coordinates of any other point (in the way that satellites are used for determining GPS coordinates). In the social sciences,

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triangulation typically refers to utilizing several methods to check whether that their conclusions do not contradict each other (Jick 1979).¹ This is one of the reasons why this book combines large-N and small-N investigations. For us, using small-N has yet another important advantage: large-N design, while helpful for testing hypotheses about trends at the world-wide level, has its limits in studying one of the key research questions of this book—the impact of NDROs on the consolidation of authoritarian regimes. Therefore, augmenting our N-large study with the small-N analysis becomes necessary. The book follows the common logic of presenting the insights of the quantitative and then of the qualitative research. However, the book develops according to a concurrent design instead of the more traditional (for the political science scholarship) sequential research design (Onwuegbuzie and Collins 2007; Creswell 2009), that is, where a large-N investigation is done to identify the common patterns in the data and then a small-N investigation is carried out to identify the causal mechanisms. Instead of following this wellknown sequence of steps, the book implements a design that is used less often in political science. The large-N part of the book (Chapters 5, 6, and 7) presents world-wide analysis of all regional organizations: it identifies the newly emerged phenomenon of authoritarian regionalism as well as new trends of development in modern world politics. The first part of the book focuses on the membership and governance of NDROs, though we provide some evidence on the role NDROs play in authoritarian consolidation as well. The second half of the book adopts a small-N analysis to look at one region— Eurasia—where NDROs are particularly prolific. It investigates the peculiarities of their functioning, focusing in particular on the link between regional organizations and authoritarian consolidation. The small-N analysis also looks briefly at the membership and governance of regional organizations in Eurasia (thus, confirming quantitative findings relevant at the world-wide level which also hold true for the specific region). The concurrent design employed in this book dictates that both the large-N dataset and small-N cases are chosen using theoretical logic and ought to augment each other by looking at different aspects of the research question. In the language of Creswell (2009), we pursue the connecting approach to the way data of the large-N and small-N investigations are mixed: that is, we keep both datasets separate, but explicitly confront the results obtained with both of them. In contrast, the sequential design would require the choice of case studies to be based on the results of the large-N analysis (Seawright and Gerring 2008). This is not what we have done in this book: our case studies ¹ For example, if a researcher intends to understand how the size of the class affects the grades of the students, she could combine regression analysis of a large sample of schools with varying class size with interviews of experienced teachers, who have taught in classes of different sizes. If both approaches point to the same direction, one can consider the results more credible.

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are not selected based on the results of regression estimates or correlations in the large-N part of the project but instead are directly derived from the theoretical logic of the study. The main advantage of the concurrent design is that it is better suited to answering different, yet interrelated research questions in the large-N and small-N parts of the sample (Creswell 2009). In the sequential design, the research question asked of one of the steps of the analysis dictates the question of the second step. Furthermore, a concurrent design could be better suited to triangulation: for example, if one selected cases for the small-N analysis based on the large-N study results, one may allow the imperfections of the large-N study to influence case selection (Rohlfing 2008). It is important to acknowledge three important issues that are highly relevant for an understanding of our results. First, it is not our intention to claim that the causal mechanisms we observe in Eurasia will necessarily be replicated in other parts of the world. In fact, as Chapter 8 shows, Eurasia has a number of specific features in terms of the functioning of the regional organizations (connected to the crucial historical role of the Soviet legacy), which explain both the proliferation of NDROs, the role assigned to NDROs by the various governments, and the specific tools used by the NDROs. One particularly important feature seems to be survival of Eurasian integration projects and resistance to internal challenges (such as wars and conflicts) as well as to external ones (e.g. the financial crisis of 2008, which actually strengthened regionalism in Eurasia, see Vinokurov and Libman 2014). Even military conflicts do not necessarily lead the countries to leaving the regional organization (thus, as of 2018, although Ukraine is preparing to leave the CIS, it still has not taken the final step—four years after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in Donbass). NDROs attract a lot of public attention and are a constant topic of political debate: Libman and Vinokurov (2012c) even point to the very high politicization of Eurasian regionalism as a specific feature of this region. In other parts of the world, even if there are numerous NDROs to be seen (as in Africa), they appear to attract less public attention. Furthermore, the regional hegemon—Russia—pays a great deal of attention to the NDROs, supporting their constant proliferation and development. From this point of view (as already mentioned in the introduction to the book), post-Soviet Eurasia can be seen as a region where the effects associated with NDROs are particularly pronounced, which is precisely the reason why studying this particular region is both an interesting and important illustration of the main hypotheses and findings of this book. In other parts of the world, NDROs could use a different mix of policy tools or play a different role. This could be because their leading states will pay less attention to them or because smaller states might be more open to breaking their ties to NDROs if it suits them politically. Therefore, we do not automatically suggest that all our findings for the SCO or the CIS should hold, for example, for the GCC or ALBA. But we do claim that Eurasia, with a very large number of NDROs and

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a relatively high role assigned to them by policy makers, can serve as an attractive region where the effects of such organizations on political regimes should be identified and studied. Second, regional organizations in general and especially the non-democratic ones are extremely diverse. The quantitative analysis of the book, for instance, combines in a single dataset organizations with very high levels of integration and cooperation as well as organizations which limit themselves to pure rhetoric (or even “ink-on-paper” organizations). Our study is no different in this respect from most large-N comparative regionalism investigations, which, by the virtue of the method used, have to include heterogeneous regional organizations in a single dataset. For us, however, this heterogeneity is a smaller problem, because we are interested in an extremely diverse set of possible mechanisms through which NDROs can influence their members. The CIS, for example, from an economic perspective, achieves very little: but because of the presence of an election monitoring mechanism and because of the popularity of Eurasian integration in a number of key countries of the region, it can serve as an effective rhetorical device supporting authoritarian regimes. In fact, some of the scholarship on the regime-boosting effect of regional organizations started precisely with questions about the possible value of supposedly non-functioning regional organizations for their members (Libman 2007; Vinokurov and Libman 2017), leading to conclusions that rhetorical benefits could justify the continued existence of the regional organizations without any economic or political cooperation. Thus, what appears to be an irrelevant regional organization for the students of economic or security regionalism, can be highly relevant for us because of the subtler effects this organization can still have. These comprise one of the main focuses of the book. Still, as is always the case with large-N analysis, our results hold on average and not for each specific unit of analysis. Third, for the qualitative analysis, one of the biggest problems is how to identify the actual interaction of autocracies within an NDRO and the specific effect of this organization on the political regimes. Authoritarian politics is highly nontransparent; therefore, to document evidence of authoritarian learning (e.g. systematic interaction of autocratic leaders who copy each other) is extremely difficult for an outsider. Yet there are examples when the interaction of authoritarian leaders or the activity of NDROs proceeds “out in the open,” and these are precisely the cases we look at. For the CIS, for example, we consider evidence of electoral monitoring by both official institutions of the CIS and the NGOs linked to the CIS (CIS-EMO), as well as the public rhetoric of the officials associated with it. For the EAEU, we study a number of high-profile cases of interaction among officials, resulting in decisions of the organization leading to possible effects on regime transition trajectories in the member countries and third countries. We have to point out, however, that each of these cases represent only “a tip of the iceberg” of

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the possible effects NDROs can have on their members. The research becomes even more difficult if we look at authoritarian diffusion, which proceeds unintentionally for the member states and thus is not always systematically analyzed even by the actors themselves. While our book as a whole combines large-N and small-N investigation, each of the small-N research chapters (CIS, EAEU, and SCO; Chapters 9, 10, and 11, respectively) also includes a subsection where we use econometric tools. However, we select these using specific features of the relevant organizations, allowing us to test hypotheses and mechanisms which we would be unable to study for the world in general. Thus, in case of the CIS, we look at the variation in the degree of participation of individual countries in this NDRO. This is because the CIS, as will be shown in what follows, is a rare example of an organization that allows each member to opt out of any agreement; the extent to which each of the CIS members is actually involved in the activity of the regional organization therefore differs dramatically. For the EAEU, we use the more convenient variation in membership, studying whether there are differences in terms of political regimes between member- and non-member states. For the SCO, finally, survival analysis is used, looking at the differences in the length of rule of autocrats from countries belonging and not belonging to the SCO (that is linked to the large-N chapters of the book). The concurrent design, thus, allows us to shed more light on the impacts of these NDROs, for which (due to the opaque nature of authoritarian politics) no direct evidence can be collected.

4.2. EMPIRICAL DEFINITIONS Chapter 3 has outlined a theoretical definition and conceptualization of NDROs. However, to identify these organizations empirically and to implement the large-N analysis, we also need to operationalize the concept of NDROs. The concept of NDROs is centered on the political regimes of the member states—that is, these are regional organizations comprised mainly of non-democracies. To measure the political regimes, we apply the Polity IV index, which is widely used in comparative politics research. We need not only indices of sufficient quality, but also those covering as many countries as possible and available over a long time period so that we can investigate the evolution of the political regimes of the member states (see Munck and Verkuilen 2002; Herrera and Kapur 2007). A particular advantage of the Polity IV index is that it is based on the underlying concepts of “democracy” and “autocracy”: thus, it better fits the theoretical conceptualization underlying our discussion—we can identify a set of NDROs and distinguish them from democratic organizations. In addition, for some of the analyses, we also

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look at yet another popular measure of political regimes—the Freedom House (FH) index. Unlike Polity IV, however, FH uses the concepts of “free,” “partly free,” and “not free” regimes. Limiting our attention only to the “not free” regimes in identifying NDROs would be too restrictive, as it would exclude from the analysis a broad domain of competitive or electoral autocracies, which, as mentioned in Chapter 2, play a very important role in the modern world. Using the concept of “partly free” regimes, will allow us to include some nascent democracies with weak institutions into the set of countries under analysis. A certain limitation of our analysis is that, according to Polity IV, the core country of the Eurasian regional organizations—Russia, was classified as (borderline) “democratic” well into the period of rule of Putin in the 2000s. However, the view on Putin’s Russia as an autocracy is hardly disputed in the literature (Gel’man 2015), and there are even those who would describe Boris Yeltsin’s regime of 1991–99 as a weak autocracy (Furman 2010). The FH data, which we use in the robustness check, suffer from the opposite problem: they seem to differentiate insufficiently between competitive autocracies in Eurasia and the full-fledged authoritarian regimes that dominate, for example the Central Asian countries. However, in the chapters on Eurasian regionalism (Chapters 9–11) our analysis includes both FH and Polity IV scores. In a relatively small sample of countries, evaluating the level of democracy in a single case could have a strong impact on the analysis and, for this reason, validating that the Polity IV and the FH data produce identical results becomes relatively more important. The second aspect of our analysis is more complex. The most obvious way to attribute a regional organization to the democratic or the non-democratic group of organizations is to look at the average score of the level of democracy of its member states. However, this approach will ignore an important feature of most regional organizations—the asymmetry of economic and political power among their members. Regional organizations with a well-defined “hegemon” are rare. The examples are most organizations in post-Soviet Eurasia with Russia at their core; the North American Free Trade Agreement— NAFTA with the US at the core; and the Southern African Customs Union with South Africa at its core. Most organizations include a small group of leading countries and numerous smaller countries. In this case, simply computing the country average score of a democracy can be misleading. First, large countries have a substantially stronger influence on how decisions within regional organizations are made.² Second, the perception of a regional organization in the ² Even where the legal framework of the regional organization suggests unanimity or opting out—small countries may expect costs to be too high to bear if they contradict the decisions of the leaders; alternatively, the leaders can influence the supranational bureaucracy and thus the agenda-setting in the RO—see Urpelainen 2012.

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outside world is shaped by its larger member countries, and not by the smaller members. In one of our empirical case studies, the CIS, some of the smaller members (such as Moldova or Kyrgyzstan) are more advanced as democracies, but the general perception of this regional group by outsiders is entirely driven by their vision of the leading country’s—Russia’s—lack of democracy (member states of the CIS, thus, are associated with a lack of democracy). Similarly, smaller countries, while joining a regional club, may think primarily about their relationship with larger countries (the argument about a manipulation factor advanced in the Chapters 2 and 3). In an extreme case, even in terms of economic and social ties, the regional organization has a hub-and-spoke structure with smaller countries being connected only to a leading country and not to each other. To deal with these issues, we apply two approaches to quantifying the concept of an NDRO. First, we look at the average Polity IV score for the regional organization’s members. Second, we identify the most influential country in the regional organization, and use this country’s Polity IV score to identify the organization as democratic or non-democratic. In order to find out which country is the most influential, we use the score of the material capabilities included in the Correlates of War database (originally developed by Singer et al. 1972).³ More specifically, we apply the so-called composite index of national capabilities (CINC), which is an aggregate of six dimensions describing the economic and military power of a country: the size of its population; the production of iron and steel; the urban population; primary energy consumption; military expenditure; and military personnel. We acknowledge that using CINC to identify the most powerful nation may create some anomalies. Many regional organizations in our data, as described in Chapter 5, concentrate primarily on economic issues: as a result, purely military power may be less important to them. Sometimes these anomalies may influence our findings. For example, among the members of the AsiaPacific Economic Cooperation (which also includes the US), China turns out to have the highest CINC score, and thus we would be forced to classify this regional organization as a non-democratic one according to the leading country. This is precisely the reason why two quantitative concepts of an NDRO are used: if we look at the average score among all countries, we will eliminate these issues. In what follows, we will focus in particular on results which remain robust throughout the approaches we use. Finally, for each of the two empirical concepts of an NDRO (the regime of the leading country and the average regimes of the member countries), we use two empirical indicators. First, we look at the actual value of the (average) score. Second, we create a dummy equal to 1 for regional organizations ³ http://cow.dss.ucdavis.edu/data-sets/national-material-capabilities/national-materialcapabilities-v4-0, accessed July 20, 2018.

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that have an average score (or the score of the hegemon) which, according to the existing classification, would make them “non-democratic” according to the Polity IV (i.e. the score is below zero). This approach to identifying NDROs clearly shows why the book implements a concurrent design and mixed-research methods: using only large-N analysis and studying the effects of membership in the NDRO on the likelihood of autocratic development is problematic. As NDROs are defined as regional organizations with non-democratic members, we will indeed find that most members of NDROs are non-democracies simply by definition. A more careful analysis would imply that we look at particular NDROs (which we define ex ante as such) and study their effects on the politics of their member states. Because the specific mechanisms associated with authoritarian influence in each NDRO are different as well (and the variety of these mechanisms has been presented in Chapters 2 and 3), we implement this analysis for the three case studies of this book—the CIS, the EAEU, and the SCO—where we combine the in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis using different approaches that are more suitable for each specific case.

4.3. THE DATASET The next problem typically encountered in performing a comparative analysis is how to define the universe of regional organizations included in the large-N study. In this book, we apply a very recent dataset, published by the Vinokurov et al. (2014) and developed by a team including one of the co-authors of this book. This dataset has a large number of advantages. Not only it is extremely broad in terms of covering a large set of regional organizations, but it also reports numerous quantitative characteristics of the regional organizations’ functioning and governance for the early 2010s. Thus, it provides a convenient and readily available basis for analysis. We, however, have to augment the dataset with a number of other indicators; these play an important role for us because of the theory and the hypotheses guiding our study. The variables will be introduced in greater detail when we proceed to the empirical analysis. The comparative analysis of regional organizations in different social sciences sub-disciplines exhibits a number of distinctive features. In particular, there exists a substantial difference between economics and political science in this respect. Economics typically uses the data from the World Trade Organization (WTO) to identify the set of regional organizations. The problem of this approach is that, first, the WTO requires notification of the trade agreements and not organizations—some agreements do not have any governance structure and thus do not fit any definition of a regional organization. Second, many notifications are inaccurate; more importantly, they do not cover

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regional organizations which do not consider international trade as their primary objective—and these may, in fact, be relevant for our study. For political science, the starting point is typically the dataset of the Correlates of War; this, however, includes not only regional but also various international organizations, and in many cases derivative ones (i.e. subsidiary organizations established by larger parent organizations). Therefore, numerous studies have developed their own lists of regional organizations which correspond to the narrower and more precise definitions present in the literature (e.g. Haftel and Thompson 2006; Vogly et al. 2008; Goertz and Powers 2014; Gray and Slapin 2012; Hooghe and Marks 2015). The dataset we use was built as a combination of both approaches: the regional organizations have been extracted from both the WTO database and the formal intergovernmental organizations (FIGO) database by Vogly et al. (2008), which in turn is based on the Correlates of War. For our purposes, we exclude all WTO-based entries which contain pure trade agreements without organizational structure (many of them are agreements signed by the EU and other countries), as well as a number of regional organizations under negotiation which have been included in the dataset already. This leaves us with fifty-four regional organizations (also referred to as regional integration projects) located in various parts of the world—Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific. For the study of the historical evolution of NDROs, we will expand this dataset by a number of groupings which had ceased to exist by the early 2010s. The full list of regional organizations is reported in the Appendix.

4.4. CONCLUSION This chapter has outlined the methodological background and research design of the book that helps to navigate a reader through the following empirical chapters. Summing up, the book proceeds as follows. First, Chapters 5–7 uses quantitative analysis (large-N study) to single out a new type of regional organization—a non-democratic organization at a world-wide level. The quantitative analysis identifies the main regularities in the differences between democratic and non-democratic regional organizations world-wide. Next, the N-large study focuses on the membership and governance of regional organizations all over the world and also provides some evidence of a link between membership and the tenure of authoritarian leaders. In the second part of the book, we step down from the world level to look into a specific region— Eurasia. This part of the book focuses on three cases from this region where NDROs are particularly prolific and enjoy very high public attention (postSoviet Eurasia). This part of the book studies the effect of regional organizations on authoritarian consolidation in more detail and identifies causal

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mechanisms. Following the concurrent research design outlined in Section 4.1, the chapters take advantage of a mixed-method approach: they combine qualitative and quantitative methods. This approach allows us to provide some evidence concerning the less transparent impacts of NDROs, that is, the effects which do not manifest themselves in high-profile events but are instead associated with the day-to-day functioning of these organizations. Most importantly, the book does not imply that Eurasian regionalism is a “typical” case and hence we do not intend to generalize lessons learned from Eurasia to any other regional organization. Instead, the book claims that Eurasia is a region where, due to the importance of its regional organizations, their possible effects on political regimes could be particularly pronounced and thus more easily observed. For the quantitative analysis, we use a broad dataset including more than fifty regional organizations in different parts of the world (which we also expand to cover historical data). Empirically, we define an NDRO by looking at the political regimes of the member states. We operationalize the concept of a non-democratic regional organization in two ways: one based on the regime of an average member country, and one focusing on the political regime of the leading state. Chapters 5 and 6 will demonstrate the main findings we obtained using the quantitative data at a world-wide level. As usual, quantitative evidence should be interpreted as evidence of correlation rather than causation. Yet the results in Chapters 5 and 6 unambiguously confirm the existence of a new previously unidentified type of regional organization—a non-democratic regional organization. This new type of regionalism exhibit characteristics differentiating them from all other regional organizations and making this class of regional organizations worthy of detailed analysis.

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5 Membership and Governance This chapter reports the first results of our large-N analysis. In particular, we look at the democratic and non-democratic regional organizations and compare them in terms of their membership and governance structures using a number of indicators. Our findings indeed demonstrate that the predominance of non-democratic members (or the presence of a non-democracy at the core of the regional organization) is associated with substantial differences in terms of how the regional organization functions. These findings are in line with our theoretical predictions. Importantly, we acknowledge that the largeN analysis of this chapter provides primarily correlational evidence; we do not claim that we can interpret the links we report as causal. Yet, as discussed in Chapter 4, our findings are still important, as they confirm the distinctiveness of the type of NDRO. NDROs then deserve to be analyzed more thoroughly in terms of their policy effects—in particular their effects on the political regimes of their member states.

5.1. PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS While Chapter 4 introduced an empirical operationalization of the concept of NDROs, we start this chapter with a number of preliminary observations about how widespread NDROs are in the contemporary universe of regional organizations. To begin, Figure 5.1 reports the distribution of the average Polity IV score of the regional organizations included in our sample (the figure is a kernel density estimate using Epanenchnikov kernel function). The distribution is characterized by the presence of a single mode corresponding to the value of the score equal to 5 (democratic countries). On average, the score is equal to 3.3. Thus, the majority of regional organizations in our dataset belong to the group of democratic organizations. However, there is a substantial

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Kernel density estimate .08

Density

.06

.04

.02

0 –10

–5

0

5

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mean_p~y kernel = epanechnikov, bandwidth = 1.7770

Figure 5.1. Distribution of the average Polity IV score of the ROs

group of NDROs with a negative average Polity IV score of their members. NDROs are therefore widely present in the modern world.¹ In our dataset, we find thirteen regional organizations which can be identified as non-democratic.² They seem to be concentrated in two parts of the world: post-Soviet Eurasia (CIS, Russia–Belarus–Kazakhstan Customs Union, Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), and SCO); and the Middle East (Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), Greater Arab Free Trade Area (GAFTA), League of Arab States (LAS), Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), and GCC). Many of these organizations have overlapping memberships. Three organizations are located in Africa (Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), and Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD)), and one (the Mekong River Group) in Southeast Asia.

¹ Interestingly enough, if we used the FH data, we would obtained somewhat different results. In this case, the average RO score is 3.8, which corresponds to the “partly free” category. The distribution, however, is bimodal: there is a peak between the scores 3 and 4 and between the scores 5 and 6. These two peaks imply the existence of two distinct types of regional organizations. The difference could be driven by Polity IV assigning a somewhat higher score to some of the autocracies that are particularly active in establishing regional organizations, such as Russia. See details in the Appendix. ² We also include regional organizations with an average Polity IV score equal to 0.

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Figure 5.2. Member countries of NDROs according to the average Polity IV index

These observations highlight two regions of the world where NDROs may be particularly important—one of these (Eurasia) will be at the core of the qualitative investigation of our study. Note further that ALBA—the Bolivarian Alliance, formed by Venezuela in Latin America and frequently discussed in the context of the studies of NDROs—is, according to the Polity IV, not nondemocratic, although it is close to it (with the average index equal to 2.2). Similarly, several African groupings (including the African Union itself) have an average Polity IV score which is positive but e very, indicating that they may be close to the NDROs. Figure 5.2 presents the geographical scope of NDROs according to Polity IV. Turning to our second definition of NDROs (through the political regime of the leading country), Figure 5.3 exhibits the distribution of the political regimes of the leading countries of the regional organizations. Again, it should be remembered that while in some cases the leading state’s dominance is unquestionable, in others its control over the regional organization may be open to dispute. However, comparing Figures 5.1 and 5.3 we do observe a striking difference: the average Polity IV score of the leading country of a regional organization is higher than the average Polity IV score of the regional organization itself. There are several explanations for this phenomenon. One of them (discussed in greater detail in Chapters 2 and 3) is that for smaller countries it is much more challenging to join a regional organization controlled by a nondemocratic leader than one dominated by a democracy because of the lack of credible commitments and risk of manipulation. Another explanation is that joining a regional organization headed by a democracy can be attractive for smaller countries: first because this type of regional organization generally enjoys a higher level of recognition in the international community, and

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Kernel density estimate .08

Density

.06

.04

.02

0 –10

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heg_po~y kernel = epanechnikov, bandwidth = 2.4834

Figure 5.3. Distribution of political regimes of the leading countries of ROs according to Polity IV

second because membership can signal the commitment of the country to certain policies, and thus attract foreign investors. While non-democracies are frequent in the modern world, from the normative perspective, with very few exceptions (such as the Gulf monarchies, North Korea, Iran, China, or Cuba), democracy is universally accepted as the normative yardstick: this is why many modern non-democracies hide themselves behind a façade of democratic (although faked) elections and legal institutions imitated from democracies. But it also means that if a regional organization is headed by a democratic state, it is typically considered to be much more respectable and recognized as such world-wide. It also means higher positive effects for the legitimacy of the national politicians by joining this regional organization.³ However, several regional organizations led by non-democracies exist in the modern world. If we look at the binary score of whether the leading country of a regional organization is democratic or not, according to Polity IV we can list fourteen regional organizations where the leading country is a non-democracy. Many are located in the Middle East (LAS, GCC, GAFTA, and OAPEC). The only group from Eurasia is the SCO—this is because, as mentioned, Polity IV made the somewhat questionable decision not to treat ³ Certainly, there are countries which will not be admitted to democracy-led regional organizations—for them an NDRO may be the only remaining option to gain legitimacy—but if the option to join a DRO is present, it is most likely to be very attractive for the country.

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the Russia of the early 2010s as an autocracy (the SCO, however, is classified as an NDRO). ALBA also appears on the list of regional organizations with a non-democratic hegemon, as do many African organizations (including the African Union itself). Finally, the list includes three groups with an extremely heterogeneous membership: APEC (discussed in Chapter 3; in this case China has the highest CINC, but it would be far-fetched to claim that it really dominates this regional organization); the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (a group of four countries—Chile, New Zealand, Singapore, and Brunei—where Singapore is technically the country with the highest CINC, but is again clearly not a hegemon); and the Caribbean Community CARICOM (for which Polity IV simply does not report the democracy scores for the majority of countries). Figure 5.4 presents a map of the world indicating the members of the NDROs according to this criterion (excluding APEC, CARICOM, and the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement).⁴ Summing up, in the early 2010s, while the majority of regional organizations were democratic, NDROs still formed a formidable group of organizations, particularly widespread in Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa—in other parts

Figure 5.4. Member countries of NDROs according to the Polity IV index of the leading country ⁴ If we look at the FH data, in fifteen regional organizations the democracy score of the leading country is six or seven (i.e. we can without doubt classify it as a non-democracy)—as against twenty-seven groups where the democracy score of the leading country is 1, 2, or 3 (i.e. clearly democratic). Among the NDROs according to the FH definition, we again find the Middle East groupings, but also most Eurasian groupings (FH clearly classifies Russia as an autocracy), and a handful of African organizations. In this case, APEC still remains a questionable case, and there is another case which potentially requires further clarification: that of Black Sea Economic Cooperation (BSEC) (in the Black Sea region, Russia is the country with the largest military potential, but this does not translate into unambiguous influence over other countries— many of them are part of the EU and of NATO, which shields them from the impact of Russia).

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of the world their presence was negligible. While African NDROs rarely have a substantial impact in terms of world policy, the Eurasian NDROs are of relevance beyond the scope of their respective regions—and therefore deserve significant attention.

5.2. INDICATORS However, while, we still have not shown whether our group of NDROs are in fact distinguishable from the democratic regional organizations according to their membership, governance, and policy outcomes. To find out whether differences are present, we will compare the non-democratic and the democratic regional organizations in terms of a number of their characteristics. We have assembled a set of indicators, partly derived from the dataset we use and partly based on our own data collection. These are presented in this section. Membership: In terms of the membership of regional organizations, we concentrate our attention on the extent of the heterogeneity of members of NDROs compared to members of DROs. Heterogeneity, in turn, is captured by four characteristics: politics, income, power, and culture. First, we look at the standard deviation of three variables across the members of the regional organization—political regimes proxies (Polity IV), income (GDP per capita), and power (captured by the CINC). Political regime heterogeneity is important because we define NDROs by looking at the average characteristics of these organizations. However, it is possible that, while being non-democratic or democratic on average, a regional organization may also include numerous countries with divergent political regimes. We intend to discover whether this divergence is more likely for NDROs than for DROs or vice versa. Similarly, we investigate economic heterogeneity (through the GDP per capita variation) and power asymmetry (through the CINC variation). Second, we also look at the cultural heterogeneity of NDROs vs. DROs. Finding an appropriate proxy for culture in large-N cross-country studies is not straightforward. Therefore, we applied an intuitive approach by looking at the religious heterogeneity of the member countries of the regional organization. The original dataset was augmented with an indicator built upon the World Religions Database (WRD, http://www.worldreligiondatabase.org/wrd_default.asp), which was constructed as follows. The WRD contains detailed data for the majority of the countries of the world, showing the share of their population belonging to different religious groups. In our analysis, we first attribute each of the countries to a particular religion, looking at which religion has the largest share of the country’s population (typically, the majority of the country’s population belongs to a

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particular religion, but in some cases the share of the dominant religion is less than 50 percent). In particular, we identify six religious groups: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and what one could refer to as the “Chinese syncretic religion”—the combination of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism typical for countries with a Chinese cultural background (China itself and Taiwan). We acknowledge that this division may hide important differences within religions (e.g. Orthodox vs. Catholic Christianity, or different confessions of Islam), but a world-wide study looking at more disaggregated data is problematic. Furthermore, we acknowledge that religious self-identification (as captured in the WRD) is different from religious practice—for us, however, the self-identification is important, since we are interested not in religion per se but rather in how it proxies for culture. Then we compute an index for each regional organization equal to the number of different “dominant religions” present among its countries. There is only one regional organization with more than three different religions present among its members (APEC)—almost a half of the regional organizations (29 out of 54) include only countries of a particular dominant religion. This is not surprising since similar culture and institutions should promote regionalism (Feng and Genna 2003; Capanelli et al. 2009); our goal is, however, to understand whether or not this factor plays the same role for NDROs and DROs. We add a further variable to the four proxies of heterogeneity (economic, political, cultural, and power) and look at the number of member countries in NDROs vs. DROs. A large membership could be associated with a larger heterogeneity of preferences of the member countries, but it can also show how attractive it is for smaller states to join a particular type of regional organization (or how many states can be coerced into joining). We include only full members of regional organizations—associate members or observers are not counted. Governance characteristics: In identifying the governance characteristics of the regional organizations, we use data from Vinokurov et al. (2014) and create a set of dummy variables, considering which governance structures or institutions exist in a particular regional organization. Six of these are used: a council of heads of states and governments; a council of foreign affairs ministers; a council (or commission) of trade ministers; a commission (as an executive institution with legislative initiative); a commission with supranational authorities; and a parliamentary assembly. The first three institutions are more typical for regional organizations with a strong intergovernmental element in their governance system; a commission, on the contrary, is a step towards a supranational approach to governance. In regional organizations where councils of the heads of states play a crucial role, decision making is concentrated at the top of national political hierarchies; councils of ministers of trade and of ministers of foreign affairs make the decision making more bureaucratic. Finally, we include the presence of parliamentary assemblies

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because of considerations found in the literature. Existing research suggests that parliamentary assemblies may play an important role in linking decision making at the level of regional organization to the preferences of the countries’ general population and not merely to those of the elites. However, the impact of even the strongest assemblies, which are directly elected by the population, remains limited in most cases (Finizio et al. 2014). Many authoritarian states may be interested in creating parliamentary assemblies for symbolic reasons, to increase the legitimacy of the regional organization—but in this case the assemblies, as the national parliaments, remain under the strict control of the executive. The dataset we use also includes information on whether there is a central bank and a secretariat in the regional organization. We do not look at these institutions because in both cases we obtain very little variance. Central banks are, with the exception of the EU, present in regional organizations with a colonial legacy, where they were established in the colonial era and survived independence (e.g. in French colonies in Western and Central Africa and some organizations in the Caribbean). Thus, the presence or the absence of a central bank hardly captures the specifics of decision making in the democratic or non-democratic regional organizations. Secretariats, on the contrary, are present in almost all regional organizations—in fact, the existence of an organized governance body (a secretariat) is frequently seen as the key element defining an international organization and separating it from a mere international agreement. The data we apply also contains some information on the authority of the secretariats in terms of decision making—whether they have the right to suggest decisions, augment them, or veto them. However, in almost all cases we observe insufficient variation—the right of secretariats to veto decisions is present only in a handful of regional organizations. Therefore the analysis includes only one characteristic of the authority of secretariats, where the variation across countries is strong enough to allow for empirical analysis— we create a dummy for regional organizations where secretariats have the right to initiate decisions. This is an important step towards supranationality, since it gives the bureaucracy of the regional organization agenda-setting power— which, in turn, can play an important role in how the final decisions appear in general (Hartlapp et al. 2013); the neofunctionalist argument considering spillovers to be a key element of the logic of deepening integration is also based on the agenda-setting power of secretariats (Schmitter 2004).

5 . 3. R ES U L T S : M E M B E R S H I P The empirical analysis is based on a two-step procedure. In the first step, we compute correlation coefficients between the democracy scores of the

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regional organizations and the characteristics of the regional organizations presented above. Where we use a binary characteristic, or a binary definition of a regional organization as democratic or non-democratic, instead of the correlation coefficient, we use the t-test comparison. In the second step, we estimate multivariate regressions (ordinary least squares (OLS) for continuous dependent variables and logit for binary ones) to check how the characteristics of the regional organization are influenced by their democracy score, controlling for a number of covariates. The first approach is helpful given the small size of the sample, which results in substantial loss of degrees of freedom if a multivariate regression is estimated. The second approach is important for dealing with possible spurious correlations due to the lack of important controls. To improve the exposition of our argument, detailed econometric tables reporting the results of the second step are given in the Appendix. Table 5.1 reports the results of the correlation analysis with respect to four dimensions of heterogeneity of the members of regional organizations. One can immediately see that there exist significant differences between democratic and non-democratic regional organizations on a number of dimensions (though, again, we do not interpret them as causal, simply correlational). While in DROs there is typically some sort of conditionality of membership

Table 5.1. NDROs and the heterogeneity of members Heterogeneity: Heterogeneity: Heterogeneity: Heterogeneity: Number democracy income power religion of members Correlation coefficients Average Polity IV −0.542*** score Polity IV score of −0.299** the leader Difference of the means Average member 1.496** is not democratic vs. average member is democratic (Polity IV) Leader is not 1.091* democratic vs. leader is democratic (Polity IV)

0.022 −0.267*

0.071

−0.110

0.033

0.333**

−0.217

−0.234*

−0.019

−1.379

3553.77a

−0.034

4596.796**

−0.212***

Note: *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%. a significant in one-sided t-test.

0.404*

5.603**

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based on political institutions (e.g. in the EU), as in global international organizations political similarity is also an important trigger of membership; this does not seem to hold for NDROs. In terms of the political regimes, we have seen that NDROs exhibit larger regime heterogeneity than DROs. This finding can be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, it is possible that DROs have stricter admission requirements. The most obvious example is the EU, which, from the Copenhagen Criteria, requires member countries to be functioning democracies. There exists a large scholarly literature showing how this conditionality was instrumental in democracy promotion and diffusion in Central and Eastern Europe (e.g. Schimmelfenning and Sedelmeier 2004; Schimmelfennig and Scholz 2008). However, the EU is not the only organization which uses this approach: the membership of countries in a number of American (Organization of American States) and African (Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) or the African Union) organizations can be suspended if democratic procedures are violated (e.g. through a coup; see also Hellquist 2014); ECOWAS occasionally implements military interventions in these cases (Hartmann 2016). The willingness of democracies to cooperate only with democratic countries can, in turn, be driven by various considerations: it can be because of normative concerns (if the regional organization commits itself to democracy promotion—as, again, the EU does) or because existing members are uneasy about possible violations in the common decisionmaking procedures if non-democracies are admitted. As a result, entry into such DROs is available only for democracies. However, this does not mean that all democracies will automatically be admitted—other factors (such as economic considerations or concerns about cultural heterogeneity) play a role as well, and therefore for some democracies the option to join an NDRO, in spite of all the concerns about the credibility of commitments we have discussed, becomes an attractive option. On the other hand, NDROs are less restrictive in their membership criteria. First, unlike the DROs, they are rarely driven by any normative concerns in their admission policies—as mentioned in Chapter 3, in the modern world most non-democracies are not usually ideological. While there may be some exceptions (such as the Arab monarchies of the Gulf or the ALBA), for postSoviet Eurasia, Africa, and many of the Middle East groups, a common ideology does not determine admission in any form. Second, unlike DROs, NDROs may be less concerned about the incompatibility of regimes in their decision making. This is because non-democracies often revisit commitments once made (even if it implies certain costs for them), unlike democracies, where revising commitments may be punished by the general population (audience costs; see Fearon 1994; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2012) or can be difficult because of the multiplicity of veto players (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999). As a result, even if an organization makes decisions it is

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dissatisfied with or finds itself in deadlock, non-democracies will simply act unilaterally. The literature on authoritarian peace, which was discussed in Chapter 2, indeed supposes that cooperation between non-democracies may be more successful than for mixed groups of democracies and nondemocracies, but other benefits associated with broader membership (e.g. growing international recognition or accessing the resources of the regional organization) may outweigh these costs. Furthermore, for non-democracies a decision to join or not to join a regional organization is frequently based on direct contact between leaders rather than the nature of institutions. In what follows, we will show that this factor does indeed play a crucial role in the governance of the NDROs as well. Furthermore, we find some (relatively weak) evidence that NDROs are more heterogeneous in terms of their religious composition than DROs (This result was established only for one of the definitions of NDROs using the Polity IV data; however, if we used the FH score, this result was observed for most of the indicators used). This finding, again, allows for several interpretations. First, it may represent the importance of public opinion in DROs, as opposed to NDROs. The experience of the decade-long negotiations about Turkey’s admission to the EU, which we referred to in Chapter 3, shows how difficult it is for the public in a DRO to accept the inclusion of countries perceived as having a cultural identity that is clearly different from the rest of the countries in the group. In non-democracies, public opinion may be less relevant or easier to manipulate, and this is why leaders can decide to include countries with different cultural backgrounds in a regional organization. Second, the heterogeneity may again reflect the willingness of the leaders of non-democratic countries to operate in an environment with low credibility of commitments. Cultural heterogeneity typically makes it more difficult for the parties to understand each other and thus reduces the level of trust. For democratic leaders, this may be a prohibitively difficult problem to resolve for cooperation. For non-democratic leaders, a low level of trust may be the environment they are used to. Finally, DROs may be more selective in admitting members because they are generally more attractive and more legitimate in the modern world—NDROs may be forced to operate with whichever countries are willing to join. A related observation is that regional organizations with a democratic leader have fewer members than regional organizations with a nondemocratic leader. Most likely, this again refers to the heterogeneity aversion of DROs. However, it may also show that in a DRO the process of admitting new members is subject to an intensive and complex social debate, while in an NDRO it can be made by a handful of members of a political elite in an unpredictable fashion. Similarly, non-democratic countries also revise their membership of a regional organization very quickly. We will, for example, show how the evolution of the membership of the EAEU occured—some of

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the potential candidate countries (Armenia, and Ukraine under President Yanukovych) made unpredictable moves and occasionally changed their attitude towards membership, and the same applied to the position of Uzbekistan towards the predecessor organization of the EAEU—the EurAsEC. At the same time, NDROs pay less attention to whether the preconditions for membership are fulfilled: they admit countries which are strikingly different from the rest of the membership, or even those in which the commitment to membership is not clear enough. In many cases, it backfires: thus, admitting Uzbekistan to the EurAsEC made the functioning of the organization substantially more difficult, because Uzbekistan systematically blocked any attempts to advance the integration agenda (see Chapter 10). An even more prominent example was a poorly designed United Arab Republic, a union state including Egypt and Syria, which collapsed a year after it was established. In terms of power asymmetry, one results stands out: regional organizations with a democratic leader have a higher power asymmetry than those with a non-democratic leader. This is compatible with our theoretical argument of Chapter 4. There are two explanations for this result. First, it may reflect the fear of manipulation. We have already indicated that the leading country in the regional organization may abuse its dominant position to extract rents at the cost of smaller countries. The willingness of smaller countries to join the regional organization then depends on the likelihood of this manipulation (Stone 2011). If there is high power asymmetry, manipulation is substantially more likely than if most members have a relatively similar power potential. For a non-democratic leader with low credibility of commitments, smaller countries may also be more concerned about manipulation. As a result, if the leading country is non-democratic (and thus creates high risks of manipulation anyway), smaller countries may agree to join the regional organization only if the power gap is sufficiently small. Stated otherwise, for a democratic leading country, the main precaution against manipulation could be its institutional setup; for a non-democratic leading country, institutions cannot prevent manipulation, and the smaller countries have to rely on structural features, due to the low power asymmetry. Concerns about manipulation play a different role in regional organizations depending on the exit options available to their member countries. If the leading country can coerce smaller countries to join, they will have to comply regardless of the risk of manipulation—this is what happened in the early NDROs, which were based on brute force. In the modern world, outright coercion is rather rare; more often, smaller countries have at least some degree of freedom in deciding whether or not they want to join. Second, the decision to create a regional organization may be associated with the willingness of smaller countries to “tie the hands” of a large country. This is because any regional organization institutionalizes the regional decision-making process, as well as making it multilateral: both of these features weaken the power of the leading country in a way that informal

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bilateral negotiations would not do. The famous quote of Hastings Ismay describes it as one of the main tasks of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) to “keep Germans down,” that is, to prevent unilateral actions by the German leadership.⁵ It is debatable, however, whether this mechanism can actually function in all cases. In particular, if the leading country is nondemocratic, creating an institutional decision-making process does not necessarily restrain it—non-democracies should find it easy to withdraw from such a decision-making process at any time. While a regional organization can still limit them to some extent (e.g. by making the leading country implement substantial investments with large sunk costs), its effectiveness in this respect will be lower than for a democratic leading country. But it also means that smaller countries should be less inclined to support such a regional organization, because their benefit from it is less. In fact, there exists an interesting discussion about the power asymmetry and political relations between countries of post-Soviet Eurasia (D’Anieri 1997), which shows that in this part of the world the logic of “tying the hands of the hegemon” (Russia) was substantially less attractive for smaller states. The results of the multivariate analysis are reported in the Appendix. We use the following variables as the main controls. First, we control for GDP per capita, which is a proxy for the economic development of the countries of a regional organization: it is likely to affect their heterogeneity as well (also, for purely technical reasons, groupings of countries with larger GDPs per capita may be characterized by a wider deviation on this parameter). As an alternative, we regress the dependent variable on the GDP of the group. This indicator, however, is less helpful as it conflates two different factors influencing the heterogeneity of the group: its size and the level of economic development. The second control is population: this is a proxy for the size of the regional organization and is again more likely to go hand in hand with heterogeneity. Third, we control for the year the regional organization was established, which can indicate the extent to which the member countries have had a chance to develop closer ties to one another during their membership of the organization, which could be significant if there is wide heterogeneity. The first two variables are from Vinokurov et al. (2014); the third variable is from Vinokurov and Libman (2017). Most of our results are confirmed, though we find no evidence that NDROs have higher religious heterogeneity (again, using FH instead of Polity IV, we confirmed this finding even using multivariate regressions). Summing up, our observations highlight that the NDROs are indeed different from DROs in terms of their membership. They are, on the one hand, more heterogeneous in terms of politics, income, and culture (the first finding ⁵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings_Ismay,_1st_Baron_Ismay#cite_note-194, accessed July 20, 2018.

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is robust to almost all alterations; the second finding is somewhat less robust; and the third is robust only using FH data being only sporadically found using the Polity IV data). On the other hand, if the leader of a regional organization is a non-democracy, the organization is more likely to be less asymmetric in terms of power. Thus, while non-democratic leaders are more inclined to exercise the option of manipulation, they are not often given chance to do so: large power asymmetry precludes smaller countries from joining an NDRO in the first place, if they have a choice. A typical DRO includes a handful of carefully selected and homogenous members in terms of how decisions are made (with similar institutions and political systems, as well as informal behavioral patterns), but some of these members may be substantially more powerful than others (the extreme examples are two North American regional organizations—NAFTA and Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA)—with the US being the unambiguously dominant country in both of them). NDROs, on the other hand, are heterogeneous in terms of their participants, but more balanced in terms of power—because of the mistrust other countries have towards an excessively strong nondemocratic leader.

5.4. RESULTS: GOVERNANCE Table 5.2 summarizes the results of the correlation analysis of the differences between the democratic and non-democratic regional organizations with respect to their governance structures. We look only at continuous metrics separating democratic regional organizations from the non-democratic organizations, and compute the difference of means of the level of democracy of the regional organization for different groups of regional organizations in Table 5.2. NDROs and the governance of regional organizations

Council of the heads of states Council of ministers of foreign affairs Council of ministers of trade Commission Commission with supranational authorities Parliamentary assembly Secretariat with the right to initiate decisions

Average Polity IV score

Polity IV score of the leader

−4.356*** 0.544 2.852** −0.796 −0.504 −0.194 −0.920

−5.071*** −1.377 1.117 0.122 0.180 0.257 0.977

Note: *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%. The table reports differences in the mean democracy scores for ROs with and without respective governance characteristics.

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terms of their governance structures—this approach appears to be more intuitive in terms of the interpretation of statistical results. The results in this case are much more consistent over various indicators of democracy and various ways of defining an NDRO than in the previous analysis. For all indicators, we find that the NDROs are more likely to have a council of heads of states and governments as the key decision-making body than the DROs. This is in line with our theoretical predictions: in NDROs the level of direct contact between political leaders should be much higher than that of any other of the organization’s institutions. In many cases, the leaders of non-democratic countries are reluctant to delegate even limited authority to the bureaucracy of the supranational organization or even to the national bureaucracies engaged in negotiations over the regional organization. Political leaders find it crucial to maintain control over most decisions to themselves. Indeed, in many non-democracies the emergence of even limited areas where control by the political leadership is not absolute can be seen as a signal of weakness, one potentially affecting the behavior of bureaucrats and politicians in other areas as well. In the case of a democratic regional organization, the emergence of such an area of limited control is likely—a decision-making body has to consider the positions and opinions of different countries, and thus bureaucrats working in this institution are forced to search for consensus with their colleagues from other countries, potentially deviating from the preferences of the leaders. The leaders reserve the right to determine the boundaries of consensus with other countries.⁶ Similarly, we also find that NDROs are less likely to have a council of trade ministers. This finding may be associated with the mistrust of the political leaders towards bureaucrats, but also with the generally lower importance assigned to the trade issues by NDROs as opposed to the other functions an organization (even one officially created to govern trade) can exercise. We find no differences in the presence of executive commissions (with and without supranational authorities) in the democratic and non-democratic regional organizations—this is probably because strong supranational institutions are, generally, exceptional in the regional organizations. In the qualitative case study of the EAEU we will show, however, that in some cases NDROs create functioning supranational institutions (although with substantial limitations), but we will also discuss the conditions under which this may happen (Chapter 10). Finally, an interesting observation is that both democratic and non-democratic regional organizations are equally likely to create interparliamentary assemblies.

⁶ Our results are also consistent with the argument of Davis (2012) that informal agreements become more difficult in the presence of democratic checks and balances; in NDROs, where such democratic checks and balances are absent, informal interaction may become the most important element of decision making, and high-level forums (such as councils of heads of state) are particularly suitable for this type of interaction.

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If we looked at the binary proxies of the NDROs, we would find that the parliamentary assemblies are created in about half the NDROs according to the Polity IV indicator vs. one third of the DROs according to this metric— but the difference is still insignificant. As mentioned, in almost all regional organizations these institutions play an essentially ceremonial role and have a limited impact on decision making. However, it is possible to hypothesize that democratic and non-democratic regional organizations use these institutions for different purposes. For the DROs, parliamentary assemblies matter since they improve the legitimacy of the supranational organizations vis-à-vis their domestic population—they create a channel through which elected parliamentarians can, at least to some extent, participate in the development of the regional organization. In NDROs, legitimacy is obtained vis-à-vis external parties—other countries, which then view the functioning of the regional organization as conforming more to the democratic blueprint accepted almost universally in the modern world as the normative benchmark. Furthermore, parliamentary assemblies provide ample opportunities for rent-seeking for the politicians involved. In the Appendix, we summarize the results of the multivariate analysis. We use the same set of controls as in the previous section, but do not report the point estimates for space reasons. The regressions are estimated using logit. The findings are mostly the same as in the case of the correlation analysis.

5.5. CONCLUSION It remains to sum up the main observations of this chapter. Our analysis has revealed that the democratic and the non-democratic regional organizations indeed have a number of distinctive features, which make it necessary to analyze them separately from each other and to develop a theory explaining the behavior and the functioning of NDROs—something which is currently missing from the literature. NDROs, according to our analysis, share three important characteristics. First, they are much more heterogeneous in terms of political regimes and culture than DROs. While, on average, their members are non-democratic, they also include more democratic and less democratic countries. Second, they are based on a lower level of power asymmetry between the leading state and the smaller states. Third, the direct interaction of the political leaders is more important for their governance than is the case in DROs, where many decisions are delegated to lower-level bureaucracies. We have provided two main explanations for these features. On the one hand, they may be associated with the preferences of the non-democratic countries regarding the optimal governance mode and the admission of members. They seem to fit the typical picture of a modern autocracy—with a weak ideological

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foundation and the predominance of informal politics behind the façade of imitated democratic procedures. On the other hand, the willingness of countries to join NDROs with certain characteristics may be lower than their willingness to join DROs with the same features. Our analysis furthermore confirmed that while DROs form the majority of regional organizations in the modern world, NDROs are still a well-defined and rather substantial group of regional organizations, particularly present in the Middle East and in post-Soviet Eurasia (though there are some examples of NDROs in Africa and individual cases in Asia and Latin America). Interestingly enough, some of our results suggest that an average member of a regional organization appears to be somewhat less democratic than an average country in the world. Of course, the comparison should be made with caution (especially as many countries belong to numerous regional organizations at the same time), but the finding still indicates that non-democracies may consider the creation of regional organizations particularly attractive. In order to understand the possible benefits of regionalism for non-democratic countries, we will first augment our discussion by a quantitative large-N analysis, which is presented in Chapter 6.

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6 Impact on World Politics and Economy 6.1. EMPIRICAL APPROACH AND I NDICATORS In this chapter, we attempt to understand whether DROs differ from NDROs in terms of their economic and social impact. Generally speaking, we use the same approach as in Chapter 5: we look at a number of political, economic, and social indicators and attempt to compare democratic and non-democratic regional organizations using the concepts we introduced in Chapter 4. We have, once again, to be particularly cautious in terms of the causality while interpreting our observations in this chapter: it is possible that countries exhibit certain growth patterns because they become part of an NDRO, but it is also plausible that NDROs, as opposed to DROs, admit only countries with certain growth patterns. We will therefore discuss our findings carefully and try to identify which direction of causality appears to be the more plausible. We will look at a number of indicators of the possible effects of NDROs (all variables are extracted from the same dataset that we used in Chapter 5). First, how do NDROs influence the development of economic ties between members? Economic integration has been considered one of the crucial tasks of many regional organizations in the world, partly because many of them have been designed following the “global script” of the EU (Jupille et al. 2013), which emphasizes economic cooperation. In particular, we consider (i) the share of intra-regional trade in the overall trade turnover; (ii) the share of intra-regional foreign direct investment in the overall inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI); and (iii) the share of emigrants from other countries within the regional organization in the total number of emigrants into these countries. The first of these variables is the most frequently used to compare regional organizations in terms of their economic integration. The second and the third variables are applied less frequently, particularly because the quality of data for FDI and for migration is much lower than for trade. Although there are obvious omissions in the trade statistics as well, the main problem for FDI data is that a substantial part of the investment flow is directed through offshore jurisdictions, making it difficult to identify its origin. Migration in many parts of the world has a very large informal component,

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which is also difficult to capture statistically. However, in some cases NDROs can exhibit greater differences when compared to the DROs in terms of investment and migration flows—thus, we look at these variables as well, although we acknowledge that they are imperfect. A second variable concerns the political relations between the countries of regional organizations: we give a dummy equal to 1 for regional organizations where some countries are, as of now, in a state of military conflict or civil war or are close to a military confrontation, and 0 otherwise. In the developing world, it is not unusual for the regional organizations to include countries with tense political relations. In the CIS, for example, Armenia and Azerbaijan have been on the verge of war over Nagorny Karabakh since the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time of writing, there are no political or trade relations between these two countries. Similarly, Ukraine did not leave the CIS in spite of the military hostilities between this country and Russia. In Africa, IGAD has had to deal with the ongoing civil war in Somalia, which in fact was one of the reasons for the revival of this organization (Weber 2015), and in Southern Asia the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has been overshadowed by on-going confrontation between India and Pakistan (Dash 1996). In many cases, the creation of regional organizations has been driven expressly by the willingness of countries to eliminate conflict or to provide a platform for dialog—with varying results. We intend to clarify whether the democratic and the non-democratic regional organizations differ in this respect as well.

6.2. EMPIRICAL RES ULTS Table 6.1 reports the correlation analysis. The first and most obvious observation we can make is that DROs exhibit a higher level of trade integration than NDROs—the intra-regional trade share in DROs exceeds that of NDROs. This result, however, is not robust to the exclusion of the EU, which, of course, stands out as an example of extremely deep economic integration among its member states. Still, the EU appears to be the case which confirms rather than subverts the general theoretical pattern. DROs may be more successful than NDROs in ensuring trade integration for various reasons. First, trade integration benefits from common rules and the removal of barriers between countries. The creation of these rules necessarily reduces the rents available for appropriation by individual bureaucrats and politicians. Bader et al. (2010) show that the logic of joint rent-seeking is important in explaining the pattern of cooperation among autocracies. From this point of view, when creating a regional organization, authoritarian states should show less interest in reducing the opportunities for rent-seeking for their elites and bureaucracies, and

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Table 6.1. Economic and political effects of NDROs Intra-regional trade Correlation coefficients Average Polity IV score Polity IV score of the leader Difference of the means Average member is not democratic vs. average member is democratic (Polity IV) Leader is not democratic vs. leader is democratic (Polity IV)

Intra-regional FDI

Intra-regional migration

Conflicts

−0.098 0.017

−0.105 −0.109

−0.199

0.657

0.056

4.306

−3.668

0.139

0.300** −0.003

0.277** −0.078

−2.693

−0.102

Note: *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%. a one-sided t-test significant.

therefore barriers to trade will persist in one form or another (this, to some extent, also applies to the internal markets of autocracies). Second, authoritarian states may use control over foreign trade as a tool of political leverage against business; in this case, again, they will be very cautious about giving it up. The possibility of reverse causality in this particular case cannot be excluded. Mattli (1999) shows that the demand for regionalism becomes stronger if trade ties between countries are more intensive, because business interests benefit more from open borders, favorable conditions for economic exchange, and common regulatory frameworks. Libman and Vinokurov (2018), however, suggest that this logic applies only to democracies, not to authoritarian states. Indeed, in non-democracies the general role of business interests and any demand for integration by private actors is less influential on political decision making. Even where NDROs do succeed in liberalizing cross-border trade (the case of the EAEU we investigate in this book is a good example of this), they typically make their decisions almost entirely without any coordination or communication with private business, which is forced to accept the reality of the new regulatory framework. That is why, possibly, countries with intensive trade ties are more likely to form a regional organization—Krugman (1991) refers to such organizations as a “natural trade bloc”—if they are democratic, but not if they are non-democracies. The results for FDI are similar to those for trade. For migration, we find no results using the Polity IV indicator: however, if we use the FH indicator, we find that the average FH score of a regional organization is positively correlated with the extent of migration ties. Thus, for the Freedom House data, migration is more intensive in NDROs than in DROs. The correlation coefficient is equal to 0.282 and is significant at the 5 percent level (note that FH

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assigns higher values to less democratic countries, so that positive correlation implies that fewer DROs have higher levels of migration integration). Although, as mentioned, our preferred metric of the political regime is Polity IV, the result is still novel and interesting. While we could have explained the lack of trade integration in NDROs by reference to the general problems autocracies face in terms of public goods production (Deacon 2009), migration flows, obviously, follow a different logic. In our opinion, there could be two explanations for this result. First, NDROs—as we have already stated—are more insulated from the pressure of public opinion than DROs. In democracies, the issue of migration is politically very sensitive and typically causes a lot of discussion. Even in the EU, which has achieved significant progress in liberalizing labor markets, the issue of internal migration remains one the public is very skeptical about, and it is constantly exploited by populist parties (Treib 2014). In other DROs, governments do not dare to approach this problem at all. In non-democratic countries, however, governments may proceed with the liberalization of migration regimes even in the face of public concern. In Eurasia, Russia keeps its borders open for migrants from neighboring CIS countries in spite of the very high levels of xenophobia in its society (Schenk 2010). The incentive for liberalizing migration could come from the way negotiations between partners in the regional organization are structured—for example, some countries may be very interested in opening up the labor markets of other countries for migrants, and in exchange will offer their support on other matters. The second explanation is to some extent even more interesting, since it reveals a rarely discussed mechanism of autocracy promotion within NDROs (see also Chapters 3 and 9). Most existing studies focus on how NDROs influence the regimes of their members through the direct interaction of their leaders and bureaucracies. Ambrosio (2014), however, points out that open borders and the movement of business can also have an influence on political regimes—for example, by providing access to foreign markets, an NDRO reduces the pressure to implement the reforms that a non-democratic country would otherwise face. Open borders for migrants can also become an implicit mechanism for the stabilization of autocratic regimes. As mentioned, NDROs are heterogeneous in terms of their regimes—they typically include “more” and “less” democratic countries (sometimes even consolidated democracies). If borders are open, migrants from “less” democratic countries can move to (somewhat) more democratic countries if they are dissatisfied with the political situation at home. Thus, instead of protesting against the existing regime, they leave the country, relieving the pressure the regime faces. In the CIS, Belarus has benefited significantly from the constant migration of more active social groups to Russia. Similarly, some other autocracies (such as Russia or, to some extent, Iran) allow emigration to the West of those who would potentially threaten the regime. From this point of view, NDROs, as

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opposed to DROs, may have particularly strong incentives to promote open borders.¹ In this case, reverse causality is less likely to pose a serious problem. If the intensity of migration is already high, it should create a strong demand for regionalism (from those benefiting from migration flows, the members of the newly formed cross-border networks, and those willing to “regulate” migration) in democracies and in autocracies alike. Therefore, it should not be able to explain the differences in the outcomes we observe. Hypothetically, in regions where migration is already very intensive, people may be more concerned about developing regionalism, and this would be more significant in democracies (which are more sensitive to public opinion) than in autocracies—but, with the exception of the refugee crises or very weak states, migration rarely reaches the level of political attention without the appropriate legal regimes, which typically emerges only if regional integration is pursued. However, as mentioned, because this result is obtained only for the FH data, and not for the Polity IV data, caution is required. Finally, we find no difference between democratic and non-democratic regional organizations in terms of the intensity of conflicts. This means that the proliferation of certain types of regime in the member countries of a regional organization does not affect its ability to deal with military disputes across its members and civil conflicts. This may be because these conflicts are either extremely deeply rooted (such as the Indo-Pakistani conflict or the Somalian civil war) and thus difficult (or maybe even impossible) to resolve, or are driven primarily by low state capacity rather than by the nature of the political regimes (at least in developing countries). In any case, while there seem to be some differences between non-democratic and democratic regional organizations in terms of their economic effects, no clear differences could have been observed for their influence on armed conflict. Another interesting observation is that all the effects we report are present only if we define the non-democratic and the democratic regional organizations according to the average level of democracy among their members. If we look at the level of democracy of the leading countries, no difference is observed (this also applies to the result for migration obtained using FH data). This result may imply that the effect is driven by the attitudes of smaller

¹ Certainly, we acknowledge the existence of an alternative strategy by the non-democratic regimes—to tighten up their control over their populations and to ensure that contacts outside the country are as limited as possible: the Cold War Soviet bloc countries (such as the USSR or the German Democratic Republic) followed this logic, as does modern-day Turkmenistan. However, if a country is concerned about the contact of its population with the outside world, it will be very cautious about creating or joining an RO in the first place. Turkmenistan, for example, declared itself an “observer” in the CIS and is the least active country in terms of the development of this regional organization—partly to avoid the risk of “contagion” from foreign ideas (see Chapter 9).

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countries rather than those of the larger ones. Indeed, smaller countries typically benefit more from international trade, and therefore should be more interested in open borders (in democracies) Smaller countries also gain more in terms of the emigration of their dissidents to larger countries (which are additionally more attractive targets for emigration) in nondemocracies. This effect may indicate that explaining the differences between non-democratic and democratic regional organizations entirely in terms of the preferences of the leaders may be too simplistic; it is necessary to focus on the entire set of countries and the complex bargaining between them (in the qualitative case studies, we will confirm this argument—the development of the SCO, the EAEU, and the CIS cannot be explained entirely by the preferences of Russia). In the Appendix, we report the results of the multivariate analysis. The findings are less robust than in the case of the membership characteristics. We still find some evidence that DROs are characterized by higher trade integration than NDROs. For FDI and migration, no consistent results are obtained.² There is also no correlation between the type of regional organization and the intensity of conflicts. Summing up, our discussion of the effects of NDROs vis-à-vis DROs leaves us with two important observations. First, NDROs are more likely to liberalize migration within the region (formally or—as is also very likely—to tolerate de facto the deviations from the formal law and weaker enforcement of the migration regulations) than DROs (we again have to caution the reader about the statistical limitations associated with this result). Second, DROs are more advanced in terms of trade liberalization.

6.3. NON-DEMOCRATIC REGIONAL ORGANIZATIO NS AND DEMOCRA TIZATION Our empirical analysis has so far provided no direct tests for another crucially important issue: does membership in NDROs prevent or limit the process of democratization? In Chapter 2, we have shown that a large portion of the discussion regarding NDROs has so far been focused on the topic of autocracy promotion. In this book, studying the effects of membership in an NDRO on the likelihood of autocratic development using the large-N dataset ² For migration, we find no results even using the FH data (regression output available on request). This is most likely because here we control for age, and large migration flows are particularly important for young NDROs in the post-Soviet space (as our small-N analysis in the subsequent chapters will show, for these NDROs the logic presented above seems to be perfectly valid).

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is problematic, since NDROs are defined as regional organizations with non-democratic members—thus, we will indeed find that most members of NDROs are non-democracies simply by definition. A more careful analysis would imply that we look at particular NDROs (which we define ex ante as such) and study their effects on the politics of their member states. Because the specific mechanisms associated with authoritarian influence in each NDRO are different as well (and the variety of these mechanisms has been presented in Chapters 2 and 3), we implement this analysis for the three case studies of this book—the CIS, the EAEU, and the SCO—where we combine in-depth qualitative analysis with large-N studies using different approaches that are more suitable for each case. In terms of the large-N data we can, however, still make some interesting observations by using the duality of definition of NDROs in this book— through their membership and through their leading country. We can study whether the fact that the leading state of a regional organization is nondemocratic does indeed increase the probability that its other members are non-democratic as well. Figure 6.1 plots the correlation of the political regime of the leading country and of the average political regime score of the member countries (Polity IV). Two variables appear to be clearly correlated. If the leading country is non-democratic, most of the members are typically nondemocratic as well. There are a number of groups where this rule does not hold—but in most cases, these include either a situation when no leading country could be attributed (APEC) or where the classification of the leading 10

EFTA NC EU NAFTA UEB CEFTA Pacific Alliance CACM DR-CAFTA CEI

Average regime of the members

CBSS

APEC

CARICOM TPSEP/P4

BSEC

5 AU ALBA COMESAEAC

0

IGAD LAS

CEMAC

SCO CAEU, GAFTA

–5

CAN

LAES MERCOSUR ACS SPARTECA ACT SAARC SACU BIMSTEC SADC D8

ECOWASGUAM MSG WAEMU CEPGL NBA CILSS OMVS ASEAN OMVG LCBC ECCAS CIS MRC ECO EURASEC RBK CU

OAPEC

GCC

–10 –10

–5

0 Regime of the leader

5

10

Figure 6.1. Political regime of the leader and of the members of the RO (Polity IV)

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country is questionable (CIS, EurAsEC, and Customs Union). ALBA, however, is an interesting case of a regional organization with mostly democratic members, but a non-democratic leader (Venezuela). In the ECO the situation is the reverse (the largest country of the group—Turkey—is also almost the only democratic one, at least at the time of investigation of this study).³ Thus, we can claim that non-democratic leaders typically “unite” countries with predominantly non-democratic regimes and vice versa. This could indicate that non-democratic leaders use NDROs as a tool for promoting or at least supporting authoritarian regimes in their neighbors; but it could also imply that autocracies have a greater inclination to cooperate with authoritarian leading countries. In Chapters 2 and 3, we have already provided detailed arguments suggesting that both directions of causality are possible: in the subsequent case study chapters this research question is addressed in greater detail. The quantitative results, however, already allow us to eliminate an important factor of how NDROs could potentially influence the political regimes of their members. In the literature on the EU, the organization’s impact is primarily associated with the conditionality of foreign assistance (already mentioned) and, ultimately, conditionality of access. The recent cases of Hungary and Poland actually pioneered the discussion about the ability of the EU to support democratic regimes among the countries which have already joined the organization—the procedure allowing the EU to revisit the rule of law in its member states was first applied in 2016 with unclear consequences. In the case of NDROs, however, we can with a high degree of certainty conclude that it is not “conditionality of access” which is used for the “transplantation of governance” (Börzel and van Hüllen 2015). As we have mentioned, NDROs are characterized by the large heterogeneity of the political regimes of their members. Hence, democracies are “admitted” to NDROs as well as non-democratic states. The effect should be associated with the way that the NDRO influences countries already belonging to it—and we will examine this in the qualitative case studies of this book.

6. 4 . NDRO S AND THE SURV IVAL OF POLITICAL LEADERS The last step of our analysis tests the hypothesis developed in Chapter 3: that there is a link between membership in an NDRO and the longevity of rule of ³ If we use the FH data, we observe a clear positive correlation of the regime of the leader and of the members—there are some exceptions from this pattern (APEC, CARICOM, and BSEC, which we have already identified as special cases, as well as the Council of Baltic Sea States, where the only non-democratic member is Russia, which me is also the largest member and has by far the highest CINC).

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authoritarian leaders.⁴ In this consideration we do not face any problems because of our definition of NDROs: we simply compare the duration of tenure of autocrats whose countries were part of an NDRO, with that of autocrats who never belonged to one. Importantly, again, we are very cautious about the direction of causality: we cannot exclude that there are unobserved characteristics of the leaders, which drive them to NDRO membership and also affect the duration of their rule. However, we find the evidence of correlation to be thought-provoking and inviting further analysis (implemented in the small-N chapters, which can more closely unpack the causal mechanisms). Our analysis is based on merging three datasets. • First, for the set of leaders’ biographies, we use the Archigos dataset (Goemans et al. 2009), which contains detailed information on political leaders of the majority of countries of the world. We look only at leaders who came to power after 1950 (because this is the era when NDROs became numerous and relevant for our analysis).⁵ • Second, we use the Polity IV database to identify the set of leaders who can be treated as non-democratic. We classify as “non-democratic” leaders in the Archigos dataset who, for more than half their rule, had a negative Polity IV indicator (Polity IV, of course, can change during the rule of the autocrat, tracking both reform attempts and successful and unsuccessful revolutions, uprisings, and coups). The resulting dataset consists of 621 leaders, including those who were in power as late as the end of 2015—the end of the coverage of the Archigos dataset. The duration of their tenure varied substantially—while about one-third of the leaders stayed in power for less than a year, six leaders controlled their countries for more than 40 years (with Fidel Castro’s almost fifty-yearlong rule being the absolute record among autocrats who came to power after 1950). • Third, we use the database of NDROs we have already discussed above (more details on the expansion of the data towards past periods are given in Chapter 7). We identify as an NDRO a regional organization with an average Polity IV score of its members below or equal to 0 for several subsequent years. On the one hand, we opted for Polity IV because its definition of authoritarianism gives us a much more limited set of NDROs—as mentioned, utilizing FH data the majority of regional organizations would be classified as non-democratic. On the other hand, we

⁴ We appreciate the suggestion of Jon Pevehouse, who suggested we implement this analysis. ⁵ We exclude foreign military governors (e.g. Achigos identifies Paul Bremmer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, as the leader of Iraq after the US invasion in 2003—these types of observation are excluded from our data) but retain leaders who came to power with foreign support, such as Babrak Karmal after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

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Regionalism in the World of International Organizations need the restriction of several consecutive years to avoid the situation when an organization’s average Polity score is negative for just a couple of years because of a short-lived coup in one of the member countries— these regional organizations are unlikely to have a sustained effect on the political regimes or be used or even perceived by authoritarian leaders as NDROs.

We then create a dummy equal to 1 for leaders who ran a country which for more than half of their rule (in years) was a member of an NDRO, and 0 otherwise. We find that 61 percent of authoritarian leaders indeed ran a country belonging to an NDRO, while for 39 percent of the leaders no membership in an NDRO was established. Again, we stress that we are comparing authoritarian regimes with authoritarian regimes—our goal is to establish the additional effect membership in an NDRO has on a leader’s tenure. We compute the duration of tenure in years (using the Archigos data) and then apply the tools of durational analysis to establish the effect of NDRO membership. As is typical in this type of work, we start with non-parametric analysis simply by comparing the probability for a leader of a non-democratic country to lose office after a certain period in power, with or without NDRO membership. We then move on to multivariate analysis, where we identify the marginal effect of NDRO membership on the duration of a leaders’ rule, controlling for a set of other covariates. In particular, we add the following variables. First, we control for the leaders’ year of accession to power. It is possible that the duration of rule of leaders changes over time as part of the evolution of the global political system, and the control variable should account for this. Second, we control for the age of the leader at the moment he loses office (or as of 2015, where the ruler was still in power then). Age, obviously, matters for the duration of rule, both because of the obvious risks of natural death. It can also affect the quality of governance (Jong-a-Pin and Mierau 2011) for both rational reasons (older leaders may be more inclined to unrestricted rent-seeking, understanding that they have only few years left in office) and the declining cognitive capabilities of the leader. Third, we control for a dummy for communist regimes (which could have had a different political organization, affecting the tenure duration) and for a dummy for nations which, according to the World Religions Dataset, had an Islamic population of more than 40 percent (religion could matter substantially for the duration of tenure). Finally, we also run a regression controlling for the country dummies, thus attempting to capture all countryspecific, time-invariant effects influencing the tenure duration. In our first step, we look at the non-parametric analysis. Figure 6.2 reports the Kaplan–Meier survival function for leaders. The idea of this graph is to compare how likely a leader is, after a certain number of years, to still be in power. We plot the survival functions separately for leaders who ran countries

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Figure 6.2. Kaplan–Meier survival function for authoritarian leaders of countries belonging and not belonging to NDROs

belonging to NDROs (member = 1) and not belonging to NDROs (member = 0). The results speak for themselves. For almost any tenure duration, the likelihood of survival in office is higher for leaders who run countries belonging to NDROs than for those who do not (incidentally, the leader with the longest period in office—Fidel Castro—is classified as not belonging to NDRO, because the membership of Cuba in the COMECON lasted for less than half of his half-century-long rule). The long-rank test for the equality of the survival functions rejects the null hypothesis (that the survival functions are identical) at any reasonable level of significance. Thus, the first impression appears to be that membership in an NDRO indeed prolongs the tenure of a leader. We augment this graphical analysis by multivariate regressions. We run the Cox proportional hazard models and report regression coefficients rather than hazard ratios. We report the results of eight specifications. Regression (1) simply regresses the tenure duration on the dummy NDRO membership. Regression (2) adds the year when the dictator came to power to the set of controls. Regression (3) controls for the age of the dictator. Regression (4) substitutes this by the year of birth: potentially, we need to check for possible age cohort effects in terms of rule practices resulting in higher or lower survival probability. Regressions (5)–(7) add dummies for communist regimes and for Islamic countries. Regression (8) finally adds the set of dummies for each country. The test for proportional-odds assumption (which underlies the

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Cox model) does not allow us to reject this assumption at any reasonable significance level in specifications (5)–(7); this is not the case for specification (8) though, which therefore has to be treated with caution (see Table 6.2). Regardless of the particular specification we estimate, we find essentially the same result. Membership in an NDRO prolongs the rule of the leader (the coefficient is negative, meaning that the probability of losing power is lower for leaders who run countries belonging to NDROs). This result holds (with the caveat already mentioned) even when controlling for country-level dummies, which means that it is driven by the within-country variation across leaders and NDRO membership rather than country-specific characteristics. Thus, we obtain very strong evidence in favor of the fundamental prediction of our analysis. Membership of NDROs is important, and does indeed appear to serve as a tool ensuring a prolonged period of rule by a dictator. While the statistical analysis does not reveal the precise mechanisms generating this effect, the subsequent chapters devoted to the qualitative discussion of the post-Soviet regional organizations should make it possible for us to identify not only whether but also how NDROs matter. Among other variables, the dummy for countries with a large proportion of Muslims in the population appears to have a significant effect on the duration of the ruler’s tenure: in such countries, the duration is typically longer. This could be an artifact of political culture, but it also reflects the fact that many Muslim states are monarchies—we implement an additional test in this respect in what follows. Older leaders at the moment of their deposition (resignation or natural death) unsurprisingly have longer tenure. Earlier birth year also seems to increase the tenure duration. We find no differences in tenure duration between communist and non-communist countries for almost all specifications. The results were subjected to a number of additional robustness checks. First, we drop the observations for China (after Deng) and Mexico, since in these two countries institutionalized authoritarian rule is based on fixed-term tenure for the leaders. Second, to make sure that our results are not driven by outliers, we exclude observations with a duration of tenure of less than one year and of more than 40 years. Third, we exclude hereditary monarchies: essentially, our concern here is to make sure that our results are not driven by observations from the Middle East, which are all members of NDROs (Arab League, more recently GCC) but, due to their political organization, may be prone to longer tenure durations than military juntas or populist dictatorships.⁶ All the tests essentially confirm our main result: leaders who ran countries belonging to NDROs had a significantly longer tenure duration than those whose countries did not belong to such organizations. ⁶ We do not consider Bokassa a hereditary monarch in spite of his claim to the Central African Empire.

Table 6.2. Effect of NDRO membership on the duration of the rule of authoritarian leaders, 1950–2015 (1) NDRO membership

−0.392*** (0.090)

Starting year of the rule

(2) −0.388*** (0.090) −0.002 (0.003)

−0.281*** (0.095) 0.000 (0.003) −0.043*** (0.004)

Year of birth

(4) −0.356*** (0.089) 0.018*** (0.004) −0.024*** (0.004)

Communist regime

(5) −0.387*** (0.091) −0.002 (0.003)

−0.108 (0.119)

Large share of Muslim population Country dummies Proportional-odds assumption test

No 0.59

No 0.64

Note: *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%, robust standard errors in parentheses

No 4.90

No 3.74

No 2.42

(6)

(7)

(8)

−0.304*** (0.094) −0.001 (0.003)

−0.283*** (0.097) −0.001 (0.003)

−0.271** (0.149) 0.005 (0.003)

−0.247*** (0.092) No 2.30

−0.148 (0.130) −0.277*** (0.099) No 5.97

Yes 357.34***

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(3)

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Furthermore, we replicate regressions separately for four quartiles of the distribution of the years of accession of dictators (before 1964, 1964–1975, 1975–1989, and after 1989). Essentially, we find a significant effect of membership in an NDRO for all authoritarian leaders who came to power in the first three quartiles, but not after 1989. Note, however, that one-third of the dictators who came to power after 1989 were still in office as of 2015 (vs. only 1.5 percent of those who came to power earlier). Thus, the lack of an effect in the youngest cohort of dictators does not disprove the effect we discuss, but rather suggests that we need further evidence to trace the survival of contemporary dictators to assess the quantitative effect of NDRO membership: the qualitative evidence on how NDROs are used to sustain authoritarian regimes and prolong the survival of dictators today is reported in Chapters 9–11 on post-Soviet Eurasian regional organizations.

6.5. CONCLUSION This chapter provides some evidence that the outcomes of the functioning of NDROs differ from that of DROs. In line with the previous literature, we find that NDROs underperform in terms of trade integration compared to DROs. At the same time, there is some evidence (which we obtain only using FH data and cannot confirm for our main indicator—Polity IV) that migration flows are more intensive in NDROs. Finally, we demonstrate that membership in an NDRO has an important political effect: it increases the length of survival of authoritarian leaders in office compared to other autocrats whose countries have never belonged to an NDRO. The effect is very robust and highly significant. As a result, NDROs can be used as important political tools for authoritarian leaders to ensure their survival—both in terms of preventing democratic revolutions and non-democratic leadership change. The longer survival of dictators is not synonymous with the longer survival of authoritarian rule—there may be countries where multiple short-lived dictatorships follow each another—but it is an important indicator that even the “window of opportunity” for democratization (typically at the moment when the dictator is deposed) is absent and that dictators benefit from NDRO membership in terms of ensuring their rule. The subsequent analysis of three Eurasian NDROs—the CIS, the SCO, and the EAEU—ought to demonstrate the specific strategies used by authoritarian leaders for this purpose—that is, how they can benefit from NDROs to pacify or weaken their potential or actual opponents and thus ensure uninterrupted rule.

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7 Past Non-Dependency in the Twenty-first Century In Chapters 5 and 6, we have shown which features distinguished democratic and non-democratic regional organizations by the early 2010s. However, the question remains whether the properties of the regional organizations we observe can be traced throughout their entire post-World War II history. Are NDROs a relatively recent phenomenon, or have they been present in world politics for a longer period? And how did they function—as opposed to the well-studied DROs? The goal of this chapter is to discuss these questions in detail. For the early years after World War II, when regional organizations in the modern sense started to emerge, we will provide a discussion of the very small set of democratic and non-democratic regional organizations which existed during this era. This is because the number of the regional organizations was too small to provide any reasonable background for a statistical study. For the period from the mid-1970s, when the number of regional organizations in the world became sufficiently large, we will use the large-N analysis as well to trace the evolution of NDROs and their importance over time. Before proceeding, however, we have to introduce an important caveat. The theoretical arguments presented in Chapter 3 (and, to a large extent, the literature we relied upon in Chapter 2) has been developed primarily for the post-Cold War era. For instance, one of the central conjectures of our argument—the pragmatism of autocracies—and the very discussion about the role of competitive or electoral authoritarian regimes—is a feature of the post1990s world. Thus, it should come as no surprise that some of the conjectures we have presented in earlier chapters would not hold before 1990: on the contrary, in the bipolar world with strong ideological commitments it should be expected. We believe this chapter to be a necessary extension of our investigation, but it should not be seen as another theory-testing exercise (of both large-N and small-N), because the theories are developed for different eras. Rather, the chapter serves two purposes: first, it provides background information on the evolution of NDROs as a phenomenon and, second, it

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acknowledges the features NDROs had in the past. These features could hypothetically influence some of the contemporary organizations through the logic of path-dependence (e.g. for NDROs, which emerged in the past, or those which came into existence “in the shadow” of past NDROs¹).

7.1. EARLY YEARS: I DEOLOGICAL AND COLONIAL NON-DEMOCRATIC REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS The existence of alliances of authoritarian states can be traced throughout history, and in some cases these groupings were created to defend a particular ideology (such as the Holy Alliance in post-Napoleonic Europe) or to expand its domain (such as the Axis powers during World War II). These early instances of cooperation are, however, difficult to compare to the modern phenomena. The Holy Alliance is particularly instructive. While it was an organization created with the explicit goal of promoting autocracy (traditional monarchic rule in Europe) and, as such, is frequently mentioned in the debate on modern non-democracies and their regional organizations (such as the EAEU or the GCC), it differs from the modern entities in two very important respects. First, it was not a regional organization: it did not have the kind of institutional structure which is characteristic of such an organization (note further, that we focus our analysis on economic organizations). Second, it is not clear whether it can be called a “regional” grouping. Clearly, it was comprised of European monarchs—that is, it was focused on the European “region” as we would describe it today. However, at the time that the Holy Alliance came into existence, Europe was not perceived as a “region” by its countries. It was an alliance of the leaders of the “civilized” and Christian world (and Europe was the embodiment of that) and not a specific regional (as opposed to global) phenomenon. In addition, members of the Holy Alliance controlled colonial possessions world-wide. This is very different from modern European (Eurasian or Arab) regionalism, which explicitly distinguishes itself from the advanced and developed global scene. In the nineteenthcentury world, the Holy Alliance was seen as a “universal” rather than as an explicitly regional phenomenon. The fact that some countries—such as the Ottoman Empire—were not admitted to the Alliance, is not because they were perceived as belonging to other regions but because they were seen as not ¹ Eurasian regionalism, to some extent, emerged in the shadow of COMECON, and the epistemic communities, which had to deal with it, were originally mostly comprised of the former COMECON scholars.

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belonging to the Christian “civilized” world and therefore not the equal of the Holy Alliance’s members. The arrival of NDROs in the sense used in this book can be traced to the 1940s, with the creation of the COMECON in 1949 and the Arab League in 1945 (note that Telo’s (2017) definition of hierarchical regionalism covers multiple projects from the interwar period, as well as some projects of the World War II era).² Already during World War II, Japan had pioneered the idea of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere; this, however, remained an ideological construct rather than a functioning regional organization. But these three cases clearly demonstrate a number of specific features of early NDROs. First, unlike the NDROs of the modern era, they were clearly ideological—in the case of COMECON, the organization implied the cooperation of socialist states; the Arab League embraced the ideology of panArabism; and the Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere developed a specific version of pan-Asianism promoted by Japan as the ideological cover for its colonial expansion.³ As such, the NDROs of the early period did not imitate the DROs—and there were no accepted legitimate examples of DROs dominating the global script (even within Europe, the European Economic Community (EEC) was in competition for the first decades of its existence with another DRO, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA)). The COMECON, for instance, offered a very different model of economic cooperation based on the coordination of national planned economies; in the modern world, only ALBA has the ambition to create something similar, but has not been nearly as successful in this respect as the COMECON. Furthermore, in the 1940s brute force was used to ensure that individual countries joined the regional organizations—this was the case for the COMECON and for the planned Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. As such, the effects of these regional organizations are unlikely to be comparable with those of the modern-day NDROs. The COMECON is probably the most relevant case for any discussion of the first wave of NDROs, as it managed to achieve much more pronounced results and also played a very important role in the structure of global politics and economics (on the COMECON, see Stone 1996; Metcalf 1998; Kansikas 2014). The organization had an extremely restricted membership: it included only socialist bloc countries sufficiently loyal to the Soviet Union (thus, China

² For COMECON, the same argument could apply as for the Holy Alliance: the structure was seen as one of two poles of the global system rather than an explicit Eastern European organization (the post-World War II Eastern Europe was in some sense constructed by the predominance of the socialist regimes). In fact, some of the COMECON members (Vietnam and Cuba) were explicitly non-regional; the set of observers included African and Latin American countries). However, over time as the borders of the Socialist bloc cemented, COMECON was increasingly often perceived as a “regional” structure, similar to the European Communities. ³ These two initiatives were clearly “regional”—precisely because they were “non-European” and, in some sense, offered an alternative to the European dominance in their regions.

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did not join) and with economic models sufficiently similar to that of the USSR (Yugoslavia with its specific model of socialism never became a member). The compliance of the members of the COMECON was enforced, if necessary, through the force of the political-military organization of the Warsaw Pact (as happened, for example, during the Prague Spring of 1968). The Soviet Union’s aspiration was for the COMECON to become an autarkic community separated from the global economy and based on the coordination of national plans. The supply chains within the COMECON were always extremely asymmetrical and non-equivalent; this was one of the reasons for its eventual demise after the beginnings of democratization in its member countries. The idea of an isolated and planned community did not work, however. The COMECON changed (somewhat in the same way as the Soviet economy itself) into a system of bargaining and negotiating between member countries, which also traded with the outside world (and used the terms of this trade as arguments in favor or against certain internal deals). However, even this informal bargaining mechanism could only have functioned with countries of a certain economic type and thus the COMECON became non-viable once market reforms began. The COMECON considered itself (and to some extent indeed was) a fundamentally different type of international organizations than that which emerged in Europe in the post-World War II era. While the COMECON did to some extent take the European Communities as its reference point (providing an alternative of “socialist integration”), its goal was not to legitimize itself through the imitation of the European Communities— rather, it legitimized itself through being as dissimilar from the former as possible and through complying with the communist ideology that the organization was based upon. At the same time, in the twentieth century up to the 1940s, the world also saw a number of regional organizations start to develop. Most of these consisted of non-democratic countries, but with a democratic leader. One example of this phenomenon is the Organization of American States (OAS), which is led by the US but at the time of its establishment included numerous non-democratic Latin American countries. Other examples are regional organizations, alliances, and confederations of colonies which were endorsed by their (mostly democratic) European hegemons. Examples of these organizations include the CFA franc zones and the East African Customs Union— the successors of these early organizations continue into the present day. Whether these organizations can be classified as NDROs in terms of their substance remains debatable. It certainly does not apply to the OAS—from its very beginning in the 1948 OAS Charter and American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, the OAS maintained a consistent democracy and human rights agenda, though the extent to which the Charter has been implemented has varied throughout its history (Boniface 2002). The postcolonial organizations represent a major dilemma in assessing colonialism in

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terms of political regime: democratic European states to some extent maintained non-democratic rule in their overseas territories, either directly by subordinating these territories to the European nations or by establishing forms of indirect rule which applied only to particular groups of their population (e.g. the European colonists). A somewhat special case is SACU, which was created by the Union of South Africa and a number of British colonies. South Africa is classified as “democratic” by the Polity IV dataset, but since 1948 it was ruled by the National Party, which promoted the apartheid legislation. Apartheid, which was also embraced by some of the other SACU members (such as Southern Rhodesia), shaped the way SACU was organized. SACU provided a rare example of a “plutocratic” regional agreement (Hancock 2009), that is, a structure where the decision making is delegated not to a supranational body, but to the leading country. Only when democratization came to South Africa was the basis for a joint decision making process created (Gibb 2006; Gibb and Treasure 2014). Summing up, the majority of early NDROs were either strictly hierarchical (dominated by a leading de facto colonial power, such as the USSR, Japan, or South Africa) or heavily ideological (again, like the COMECON or the Arab League), or both (the COMECON is probably the paragon example of an organization combining both features). The hierarchical aspect was associated with direct or indirect power delegation to the most powerful member, which designed the structure of the regional organization and directed its development (and, in the case of SACU, even exercised direct decisionmaking authority over common economic issues). The ideological aspect shaped both the objectives pursued by the NDROs and the way they functioned (again, the COMECON with its special idea of non-market exchange between socialist economies is a prominent example of this). From this point of view, these NDROs were clearly distinct from the early models of democratic regionalism which emerged in Europe with the EEC and EFTA—these organizations were also not perceived as something an NDRO would attempt to imitate.

7.2. LARGE-N ANALYSIS: NDRO S DURING AND AFTER THE COLD WAR In the 1960s, the number of regional organizations throughout the world started to grow, this time under the obvious heavy influence of the European experience. This Old Regionalism (Söderbaum 2016) frequently explicitly imitated the European institutions and proposed a similar broad agenda for regionalism. From the late 1960s, the number of regional organizations in

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the world became large enough to allow us to perform the large-N analysis presented in what follows. In order to investigate the development of NDROs, we selected four points in time—1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005—and looked at the composition of regional organizations world-wide in terms of their division across democratic and non-democratic regional organizations, and in terms of their characteristics. The basis for our analysis was the dataset we used in Chapters 5 and 6. However, for the purposes of the historical analysis, we had to include in this dataset a number of regional organizations which had ceased to exist by the early 2010s. As Vinokurov and Libman (2017) demonstrate, it is rather unusual for countries to abolish a regional organization altogether—typically they are merely renamed or re-established, but do not cease to exist completely. However, in some cases the organizations have indeed been abolished. We have added three organizations to our dataset (incidentally, all three are classified as NDROs): the COMECON; the Central Asian Economic Cooperation (this organization existed under the different labels of the Central Asian Union and the Central Asian Cooperation Organization between the early 1990s and 2004, when it was merged with the EurAsEC); and the African and Malagasy Union, which existed between 1961 and 1985 and was another postcolonial regional organization, originally sponsored by France. The four time periods we study allow us to trace the effect of a number of major historical events on the composition and the functioning of the NDROs. First, we can compare the situation during the Cold War (looking at the 1975 and 1985 data) and after the end of the Cold War (in 1995 and 2005). This fundamental shift not only increased the number of democratic states worldwide, but also created a new international region—post-Soviet Eurasia— which, as we have already argued, plays a particularly important role in terms of the number of NDROs in the modern world. At the same time, by looking at 2005, we may pick up the resurgence of non-democratic states (Russia and China) as major actors in global politics. This will contrast with the 1990s, when the democratic US and the EU played the dominant role in international relations (Larson and Shevchenko 2010). Second, we can trace how the third wave of democratization has gradually changed the composition of regional organizations in terms of their split between democratic and nondemocratic regional organizations world-wide. As with Chapters 5 and 6, we use several approaches to defining NDROs so that they more accurately represent the theoretical arguments of our book. In the rest of this chapter, we start by presenting the evolution of the share of NDROs world-wide throughout the period of our investigation. Figure 7.1 reports the Polity IV score of an average regional organization member in the world in 1975–2005. For comparison, we also present the average Polity IV score of the entire set of countries world-wide. We can see that the value of both indicators gradually increases, indicating that more and more countries

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4 3 2 1 0

1975

1985

1995

2005

–1 –2 –3 Average polity score of all world countries Average polity score of RO members

Figure 7.1. Average Polity IV score of a member of a regional organization and of a country in the world, 1975–2005

are becoming democratic (precisely as the argument for the third wave of democratization would suggest). This means that over time the share of NDROs in our dataset decreases, and the share of DROs increases. At the same time, we see that democratization world-wide is moving faster than the democratization of regional organizations. In the 1970s, an average member of a regional organization was a non-democracy; in 2005, it was a democracy. However, in 1975, an average country of the world was less democratic than an average member of a regional organization; by 2005, an average country of the world was more democratic than an average member of a regional organization. There are two possible explanations: either members of regional organizations were democratizing at a slower pace than other countries, or non-democratic countries had started to participate in regional organizations more actively than democracies. Both interpretations are interesting. On the one hand, a higher demand on the part of non-democratic countries for membership in regional organizations can be interpreted as a willingness to use regional organizations as an instrument of legitimization and, ultimately, of regime-boosting (Söderbaum 2004a, 2004b). Since NDROs are generally perceived as less legitimate, nondemocratic countries could become more active in initiating numerous new projects and initiatives to compensate for their lack of recognition. The data may also mean that in the 1970s the demand for regionalism as a tool for

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regime-boosting was smaller. Indeed, the presence of the bipolar world order, where the USSR (and, in many instances, also the US; see May and Zelikow 2007) readily provided assistance to non-democratic regimes due to geopolitical concerns, made it less important for non-democratic countries to create regional organizations to demonstrate their legitimacy. Thus, the demand for regionalism could have been explained to a greater extent by the economic benefits of the regional organizations, which democracies are more likely to realize.⁴ On the other hand, if the members of regional organizations democratize more slowly than other countries, this finding (combined with the insight by Pevehouse (2005), who demonstrated how DROs can be used to consolidate the democracy of their members; see also Chapter 2) can be seen as indirect evidence that NDROs are indeed (successfully) used for the consolidation of non-democratic regimes. It is also possible, however, that the effect we observe is driven by a particular part of the world—post-Soviet Eurasia. Many new regional organizations of the 1990s were created by former Soviet Union republics (which, as we will show in what follows, systematically participate in several regional organizations at once), and it is possible that it is precisely this wave of NDROs that explains the growing discrepancy between the level of democracy of an average regional organization member and an average country of the world in the 1990s. Again, the qualitative part of this book will be used to explore this argument in greater detail. Figure 7.2 shows the development of the average Polity IV scores of the leading countries of the regional organizations. Generally, this seems to follow a pattern similar to that of the Polity IV scores of the average members of the regional organizations. Again, we observe a shift towards more DROs over time, driven by the general trend in the world towards democratization. There seems to be no consistent evidence that the leading countries of regional organizations have been more or less democratic than the average countries of regional organizations in the past. Finally, Figure 7.3 provides a summary of our discussion, using a binary definition of NDROs: as organizations where the average member (or the leading state) was classified as “not democratic” according to the Polity IV data. We document a striking decline in the number of NDROs in the world. In the 1970s, more than 60 percent of all regional organizations could have been attributed to the non-democratic group. In the 1980s, NDROs were still in the majority. Since the 1990s and in the 2000s, however, most regional organizations in the world have been democratic; NDROs made up less than

⁴ Indeed, as mentioned, regional organizations, which successfully liberalize international trade, are mostly democratic; see also Mansfield et al. 2000 and Milner and Kubota 2005 on the higher propensity of democracies to liberalize their foreign trade.

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4 3 2 1

0 1975

1985

1995

2005

–1 –2

Figure 7.2. Average Polity IV score of the leading country of a regonal organization, 1975–2005

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1975

1985 NDRO (Polity IV)

1995

2005

NDRO (leading state, Polity IV)

Figure 7.3. Share of NDROs according to political regime of an average country and of the leading country, 1975–2005

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one-third of regional organizations world-wide as of 2005.⁵ However, it is a substantial share, and, as the subsequent discussion will show, some of the NDROs exercise a substantial policy impact, an aspect which should not be neglected. Interestingly, in 2005 there are slightly more NDROs according to the leading country’s regime, while in the Cold War era the situation was reversed. Thus, today we observe more cases where an autocratic leader coexists with a number of smaller, more competitive and pluralist countries (Eurasia will be highly representative of this pattern) than there were during the Cold War (when a more frequent setting was a democratic leading state coexisting with authoritarian small countries). However, this difference is very small and should not be overestimated. How can we interpret the data we have obtained? The majority of the regional organizations which came into existence in the 1960s–1970s, that is, the wave of “Old Regionalism,” were set up by non-democratic countries. In that period, however, non-democracies were still somewhat less likely to create regional organizations than were democracies. Over time, however, the overall process of democratization turned many of the regional organizations which were originally established by non-democracies into democratic organizations. There have been almost no cases of NDROs ceasing to exist due to the democratization of their members. The only relevant exception is the COMECON, which disappeared because of tectonic shifts in world politics at the end of the Cold War. In other (very few) cases where regional organizations have been legally abolished, this change was entirely unrelated to the democratization of the member countries. In Central Asia however, the formal cancellation of the Central Asian Economic Cooperation (CAEC) organization coincided with the final consolidation of authoritarian regimes in all countries of the region except Kyrgyzstan. More frequently, the nature of the regional organization changed because of the democratization process of its members. As a result, some of the NDROs underwent significant changes (the example of SACU, already mentioned, is highly illustrative in this regard). More importantly, the 1980s and the 1990s witnessed a wave of new regional organizations being established, partly across the old dividing lines of the Cold War (e.g. in Europe, regional organizations were set up in the Baltic and in the Black Sea regions). These organizations were more frequently democratic than non-democratic. As a result, by the end of the first decade of the 2000s, DROs became the dominant form of regional organizations world-wide. At the same time, however, non-democratic states seem to have increased their demand for participation in regional organizations—thus, ⁵ In the Appendix, we report the analysis based on the FH data, where we attribute all the regional organizations with a “partly free” or “not free” average (or leading) member to the category of NDRO. It shows that in the 2000s the majority of the NDROs in the world could still have been classified as “partially free” or “not free.”

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the process of “democratization” (in the sense we use in this book, as presented in Chapter 2) proceeded at a slower pace for regional organizations than the overall spread of the third wave of democratization.

7. 3 . WERE DRO S AND NDRO S ALWAYS D I FFE RENT? We have already argued that the first NDROs typically constituted special cases of regional integration—either within colonial empires, or based on a strong ideological foundation. However, at that time no clear pattern was observable among the DROs—we have already mentioned the striking differences in the approach towards regionalism taken by the EEC and by EFTA. Over time, the European model of regionalism became more and more popular and formed the blueprint for most regional organizations, which they—at least on the formal level—adhere to. However, our analysis of the early 2000s demonstrates a number of substantial differences between DROs and NDROs. These differences rarely manifest themselves in conceptual contradictions of how regional organizations should be organized (ALBA with its willingness to create an alternative to the free trade approach is the only exception we know). More frequently the differences are associated with some variations of formal governance or—even more importantly—in informal governance mechanisms, which lead to different results for the way DROs and NDROs function and to different compositions in terms of their members. Does this mean that these differences had already emerged during the Old Regionalism wave or are they a more recent phenomenon? To investigate this issue, in Table 7.1 we report the correlation between the level of democracy of the average member of a regional organization and the characteristics of the regional organization—we focus in particular on the heterogeneity of political regimes and on the power asymmetry (since these Table 7.1. Changes in the characteristics of the NDRO over time, NDRO defined through the average democracy score of its member countries Year

Heterogeneity of democracy

Power asymmetry

1975 1985 1995 2005

0.0305 −0.0124 −0.3782** −0.5048***

−0.1078 −0.1228 0.2677* 0.1146

Note: the table reports correlation coefficients between the average level of democracy in the RO and the heterogeneity of democracy and power asymmetry indicators. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

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two characteristics were shown to be important in the analysis of Chapter 5). The indicators are measured as in Chapter 5, so, in some sense, we replicate some of the results of that chapter, but for different time periods. Until the end of the Cold War, we observe much less evidence of significant differences between DROs and NDROs. The important observation of Chapter 5—that DROs have lower within-organization regime heterogeneity than NDROs—is found only for the periods after the end of the Cold War. As for power asymmetry, we find some evidence that it is indeed smaller in NDROs, but also only for the period after the Cold War (this effect disappears in the 2000s). If we defined NDROs through the level of democracy of their leading countries, the results would be similar (Table 7.2). Hence, we have to conclude that there indeed a fundamental change occurred in the universe of regional organizations after the collapse of the communist bloc. In terms of the regime heterogeneity in NDROs, two explanations can be put forward. On the one hand, we could be observing a process of de-ideologization of the authoritarian regimes, which have abandoned the “grand ideologies” of the past and have begun to concentrate on mimicking democracy. An ideological autocracy cannot admit countries with different regimes (or, possibly, even autocracies with different ideologies) into a regional organization: membership of a democratic country or a country without a socialist planned economy in the COMECON was barely imaginable. After the Cold War, the last “grand ideology”—communism—collapsed, and the regimes became more flexible, following geopolitical or rent-seeking concerns. Another explanation is that after the end of the Cold War countries became more selective in joining regional organizations. In the bipolar world, a decision to join a regional organization was frequently predetermined by the position the country took in the competition between the USSR and the US— thus, Cuba, after it joined the socialist camp, had hardly any choice but to become part of the COMECON. Certainly, during the Cold War there were regional organizations which explicitly tried to distance themselves from both camps, but this task (as the history of the Non-Alignment Movement shows) Table 7.2. Changes in the characteristics of the NDRO over time, NDRO defined through the democracy score of its leader Year

Heterogeneity of democracy

Power asymmetry

1975 1985 1995 2005

−0.0547 0.2398*** −0.2158*** −0.2413***

−0.0382 0.0093 0.3713*** −0.0706

Note: the table reports correlation coefficients between the average level of democracy in the RO and the heterogeneity of democracy and power asymmetry indicators. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

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was very difficult. After the end of the Cold War, countries had much greater freedom to join regional organizations or to abstain from them. Besides, the emergence of the WTO signified a much wider liberalization of international trade, so that the economic benefits of membership of a regional organization (i.e. access to larger market) became less important as well. As a result, as mentioned, the less legitimate NDROs faced greater problems with membership and had to adjust by becoming more flexible. In terms of power asymmetry, our main explanation for the unwillingness of countries to join a regional organization created by a non-democratic, powerful hegemon enough was the substantial concern regarding manipulation by that hegemon. Again, if the freedom of choice of countries is more limited (as it was during the Cold War era), the concerns surrounding manipulation are also less important—some countries may always be dependent on a particular influential pole in global politics. Hence, countries could have fewer reservations about joining NDROs. Summing up, the end of the Cold War transformed the nature and the functioning of authoritarian states (Levitsky and Way 2010), but also the nature of NDROs. In the empirical case we investigate in the qualitative part of the book, we will demonstrate how these “modern era” NDROs function and the effects they have.

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8 The Enigma of Eurasian Regionalism The second part of the book embarks on a journey to Eurasia and three regional organizations located there: the Commonwealth of Independent States, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Representing three types of regional organization (political, economic, and security-based) they provide sufficient variation in the functioning of the NDROs and in their various effects on their member states and neighborhood. In Eurasia, NDROs are particularly prolific (see the introduction and Chapter 4). While in the early 1990s high hopes were placed on the possibility of a democratic transition in post-Soviet Eurasia, as of first decade of the 2000s it became clear that most countries of the region had chosen the path to consolidated autocracies (Levitsky and Way 2010). At the same time, Russia remained particularly in favor of creating multilateral regional organizations. Ultimately, Eurasia became a home for an entire “family” of interrelated NDROs (with numerous subsidiary organizations and institutions), sharing overlapping membership and having diverse but frequently overlapping goals and objectives. In this context, the obvious puzzling question is if and whether the two processes were related in any way. Did proliferation of regional organization led by Russia relate in any way to the wave of autocratization in the region? The second part of this book will look into the nexus of regionalism and political regimes within this specific regional context. Eurasian regionalism is quite unique and is characterized by several important specific features, which have to be taken into account. The existence of these features is to some extent determined by the history of Eurasia and to some extent shaped by economic, social, and political ties between countries. These specific features are important for a number of reasons. First, while studying the causal mechanisms explaining the effects (or lack thereof) of NDROs on politics and societies, we need to take the specific features of Eurasia into account. For example, some of the indirect autocracy-promoting effects of Eurasian NDROs can be linked to historical legacies in regionalism, to the so-called “limiting factor” dependence of economies of the region upon each other (see also Chapter 3), and to the presence of various ethnic and/or territorial conflicts spread across post-Soviet Eurasia. Scholars of regionalism

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argue that each and every single regional integration project is unique in its own way—it has its own historical path and modern features that make it sui generis. Therefore, the challenging question is: are the findings discovered in our large-N study at the world-wide level also to be found within Eurasia? Despite its uniqueness, does Eurasian regionalism exhibit the same trends in the development, characteristics, and impact of NDROs identified in the first half of the book? If the answer to this is yes, a closer look at three regional organizations in Eurasia may help to untangle the causal mechanisms of regionalism’s impact on political regimes throughout the world. Before a detailed analysis of specific regional organizations, this chapter provides an analysis of the entirety of Eurasian regionalism as a phenomenon. First, it offers a summary of the historical development of Eurasian regionalism. Second, the chapter looks into a more intriguing issue of how (and whether) historical legacies matter for the evolution of Eurasian regional organizations. The fact that history is crucial for the understanding of postSoviet politics in general has been well recognized in the literature by a number of influential contributions (Jowitt 1992; Grzymala-Busse 2002; Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln 2007; LaPorte and Lussier 2011; Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2011, 2013, 2014; 2017; Frye 2012; Libman and Obydenkova 2013b; 2015, 2016; Beissnger and Kotkin 2014; Obydenkova and Libman 2015c; Lankina et al. 2016a; Simpser et al. 2018; Lankina and Libman 2019). More generally, the historical institutionalism literature (Thelen 1999) points out that the development of regionalism is path dependent and therefore the historical forms taken by regional organizations should affect their contemporary design and functions. Even more, as Gray (2018) points out, the failure of regional organizations has an impact on negotiations about new regional organizations. Third, we discuss how extreme economic dependence between the states of Eurasia (which can again be traced to the common Soviet past) produced a specific phenomenon of a “limiting factor.” A “limiting factor” is especially important in this context as it relates directly to regionalism (e.g. to a state choosing to become a member of a regional organization) and it also negatively affects the possibilities of democratic transition. Fourth, we address the issues of frozen conflicts and border disputes, which additionally play an important role in the evolution of the Eurasian regionalism.

8.1. A BRIEF HISTORY OF E URASIAN REGIONALISM One of the most puzzling issues associated with analyzing regionalism in Eurasia is that its beginning is not entirely clear. Eurasian regional organizations seem to emerge in the “grey” area between the coup attempted by conservative communist forces in August 1991 and the formal dissolution of

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the USSR in December 1991 into fifteen independent states: three Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), Caucasian states (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan), Eastern European states (Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia), and Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan). Of these countries, the Baltic states never participated in regional integration in Eurasia, while the participation of other states took different forms during different historical periods. The first treaty signed within this framework was the Economic Community Treaty in October 1991, which was established by the Soviet republics with the intention of maintaining a common economic space for the member states. The treaty established the Interstate Economic Committee as a governing body for economic affairs; interestingly, it is signed by republics “regardless of their current status”—while some republics intend to stay part of a renewed Union, others were clearly committed to full independence. The dissolution of the USSR in October 1991 took the form of the establishment of yet another regional organization—the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)—which soon became a structure that included all the post-Soviet countries except the Baltic states. After the war in 2008, Georgia left the CIS and, as of 2018, Ukraine is preparing to exit as well. Hancock and Libman (2016) distinguish three epochs of Eurasian regionalism. The first can be roughly attributed to the period of 1992–94. This is the era when Eurasian states were still convinced that they would be able to revive and reorganize economic cooperation within the framework of the CIS. The idea (to some extent endorsed by Western partners) was to maintain close economic ties between the post-Soviet countries, possibly based on a common currency (the ruble zone). The CIS seems to be a chaotic combination of the remaining elements of the Soviet past (partly based on highly intensive forms of cooperation, e.g. in infrastructure areas such as aviation, railroads, and electricity, see Libman and Vinokurov 2012a) and, above all, oil and gas infrastructure.¹ At a later stage, the CIS countries focused on imitating forms of cooperation demonstrated by the more “advanced” Western regional organizations (especially the EU). CIS members signed (within a very short interval of time in 1992–94) a free trade area treaty, a customs union treaty, an economic union treaty, and a payment union treaty. In addition, there is the Tashkent treaty, which is intended to make the CIS a functioning security organization. None of these agreements have been fully implemented, and the idea to pursue integration through the CIS was ultimately abandoned (on the CIS see Olcott et al. 1999; Abdelal 2001, 2002; Miller 2006; Libman 2007; Kubicek 2009; Obydenkova 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Czerewacz-Filipowicz and Konopelko 2016). ¹ On oil and gas infrustructure from the perspective of companies and firms, see Abdelal (2013, 2015); from an anthropological perspective, see Rogers (2015).

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The second epoch starts in 1995 and continues until roughly 2006. During this period, the idea that the CIS can be used as a functioning platform for economic cooperation was abandoned, as the fundamental differences between the countries become substantially clear. (This does not mean that the CIS has become irrelevant—this is precisely the era when the autocracypromoting functions of the CIS became clear, which will be reviewed in subsequent chapters. In addition, the CIS framework still retains a substantial potential for manipulation, which we will also review in what follows). At the same time, Eurasia witnessed the emergence of several smaller integration “clubs.” One of the most prominent is that of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Belarus—these countries established a Customs Union (1995), transformed it into the Eurasian Economic Community (2000), and reorganized the Tashkent treaty to make it a full-fledged Collective Security Treaty Organization (2002). Furthermore, Russia and Belarus have signed a series of treaties, eventually leading to the creation of the Union State of Russia and Belarus, which is frequently listed among the regional organizations in Eurasia (though it is, strictly speaking, a bilateral structure) (Danilovich 2006; Marples 2008; Vieira 2017). In addition to the Russia-centric organizations, Central Asian states pioneered their own regional organization (originally the Central Asian Union, later the Central Asian Cooperation Organization and the Central Asian Economic Cooperation). This organization did not make any substantial progress and ultimately merged with the Eurasian Economic Community (Rosset and Svarin 2014). The third epoch started in 2006, with Eurasian countries establishing the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) and soon after opening negotiations for the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which was created in 2010 and transformed into the Eurasian Economic Union in 2016. A major difference between this era and its predecessors is that it saw much greater progress in terms of economic cooperation and a much higher degree of implementation of agreements signed by the member countries. The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is the most successful example of this development; it managed to implement a more or less functioning customs union. This is important for our analysis, as we need to discuss the implications of this change for its effect of the NDROs and on regime transition in the countries of Eurasia. After 2014, further progress of the EAEU seemed to stall: while, formally, the organization managed to make progress in terms of its ambitious plans, in reality this was primarily achieved by creating agreements which had very shallow content, implying only a limited degree of policy coordination (on the EAEU see Dragneva and Wolczuk 2013; Dutkiewicz and Sakwa 2014; Vymyatnina and Antonova 2014; Lane and Samokhvalov 2015; Kirkham 2016; Molchanov 2016; Roberts and Moshes 2016; Khitakhunov et al. 2017; Vinokurov 2017, 2018).

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The establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) offers a trend that parallels these three epochs described above for Eurasia. The SCO came into existence as an informal coalition of countries focusing on resolving border issues between the former Soviet Union republics and China. Having successfully resolved this task in the 1990s, in the 2000s Russia, China, and the Central Asian states decided to extend the scope of their cooperation by creating a formal regional organization. Unlike all the other organizations we have described so far, one of the key SCO members—China—is not a postSoviet country. Also, the power structure in the SCO is strikingly different from the CIS, the EAEU, the Union State of Russia and Belarus, or the CSTO, as there are two key players with distinct competitive advantages vis-à-vis other countries present. The Chinese presence changes the extent to which the SCO mirrors the European Union (the SCO, unlike the EAEU, does not try to imitate the EU but instead develops as an independent international organization; see Chapter 11) and sets a different for tone the functioning of the organization (e.g. the Three Evils concept as the main element of its propaganda and the rhetoric used as a tool of autocracy promotion), which we will discuss in Chapter 11. A number of important trends can be discerned in the development of Eurasian regionalism. The first is that Eurasia—similarly to other parts of the world (Baldwin 2006) experienced a transformation into a “spaghetti bowl” of regional organizations and agreements (the list provided above does not offer a complete picture, since, as the subsequent analysis will show, many of the organizations also include subsidiary structures—e.g. approximately eighty industrial councils and organizations in the CIS). Some of these organizations remained linked through common institutions (e.g. EurAsEC delegated the tasks of its court to the Economic Court of the CIS until the Customs Union was established in 2010). Second, over time, regional organizations copied the European Union more and more closely. While in the CIS the EU influence was originally rather moderate, the Eurasian Economic Union, as we will discuss in Chapter 10, was, in terms of the design of its institutions, attempting to copy the EU as closely as possible (formally; the informal decision-making structure is very different). Overall, while the CIS institutional design can be seen as a “specific” post-Soviet variety of regional organizations, the EAEU became much more of a “standard,” similar to other regional organizations in terms of “downloading the global script.” A common thesis for observers of Eurasian regionalism until the EDB and the 2010 Customs Union were established is that both economic and political/ security regionalism produced few tangible results (the SCO was typically perceived much more favorably, but even for this organization some of the ambitious economic goals promoted by China—such as the SCO Bank or the free trade area in the SCO—have never been implemented, see Song 2014; Gabuev 2015a, 2015b). Thus, most of the research on Eurasian regionalism

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focused on why these countries failed to integrate. A number of highly influential studies have highlighted the inherent contradiction between the very concept of regional integration and the nation-building projects new independent countries were engaged in (Abdelal 2001; Hale 2009), others have pointed out the role of economic crisis in creating strong protectionist urges in the post-Soviet countries (Vinokurov and Libman 2014). However, a number of studies have also explicitly focused on the non-democratic nature of the post-Soviet countries (which, as mentioned, have become evident since the 2000s) as an explanation for the lack of cooperation (Libman and Vinokurov 2012c; Roberts 2017). In contrast to existing studies, the focus of this book is different. While we discuss economic and security cooperation in the post-Soviet organization, our main attention is on understanding whether and how they affect the proliferation of authoritarian regimes in Eurasia. Here, we intend to find out not only whether there is a correlation between the authoritarian nature of the regimes and the membership or the intensity of participation in the regional organizations, but also to single out specific mechanisms and tools that regional organizations can use to strengthen authoritarianism. These tools differ depending on the organization under examination. The case of the CIS is the most obvious: here our focus is on the election monitoring by this regional organization and, respectively, the legitimation of authoritarian regimes through this tool. Similarly, the SCO’s contribution is also rhetorical (but associated as well with the provision of economic aid connected with the functioning of the organization). The EAEU poses the most difficult question for us: as we will show, for this primarily economic (and so far the only really functioning) regional organization in Eurasia, the evidence of its regimeboosting activities is weak; but at the same time there is also an indirect mechanism (associated with Russian foreign policy), which makes the EAEU relevant for the consolidation of autocracies in Eurasia.

8.2. HISTORICAL LEGACIES AND E URASIAN REGIONALISM The evolution of Eurasian regionalism as described in Section 8.1 shows its clear link to the communist past—in fact, one can even argue that the very existence of Eurasian regional organizations is a form of organizational legacy of the USSR. Libman and Vinokurov (2012c) and Libman (2011) describe Eurasian regionalism as a very specific form of “holding-together” regionalism. That is, while in the existing literature on regionalism the focus is on how countries manage to become more closely interconnected and integrated over time, in Eurasia we observed the opposite process: countries originally highly

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integrated had to maintain a certain level of economic tie, at the same time developing their own national economies. Over time, this “holding-together” regionalism turned out to be an attractive institutional way to exercise regimeboosting. This section demonstrates the importance of historical legacies in the development of Eurasian regionalism and its impact on political regimes in Eurasia. Generally speaking, there are two perspectives on historical legacies, which are relevant for us. The first refers to studies on the communist legacies in the narrow sense, that is, to understanding how the institutions and practices of the past influence contemporary institutions and practices. From the point of view of the second perspective, the functioning of Eurasian regionalism could be influenced by the socially constructed image of the communist past—how the communist era is perceived and interpreted by the elites and the population of the post-Soviet countries. Historians and political scientists in this context frequently talk about the second perspective, “communist memories” (Pridham 2014; Gel’man 2017; Rotaru and Troncota 2017). They could be (and frequently are) an inaccurate representation of the communist past— they are influenced by social myths and government propaganda; yet they also can provide an important explanation for the performance of the Eurasian regional organizations. In terms of legacies, there are three aspects of the Soviet past which explain the way in which Eurasian regionalism has developed. First, there is an obvious “physical” legacy of the USSR present in Eurasia: the post-Soviet countries are connected to each other through the Soviet infrastructure; their companies are linked to each other because of the existence of the Soviet supply networks. This legacy creates incentives for the post-Soviet countries to maintain some level of economic cooperation. Otherwise their economies will need to undergo through painful restructuring: new infrastructure would have to be created, while machinery and equipment would need to be purchased to overcome the technological complementarities, etc. (this is precisely the idea of the “holding-together” regionalism).² Another important aspect of the historical legacy is the communist policy of mass mobility. The policy was implemented for various reasons such as, for example, creating a onestate identity and the elimination of an ethnic territory-based identity (that could create the potential for separatism and potential revolution). As an outcome of this policy, families were dispersed all over the former Soviet

² At the same time, as Libman and Vinokurov (2012a) show, it also reduces the interest of the bureaucracies in supporting regionalism in Eurasia. This argument is based on the Public Choice approach to bureaucracy: the literature on Public Choice sees bureaucrats as budget maximizers and, in the post-Soviet context unlike many other organizations, budget maximization is achieved through disintegration (associated with the creation of new infrastructure and assets) rather than integration (which simply means that the old infrastructure has to be maintained).

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Republics and ethnic groups lived on both sides of official borders.³ A further Soviet (or even pre-Soviet) legacy is the presence of the Russian language as the lingua franca in Eurasia (Pavlenko 2006). As of 2011, 70 percent of the population of Azerbaijan, 66 percent of Armenia, 78 percent of Georgia, almost 100 percent of Kazakhstan, 87 percent of Kyrgyzstan, 69 percent of Tajikistan, and 99 percent of Uzbekistan were reported to have some command of the Russian language.⁴ In Belarus, Russian dominates the Belarusian language (Zaprudski 2007). Linguistic commonality is important for the presence of diffusion effects, which are highly relevant for the study of the external dimension of regime transition, as discussed in Chapter 2. Second, the legacy argument can be analyzed from the “narrower” perspective offered by historical institutionalism, which we have already referred to in the introduction to this chapter. Historical institutionalist research (which has flourished in the literature on the EU; see Pierson 1996) suggests that the evolution of an organization is determined by the previous steps in its development, that is, by path dependence. The most obvious case can be made for the CIS, which naturally “grew” out of the post-Soviet institutions. The organization emerged in the context of the dissolution of the USSR and effectively took over some of the Soviet institutions (for example, part of the Soviet armed forces operated for several years under the auspices of the CIS). This determined two features that the CIS had from the very beginning (which we will address in the subsequent analysis): an extremely broad scope of tasks and objectives that the integration claimed to address (the initial framework of the CIS covered all topics from economic to political, security, and cultural cooperation), and a strictly intergovernmental design, one based on the unwillingness of the Soviet republics to commit to a more sophisticated integration scheme. In the early 1990s, the main goal pursued by the postSoviet countries was to develop their own sovereign institutions; hence, any form of supranationality was treated with extreme caution. Unsurprisingly, this combination of extremely high ambitions and a lack of willingness of the member countries to pursue a more effective integration approach resulted in the CIS massively underperforming in terms of more tangible economic and political cooperation. This cemented the path for the CIS, which over time was perceived by the elites as an ineffective tool for economic cooperation (here the focus shifted towards narrower groupings, which we discuss in Chapter 9). But, at the same time, the breadth of the mandate of the CIS, and especially the fact that it included a political agenda (with the associated human rights and

³ Even within the former Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (one of fifteen Soviet republics), the borders between subnational regions were drawn to split ethnic groups (a classic example would be Northern and Southern Ossetia). For detailed analysis of this matter, see Giuliano 2011. ⁴ http://www.ca-portal.ru/article:5351, accessed July 20, 2018.

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democratization rhetoric) was the reason why the organization could have been effectively transformed into a tool of authoritarian stabilization. It would have been much more difficult to do this with a regional organization with a very narrow economic mandate. For other post-Soviet regional organizations which came into existence in the second and the third epochs of the post-Soviet regionalism, the link to the Soviet past is less evident. These organizations were formally created “from scratch” without integrating any Soviet institutions. In many cases, they consciously took a very different path from the CIS: one which was more intensely focused on an integration agenda, binding commitments (which the countries did not uphold until 2010 anyway) and a different institutional design (Gleason 2004). However, the shadow of the CIS was still present for these organizations as well. On the one hand, the very poor performance of the CIS combined with extreme rhetoric and (originally) high expectations concerning the CIS (especially in the early 1990s, when the CIS was perceived by some as the direct continuation of the USSR) made regional governments more skeptical about the progress of Eurasian regionalism. From this point of view, the establishment of the Customs Union in 2010 constitutes a major break in the pattern of the regional development. On the other hand, the poor performance of the CIS was one of the reasons why post-Soviet countries attempted to avoid copying its institutions in the subsequent organizations. The CIS remains the only example of what we will describe as “a-la carte regionalism.” It may also be one of the reasons why many successor organizations (EurAsEC, CU, EAEU) had much weaker political agendas (another being fears of Russian influence, which we discuss in Chapter 10). Third, we also need to acknowledge the traditional arguments of the legacy of communism typically highlighted in the literature—the prevalence of inefficient institutions, corrupt bureaucracies, and authoritarian regimes (Beissinger and Kotkin 2014; on the stability of and challenges to authoritarianism and inefficient institutions in Eurasia see Fish 2005; Hale 2005b, 2015; Frye 2010; 2017; Bunce and Wolchik 2011; Obydenkova and Libman 2013). These domestic factors clearly influence the performance of the regional organization as well. On one view, poor quality bureaucracy and authoritarianism are generally seen as important obstacles to effective economic integration (see also Chapters 2 and 3). On the other, communist legacies have substantially contributed to the transition of leading post-Soviet countries into autocracies and thus of the post-Soviet regional organizations into NDROs. Here, the ROs’ contribution to the stabilization of autocracies, which we will discuss in Chapters 9–11, can be seen as a factor reinforcing the historical legacies of communism. At the same time, in the context of historical memories, we also need to highlight two factors that are relevant for the development of post-Soviet

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regionalism. First, a substantial portion of the Eurasian population still perceives itself as having a specific “Eurasian” identity, which is the reason why the CIS still enjoys large public support (for Russia, see Rose and Munro 2008; see also Chapter 10 on the EAEU). In this respect, the positive perception of Eurasian regionalism is partly an outcome of the predominance of historical myths presenting a very positive picture of the Soviet past. Second, the same applies to the Russian elites. In a country where a substantial portion of the elites (including Putin himself, see Lukyanov 2009) sees the collapse of the Soviet Union as a clearly negative event, the CIS, as the last remaining institution bringing the broad group of post-Soviet countries together, is perceived as worth saving and maintaining, in spite of its apparent inability to improve economic cooperation. The assessment of the EAEU is even higher: Libman (2017) shows how, in the eyes of the Russian elites and epistemic communities, for many years the existence of this organization was an important symbol of Russia’s global and regional power status. A widespread perception in the Russian discourse is that regionalism serves as a tool empowering, not constraining, the hegemon or the leading nation, and that by creating regional organizations these nations are given an opportunity to exercise a stronger influence on the world order. How does the existence of these historical legacies affect the hypothesized effect of the post-Soviet NDROs on the political regimes of their member countries? Two issues have to be considered. First, the fact that regionalism in Eurasia enjoys high popularity, in at least some countries, increases the ability of the governments to use it as a tool for regime boosting. As we have already noted, for Belarus, for example, the idea of a “closer union” with Russia became a crucial part of the regime’s ideology. However, this effect will vary across different countries and over time. For example, Figure 8.1 illustrates data from public opinion surveys about people’s attitudes towards the EAEU in the member states of this organization. One can see that the EAEU is very popular in most of them (although its popularity in 2017 was somewhat less than in 2012 in most countries except Kyrgyzstan). According to the same survey, the EAEU enjoys strong support in Tajikistan (69 percent in 2017) and to some extent in Moldova (48 percent in 2017). In Georgia and Ukraine the attitude is much more negative—in Ukraine, as of 2015, only 19 percent of the population had a positive attitude to the EAEU.⁵ In Russia itself the regime is able to score points with the public by promoting regionalism: in this case, in addition to the Soviet nostalgia, the public is likely to support regionalism as sign of the heightened geopolitical

⁵ This reflects the strong differences in the extent to which irredentist movements existed in the Soviet republics in the 1980s. See Suny 1993; Hale 2000, 2004, 2005a, 2009; Beissinger 2002, 2009; Giuliano 2006.

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90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Armenia

Belarus

Russia 2017

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

2012

Figure 8.1. Share of respondents supporting the EAEU, 2012–2017 Source: EDB 2017b

importance of Russia.⁶ Second, the persistence of common infrastructure and the economic interdependence of countries can also be used to strengthen authoritarianism—we will discuss this in Section 8.3 on the limiting factor. Table 8.1 summarizes the main types of historical legacies and memories relevant for an analysis of Eurasian regionalism.

8.3. THE L IMITING F ACTOR An important feature of the Soviet economy was a very high level of asset specificity, that is, a typical Soviet enterprise was able to use its resources only with a particular supplier and produced output usable only by a particular customer. The machinery and equipment were not designed to allow the enterprise to re-orient itself towards new suppliers or customers: on the contrary, the Soviet government specifically insisted on integrating all enterprises in a single supply chain, treating them like the shops of an individual ⁶ This trend is sometimes considered the consequence of radical decentralization within Russia itself in the 1990s and fears the state may disappear (on decentralization, see Obydenkova 2011b).

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Table 8.1. Historical factors and Eurasian regionalism Factor Material legacies

Effects Oil and gas infrastructure: Interconnectedness of oil and gas shipping; oil and gas infrastructure was built to create a complete dependence of oil and gas transport on Russia and through Russia. Labor and trade territorial division infrastructure: Established trade links and labor division across regions, incentives for economic cooperation between countries; infrastructure for oil and gas Social aspects: Diasporas, migration, dependence on free movement of people, on migration remittances, lingua franca

Continuities in the development of regional organizations

Lack of transparency, low trust of governments in the ability of regionalism to deliver actual economic cooperation; inclusion of political issues in the scope of regional organizations (relevant for the CIS and for autocracy promotion through this organization)

Legacies of poor quality of governance and corruption

Obstacles to regional integration; transformation of Eurasian ROs into NDROs; lack of transparency, low trust, flourishing of bilateralism within multi-lateral organizations

Historical memories: Communist nostalgia

Popularity of regionalism; public support for regionalism; and thus its greater ability to serve as a tool of legitimacy provision

factory with extremely high specialization. Similarly, the infrastructure was created to supply Soviet enterprises with resources from different parts of the country (Obydenkova and Libman 2012; Libman and Obydenkova 2014; 2016; Lankina and Libman 2019). Unlike Chinese central planning, which embraced the idea of regional self-containing units (“cellularity,” see Donnithorne 1972; Lyons 1985), in the Soviet Union individual regions also developed very high levels of specialization, making them all dependent on each other. This structure was one of the reasons for the extremely high costs of transition (Blanchard and Kremer 1997; Linn 2004). The study by Burawoy and Hendley (1992) provides an example of a Moscow enterprise, with the label Rezina in the late 1980s to the early 1990s. The enterprise produced rubber products and enjoyed a monopoly position for most of its goods. At the same time, 55 percent of its output was provided to seven main customers. According to Linn (2004), 34 of 65 items of agricultural equipment in the USSR were produced by a single enterprise. At the macroeconomic level, Figure 8.2 reports the share of the output of certain industries of the Russian economy as of 1991 that were exported to the post-Soviet countries in the total exports. One can see that in the last year of the USSR, Russian goods

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Ferrous metals Wood Machine building Non-ferrous metals Oil and gas Food Coal 0

20

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Figure 8.2. Share of Soviet republics in the total exports and imports of goods from Russia, 1991 Source: Goskomstat 1993

were primarily supplied to other Soviet countries rather than external partners. Similarly, imports to Russia also came mostly from other Soviet republics. As of 1992, 26 percent of all tractors, 15 percent of large diameter pipes, and 18.5 percent of all freight cars produced in Russia were supplied to the post-Soviet republics—if one takes into account that Russia itself has very high domestic consumption, this number clearly illustrates the extent of economic dependencies within the Soviet economy (Goskomstat 1993). Belarus exported 74 percent of all tractors it produced, 90 percent of all excavators, and 73 percent of all metal cutting machines to other Soviet republics.⁷ Furthermore, the skills of employees are also characterized by high asset specificity, which, combined with low mobility of the labor force, is a source of political control in post-Soviet authoritarian regimes (Obydenkova and Libman 2012; Frye et al. 2014, 2018; Libman and Obydenkova 2014, 2016; Lankina and Libman 2019). This economic interdependence created an important phenomenon affecting the likelihood of authoritarian consolidation, which Libman and Obydenkova (2014) refer to as “dependence of economic growth” or a “limiting factor”; see also Chapter 4). The concept of a limiting factor comes from biology and describes situations when the yield of a crop depends not on the average input of various factors but on the single factor that is in shortest supply. Stated otherwise, if this “limiting” factor is missing, increasing the supply of all other ⁷ http://observer.materik.ru/observer/N28_93/28_14.HTM, accessed July 20, 2018.

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factors does not increase the yield: the only way to increase the yield is to ensure that the limiting factor is supplied in high quantity and without interruption. Adjusting this concept to economic phenomena, “limiting factor” appears to describe a situation where the economy is characterized by three features: (a) without obtaining a particular input (imported from abroad or produced in the country) the economy is unlikely to generate sufficient economic growth or even stay functioning in the short run; (b) while in the long run the economy can free itself from dependence on this input, it is extremely costly (and without having the input in the short run, no resources for long-run restructuring are available); and (c) the supply of the input can be controlled by a handful of economic agents or the government (it is a “grabbable” resource, see also Boschini et al. 2007). If all these conditions are present, a limiting factor should increase the likelihood of authoritarian consolidation. The most obvious example of a limiting factor, which has been sufficiently well studied in the literature, is a country’s dependence on the supply of natural resources (e.g., oil, gas, or minerals). Resource-rich countries typically develop economies that are unable to sustain economic growth if this resource supply is interrupted (because all other industries are crowded out due to Dutch disease effects or because under conditions of resource abundance there is no incentive to improve production efficiency). Diversification, while proclaimed by many countries in this group, remains a goal only very few manage to achieve (Ross 2017). In the case of grabbable resources such as oil, the government can easily establish control over it and then transfer this economic power into political power. Thus, the limiting factor logic is yet another explanation for why authoritarianism flourishes in resource-rich countries. However, limiting factor logic is not limited to the countries or regions with large resource endowment. The conditions of high asset specificity should also produce similar effects: therefore we expect limiting factor logic to play a significant role for autocracy consolidation in the post-Soviet context. In post-Soviet Eurasia, four countries (Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan) can be included in the group of those which are resource dependent. According to World Bank data, as of 2016, oil rent accounted for 17.5 percent of the GDP of Azerbaijan (seventh in the world); 10 percent of Kazakhstan’s GDP (fifteenth in the world); 7 percent of Russia’s (seventeenth place), and 5.5 percent of Turkmenistan’s (nineteenth place). Fuel exports as a percentage of the total of merchandize exports were 90 percent for Azerbaijan, 63 percent for Kazakhstan, and 48 percent for Russia as of 2017 (World Bank data; for Turkmenistan no data are available). Some other countries also depend on a small set of industries (cotton and oil for Uzbekistan, hydroelectricity for Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan). In fact, the role of oil and gas in the formation of the post-Soviet autocracies has been well acknowledged in the literature (e.g. Bayulgen 2005).

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Libman and Obydenkova (2014) demonstrate a specific example of the limiting factor mechanism in the post-Soviet context, looking at the trade between post-Soviet countries as a channel through which the limiting factor logic can work. They focus, in particular, on the consolidation of subnational authoritarian regimes and study the case of Ivanovo—a Russian region with a predominantly textile industrial sector, heavily dependent on the supply of textiles from Central Asia. The machinery and equipment of Ivanovo’s textiles industry requires cotton of a particular fiber length, which is cultivated in Central Asia; but also Central Asian cotton, because of its fiber length, is more difficult to sell to other countries. In the case of Uzbekistan—the leading Central Asian cotton producer—trade in cotton is controlled by the government, which prefers to make deals with partners that are also backed by the government.⁸ Thus, the regional administration of Ivanovo developed a gatekeeping role of providing access to cotton and used this role to consolidate its power, turning Ivanovo into a consolidated autocracy. Belarus stands out as a particularly pronounced example of the limiting factor being used to strengthen a regime. The Belarusian economy is heavily dependent on Russian subsidies. This support comes in many forms, but in particular it is linked to the supply of cheap oil and gas to the country and payments for the transfer of natural resources from Russia into the European Union. It is safe to say that the economy of Belarus is completely dependent on the Russian subsidies. The World Bank (2012a) estimates that the share of Russian energy subsidies in the GDP of Belarus in 2001–06 were roughly 15–20 percent. In 2009, according to these estimates, it was close to 10 percent. For 2011–14, Knobel (2015) estimates annual energy subsidies to vary between 8 and 14 percent of GDP. Chubrik (2016) argues that the overall accumulated subsidies received by Belarus in 2000–15 were close to the country’s annual GDP; other assessments give even a higher level of almost 200 percent of GDP. Figure 8.3 reports yet another assessment of the size of energy subsidies Belarus receives from Russia from RBC (2017): the indicator is computed as the additional amount of money Belarus would have had to pay for energy if it were supplied at the same price as that Russia demands from Germany. The IMF (2016) estimates suggest that Russian support to the economy of Belarus varied between 11 and 27 percent of GDP annually in 2005–15 (this includes energy subsidies and financial flows). In addition to direct government lending from Russia and from the Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development (see Chapter 10), Belarus also receives loans from Russian state-owned banks for individual business projects. In a nutshell, cheap gas is used to sustain Belarusian enterprises, which are characterized by a very low level of energy efficiency and have not improved ⁸ For an in-depth analysis of Central Asian politics and business, and for the influence of Russia and the US in Central Asia, see Cooley (2012) and Cooley and Heathershaw (2017).

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Figure 8.3. Energy subsidies from Russia to Belarus, bln. US$ Source: RBC 2017

substantially over time. Crude oil (this issue will be particularly important for understanding the EAEU formation logic, which we address in Chapter 10), is important for Belarusian refineries (Libman and Ushkalova 2013), which export the processed oil to the EU. As long as Russia provides cheap access to oil and gas, Belarus finds itself in a somewhat strange position similar to a resource-rich country without actual natural resources: although Belarus does not extract any oil and gas itself, it can count on a sufficiently large and cheap energy supply from Russia and beneficial contracts for energy transfer. Access to Russian resources is, however, conditional on the political loyalty of the Belarusian regime to Russia in general and to Russia-led regional initiatives in particular. Here, the president of Belarus—Lukashenka—has been successful to proving to Russia that, while there are occasional contradictions between him and the Russian leadership (which at times result in short-term economic punishments imposed by Russia), he is still the only leader able to guarantee the long-term alliance between Russia and Belarus. Having undivided control over diplomatic relations with Russia implies total control over the subsidies from Russia—one of the important mechanisms allowing Lukashenka to consolidate his power. While the gains of Belarus are clear in this context, it is important to highlight the reasons behind the generosity of Russia towards Belarus. Belarus is a relatively small state located right between Russia and the European Union, bordering three EU-members—Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland—as well as Ukraine. Russia needs to keep Belarus among its geopolitical allies just as Belarus needs Russia to keep its economy alive. Having

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preconditions for the limiting factor, makes it easier for Russia to prevent Belarus sliding towards the West by maintaining and subsidizing the Belarusian economy and for the Belarusian leadership to consolidate its authoritarian rule. At the same time, Belarus is part of a number of post-Soviet regional alliances: the CIS, Union State of Russia and Belarus, the EAEU (and all its predecessors described in Chapter 9), and the CSTO. There are cases of postSoviet countries which exhibit all the features of the limiting factor logic (and where the limiting factor contributes to the consolidation of authoritarian rule), but which are not encouraged by Russia to participate in the Russiacentered regional organizations. An excellent example of these countries is Tajikistan (as we will discuss in Chapter 10). Tajikistan, in fact, illustrates another type of limiting factor present in postSoviet Eurasia, this time associated with labor migration. Russia attracted labor migrants from the poorer Central Asian countries Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, as well as from Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Kazakhstan also became an important destination for labor migration from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (on post-Soviet migration, see Korobkov 2007). Table 8.2 presents the extent to which CIS countries are dependent on migration from Russia. Not only do many citizens of these countries work and live in Russia, but the financial transfers from Russia make a major contribution to their GDP. The acute economic crisis Russia entered in 2014 has apparently reduced the Table 8.2. Dependence of the CIS countries on migration to Russia Country

Armenia Azerbaijan Belarus Kazakhstan Kyrgyz Rep. Moldova Tajikistan Turkmenistan Ukraine Usbekistan

Money transfers of individuals from Russia, mln. US$, 2017

Number of citizens registered by the Russian migration authorities as staying in Russia throughout 2017

Share of labor migrant remittances in GDP (%, 2017)

1,065 892 314 709 2,211 525 2,536 2 750 3,901

658 634 394 588 880 542 2,106 74 1,792 4,082

13.3 2.8 2.2 0.2 32.9 20.2 31.6 0.0 10.8 ND

Note: (1) the information on the number of citizens present in Russia includes, on the one hand, all reasons for international travel (not only labor migration), but, on the other hand, does not cover the unofficial migration, which can be substantial (e.g. migrants with dual citizenship). (2) the share of remittances in GDP includes remittances from all sources. However, with the exception of Moldova and possibly Ukraine, where a large fraction of its labor migrants work in Europe, for almost all other CIS states Russia is the only important migration destination. Sources: for money transfers, Russian Central Bank (http://www.cbr.ru/statistics/Default.aspx?Prtid=tg); for the number of migrants, Russian Ministry of the Interior (https://xn–b1aew.xn–p1ai/Deljatelnost/statistics/ migracionnaya/2/); for remittances, World Bank (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/bx.trf.pwkr.dt.gd.zs).

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benefits of labor migration to Russia, but it is possible that even in these conditions migrants prefer to stay in Russia, fearing even worse economic conditions at home (Ryazantsev 2016). The scale of migration flows in the CIS is certainly also driven by large income heterogeneity among members, as well as by the Soviet legacy—the widespread knowledge of Russian, for example, offers migrants easier integration into the Russian labor market. While for some countries labor migration is important but not crucial, for others—Tajikistan in particular—a big proportion of the country’s GDP is composed of migrants’ remittances. Since Tajikistani migrants do not have access to alternative labor markets, this constitutes an example of a limiting factor. A large proportion of migration flows from the wider CIS to Russia is frequently claimed to take place “under the radar” of the official authorities: migrants frequently work without the necessary permits or do not comply with registration procedures. However, even this informal migration would be substantially more difficult if the countries revised the CIS framework or unilaterally restricted migration. Russia frequently uses the “migration card” while bargaining with other CIS countries. For example, in 2011 it threatened to expel Tajiki migrants as a reaction to alleged smuggling.⁹ However, it still maintains a relatively free regime of movement of people across its CIS borders. This does, in fact, happen in spite of the widespread public disapproval of migration by the Russian population, where xenophobic and anti-migrant sentiment has been extremely strong since the mid-2000s (Schenk 2010). The overall perception of migration in Russia is extremely negative, and the Russian government could have easily garnered additional support by toughening its migration regime. The limiting factor, therefore, has both internal and external dimensions (one more pronounced than other). The internal dimension of a limiting factor is associated with the domestic characteristics of the economy of a polity. The external dimension involves the international ties—(e.g. trade or the movement of people or capital). The external dimension of a limiting factor (like those present in the cases of Belarus or Ivanovo oblast in Russia) is substantially more important in explaining patterns of regionalism and its policy effects. The massive development of inter-regional and inter-republican economic ties in the USSR combined with high specialization and thus high asset specificity is an important aspect making the prevalence of limiting factor logic in post-Soviet Eurasia more likely. For example, in the case of trade, in an environment where there is poor protection from the rule of law, the presence of government guarantees becomes crucial for any cross-border transactions. (In addition, in some countries—like Belarus or Uzbekistan—the state-owned sector of the economy still dominates—while other countries—like Russia or

⁹ http://www.rbc.ru/society/14/11/2011/5703eec29a79477633d39f97, accessed July 20, 2018.

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Kazakhstan—have been characterized by a clear trend towards state capitalism in the last decade (Spechler et al. 2017).), It is therefore relatively easy for the incumbent to the access to the limiting factor and to use it as a tool to consolidate an authoritarian regime. For migration, similarly, good political relations are needed to allow migrants access to the labor markets of other countries, similarly providing opportunities to capture access to the limiting factor (see Chapter 9 for more detailed discussion of the role migration plays in authoritarian consolidation in Eurasia). This creates a very important effect, which distinguishes post-Soviet Eurasia from many other parts of the world. Globally, there is debate over whether free trade fosters democratization (see Chapters 2 and 3)—it could have a positive effect by empowering private actors and supporting the transmission of norms and values. Contrary to the logic of limiting factor, most studies of global trade view foreign trade as the free movement of goods organized by numerous private companies and as a source of democratization (Milner and Kubota 2005). Studies on the pro-democratizing impact of foreign trade are compatible with research on the democracy-reinforcing impact of international factors in general (e.g. Levitsky and Way 2010). In its turn, foreign trade itself is intrinsically associated with studies of regionalism and integration and often viewed as another democracy-reinforcing factor (Pevehouse 2005). In this context, Eurasian regionalism stands out. Many trade transactions occur along the monopolistic value chains based on old Soviet ties (i.e. they provide for a single source of economic development to be easily taken under the control of central government, thus, switching the mechanism of limiting factor). In addition, trade is heavily politicized and involves a substantial presence of governmental actors. This type of trade tie is likely to strengthen the authoritarian path of regime transition rather than weaken it (Obydenkova and Libman 2012). Of course, it is not the case that all trade in Eurasia is politicized and based on old Soviet ties—for example, in Central Asia there is substantial informal cross-border trade (Kaminski and Mitra 2010, 2012; Turaeva 2014), and along Russian borders there has been a booming trade driven by new consumer-oriented private industry. However, the old trade ties still play a crucial role. Thus, the limiting factor mechanism can be associated only partly with historical legacies (the case of Belarus) but can also be relatively independent of historical factors (the case of Tadjik labor migration, which benefits from the widespread knowledge of the Russian language in Tajikistan, but emerged in its current form only in the 2000s). The limiting factor logic can explain why a certain state is a desirable candidate for membership in a regional organization (the case of Belarus and its strategic importance for Russia, makes it a welcome member of most existing regional organizations led by Russia). At the same time, it sheds light on a situation where a seemingly friendly state with regime affinity is not welcome to join a

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Eurasian regionalism: preservation of trade ties

Asset specificity of the Soviet economy

Crucial role for economic growth High switching costs

Politicization of post-Soviet trade

Authoritarian consolidation

Easy for the government to grab

Figure 8.4. The logic of the limiting factor in the post-Soviet trade

regional club of autocracies (e.g. Tajikistan not being invited to join the EAEU, see Chapter 10). From this point of view, we are likely to observe a very peculiar effect of regionalism in Eurasia, if it results in abolishing borders for cross-border trade (as we have argued above, most Eurasian regional organizations did not actually achieve this goal). By facilitating trade (and, in cases of a customs union with a high external trade tariff, even diverting trade from the third countries to within-union transactions), a regional organization in Eurasia can effectively preserve the existing economic ties based on the limiting factor logic and thus support an authoritarian path of regime transition. This case is particularly insidious, because there is also a purely economic logic behind protecting trade ties between countries—re-orienting towards new suppliers or markets is extremely expensive, and thus countries have good reason to support regionalism in order to promote economic cooperation. One can also argue that the effects associated with the limiting factor logic are not necessarily outcomes of conscious decisions made by politicians (i.e. autocracy promotion) and may fall into the realm of autocracy diffusion. Nevertheless, they are extremely important and thus have to be taken into account when analyzing the political effects of Eurasian (economic) regionalism. The causal logic of this specific type of limiting factor is presented in Figure 8.4.

8.4. FROZEN CO NFLICTS AND BORDER DISPUTES While looking at the rhetoric produced by regional organizations in Eurasia and the scholarship focusing on economic regionalism in the post-Soviet world, there is a further important issue which should not be overlooked as

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it has a major impact on regional cooperation. This is the extent to which the countries of Eurasia are involved in various border disputes, as well as the presence of semi-recognized and non-recognized polities in the post-Soviet region. Border conflicts are certainly not unique for Eurasia: SAARC in South Asia also experiences similar problems (see Chapter 6), as do some of the African and Latin American regional organizations. An important feature of Eurasia, however, is the combination of disputes between countries and high economic interdependence. In any case, the existence of border disputes is an important factor affecting how much Eurasian regionalism is able to serve as a tool of regime boosting, which we will review in what follows. While the collapse of the Soviet Union did not follow the dreaded “Yugoslav scenario” with full-scale wars between countries and Russia’s intervention in other states in order to protect Russian-speaking minorities, it still resulted in a number of conflicts, which remain unresolved until today. After 1992, there were four territories in Eurasia, which are typically described as zones of frozen conflicts (although this description is in many instances misleading, because some of these conflicts regularly “unfreeze” with substantial death toll): Nagorny Karabakh (which seceded from Azerbaijan and is strongly connected to Armenia), South Ossetia (seceded from Georgia; after 2008 officially recognized by Russia), Abkhazia (seceded from Georgia; after 2008 officially recognized by Russia), and Transniestria (seceded from Moldova; enjoys some support from Russia). In addition to these territories, there are several Eurasian countries with unresolved border disputes. These are particularly frequent in Central Asia, where, for example, Uzbekistan used minefields to separate its borders from Tajikistan. Further separatist enclaves (e.g. Chechnya in Russia) ultimately did not survive in the long run. The South Ossetian conflict became the trigger for a war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. In 2014, finally, Russian military intervention in Ukraine produced two further separatist enclaves (Donetsk and Luhansk), as well as the annexation of Crimea, which is likely to remain a major international crisis point for decades to come. The existence of these conflicts has an impact on both regionalism and its autocracy-promoting function. In terms of the effect on regionalism, conflicts are clearly a factor preventing countries to engage in even symbolic cooperation, yet alone any real economic or political interaction. One can hardly imagine a free trade area including both Azerbaijan and Armenia (with that border remaining closed to any transactions since the early 1990s). Border disputes are one of the reasons why regionalism in Central Asia remained unsuccessful. Since 2008, any form of regional integration in Eurasia involving Georgia and Russia has been impossible. In the early 1990s, Eurasian regional organizations (in particular, the CIS) were used for peacekeeping operations in some of the conflict zones, but with very limited effectiveness (we will discuss this issue in Chapter 9).

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In terms of autocracy promotion, one needs to make two important observations. First, in the presence of conflicts, the legitimacy effect associated with Eurasian regionalism could be less for some of the regimes. On the contrary, legitimacy could increase if the country keeps its distance from the regional organizations. This could apply even to pure integration rhetoric. In Eurasia, the existence of frozen conflicts was one of the main reasons for the establishment of GUAM—a regional organization including Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova (three countries which had separatist enclaves since the early 1990s, and one—Ukraine—which has had to deal with this problem since 2014). While the GUAM eagerly presents itself as a coalition of more democratic countries in Eurasia, the membership of Azerbaijan makes this self-presentation questionable: Azerbaijan is a consolidated autocracy. At the same time, a consistent goal of GUAM since its establishment has always been to draw the attention of the international community to the issue of the frozen conflict and the role Russia plays in these conflicts (Vinokurov and Libman 2017). Similarly to other Eurasian organizations established before 2006, GUAM has very limited economic effects, but it is an important rhetorical instrument for the member states. Second, the non-recognized states can be seen as objects of autocracy promotion. Tolstrup (2016) discusses the role Russia plays in sustaining “pockets of autocracy” in the secessionist territories. This effect, however, is based primarily on bilateral relations between the secessionist governments and Russia (although, as the Chapter 10 will show, Russia refers to the EAEU in its agreements with some of the secessionist territories). Not all non-recognized states are authoritarian: in some cases, they develop pluralist politics. This is difficult to control even for Russia (as was the case in Abkhazia in 2004, when despite Russia intervening directly in the presidential elections in this territory, a different candidate to the one backed by Moscow was victorious). Similarly to limiting factor that can or cannot be part of historical legacies, the ethnic-territorial conflicts also only partly constitute historical legacies. Some of the conflicts emerged immediately after the collapse of the USSR (in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova; Russian secessionist territory Chechnya, which came under Moscow’s control in the early 2000s, also belongs to this group). However, for other conflicts, the direct link to the Soviet past is less obvious. Thus, while the war in Donbass (associated with the emergence of the Donetsk and the Luhansk People’s Republics) to some extent capitalizes on strong political divisions between Eastern and Western Ukraine, which can be traced back to the USSR, the consensus of observers is that we would not see the emergence of secessionist territories without strong support from Russia, driven by its political concerns as of 2014 (e.g. Allison 2014; O’Loughlin et al. 2017).

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8.5. CONCLUSION This brief discussion of Eurasian regionalism makes it possible to highlight a number of features of the region that we will discuss in the remaining part of the book. First, a strong impact of historical legacies (and, in particular, the high popularity of Eurasian regionalism in at least some of the countries of the post-Soviet world) is one of the reasons why Eurasian regionalism can be used as a rhetorical device providing legitimacy to ruling authoritarian elites. The situation is different from other parts of the world, where regional organizations receive much less attention and popularity. Here, the main regimeboosting effect of NDROs is that they increase the international legitimacy of authoritarian regimes; in Eurasia, in addition, regionalism is in itself an attractive idea that a significant part of the population is willing to support. Second, the limiting factor logic is yet another important factor for the consolidation of authoritarian regimes in Eurasia: in case regional organizations indeed manage to promote trade in the region, they could contribute to the preservation of economic ties associated with the limiting factor and thus indirectly strengthen authoritarian regimes (the strength of this effect will be subject to empirical observation). Third, the multiplicity of conflicts in Eurasia reduces the usefulness of regional organizations for autocracy promotion (in fact, conflicts are one of the main reasons why in some countries— Georgia after 2008, Ukraine after 2014—Eurasian regionalism ceased to be popular in any way). The overview of Eurasian regionalism in this chapter demonstrates both its similarities with other regional organizations as well as its uniqueness. In terms of similarities, the chapter demonstrates the rather typical problem of an implementation gap that regional organizations in this part of the world face. Eurasia is not unique in this instance: in fact, for most regional organizations underperformance as opposed to the declared goals is the rule rather than the exception (e.g. Gray 2014, 2018). For us, this issue will be important for identifying the specific mechanisms that allow regional organizations to exercise an impact of the consolidation of authoritarian regimes even if the extent of economic cooperation is limited (in case of the CIS, for example, it is in electoral monitoring). It also means that, again, even the failure to fully implement official economic goals does not make regional organizations irrelevant: they could have additional effects, associated with regime boosting (Söderbaum 2004a). On the other hand, as scholars of comparative regionalism regularly highlight, each and every regional integration project is truly unique. Most regional organizations emerged in a specific environment and are strongly influenced by the cultural, political, and social specifics of their region (Duina 2006). Thus, one should not treat Eurasian regionalism as a “unique phenomenon”—merely one of many specific examples of regionalism,

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Limiting factor

Ethnic conflicts

Soviet legacy

Figure 8.5. Specific features of the Eurasian regionalism

which, as discussed in this chapter, deserves particular attention from the point of view of this book. As a final remark, we need to acknowledge that three features of the postSoviet regionalism we have discussed in this chapter—Soviet legacies, limiting factor, and ethnic conflicts—are related to each other, but do not fully overlap. The Venn diagram shown in Figure 8.5 illustrates the logic of our argument more precisely. Thus, the limiting factor is to some extent the result of Soviet asset specificity, but to some extent an inevitable outcome of the geography of the post-Soviet world—all of its countries except Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia are landlocked; many of them depend on each other to get access to key markets (the Russian pipeline network through Belarus or Ukraine or Russia as a transit country for Central Asia). Ethnic conflicts, again, are to some extent driven by Soviet ethnic policy and the way the borders between Soviet republics were determined (e.g. Geukjian 2016), but to some extent it is an outcome of pre-Soviet processes or is influenced by global changes. We will take the factors described in this chapter into account while studying Eurasian regionalism.

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9 Political Regionalism The CIS

We start our detailed analysis of individual examples of NDROs with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a multi-purpose regional organization, which in since the early 2000s has focused primarily on political and humanitarian issues.¹ Following the logic of the theoretical part of the book, we start this chapter by looking at the heterogeneity of CIS members and the power asymmetry that is characteristic of this regional organization. We then study the governance structures of the CIS. The main focus of the chapter, however, is on understanding the consequences of membership of the CIS for its member states. Since, as we will show below, the CIS has achieved almost no progress in economic issues and has limited implications for security, our main objective is to understand the role of the CIS in terms of politics, especially its contribution to the stabilization of authoritarian regimes in Eurasia.

9.1. HETEROGENEITY AND PO WER A S Y M M E T R Y I N THE CI S The CIS was the first regional organization that emerged in the post-Soviet space. Its origins are unique if compared to the emergence of regional organizations world-wide. This is one of the few cases in modern history when an international organization was formed in the aftermath of the disintegration of a state—in this case, the USSR. On 8 December 1991, the agreement establishing the CIS was signed by Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, announcing that membership in this new regional organization was open to any former ¹ Some of the results presented in the chapter are based on Libman and Obydenkova (2013a). Reprinted with the permission of Springer. “Informal Governance and Participation in NonDemocratic International Organizations,” Review of International Organizations 8: 221–43. 2013.

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Soviet republic. The CIS Agreement also stated that all former Soviet republics were independent states. This appears to be the main reason why the countries signed the agreement in the first place—when the CIS was conceptualized, it was primarily seen as a tool to reinforce and legitimize the independence of the member states rather than to strengthen their cooperation. Only ten days later, the heads of Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan signed the Alma-Ata Protocol to the CIS Agreement (on 21 December 1991), joining the CIS as member states. Georgia became a CIS member two years later, in December 1993. From the very beginning, only the three Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) remained firmly outside the CIS. Two countries claim to enjoy a special status in the CIS. Ukraine has never ratified the CIS Charter, although it has participated in all CIS activities (in the Russian-language documents of the CIS, therefore, a legal distinction is made between “members” and “participants” of the CIS). Turkmenistan has, since 2005, described itself as an associate member of the CIS, although legally the CIS does not envision associate membership. After the Russian–Georgian war in August 2008, Georgia announced its desire to withdraw from the CIS. After the obligatory year of waiting (following the rules of the Charter), Georgia left the CIS in August 2009. Since that time, membership has remained stable with no critical changes, with eleven former Soviet republics (Ukraine has continued to discuss the possibility of exiting the CIS since 2014; in 2018, it announced that it does not need to leave the CIS, since it never belonged to it, because it did not ratify its Charter, but the same status has not stopped the Ukraine from considering itself part of the CIS in the past). There has been informal discussion about the possibility of other countries becoming members of the CIS (e.g. Afghanistan declared its willingness to join the CIS in 2008), but this has always been rejected—the CIS is a club of post-Soviet states only. From the very beginning, the Soviet legacy was the main commonality of the members of the CIS, and over time, as this factor became weaker, the heterogeneity of the CIS became more obvious. The CIS, as of now, consists of extremely heterogeneous states with strong economic, political, and cultural differences. Political heterogeneity, although substantial, is probably the smallest of these. The majority of the CIS members are classified, according to the FH data, as “not free” or at best “partially free” (see Figure 9.1). However, within the class of authoritarian or hybrid regimes, the CIS countries are very diverse. The Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan quickly transformed themselves into consolidated authoritarian regimes under the absolute control of the president; this system survived the death of the regime founders in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. There is, however, a substantial difference between Turkmenistan, where people do not enjoy even limited freedoms and political participation, and Kazakhstan, which is much more open and pluralistic. This

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Azerbaijan

Russia Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

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3 0

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GDP per capita PPP 2011

Figure 9.1. Economic and political heterogeneity of CIS countries

also applies to Russia, Armenia, and Belarus, which, on the one hand, at least since the early 2000s, are ruled by consolidated authoritarian regimes, but where some level of political participation is still allowed. However, the extent to which this happens varies from country to country and from time period to time period (the situation in Armenia could change after the revolution in 2018 though, which might open an opportunity for a more democratic system in the country). Moldova managed to create a political system with relatively free elections; these, however, are plagued by oligarchic influence. The same has applied to Kyrgyzstan since 2010 and to Ukraine since 2014 (or, possibly, even since 2004). The most striking difference between the CIS countries is associated with cultural specifics. The CIS is one of the very few regional organizations that includes countries with a substantial presence of different Christian denominations (Orthodox Christianity in Russia, Georgia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova; Old Orthodox Christianity in Armenia; and various Catholic and Greek-Catholic groups in Belarus and Ukraine). Both of the major Islamic denominations are represented—Sunni and Shi’a in Russia, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia—as well as Islamic minorities in Georgia and Moldova (Azerbaijan is one of the few countries of the world where both Sunni and Shi’a are present in almost equal proportions). In addition Russia has a substantial Buddhist minority. The CIS thus includes regions where almost all major religions of the world are present.

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In the same way, the economic differences between the CIS countries are enormous (Figure 9.1). While the richest countries of the CIS are comparable with the poorer EU members, the poorest CIS countries clearly belong to the group of least developed countries. The GDP per capita of the richest CIS country is nine times that of the poorest (in the EU, if one excludes the extreme case of Luxembourg, the difference is roughly twice).² This variation in income, although substantial, does not, in fact, fully represent extreme differences in economic structures: the CIS includes both resource-rich and resource-poor countries, countries with a primarily agricultural focus and those with a strong industrial sector, etc. The reason why all of these countries formed a regional organization is straightforward: it is a legacy of the Soviet Union, which included extremely different territories. Over time, the transition process resulted in an increase in these differences, due to the variation in reform strategies and political developments, as well as to the revival of the pre-Soviet cultural legacies suppressed by communism (Gleason 2010). However, the growing heterogeneity of the CIS did not result in the restructuring of its membership: the core country of the CIS, Russia, seems to tolerate the substantial differences among the member countries. In particular, the differences across members became especially pronounced in the 2000s, when the transition process was sufficiently advanced; but it was the early 2000s when the majority of the CIS countries (and, especially, Russia) evolved into consolidated authoritarian regimes. This is in line with the theoretical argument of the book on the larger heterogeneity of membership in NDROs. At the same time, the CIS differs from the average NDRO we study in this book by being an organization with an extremely pronounced hegemonic structure. Russia is without doubt a hegemon in the CIS. In terms of the main quantitative measure we use in this book—the CINC—Russia accounts for 62 percent of the overall power potential of the group of CIS countries. In 2007, Russia’s CINC (0.039) was approaching being four times higher than Ukraine’s (0.012), the second country in the CIS in terms of this indicator. Kazakhstan’s CINC was only 0.003, that is, ten times smaller than that of Russia; Belarus and Uzbekistan showed even smaller values for this indicator. As we have hypothesized, the non-democratic hegemons should face particularly large problems attracting partners due to the low credibility of commitments. But we also argued that this problem could be mitigated by a specific governance structure, as is indeed the case in the CIS. We will address this topic in what follows—the possibility of the members opting out of participation in particular agreements and of varying the intensity of their participation in the regional organization. ² http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/EU-Commonwealth_of_ Independent_States_(CIS)_-_statistics_on_GDP, accessed July 20, 2018.

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9.2. GOVERNANCE The structure of governance of the CIS is outlined in Charter VI, Articles 21–35, of the CIS Charter, with the Council of Heads of States as the decisionmaking body of the organization. Article 21 states that the Council will be a decision-making body and will have meetings twice a year. The Council of Heads of Governments is to coordinate various aspects of cooperation and is meant to meet four times each year. The Council of Heads of States and the Council of Heads of Government are meant to take decisions on the basis of mutual consensus. If a state is not interested in participation in decisionmaking with regard to a certain issue, the lack of interest of this member state will not be considered an obstacle to decision making (Article 23). The Charter states that based on the decisions of the councils, the Council of Foreign Ministers will coordinate the foreign political activities of member states and will organize consultations on issues of mutual interest (Article 27). The Coordination and Consultative Committee is planned as a permanent executive and coordinative body of the CIS (Article 28). The Committee may forward the proposals on cooperation on the development of socio-economic relations, organize conferences, and “promote the work of other organs” of the CIS (Article 28). The Coordinator of the Committee is appointed by the Council of Heads of States and, like the council, is located in Minsk. Unlike the committee, which seems to be a purely administrative body, the Council of Defense Ministers has wider functions outlined in the Charter. The Council of Defense Ministers and the Allied Armed Forces Chief Command will command the Allied Armed Forces, military observers, and the peacekeeping forces in the CIS. Both the Council of Defense Ministries and the Allied Armed Forces Chief are under the direct control of the Council of Heads of States. Though the procedure for the election or appointment of a head of the Council of Ministries and the Chief Command are not specified in the Charter, it is likely that both were meant to be appointed by the Council of Heads of States. Originally the Allied Forces of the CIS consisted of the Soviet military assets the members were unable to divide up among themselves and were, in terms of their organization, a direct continuation of the Soviet Ministry of Defense. These Allied Forces were dissolved and, at the time of writing, the CIS does not have a military component. Another military organ of the Council of Heads of States is the Council of the Frontier Troops Chief Commanders, whose function is to control and defend the external frontier of CIS member states. Apart from foreign affairs and military bodies, the Economic Court and the Commission on Human Rights are both under control of the Council of Heads of States. A body with somewhat less significance, the Organs of Branch Cooperation work with the Council of Heads of Government. The Economic Court of the CIS has no significance in terms of decision making. The Charter also described the

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spheres of interparliamentary cooperation through the establishment of the Interparliamentary Assembly and regulations of financing. The budget is also under the direct control of the Council of Heads of States. Thus, the CIS confirms another important conjecture we made about the governance of NDROs: the predominance of intergovernmentalism or, additionally, of the highest-level decision making (essentially, any decision in the CIS which is of substantial relevance for the member states has to go through the Council of the Heads of State). This design, however, also reflects the nature of the CIS as an organization. It emerged after the collapse of the USSR and was designed to a large extent to reinforce independence: the member states were simply unwilling to commit to a higher level of cooperation and, in particular, to the supranational institutions (if some institutions with supranational elements indeed emerged—such as the Interstate Economic Committee in the CIS Economic Union—they typically did not survive for long). But even within the limited confines of intergovernmentalism, CIS exhibits a specific and important feature. Unlike most other regional organizations, participation in the CIS is not a binary decision. Each country is free to select the intensity of its involvement in the CIS—which we will refer to as the intensity or level of participation—within the CIS legal framework. CIS member states are allowed to abstain from participation in any decision of its institutions or any agreement signed. Thus, the CIS essentially has produced what might be termed a “regional organization à la carte,” or a menu of different agreements, decisions, and acts from which member states are (almost) free to choose. Of course, the choice is subject to external influences and substantial informal bargaining, often heavily affected by Russia (as the key player) and other major players, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan. To our knowledge, there have been no instances in which Russia explicitly forced CIS states to join any agreement by using military force (the war between Russia and Georgia was not related to Georgia’s position toward the CIS and, in fact, resulted in Georgia’s exit from the grouping; Conflict between Russia and Ukraine was also not linked to Ukraine’s membership of the CIS in any way). However, Russia has actively used informal pressure of various sorts, such as manipulating the price of natural gas or delaying the withdrawal of military installations. The variation in terms of the participation in the CIS agreements among the member states is enormous, as Figure 9.2 shows. Clearly, Russia leads in terms of the overall number of decisions accepted for the entire period of the CIS’s existence, although this is not the case for individual types of agreement (in the area of political cooperation, the Kyrgyz Republic has signed more agreements than Russia). The results are even more complex if one views them by period: for some nations (such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), the number of agreements accepted stagnates or declines, whereas for others (especially Belarus) it increases. Russia is typically followed by its close allies: Armenia,

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> 1600

1100–1500

500–1100

< 500

Figure 9.2. Number of the CIS decisions accepted by the CIS states, 1991–2010

Kazakhstan, Belarus, Tajikistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan, as well as Moldova and Georgia, show much lower levels of interest in CIS agreements, with Turkmenistan demonstrating the least interest among all CIS states. This variation is important for us not only conceptually (to explain the existence of an NDRO with a powerful hegemon), but also from the empirical standpoint. While studying the effect of the CIS on political regimes, we will rely on these data to look at the correlation between political regimes and the intensity of the participation of individual countries in the CIS, which is important for studying the causal effects of the CIS on its members.

9.3. EFFEC TS O F THE CIS: ECONOMIC AREA From the point of view of economic development, the lack of performance of the CIS is particularly telling (Kubicek 2009). Any plans for broader cooperation going beyond a free trade area (e.g. a customs union or an economic

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union) were rejected in the early 1990s; the CIS Economic Union agreement was never implemented, while some of the economic agreements (such as the CIS Payment Union of 1994) simply became obsolete over time, as the particular challenges of the CIS countries disappeared. The free trade agreement was discussed several times; in some cases, it was signed but never implemented, while in others it was rejected by the CIS members (including, paradoxically, Russia, which blocked the Ukrainian free trade proposal in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s). In 2011, the CIS countries finally agreed on a free trade area agreement; this, however, contains numerous exceptions (the agreement was not signed by Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan and was only signed with a number of reservations by Uzbekistan). The compliance with the new agreement is also limited: in 2016, Russia unilaterally imposed duties against Ukraine (and in 2014 against Moldova), which was presented as a reaction against these countries’ signing Association Agreements with the EU; Ukraine retaliated by abolishing the free trade area with Russia. There is, however, an area where the CIS performs relatively well, though it may be to a large extent explained by the unilateral actions of the member countries and by the bilateral treaties between these countries rather than by the CIS framework as such: the CIS still maintains an area with relatively free movement of people. Originally, after the fall of the USSR, the borders of the CIS members were symbolic and porous; the CIS countries mostly allowed their citizens to cross to other CIS states without substantial restrictions, often with domestic IDs rather than international passports. Over time, the regulations were toughened, but the majority of the CIS countries do not require citizens of other CIS states to obtain a visa to visit them. For example, citizens of nine CIS countries still enjoy visa-free travel to Russia (either for an unlimited period of time or for a 90-day period); the only exception is Turkmenistan. Russians are allowed to visit the same countries without a visa. There has been discussion since the onset of the war in Donbass about introducing visas for Russians in Ukraine, but the decision has not been implemented as of 2018, though there is a requirement for Russian citizens to preregister their travel to Ukraine at least one month in advance at a website of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry. In addition, the internal regulations for foreigners (e.g. registration after arrival at a certain location or obtaining work permits) are frequently relaxed for CIS members. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule: the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia, for example, is closed for any form of travel. In the 2000s, this freedom of mobility, along with poor enforcement of the existing acts, rules, and regulations, was one of the reasons for the emergence of large migration flows within post-Soviet Eurasia, which were discussed in Chapter 8. The existence of a relatively free migration area in the CIS is in line with the argument presented in Chapter 6. We have suggested that in NDROs

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public sentiment may be less important for the member countries, which would therefore agree to embrace migration if they could extract economic and political benefit from it. This is what is happening in Russia: the regime is able to disregard the demands of the public in this respect, first, due to the economic gains to be made from migration (which fills a substantial labor gap in the Russian market), and second, and potentially even more importantly, because it can use migration as a tool of political pressure against other countries of the CIS. This is because, as mentioned, migration increases their dependence on Russia. There are occasional populist measures in the area of migration as well (e.g. in 2007 the federal government prohibited the employing of migrants in certain forms of retail),³ but they seem to occur much more often at the regional than at the federal level. The Russian government is more interested in making sure that the CIS remains in the Russian sphere of influence and uses migration as a tool of bargaining with other states of post-Soviet Eurasia. There have even been cases where migrants enjoyed certain privileges over the domestic population (in terms of mandatory registration of residence, for example), which were implemented as incentives for other CIS countries to remain loyal to Russia. We can go as far as to claim, somewhat provocatively, that a (currently extremely unlikely) democratization of Russia and of the CIS countries in general would undermine the free mobility of labor in this area. It should be mentioned that individual CIS bodies are, in fact, able to play an important economic role, but one mostly driven by specific circumstance: for example Libman and Vinokurov (2012a) describe the successful cooperation of CIS states in the electricity and railroad sectors, where they have to deal with the common infrastructure they inherited from the USSR. As soon as the countries achieve higher independence in these sectors (e.g. electricity), the power of the CIS institutions goes down. In some cases, the CIS bodies seem to function only as long as they do not provoke conflicts with the member states. An example is the International Aviation Committee (IAC), a body responsible for certifying aircraft for use in the CIS and for the investigation of incidents in the area of aviation. In 2015, the IAC suddenly and unexpectedly revoked the certification for the use of Boeing 737 planes in the CIS. The media speculated that this was an outcome of the then recent bankruptcy of Transaero, a large Russian private airline, whose owners had close personal ties to the IAC.⁴ The IAC decision was revoked almost immediately; however, as a reaction to the conflict, the Russian government decided to revoke the authority of IAC in this matter.⁵

³ http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/2009/0367/analit02.php, accessed July 20, 2018. ⁴ http://www.rbc.ru/business/06/11/2015/563bf0209a794703297026d8, accessed July 20, 2018. ⁵ https://lenta.ru/news/2015/11/26/no_more, accessed July 20, 2018.

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While most of the goals were left unimplemented, the question could become why this organization was really created. It seems to be no puzzle, however: as often claimed openly in speeches of the President Putin of Russia in the 2000s, and mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,⁶ the CIS was designed to soften the consequences of the collapse of the USSR and to represent the “civilized divorce” of the former Soviet states, to ensure a smooth transition from disintegration into the functioning of newly independent states. At the moment of the disintegration of the USSR, the consequences of the collapse were largely unknown and unforeseen. The creation of the CIS was a strategy to keep the door open to any form of cooperation should it be needed. Despite a failure to implement specific economic, social military, and human rights programs, the CIS was transformed into a convenient forum for dialog and a meeting place for heads of states. Throughout its existence, the CIS has experienced many calls for reform. The bureaucratic structure of the CIS was re-organized and cut by 35 percent in 2006 (Vinokurov 2010). In 2007, a further reform program was passed involving additional institutional changes in the design of the CIS, mostly in line with the Russian agenda. More recently, in April 2016, Kazakhstan suggested considering reform of the CIS at the Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs. The reasoning behind this suggestion is that many of the officially claimed original goals of the CIS have been implemented by other regional organizations with often overlapping member states (such as the EAEU, which implements economic objectives and the CSTO, which implements military defense goals). Therefore, as was pointed out by Kazakhstan, there is a need to adjust the CIS and avoid duplicating the programs and goals that are carried out by other organizations with the participation of the same member states, and to make the CIS smaller and more efficient in the implementation of its goals. Reform would consist in the “optimization” and “adaptation” of the CIS to modern political challenges as well as accounting for the economic crisis that has afflicted some of the CIS member states.⁷ Still, no significant progress in terms of reorganizing the CIS bureaucracy to support economic cooperation was achieved.

9.4. EFFECTS OF THE CIS: SECURITY In terms of security, two strands of analysis should be distinguished. On the one hand, as mentioned, the CIS (and its Allied Forces Command) was used to ⁶ http://www.newsru.com/russia/25mar2005/doomed.html, accessed July 20, 2018. ⁷ Chernenko, E (2016). Reformu SNG Predstavyat k Yubileyu. Kommersant, April 9, https:// www.kommersant.ru/doc/2960664, accessed August 19, 2018.

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govern the Soviet military assets, which were either disputed by the CIS countries (such as the Black Sea Fleet, contested between Russia and Ukraine) or were considered too important and were thus originally designed to be governed jointly by the CIS states (nuclear weapons). The importance of this function diminished rapidly, as new independent states strengthened their military capability; currently, the CIS does not play any role in this respect. Another, and potentially more interesting, aspect of the discussion is the role of the CIS in the peacekeeping process in the region. This role appeared to be rather substantial in the early 1990s: by 2000s, however, the multilateral component of CIS peacekeeping had been lost entirely (the troops were provided by Russia alone). The remaining Russian troops, which once were part of CIS missions, should instead be seen as parties in conflicts than as nonpartisan intermediaries. In the early 1990s, peacekeeping efforts in the CIS area concentrated on (i) secessionist conflicts in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova (Abkazia, Southern Ossetia, Nagorny Karabakh, and Transnistria) and (ii) the civil war in Tajikistan. The peacekeeping forces were deployed in four out of five conflicts; in Transnistria and Southern Ossetia the peacekeepers were, however, not part of the CIS initiatives and their action was based on agreements between the parties to the conflict and Russia. Thus, the CIS as an international organization was involved in merely peacekeeping in Abkhazia and Tajikistan. In Abkhazia, in 1994, the Council of the Heads of State approved the establishment of Collective Peacekeeping Forces to separate the conflicting parties. However, the CIS operation was not multilateral in nature—Russian forces operated under the CIS banner. In Tajikistan, a CIS peacekeeping operation took place in 1993–2000. Originally, it was designed as a multilateral operation and included Russian, Kazakhstani, Kyrgyzstani, and Uzbekistani forces (the initial plan also suggested the inclusion of the Tajikistani military, which was later excluded to match international norms on peacekeeping operations). Russia had to bear 50 percent of the costs of the operation, while Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan intended to cover 15 percent each, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan each had to pay 10 percent. In reality, however, only Russia provided any financing to the collective forces. The participation of smaller CIS countries was limited to small military contingents or simply a number of observers and decreased over time. In essence, the collective peacekeeping in Tajikistan also became a Russian operation. At the same time, since 1994, its focus switched from a traditional peacekeeping role to protection of the border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan (to prevent the incursion of militant groups, and drug and weapons trafficking etc.). In this capacity, it is difficult to separate CIS activity from the activity of the Russian border guard stationed in Tajikistan before the start of the CIS operation; these guards worked on the basis of a bilateral agreement.

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In a nutshell, CIS peacekeeping was therefore Russian peacekeeping; the CIS merely contributed to the legitimization of the Russian forces. The effect of the additional CIS endorsement was rather limited: for example, in the mid2000s, Georgia did not seem to differentiate between the CIS operation in Abkhazia and the non-CIS operation in South Ossetia, treating both as Russian forces. The effectiveness of the CIS operations differed. In Tajikistan, Russian intermediation ultimately resulted in a ceasefire and a political settlement of the civil war. Although the border to Afghanistan remains a source of instability and drug trafficking, this operation can be classified as a success. In Abkhazia, initially, the CIS forces managed to prevent a full-scale confrontation between Georgian forces and separatists; the ceasefire at the border was never complete and a political settlement was never achieved. In the mid-2000s, the new Georgian leadership under Mikhail Saakashvili rejected Russian intermediation in the conflict; in 2006, the Georgian parliament requested Russian forces be withdrawn from Georgian territory.⁸ After the war of 2008, Georgia left the CIS and thus the mandate of the CIS forces expired; Russian troops based in Abkhazia are now there under the bilateral agreement with the Abkhazian government. While it is possible to say that in the 2000s the Russian presence prevented any military escalation (for some time, until 2008), the consensus of the observers seems to be that it did not contribute to a genuine resolution of the conflict. Instead, Russia relied on “controlled instability” as a tool of influence over its neighbors, making them more dependent on Russia (Abushov 2009). Eventually, Russian forces became a source of conflict rather than of settlement. The discussion of this section clearly shows that the CIS did not play a substantial role in improving regional security (see also Allison 2001). It was the Russian Federation which exercised an influence (occasionally positive and occasionally negative, depending on its objectives) on regional security situations. This is not surprising given the extreme asymmetries of power and resources in the CIS: in the 1990s, smaller CIS states simply lacked a sufficient functioning military to participate in peacekeeping activity. However, it also stresses the particular problems non-democracies face in cooperating in such a sensitive area as security.

9.5. EFFECTS OF THE CIS: POLITICS

9.5.1. Methodology of the analysis A particularly interesting topic for us is to test whether the CIS has an impact on the political regimes of the member countries, that is, whether an NDRO ⁸ http://www.newsru.com/world/18jul2006/gruz.html, accessed July 20, 2018.

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indeed exercises an anti-democratic external influence in Eurasia. While studying this research question, however, we encounter a fundamental problem associated with establishing the direction of causality, as we described in Chapter 3. The presence of regional organizations with predominantly non-democratic states can be explained by one of two conflicting logics. On the one hand, we could observe “self-selection,” that is, non-democratic states are more likely to join regional organizations where there is already a predominantly non-democratic membership. On the other hand, NDROs can themselves reinforce autocracy. Since the way we defined NDROs in the cross-regional analysis precluded us from studying their political effects, we will attempt to do so while focusing on individual regional organizations. In the case of the CIS, we use the unique feature of this regional organization—the “regionalism à la carte” approach. As a result, we observe a substantial variation in the extent to which the CIS countries actually participate in the regional organization. We attempt to correlate this level of participation with the political regimes of the CIS countries. Both directions of causality that we have suggested above imply that a higher level of democracy should be associated with lower participation in the CIS. In the next step, we use qualitative evidence to support each of the directions of causality. The data used in this study derive primarily from the CIS Register of Official Acts, which includes all agreements, decisions, and protocols signed by the CIS members as part of the organization. Each document is assigned to a particular issue, of which there are six large areas (organization of the CIS, economic cooperation, political cooperation, social and humanitarian cooperation, legal cooperation, and military and security cooperation) which are then subdivided into multiple smaller areas. Furthermore, for each document, the CIS reports those exact countries that have decided to sign this agreement.⁹ Our unit of observation is therefore the number of agreements in a particular area signed by a particular country in a particular year.¹⁰ In the main

⁹ The acts of the CIS signed by the members (or passed by the CIS institutions, which, however, always have an intergovernmental nature and include ex officio high-ranked bureaucrats of the member countries—e.g., the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, the Council of Prime Ministers, the Council of Ministers of Transportation, etc.—and are operating on the principles of voluntary participation in each decision described above) all have de jure the same binding legal status (although, depending on the individual country’s law, some may require different forms of ratification). They refer to very different types of decisions—from new norms to budget contributions and allocations of funds to key personnel decisions—yet it is hardly possible to rank them according to importance. Personnel decisions, for example, may play a crucial role in terms of the ability of the leading state to manipulate and have often caused greater disagreement among the CIS states than the more general treaties. ¹⁰ Therefore, our work is related to Malfliet et al. (2007), Hale (2008), and Darden (2009), who also look at the number of agreements signed in the CIS, although using different time periods and investigating different questions from those asked in this chapter.

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specification, we include only agreements signed unconditionally. In the CIS, countries are allowed to sign an agreement with a caveat, and, as Hale (2008, p. 195) notices, “reservations often stripped a given treaty of any real meaning.” In other cases, caveats were merely technical provisions implied by national legislation. In some cases, they were associated with budget issues and the financing of CIS initiatives. To ensure a uniform interpretation of our dependent variable, all agreements signed with reservations are excluded, but will be added into one of the robustness checks. Because agreements sometimes require more than a year of discussion, using annual observations may be impractical. Hence, we have divided the entire period into five-year increments (1991–1995, 1996–2000, 2001–2005, and 2006–2010; we limit our study to the 1991–2010 period due to data availability) and have calculated the total number of agreements accepted for each period. Thus, in the baseline specification, we observe each country for four periods and six areas of cooperation. This method provides us with 24 observations per country. Furthermore, we include in our sample all 12 former Soviet republics that were members of the CIS during most of the 1991–2010 period. Hence, the overall number of observations in the baseline specification equals 288. We will address the problem of possibly arbitrary periodization in one of the robustness checks. In our dataset, we include Georgia, which was a member of the CIS for almost the entire period of our investigation. As mentioned, this country was characterized by a rather specific path in the CIS. All CIS states expressed their general willingness to join the organization in December 1991 by signing the Alma-Ata Declaration, although the ratification of this document by some countries followed only in 1993–1994. Georgia, however, did not attend the Alma-Ata summit and did not originally sign the declaration, joining the organization only in 1993.¹¹ Georgia has also been the only country to officially leave the CIS so far, although it is reported to have requested to remain part of some CIS agreements (Mikhailenko 2011). While we include Georgia in our baseline sample, we also estimate all regressions excluding Georgia; in doing so, the results do not change. Our key explanatory variable is the political regime of the CIS countries, which was also averaged over five-year periods. Our baseline regressions, which we report in this chapter, were estimated using the FH dataset; however, we also run regressions using Polity IV as a robustness check. Thus, essentially, we correlate the number of agreements signed over a certain time period with the level of democracy. Furthermore, we use a battery of control variables to isolate the link between political regimes and the intensity of participation.

¹¹ In December 1991, the country experienced a successful military coup, forcing the president, Zviad Gamsahurdia, into exile.

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First, we control for the level of economic development and economic potential, that is, GDP per capita (in constant 2000 US dollars, averaged over the five-year period), total GDP (in constant 2000 US dollars, averaged over the five-year period), and log total GDP.¹² Hale (2008: 212) suggests that higher levels of development make the benefits of post-Soviet integration smaller. For example, economically large countries may be less dependent on access to the CIS markets or be more attractive to partners outside the CIS. A small GDP makes countries more dependent on possible support from the outside, which very often comes from Russia or other CIS states. At the same time, economic development is connected to democratization and marketization, so excluding this variable could create an omitted variable bias. Because there are very strong differences in terms of GDP and GDP per capita among the post-Soviet states, our preferred specification uses log GDP to avoid the impact of outliers (particularly Russia, with its very high GDP as opposed to other countries of the CIS and its very high involvement in the CIS). Second, we control for the economic openness of each country and, specifically, the extent of its economic dependence on the CIS (again, averaged over a five-year period). Economic openness is measured as a share of foreign trade in GDP (according to World Development Indicators). Economic dependence on the CIS is captured by the share of trade turnover (exports plus imports) with the CIS in total trade turnover (this variable is reported by the CIS Interstate Statistical Committee). The inclusion of the share of CIS trade is straightforward. If it is high, the country may be more interested in increasing its level of participation in the CIS merely to preserve access to crucial markets, even in the limited form ensured by the CIS. Even if the CIS trade share is substantial and the overall foreign trade of a country is low, the national economy of the country is still relatively independent of post-Soviet trade. Hence, we must control for the overall dependence on foreign trade as well. If the overall dependence on foreign trade is high and dependence on CIS trade is low, it may indicate that the country has easy access to markets outside the CIS and, again, is less dependent on post-Soviet integration. Third, we control for a dummy variable equal to 1 for countries that joined the WTO (Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine) during the period in question.¹³ Joining the WTO may reflect the range of exit options available for a country and its involvement in international economic ties outside the CIS (see Darden 2009). However, the norms of the WTO sometimes preclude CIS countries from signing particular economic agreements. Fourth, a topic of crucial importance for participation in post-Soviet regional organizations is the issue of the ethnic composition of the population

¹² Data are derived from the World Development Indicators. ¹³ More specifically, we set the dummy to 1 if the country was part of the WTO in the last year of the respective five-year period; we use the same convention in robustness checks as well.

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(Abdelal 2001, 2002; Hale 2008). Ethnicity is likely to determine public preferences for the CIS. More specifically, there are two components to be examined: the share of ethnic Russian population and the share of what is traditionally called the titular nation in the CIS, that is, Armenians in Armenia, Ukrainians in Ukraine, etc. Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to control for this variable in an empirical setting, given the poor quality of statistics. Typically, data on ethnic composition are collected as part of census data; however, they are often not precise enough to identify the complex matters of ethnic identification (e.g. in Ukraine, where the group of Russian-speaking Ukrainians of the Eastern regions is substantially different from the Ukrainianspeaking Ukrainians of the West) or may suffer from misreporting (especially in countries where some sort of ethnic discrimination exists). Additionally, not all countries implement the census on time. Finally, because the census is usually taken once a decade, we typically have only between one and three observations for the post-Soviet states. Nevertheless, we control for both characteristics to at least partially combat the problem.¹⁴ Finally, we control for the extent of economic reforms in the CIS countries. For this purpose, we add the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development index of structural reforms to the set of covariates, which has been actively used in the research on transition countries (e.g. Aristei and Perugini 2012). We take the average European Bank for Reconstruction and Development index over all areas of structural reforms. The index varies between 1 (low progress) and 4.3 (standards and performance typical for advanced industrialized economies). There may be a link between democracy and economic reforms, although the exact nature and direction of this link is debatable; progress in economic reforms can also drive the CIS countries to different levels of participation in the regional organization. All regressions are estimated using both OLS and negative binomial regression (because we have a count dependent variable; negative binomial estimates are reported in the Appendix). Each regression includes a full set of time and country fixed effects as well as fixed effects for individual areas where agreements are signed to capture the unobserved heterogeneity. We also cluster standard errors by area because it is likely that the number of agreements signed by each country in a particular area is interdependent (each agreement is signed by multiple countries).

9.5.2. Results Table 9.1 reports the main results of our study, using the FH index of democracy. Regression (1) includes merely the progress of economic reforms ¹⁴ We set both variables to equal the latest possible census data available for a particular period; again, the same assumption is used for all robustness checks.

Table 9.1. Determinants of the number of acts of the CIS unconditionally accepted by individual member states, 1991–2010, dep.var.: number of acts accepted, OLS

Economic reforms (EBRD) GDP per capita GDP Log GDP Foreign trade to GDP Share of CIS trade WTO member

Share of ethnic Russians Share of titular ethnicity Constant Observations R² Adjusted R² LR test

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

(12)

7.794** (2.871) 24.822** (8.851)

7.373* (2.934) 24.769** (8.869) 0.003 (0.002)

6.557** (2.533) 24.007** (8.634)

8.328** (3.149) 23.176** (8.071)

8.200** (3.073) 22.521** (7.825)

5.860* (2.285) 19.817** (6.494)

8.381** (3.174) 22.717** (7.865)

5.820* (2.266) 20.058** (6.462)

5.816* (2.453) 15.089** (5.311)

4.045* (1.793) 12.222** (4.271)

7.120* (3.074) 19.199* (7.544)

5.268* (2.213) 15.307** (4.902)

−8.405 (7.227) −0.052 (0.032) 0.366** (0.123) −0.494 (0.545)

−5.001 (5.561)

−3.666 (6.447) −0.098* (0.049) 0.210 (0.115)

−9.100 (6.955)

−6.594 (7.343) −0.059 (0.036) 0.225 (0.121)

−1.307** (0.450)

−1.450** (0.519)

0.000** (0.000)

−12.870 (6.921)

−14.233 (8.027) −0.023 (0.025)

−8.291 −12.717 (7.173) (6.861) −0.051 (0.032) 0.365** (0.123) 0.851 (0.657)

0.296* 0.255 (0.132) (0.129) −94.617* −95.038* −86.533* 212.719 249.135 134.019 209.621 136.595 112.975 97.912 115.345 95.499 (42.225) (42.291) (39.941) (127.280) (158.822) (164.529) (126.059) (165.783) (135.793) (180.559) (125.583) (164.555) 288 288 288 288 288 270 288 270 240 234 248 238 0.757 0.757 0.758 0.758 0.758 0.774 0.758 0.774 0.761 0.770 0.752 0.768 0.738 0.737 0.738 0.738 0.737 0.751 0.737 0.750 0.738 0.744 0.728 0.742 407.149*** 407.366*** 408.279*** 409.132*** 409.175*** 401.030*** 409.151*** 401.037*** 343.100*** 343.497*** 346.270*** 348.059***

Note: robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** at 5% level, * at 10% level. Robust standard errors clustered at area level. Includes country, area, and time fixed effects.

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Democracy (Freedom House)

(1)

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and democratization; regressions (2), (3), and (4) also control for GDP, GDP per capita, and log GDP; regressions (5) and (6) add the trade structure to the set of covariates; regression (7) controls for the WTO membership; and regression (8) simultaneously controls for WTO membership and trade structure. In the same way, regressions (9) and (10) control for the share of ethnic Russians (here we exclude the Russian Federation itself, for which this variable is obviously meaningless), both excluding and including trade structure. Regressions (11) and (12) replicate these results by replacing the share of ethnic Russians with the share of titular nation (again, we exclude Russia). Our regressions show that democratization is persistently and negatively correlated with the level of participation in the regional organization. This result is exactly what we hypothesized: countries where the level of democracy is lower are more inclined to join a non-democratic international organization. The effect is highly statistically significant. For OLS, in specification (1) we find that an increase of the FH index by one unit causes a ceteris paribus increase of the number of agreements signed by 7.8 units; that is, Tajikistan, if it managed to improve its level of democracy from 6 (the actual level) to 3 in 2006–10, would reduce the number of agreements signed by 23.4 from the actual level of 182 agreements (to provide a comparison, Ukraine signed 114 agreements during this period). To validate our findings, we performed a battery of robustness checks. They are discussed in the Appendix and support the main findings reported above. We also extend our analysis by looking at a set of further control variables, which could potentially matter for the interpretation of our results. First, we control for the breadth of ties to extra-regional players (specifically, the USA, the EU, and the IMF) which could have affected the integration decisions in post-Soviet Eurasia. We measure this factor by controlling for the following variables: • US economic and military assistance (reported by the United States Agency for International Development, in millions of US historical dollars); • TACIS funds allocation in 1991–2004 (in millions of euros); • participation in IMF programs (using the index created by Fang and Owen 2011 for 1992–2005, which we average over five-year-increments); and • official development aid from the EU institutions (from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Official Development Assistance (ODA) dataset, in millions of US dollars; since the dataset does not include any information on two key European CIS countries— Belarus and Ukraine—until 2005 and also for Moldova for the early 1990s, we use it only for the 2005–10 period). None of these additional controls changed our results. For the civil aid from the USA, economic assistance from the EU (ODA database) and TACIS aid we

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find the expected negative sign of the coefficients. Somewhat surprisingly, US military aid is positively correlated with CIS membership, most likely because Central Asian countries are among its key recipients (as part of the military campaign in Afghanistan). Geography (e.g. proximity to Europe) may also be an important factor influencing the exit options available to individual countries. Because we ran fixed effects regressions, simply including this variable in the set of covariates is impossible; however, we can investigate the interaction between the geographical factor and the FH index. To capture geographical proximity to Europe, we calculated the distance between the national capital and Brussels (in kilometers). If we include these interaction terms into the set of covariates, we still obtain a significant direct effect of democratization, which preserves its sign and significance. However, interaction terms are also significant. We find that non-democracies are more likely to increase their level of participation in the CIS; however, this effect is stronger for countries closer to Europe. The first result may be related to the fact that non-democracies in Europe are to a greater extent restricted in gaining access to other regional organizations (since the EU has very strict rules in this respect), and hence are forced to participate in the CIS (Belarus is, probably, the most prominent example of such a country).

9.5.3. Support for autocratic consolidation and electoral monitoring The effect we observed so far, as mentioned, can be interpreted in two ways from the point of view of causality. Thus, the goal of the subsequent discussion is to provide some qualitative evidence supporting each of the directions. We start with the possible effect of the CIS on the regimes of the member countries. Here, at the first glance, it appears to be rather difficult to develop a coherent argument. As we have mentioned, the impact of the CIS in terms of economic and security issues is very weak: why should we expect the CIS to matter for the domestic political development of its members? Moreover, CIS official documents show a clear commitment to democracy and human rights: the CIS framework is, from this point of view, identical to that of a DRO and does not contain any explicit statements which could be interpreted as supporting authoritarian regimes. While some of the regional organizations de facto support authoritarian regimes by emphasizing sovereignty (the ASEAN Way as discussed in Chapter 2, for example), the CIS does not seem to fit into this category: the organization’s acts do not point to the superiority of sovereignty over democratic values and human rights. So why should we expect the CIS to become a tool for strengthening authoritarian tendencies among its members? Essentially, to make the claim we intend to make in this

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sub-section, we need to find a specific mechanism of autocracy promotion (or, at least, for the support of authoritarianism) associated with the CIS in particular (and not with the generic Russian influence on its members). The case of the CIS, however, does provide us with this mechanism: this is the role the CIS plays in electoral monitoring. CIS electoral monitoring has been associated with numerous organizations. On the one hand, there are official monitors dispatched from the CIS itself, as well as (as a separate group of monitors) from its Interparliamentary Assembly. The first monitoring missions were dispatched in 2001 and 2002 but were not backed by a clearcut formal institution. In 2004, the CIS passed a special Statute of the Mission of Observers of the CIS, and in 2006 it set up an International Institute for Monitoring Democracy Development, Parliamentarism and Suffrage Protection of Citizens (IIMDD), thus creating a much more formal environment for its electoral monitoring. Over time, the Institute grew, and as of 2018 includes not only the head office, but also branches in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova. In 2001–09, the Mission monitored forty-seven elections, employing more than 9,000 observers. In 2011, the CIS recommended increasing the electoral monitoring role of the Mission. Since 2012, the observers’ missions have been financed through a separate budget. Interestingly, the main justification for this decision were upcoming Russian presidential elections, for which CIS observers also seem to be considered as a source of legitimacy.¹⁵ Summarizing the activity of the CIS monitoring missions, two key features stand out. First, the standards of the monitoring implemented by the CIS differ substantially from those of OSCE, even at the formal level: it was only in 2008 in St. Petersburg that the meeting of OSCE and the Interparliamentary Assembly of the CIS took place to work out universal criteria for the evaluation of democratic elections, with no progress having been observed so far. More importantly, the CIS is explicitly and openly critical of the OSCE standards, on the procedural, and on ideological grounds. The set of interviews of leading CIS officials published on the website of the Institute¹⁶ includes claims describing EU electoral procedures and the monitoring practices of overseas organizations as “backward,” compared to those of the CIS, as well as calls to recognize the need to acknowledge the “country-specific” varieties of non-democracies. In 2016 Dmitriy Gladey, the head of the IIMDD, suggested that the implementation of any critique of the OSCE should be made “considering” the national specificity of the country (essentially justifying any possible deviation from the OSCE norms). Any advice from the international observers should, according to Gladey, be used “from the position

¹⁵ Izverstiya, December 22, 2011. ¹⁶ http://www.iacis.ru/html/?id=83, accessed July 20, 2018.

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of realism.”¹⁷ Other frequently quoted examples of the “deficits” of OSCE monitoring include a lack of language knowledge on the part of the observers, a deficit of experience of working in Eurasia, or the presence of observers from countries which themselves do not permit electoral monitoring.¹⁸ At the same time, CIS observers eagerly search for analogies between the electoral practices of the CIS countries and of the established democracies—such as the US—to overcome the criticisms of the international observers.¹⁹ According to Sergey Lebedev, the head of CIS electoral monitoring in 2011: We see what is happening during the elections with the eyes of the friends and want to help our partners to decently carry out elections, to ensure the rights of the voters. And for Western observers, for some reasons, the main goal is to find problems, and then keep [the information about] these problems until the end of the elections, and only after that to openly declare it.²⁰

The second key feature of CIS monitoring missions is that the conclusions of CIS observers are systematically at odds with those of international observers from the OSCE or similar organizations. CIS observers almost always confirm that elections in any country correspond to “democratic standards” and, thus, they are actively used as a tool to support the legitimacy of non-democratic regimes within the CIS. In some cases, this has take an extreme form—in 2013, for example, the CIS endorsed the elections in Turkmenistan as “free and fair” (with Turkmenistan being indisputably the most restrictive autocracy in postSoviet Eurasia).²¹ As another example, CIS observers condemned the repeated second round of presidential elections in Ukraine in 2004, while fully approving the initial second round (which had led to the victory of Yanukovych and was associated with significant violations and falsifications) (Fawn 2006). Unofficially, CIS observers occasionally append their press conferences by statements of the following kind: Going back to Kazakhstan, I have to say that elections are a temporary process, they take only a month of time, and the usual life continues, and we, CIS observers, were able to see in both Astana and Kazakhstani regions that the life

¹⁷ http://www.belta.by/interview/view/na-rekomendatsii-mezhdunarodnyh-nabljudatelejstoit-smotret-s-uchetom-natsionalnyh-realij-5000/, accessed July 20, 2018. ¹⁸ http://owa.iacis.ru/pressroom/news/tavricheskiy_dvorets/mejdunarodnyie_nablyudateli__ sovetniki_a_ne_sudi__intervyu_generalnogo_sekretarya_soveta_mpa_sng_mihaila_krotova/, accessed July 20, 2018. ¹⁹ Kornia, A. (2011). Pochti Amerikanskie Vybory. Vedomosti, January 27, p. 2. ²⁰ Missiyu Nablyudateley SNG Uvelichat k Vyboram Prezidenta. Izvestiya, December 22, p. 2. ²¹ http://iacis.ru/pressroom/news/mezhdunarodnyy_institut_monitoringa_razvitiya_demokratii/ dmitriy_gladey_uchastvoval_v_rabote_missii_nablyudateley_ot_sng_vyborov_deputatov_ medzhlisa_v_turkme/, accessed July 20, 2018.

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in Kazakhstan, according to our assessments, is getting better . . . New houses are built, new roads are constructed.²²

As a result, the CIS provides a veil of international legitimacy to clearly falsified or fake elections. This has two effects. First, it could strengthen autocracies directly by legitimizing them. This effect is likely to dissipate over time, as people come to see the obvious discrepancy between the CIS conclusions and their real-life experiences of the elections. However, second, the CIS observers de facto discredit the OSCE and other international organizations, as they make it more difficult for the public to distinguish which conclusions are accurate (in fact, they allow the post-Soviet regimes to frame the differences between the CIS and the OSCE conclusions as an outcome of a power struggle between Russia and the West, where both sides are to be evaluated as equal from a normative standpoint). It disarms possible opponents of the regime, as it makes the yardstick of democratic unclear. Russo (2017), discussing the activities of CIS observers, notes an important feature of their work. Unlike their colleagues from the SCO (which also has an electoral monitoring arm), who never question any electoral outcomes and base their conclusions on the primacy of neutrality, the CIS observers use the same language as the OSCE observers (e.g. they call for fair and transparent elections), but they come to very different conclusions (e.g. they see alleged Western interference and not the actions of the incumbents as the main problem). While in some cases the democratizing CIS countries have refused to admit CIS observes (as did Ukraine during the presidential elections of 2014)²³, this decision in itself can be used by Russian propaganda, portraying the elections as non-democratic and alleging that the countries fear true and open international monitoring. Hence, both the presence and the absence of the CIS observers can be used to strengthen external anti-democratic influences. The use of CIS monitoring for regime boosting fits a global trend in modern electoral authoritarianism (Debre and Morgenbesser 2017). It is important to note that the advance of CIS electoral monitoring would hardly be possible without a clear and well-developed political agenda on the part of the regional organization. Stated an other way, the fact that the CIS has formally incorporated a set of political goals (including, for example, the protection of democracy and human rights) and appropriate institutions (an Interparliamentary Assembly) has allowed it to legitimately create the CIS’s monitoring institutions, which “hide” behind a democratic façade to promote an authoritarian agenda. A purely economic regional organization would find it more difficult to legitimize the creation of an electoral monitoring mission,

²² https://www.zagranburo.org/наехать-на-обсе-–-это-святое-для-мисси/, accessed July 20, 2018. ²³ https://ria.ru/world/20140523/1008999858.html, accessed July 20, 2018.

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as Chapter 10 will show. At the same time, the main steps for boosting CIS monitoring were taken in 2004–06, that is, during the period of, on the one hand, the consolidation of Russian authoritarianism, and, on the other hand, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, which was perceived by the Russian leadership as a singular foreign policy defeat, leading to the loss of any influence over Ukraine and its shift into the “Western camp” (on the impact of the Orange Revolution on Russian domestic and foreign policy, see Ambrosio 2006 and Horvath 2011). Thus, the development of this instrument for strengthening authoritarian consolidation seems to be linked to both the initial conditions (the declared mandate of the regional organization, which to some extent follows the historical legacies of its foundation) and the evolution of political regimes in Eurasia. In the mid-2000s, the Russian regime found itself in need of a policy tool to discredit the democratic tendencies appearing in some of the CIS countries and thus to protect itself. The mandate of the CIS (combined with the strong Russian influence in the organization) provides perfect opportunities to develop this tool. At the same time, authoritarian leaders in the CIS also benefit from the mandate; CIS observers are present at Russia’s own (parliamentary and presidential) elections (on the CIS electoral observation see also Fawn 2006; Walker and Cooley 2013).

9.5.4. The case of CIS-EMO Another branch of CIS electoral monitoring is the CIS-EMO.²⁴ It is an NGO which works as a separate team from the official CIS monitors, but arrives at the same conclusions (Kupchinsky 2005). The activities of EMO (Electoral Monitoring Organization) are better traced in the mass media, and we focus on its monitoring across the post-Soviet states. The EMO was registered as an NGO in December 2003 and it stated it had no ties to the official CIS monitors: “confusion resulted from the fact that this NGO had a very similar name to the official CIS monitors, and that its reports were almost carbon copies of those filed by the official CIS monitors.”²⁵ However, the reasons for founding the CIS-EMO are still unclear. One of the explanations discussed in the mass media is that the CIS-EMO was established to promote the image of an NGO that is independent of politicians in any state, and thus objective in evaluating the elections. To this end, and to demonstrate its international nature, the CIS-EMO welcomed experts from a small number of Western European states. ²⁴ On the difference between the two, see for example, Juraev (2006: 13) and Kupchinsky (2005). ²⁵ Kupchinsky (2005).

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Somehow, the activities of the EMO, though mentioned in the mass media, have not received the attention of scholars and have never been subject to close analysis. The EMO emerged from the Convention on the Standards of Democratic Elections, Electoral Rights, and Freedom in the Member-States of the CIS, adopted in October 2002. The official aim of the EMO is to assist the developing democratic states in the promotion of free and transparent elections. Since that time, the EMO has started to send its electoral observers to various member states as well as abroad (e.g. France and Germany) and also to subnational regions of Russia. The interest of developed democratic states, such as France, is somewhat unexpected, given that the official aim of the EMO is to help to developing democracies, not consolidated ones. The nature of the EMO as an institution is not very clear: it is called an NGO, but at the same time it is part of the CIS, with an international membership beyond the former Soviet space. It has a number of Western European politicians from Slovakia, Germany, Italy, Poland, France, and Latvia, among others. The question is how the objectives of the EMO were decided and what the reasons behind this activity are. First, electoral monitoring can only take place with the permission of the state hosting the elections. This might explain why the EMO has opted to accept some international experts from outside the former Soviet states that could be more welcome at the elections (unlike monitors associated directly with the CIS). The participation in the activities of such states as France and Germany can probably be viewed as a desire to provide an example of transparent and democratic elections, allowing observers coming from former Soviet republics to learn. Experiencing elections in Germany, France, Poland, and Estonia would provide an opportunity for EMO observers to learn what truly democratic elections look like. This can probably explain how the EMO came to observe parliamentary elections in Germany in 2009 or presidential elections in France in 2012. On the part of the CIS, dispatching observers to Western European states and even to Turkey can be also viewed as a demonstration to the West of the acceptance of democratic elections and the imitation of the Western practices. Second, there are four main groups of entities where the EMO has become involved in monitoring the elections: some of the former Soviet republics; separatist regions (e.g. Abkhazia, Transnistria, and South Ossetia); subnational regions of Russia; and Western European states and Turkey. It is somewhat less clear why the EMO has become involved in various electoral campaigns across the subnational regions of Russia (e.g. in parliamentary elections in Volgograd, Vladimir, and Archangelsk oblasts in 2009; in parliamentary elections in Ryazan, Voronezh, Belgorod, and Chelyabinsk oblasts in 2010; and in mayoral elections in Kostroma in 2009). However, it is noticeable that the interest in subnational regions in Russia lasted less than two years (2008–09). It can be viewed as a form of muscle-flexing and a way to practice

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the “monitoring lessons” learned elsewhere. Monitoring did not take place in the subnational regions of any other state, with the exception of Eastern Ukraine. The reasons behind the monitoring in separatist regions, such as Abkhazia for example, are clear: to ensure the “right” results of the elections. What is of special interest for this chapter is how the EMO selected the critical elections among former Soviet states: in which cases did it feel the need “to monitor” the elections, and how (if at all) did this monitoring have an effect on the direction of the political regimes in these states? The intention of the CIS to control electoral outcomes in post-Soviet states is obvious: it established CIS electoral monitoring and, in addition to this, EMO as an NGO. However, the question is whether the CIS-EMO has actually contributed to the consolidation of autocracy among its member states and associate states? It is important, however, to highlight that the CIS cannot be the only factor that explains the consolidation of autocracy; it can be analyzed as one of many other existing factors contributing to this process. The consolidation of an autocracy might follow one of two paths: the active path is through contributing to changing regime development (from democratization to autocratization); while the passive path is through contributing to sustaining an already non-democratic regime (facilitating the consolidation of an autocracy). We sketch two types of potential impact of the EMO with regard to its activities across the post-Soviet states. Table 9.2 provides a summary of the activities of the EMO in all post-Soviet states from the inception of the organization in 2003 until 2015. What is the reason for establishing the EMO? There are a number of reasons, including imitation of Western democracies, demonstrating to the West the acceptance of democratic values, but also the legitimization of falsified electoral outcomes, as well as support for pro-Russian candidates. These are the channels where the CIS can actually be pictured as active and even relatively successful in achieving its unofficial goals (as compared to the official objectives of its Charter). The activities of the EMO across former Soviet states can be broadly divided into three groups. In the first group of states, a transition from a more democratic system towards an autocracy took place (e.g. Russia and Belarus were considered to be partly free in 1990s and not free in 2015; Armenia and Tajikistan became less free over the 2000s). In the second group, the regimes were and remained autocratic (where autocratic pro-Russian leaders were always supported by the CIS-EMO). In the third group, actual democratization took place despite the attempts of the CIS to influence electoral outcomes through the EMO. The EMO carried out activities across all twelve post-Soviet states in both member states and non member states, with varying degrees of success. Successful attempts to influence electoral outcomes: The CIS-EMO role in the sustainability of non-democracies. Most of EMO’s activities took place

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Table 9.2. Activities of the EMO up to 2015 and dynamic of political regimes in postSoviet states EMO successful impact: Transition took place from democratic to autocratic

EMO successful impact: Sustained the consolidation of autocratic states

EMO unsuccessful: tried to influence but no results, no impact

Armenia: autocratization 1994: 3.5 PF 2015: 4.5 PF N of EMO events:

Kazakhstan: supported 1998: 5.5 NF 2015: 5.5 NF

Moldova (member) 1994: 4.0 PF 2015: 3.0 PF

N of EMO events: 7 Belarus 1993: 3.5 PF 2015: 6.5 NF

9 Uzbekistan: supported 1999: 6.5 NF 2015: 7.0 NF

4 Ukraine 1992: 3.0 PF 2015: 3.0 PF

N of EMO events: 7 Russia 1993: 3.5 PF 2015: 6.0 NF

5 Azerbaijan: supported 1998: 5.0 PF 2016: 6.5

5 Georgia (out in 2009) 1993–95: 5.0 PF 2015: 3.0 PF

N of EMO events: 9 Tajikistan 2003–12: 5.5 NF 2013–16: 6.0 NF N of EMO events: 5

8 Turkmenistan

4 Kyrgyzstan 1998: 5.0 PF 2015: 5.0 PF 9

3

Source: Compiled by the authors. The data on the number of activities of EMO per state is taken from the official website of the CIS-EMO (in Russian). The data for political regime fluctuation is taken from the rating of Freedom House.

across all three groups as listed above, including in Russia (to demonstrate that the EMO is not a Russian-led organization and aspires to monitor elections in that country too; the Russian invitation to monitor is also meant to set an example to other post-Soviet states and help to legitimize its own presidential and parliamentary elections). Along the same lines, EMO was frequently present in pro-Russian Kazakhstan (again with its two most obvious goals of contributing to the legitimization of the regime and setting an example to other post-Soviet states to invite the EMO to monitor their elections). Another example of sustaining autocracy was carried out by the CIS monitors in Belarus. For example, in parliamentary elections in October 2004, the CIS monitors stated that elections in Belarus were democratic, transparent, and legitimate, in contrast to the conclusions of the OSCE regarding the same elections.²⁶ In the case of Belarus, sustaining autocracy and legitimizing the parliamentary and presidential elections was one of the contributing factors in the consolidation of Lukashenka’s autocratic regime. The lowest level of EMO activities took place in Turkmenistan (the EMO has operated there on only three occasions). Turkmenistan is a consolidated ²⁶ See, for example, Kupchinsky (2005).

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autocracy, and so does not present a challenge to the current regime nor to the CIS. However, Turkmenistan, like any consolidated autocracy, does care about the legitimatization of its own regime from time to time and that probably explains why it let the EMO in to legitimize its electoral activities. Unsuccessful attempts to influence electoral outcomes: The CIS-EMO activities and electoral revolutions: There is a reason why all “color” revolutions can be properly described as electoral revolutions. All of them took place around the attempted falsification of electoral results; the most prominent cases are the Orange Revolution in Ukraine 2004 and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. In both cases, the falsification of the electoral results and the legitimizing of these on the part of the CIS became a trigger for mass protests and demonstrations. In both cases, the mass protests and electoral monitoring of the OSCE and the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations was an important counter-balance to the government attempt to maintain power through manipulative elections, the support of the CIS, and even of observers from the SCO. More importantly, however, the conclusions of both the CIS and the SCO observers coincided in evaluating the parliamentary elections as “satisfactory,” while the CIS reported them as “legitimate, free and transparent” (Juraev 2006, p. 13). After President Akaev left Kyrgyzstan and the political opposition took over Government House, presidential elections were scheduled for July 2005. This time the conclusions of both the OSCE and CIS were in line with the conclusions of all other international electoral observers. Why did the CIS this time play along with the rules of democratic elections and provide a report matching that of the OSCE? The answer is threefold: first, after pro-Kremlin President Akaev left the country, there was no turning back; second, it demonstrated that the CIS observation was (and by extension always was) objective; and third, the risks of declaring the elections illegitimate were not worth taking—a different report would not have changed the political situation in Kyrgyzstan. Georgia withdrew from contact with the CIS and the EMO following the war in August 2008, though the EMO had had only a low level of involvement in the country prior to that date. Somewhat similarly, EMO tried to influence the direction of the political regime in Ukraine: out of five events in total, three of them took place during one crucial year—2004. In 2004, Ukraine witnessed three occasions when the EMO operated: on 21 November, on 31 October, and finally, on 26 December. In 2004, Putin supported the pro-Kremlin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The CIS monitors, as mentioned, stated that the electoral support for Yanukovych was legitimate and the elections were transparent and free. In contrast, the OSCE observers claimed the second round of presidential elections were fraudulent. That discrepancy became a catalyst for the Orange Revolution in 2004 and a rerun of the second round of presidential elections. This rerun was stated by the OSCE to be free

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and transparent, whereas the CIS observers claimed it to be illegitimate. Overall, the attempts of the CIS to influence the electoral results in Ukraine in 2004 were unsuccessful. In 2004 the EMO for the first time challenged the democratic and transparent nature of the final round of the Ukrainian presidential elections. Subsequently, Ukraine suspended its participation in the CIS and its collaboration with the EMO. It was also the first time when the results of the electoral evaluation of the EMO did not coincide with the results of the electoral monitoring of the OSCE. Ukraine clearly demonstrates a case where the CIS attempted to influence the political regime development with the help of the EMO. Its support for the pro-Russian Ukrainian political opposition in 2004 demonstrates that the EMO is an active tool promoting the influence of the CIS hegemon, Russia. After the events of 2004, it took eight years, until 2012, before Ukraine invited EMO observers in again. In the aftermath of Ukrainian events in 2004, Moldova, learning from Ukraine’s experience, chose not to invite the EMO-CIS observers to its parliamentary elections in 2005. The EMO operated in the country only in 2009 and 2010. In 2009, there was monitoring of the preparations for parliamentarian elections. Two other EMO activities were carried in 2010, during the referendum in support of the constitutional reform of Moldova (September) and preliminary parliamentary elections (November). Finally, significant attention was given to Kyrgyzstan. Even prior to the elections in 2005, the government-affiliated mass media was used to suppress protests, political opposition, and Western electoral observers in Kyrgyzstan. Karagulova (2006), for example, demonstrates how the national mass media portrayed the international mission of the observers as enemy and alien. The initial involvement of the EMO in monitoring in Kyrgyzstan took place in 2005, when both parliamentary and preliminary presidential elections took place. For the parliamentary elections, the CIS-EMO and the OSCE reached different conclusions. There were “sharp differences in how these missions reported on the elections” and how the Akaev “government deliberately ensured that there were ‘pro-government’ election missions operating, as a strategy to neutralize the effect of critical observation report” (Torjesen and Overland, 2006, p. 6). The CIS monitors claimed the parliamentarian elections were free, transparent, and democratic. In contrast, the OSCE called them non-democratic. After the CIS declared the elections democratic, demonstrations and protests spread throughout the Kyrgyzstan until the end of March (when President Askar Akaev left the country). While Kyrgyzstan was still considered to be “partly free” by the FH rating, it has remained consolidated on the edge of “not free” during its 25-year transition period. It might be close to experiencing democratization, were it not for the support of anti-democratization activities and legitimization provided by the CIS-EMO. Maybe it is because Kyrgyzstan lies between democratization and autocratization, that it has experienced so much increased

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attention from the EMO-CIS, which has clearly tried to prevent the state from democratizating (Kyrgyzstan is the state which has experienced the highest number of EMO activities—nine missions between 2005 and 2015).

9.5.5. Autocratic self-selection While Section 9.5.4 has provided detailed information on how the CIS supports autocratic consolidation in the countries of Eurasia, we can also advance the opposite argument: non-democratic states are more likely to increase their participation in the NDRO. On the theoretical level, two causal mechanisms can be distinguished in this respect. On the one hand, countries may join the CIS because they have no alternatives: the DROs are reluctant to admit non-democratic states, and existence without any external support is not an attractive option for some of the countries. This argument is probably particularly likely to apply to the countries of the CIS which are located closer to the EU. In Europe, the EU is essentially the only realistic integration alternative. It would certainly be incorrect to claim that the EU does not develop close economic and political ties with non-democracies: the EU’s relations with Azerbaijan, in fact, illustrates that the goal of democratization, while important for the EU, is not pursued unconditionally. However, there are still limits to how far the EU is willing to go in developing ties to nondemocracies. While the Asian members of the CIS could, hypothetically, rely on China, the European non-democratic CIS members have to search for support from Russia.²⁷ Russia, in spite of some critical statements regarding the CIS (including some made by Vladimir Putin himself), still appears to pay considerable attention to keeping the organization running. This, in turn, reflects the position of the Russian population, which remains largely in favor of postSoviet regional integration. The Russian leadership has reacted very strongly to the possible exit of member states from the CIS. From this point of view, membership in the CIS has always been used by the post-Soviet countries as a tool to demonstrate their willingness to maintain ties with Russia, both in terms of the Russian leadership and their own domestic populations (Miller and Toristyn 2005; Dubnov 2009). Domestic populations support post-Soviet integration in a number of CIS member states, especially those with large Russian ethnic minorities. Ultimately, given the reaction of both the general population and elites to the collapse of the USSR in many post-Soviet ²⁷ The situation may change, though, given the current circumstances of large-scale confrontation between Russia and the EU—the EU may be more willing to cooperate with even the nondemocratic states of Eurasia. The suspension of sanctions against Belarus in 2015 could be interpreted as evidence in favor of this view.

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countries, the CIS appears to serve as an important source of legitimacy for some member governments. From this point of view, Abdelal (2001) and Hale (2008) link participation in the CIS to the development of nationalism and ethnic identities in individual post-Soviet states. Another argument, which we have already presented in Chapter 3, suggests that the willingness of a country to participate in a regional organization is driven to a large extent by the perceived risk of manipulation by the leading state, or the likelihood that the leading country will use its power at the expense of the smaller state. Joining a regional organization (even a weak one, such as the CIS), to some extent restricts the country’s foreign policy options and makes it more dependent on the regional organization (given the sunk costs associated with membership). This means that if the largest country (or, as in the case of the CIS, the hegemon) makes a unilateral decision to ignore some of the rules of the regional organization or to twist them in its favor, the smaller countries have to comply: their dependence on the regional organization makes it impossible for them to exercise any effective resistance to the actions of the hegemon. If the countries anticipate this eventuality, they will not join the regional organization (or, in our analysis, will not increase the level of their participation if they are already members). Although the CIS does not currently deliver substantial policy results in many areas, its institutional infrastructure and the formal commitments made by its members actually do provide it with substantial opportunities to influence its members. De jure, the CIS is a consensus-based organization (as discussed below), but it includes a comprehensive network of agreements which—if taken literally—could restrict the actions of member states quite severely. To provide some examples, the Economic Union Treaty of 1993 suggests that the countries making up the CIS intend to abolish customs duties and non-tariff barriers for mutual trade, establish a common customs barrier against third parties, and coordinate decisions in the areas of monetary and fiscal policy. The Labor Protection Treaty of 1994 requests CIS countries to coordinate their labor standards and safety procedures. A 2011 treaty calls for CIS countries to establish a common system of registration for third country citizens entering the CIS. The Antitrust Policy Coordination Treaty of 2000 requires the establishment of a common antitrust regulation in the CIS. Many of these requirements have never been fulfilled, yet the CIS countries (or at least some of them, as discussed below) have signed these treaties. Many restrictions imposed by existing treaties favor the leading state, either economically (providing attractive opportunities for the business expansion of Russian multinationals) or politically (restricting the opportunities of CIS members to participate in outside regional organizations). From this point of view, the following argument can be advanced to support the logic of CIS membership. Under normal circumstances, member states are free to ignore any commitments they make. This practice represents the

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commonly described “ink-on-paper,” or rhetorical, regionalism. Members of the CIS sign agreements that they never intend to follow. In the case of extraordinary events, for example, when the risks are especially high for a leading state that its dominance or image as a strong state will be damaged, the situation changes dramatically. Because the active role of the CIS can serve as a source of this legitimacy, the leading state is likely to attempt to revive the legal framework and exploit the opportunities provided by the CIS’s formal arrangements. Similarly, a power shift in the relations between the states due to exogenous factors (such as economic growth) can change the attitude of countries toward cooperation (Genna and Hiro 2004) and hence affect the willingness of the leading state to actually use the CIS’s formal framework. Hale (2008, p. 212) discusses a similar argument, indicating that the CIS faced a credible commitment problem, defined as “the difficulty involved in guaranteeing to a potential union’s would-be member states that they will not later be exploited in that union but will instead partake in a share of the benefit,” and illustrating for two case studies (Uzbekistan and Ukraine) the substantial effect this credible commitment problem had on the decision to increase the country’s level of participation in the CIS. Russia, in fact, has attempted to use the CIS institutions to advance its foreign policy agenda in the past, though with varying success. The activity of the CIS electoral monitoring described in Section 9.5.4 can be viewed through this perspective as well. As Obydenkova and Libman (2014) and Babayan (2015) show, in the foreign policy activism of autocracies (Russia’s in particular) it is often difficult to distinguish narrowly defined autocracy promotion and geopolitical goals. As we have shown above, Russia seems to have encouraged and supported CIS electoral monitoring particularly after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004. While Russia undertook numerous attempts to prevent similar development in other countries of post-Soviet Eurasia (e.g. Belarus, see Silitski 2005), the CIS institutions have also been used in this context. Interestingly, there is no evidence of Russia using CIS institutions to legitimize its actions during the conflict with Ukraine in 2014–16. The CIS did not make any statements on this topic; and even the Russia-controlled CSTO limited its activity to a general statement of support for the Minsk accords.²⁸ This is probably because, given the scope of the conflict, the extent of the Russian involvement and the international reaction, additional statements by the CIS (even if they were achievable—as we will show in what follows, this could have been rather difficult for Russia) would have had little effect on perceptions of the legitimacy of Russia’s position and actions by the Russian public and foreign partners. ²⁸ https://jpgazeta.ru/odkb-nastaivaet-na-soblyudenii-minskih-dogovorennostey-po-ukraine/. While originally the CSTO officials indicated the possibility of the organization’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine, these statements soon disappeared.

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An example of an unsuccessful attempt at instrumentalizing the CIS undertaken by Russia was the position of the CIS after the war with Georgia in 2008. This was probably one of the most serious challenges Russia faced in its relations with countries that were formerly members of the Soviet Union. The war itself, of course, did not involve the use of any CIS instruments. In this case, Russia primarily attempted to ensure two measures: CIS support for Russia and the recognition of Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia by CIS states. To this end, the CIS, the CSTO, and the SCO meetings were assembled. In September 2008, the CSTO decided to condemn Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia but refused to accept any consolidated course of action with respect to the recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The SCO summit merely declared its concern regarding the military confrontation. The position of China, the only non-post-Soviet member of the organization, was seen as crucial in this instance—China, for its domestic reasons, is very skeptical about supporting any separatist enclaves worldwide and thus decided not to encourage Russia’s actions in this case as well. The CIS summit did not make any statements on the issue. Hence, whereas in the case of Ukraine one could argue that Russia’s strategy was to some extent successful (i.e. the Orange Revolution was not followed by similar events in Russia or, say, in Belarus), using NDROs in the case of the Georgian war failed. Nevertheless, Russia once again sought international legitimacy for its actions by reviving otherwise dormant international organizations. In Chapters 2 and 3, we conjectured that the likelihood of a state experiencing manipulations increases in regional organizations with non-democratic leading states (such as Russia). In addition, and this is essential for us, the risks associated with manipulation or the inability to react to the leading country’s unilateral choices are higher for democratic regimes than for nondemocracies. Non-democracies have fewer internal restrictions than democracies (e.g. their audience costs are lower, the number of veto players is smaller, etc.). Furthermore, non-democracies can sustain a particular foreign policy course despite a higher level of public disapproval than democracies: thus, if the decision to cease cooperation with a regional organization causes economic pain, non-democracies are more likely to survive this than democratic countries. (This is especially so if the non-democracies utilize propaganda and blame-shifting—in this case, the “rally-round-the-flag” effect can actually help them in consolidating their regimes.) Hence, it is easier for their leadership to make a painful decision to exit a regional organization regardless of the extent of cooperation already achieved. In post-Soviet Eurasia, in fact, we have observed several non-democratic countries which behave in this way. In Eurasia, Uzbekistan is probably the most pronounced example of what might be called “venue-shopping”: this country joined regional organizations and exited them at its discretion, depending on very short-term changes in domestic political goals. Thus, after the massacre in Andijan in 2005, when

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Uzbekistani security forces fired upon civilians and the US and the EU imposed sanctions against the country, it swiftly decided to join the EurAsEC and the CSTO. A week after EU sanctions were abolished in 2008, Uzbekistan left the EurAsEC. It also left the CSTO in 2012. Another, and more recent example, is the position of Belarus and Kazakhstan in blocking Russian sanctions against Ukraine in the EAEU in 2014— again, this was an attempt by Russia to use a regional organization to promote its foreign policy agenda against the will of its members (we discuss this in greater detail in Chapter 10).²⁹ The fact that Belarus and Kazakhstan could to some extent resist Russian pressure is, to a degree, an outcome of the tight grip of their political leadership—they could survive possible Russian sanctions (as long as these were not excessively harsh: but this was unlikely due to the general international position of Russia and its unwillingness to alienate its EAEU partners). Belarus, in general, has a long history of resisting the demands of Russia on a number of crucial issues, while complying with them in others. For example, in spite of the numerous attempts of Russia to change it, the Belarusian economy remains closed to Russian corporations willing to acquire assets.³⁰ From this point of view, our empirical results can be explained by a combination of two factors. On the one hand, the CIS can produce tangible gains for the already established non-democratic regimes by further supporting their legitimacy (given the positive attitude to the CIS in their populations). On the other hand, the non-democracies have less to fear in terms of possible Russian manipulation as it is easier for them to cut cooperation in this case and to survive the subsequent economic pain. (Note that this is a ceteris paribus argument, i.e. explaining the behavior of two countries with roughly similar levels of dependence on Russia—if the non-democratic country is also more dependent on the hegemon, the economic pain could be so great that it will make rebellion against the hegemon’s agenda too costly; this may explain why smaller CIS countries such as Tajikistan or Belarus in many cases still have to comply with Russian pressure.) Thus, the non-democracies are also

²⁹ In this case, we observe a paradoxical phenomenon: while typically both of the mechanisms we study in this chapter (autocratic self-selection for the membership of the NDRO and the effect of the NDRO on the members’ political regimes) move in the same direction, they may also in some cases have the opposite effect: in the EAEU the non-democratic nature of its members has made it easier for them to participate in the NDRO, but it has also reduced Russia’s ability to instrumentalize the EAEU for autocracy promotion. ³⁰ We do not argue that the Belarusian decision to restrict Russian FDI is beneficial for the country; we merely suggest that an authoritarian regime can, in many instances, withstand the pressure of its powerful neighbor to a larger extent than a democratic regime may be able to. Even Belarus had to comply with some of the Russian demands—e.g. Gazprom took over the Belarusian pipeline network—but it took over a decade of bargaining and a major economic crisis in Belarus in 2011 to finally complete the deal.

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more likely to increase the level of their participation in the CIS, as they can, if necessary, easily reduce it again.

9.6. CONCLUSION This chapter focused on the case of the CIS as an NDRO to provide further evidence concerning the main theoretical argument of this book. In a nutshell, the following results stand out. First, in line with the theory, we observe the CIS to be extremely heterogeneous in its membership. Second, contrary to our expectations, the CIS has a strong hegemon—we explain this by the specific institutional design of the CIS, allowing the countries to vary the extent of their participation in the regional organization through opting out of different agreements. Third, and most importantly, we carefully investigated the consequences of the CIS for their members. We found that the CIS plays a very limited role in the security and the economic domains (with one important exception—a very high level of labor mobility, which again is in line with the theory of this book). We also found that the extent to which individual countries participate in the CIS is, indeed, positively correlated with the presence of authoritarian regimes. By investigating this empirical correlation more carefully, we advanced two theoretical mechanisms to explain it. On the one hand, through its electoral monitoring activities, the CIS could strengthen the authoritarian tendencies among its members. On the other hand, the correlation could be due to the fact that autocracies can extract certain benefits from increasing their level of participation in the CIS (legitimacy), but, more importantly, they have less to fear by increasing the level of participation in the organization, as they are more resistant to the manipulations of the hegemon. The logic of the argument of the chapter is presented in Figure 9.3. Most likely, both effects reinforce each other. Legitimacy benefits and symbolic

CIS electoral monotiring

CIS strengthens/stabilizes autocratic regimes among its members

CIS is an NDRO CIS participation criteria

Non-democracies can join to increase their legitimacy

Higher risk of manipulation by a non-democratic hegemon

Non-democracies will join because of higher resistance to manipulation

Autocracy and participation in the CIS are positively correlated

Figure 9.3. The causal logic of the link between authoritarianism and CIS participation

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support from CIS electoral monitoring make the autocratic tendencies in the CIS countries stronger; but stronger autocratic tendencies make them even more likely to participate in the CIS, given that their resilience to manipulation (ceteris paribus) increases. The result could be (potentially) a vicious circle of a self-enforcing NDRO and autocratic tendencies among the members. This vicious circle, however, relies on another very important feature: the willingness of the hegemon (Russia) to actually pay for the work of the CIS and to endorse its activities. While the CIS is still important for Russia, in recent years the country’s attention has clearly shifted to a different regional organization— the EAEU. We will investigate this body in greater detail in Chapter 10 and show that the conclusions we reached for a regional organization with a very clear political focus do not necessarily hold for regional organizations with a different set of formal objectives.

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10 Economic Regionalism The EAEU

The idea that instead of pursuing regional integration within a broad framework of the CIS (where finding consensus has been notoriously difficult) one needs to find a smaller group of post-Soviet countries willing to engage in the regionalist project had already emerged by the 1990s (Bremmer and Bailes 1998). Over time, this project materialized into the formation of a group of post-Soviet states which (under different labels) pursued an ambitious program of regional economic integration, focusing especially on the completion of a customs union. Unlike the CIS, which, as Chapter 9 has shown, increasingly focused over time on political (as well as humanitarian) issues, the sequence of organizations we look at in this chapter maintained a strict economic focus (at least in terms of their formal goals) throughout the one and a half decades of their existence. It is reasonable to discuss these organizations as (direct or indirect) continuations of one another, since they were set up by a very similar group of countries (in all cases, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan were the core players, sometimes joined by other smaller countries—Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, and Uzbekistan), and since the goals of all the organizations were almost identical (though the governance mechanisms and the implementation gaps toward these goals were not). Established as the Customs Union in 1995, the group, as we will show in what follows, went on to create the EurAsEC in 2000–01, another Customs Union in 2010, the Common Economic Space (CES) in 2012 and, ultimately, the EAEU in 2015. The EAEU has enjoyed some political attention recently as it has frequently been linked to the ongoing large-scale conflict between Russia and the West (since 2014), which we will discuss in what follows. This development is the reason why some observers have looked at the EAEU primarily in the context of aggressive Russian foreign policy and that country’s attempts at autocracy promotion. We critically examine these popular claims, using both econometric evidence and detailed case studies. To preempt our results, there exists no

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evidence whatsoever that the EAEU or any of its predecessor organizations as international actors (e.g. through the Eurasian Economic Commission) or as sets of international agreements were in any way involved in autocracy promotion. While some prominent Russian hardliners in the conflict against Ukraine were associated with the Customs Union (the most prominent example is Sergei Glazyev, the former head of the Customs Union Commission), their active involvement in the Russia–Ukraine conflict happened only after any formal relation to the Customs Union or the EAEU had been severed. In sum, if we look at the effects that the EAEU as such (i.e. the actually existing international organization) had in terms of the escalation of conflict in Eastern Europe, we have to conclude that these effects were absent or at best very weak. The EAEU, however, mattered as a pretense or a motive for Russian foreign policy. Regardless of what the EAEU was actually doing or what Ukraine’s EAEU membership would mean in reality, Russian leaders seem to have perceived Ukraine’s joining the EAEU as a desirable outcome (or, at least, as a helpful way to overcome the clearly undesirable outcome of the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement) and acted accordingly. In a nutshell, it means that the image of the EAEU in the minds of Russian elites became the reason for conflict escalation—but this image does not adequately represent the real functioning of the EAEU. This makes the discussion of the actual functioning and effects of the EAEU particularly important—not only from a positive point of view, but also normatively as a tool to evaluate the possibilities for interaction with Russia. This is precisely our focus in this chapter.

10.1. DEVELOPMENT AND EXPANSION The process of creating closer economic integration for a sub-group of countries in Eurasia, which we study in this chapter, officially started in 1995 when Russia and Belarus signed the (first) Customs Union treaty; the same year, Kazakhstan also became a member of this organization. (This is what we described as the start of the second era of Eurasian regionalism in Chapter 8.) The goal of the Customs Union was, on the one hand, to abolish internal trade barriers and to create a common external tariff, and on the other, to put in place what the first Customs Union agreement from 20 January describes as a similar (“odnotipnyi”) mechanism of economic regulation—the harmonization of economic law and the implementation of market reforms. In 1996, Kyrgyzstan joined the organization; in 1998, Tajikistan also became a member. Throughout the first five years of its existence, these five countries signed numerous agreements mostly declaring their goals of trade integration. The 1998 “Ten Simple Steps Towards Common People” declaration also included

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a number of steps towards regulatory harmonization (e.g. access for all residents of the Customs Union to medical services, simplification of money transfers, etc.) and humanitarian integration (e.g. freedom to broadcast over the entire territory of the Customs Union). However, almost none of the steps suggested in the early agreement were implemented or, if they were implemented (such as the temporary removal of customs controls; see Hancock 2009), they did not last long. The ultimate two problems for the Customs Union were, on the one hand, the unilateral decision of Kyrgyzstan to join the WTO (which required a substantial reduction of tariffs that were unacceptable for other members) and, on the other, the new wave of economic crisis in Russia—the devaluation of the Russian ruble in 1998 created a major competitive advantage for Russian exports to other countries and forced them to implement protective trade measures. In sum, this first project remained, in an economic sense, merely a collection of declarations and statements of intent. In 2000, five countries of the Customs Union signed an agreement establishing the EurAsEC as a new international organization (it came into force in 2001). The EurAsEC pursued the same goals as its predecessor, in particular the objective of a customs union. Generally speaking, the task of creating a free trade area (i.e. abolishing customs duties between the EurAsEC countries) was resolved, though not within the EurAsEC as such but rather through unilateral and bilateral measures (the harmonization and abolition of non-tariff barriers did not occur—it remains a salient topic as of now; see Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) 2015a). At the same time, progress towards the customs union remained extremely slow: the countries failed to achieve any significant advances in harmonizing the external customs tariffs (Golovnin 2008). The organizations did reach certain results in terms of creating common regulatory standards, but these were also very limited. In 2006, Uzbekistan joined the EurAsEC (after the Andijan massacre, as discussed in Chapter 9), only to leave in 2008. According to most accounts, the activity of Uzbekistan in the EurAsEC remained very limited: the country was extremely slow at implementing new norms and regulations, and frequently blocked any advances towards further integration. In 2006, the three largest countries of the EurAsEC—Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan—decided to intensify their interaction in terms of regional integration, and in October 2007 they signed a new agreement establishing a customs union. The newly established Customs Union Commission was endowed with the task of developing the common customs tariff and the Customs Code. This task was completed in 2009, and in 2010 the new Customs Union came into force. The organization was embraced by Russia and Kazakhstan and accepted with reluctance by Belarus—however, the latter ultimately also decided to become part of the treaty. Legally, the new Customs Union was part of the EurAsEC, but it had a separate set of governing

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bodies—in particular the Customs Union Commission—with a different set of authorities and responsibilities. The major difference between this new Customs Union and its predecessors was an unprecedented level of compliance by member countries, which indeed adjusted their customs tariffs in line with the requirements of the Union and abolished internal customs checks. In the Customs Union, unlike in the predecessor organization, the countries adjusted their tariffs to the commonly agreed levels (although this required substantial changes for some of the member states; see IERAS 2012) and started applying the common Customs Code governing trade. This level of compliance persisted until 2015, when Kazakhstan unilaterally decided to decrease about a quarter of its tariffs in the goods nomenclature to adjust to the requirements it accepted as part of its WTO accession negotiations; however, the majority of tariffs in the EAEU remain harmonized. In 2012, the Customs Union was transformed into the CES, that is, in addition to the freedom of trade in goods, the countries agreed on the free movement of labor and capital. In the same year, the Eurasian Economic Commission was created as the new governing body of the CES. In 2011, Kyrgyzstan started negotiations concerning its membership of the CES, and in 2013 Armenia surprised numerous observers by declaring its willingness to join the Customs Union instead of the Association Agreement with the EU. In 2014, finally, the member countries of the Customs Union agreed to transform it into the EAEU. The EAEU treaty came into force in 2015, and in the same year the EurAsEC was legally abolished. In 2015, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan joined the EAEU; thus, the organization included all members of the original EurAsEC except Tajikistan, but also incorporated Armenia. The provisions of the EAEU treaty mostly codify and systematize the already existing regulations of the Customs Union and the CES, but also include ambitious plans for the liberalization of markets for services and for crucial goods (e.g. medical products and energy). In 2015–17, the EAEU made substantial progress in terms of preparing the framework for the common electricity market (Pastukhova and Westphal 2016, 2018); in 2017, an agreement on the common market for medical products was reached and the new EAEU Customs Code was adopted. Both the agreement and the Code, however, became reality only after substantial concessions reducing the actual extent of integration (Vinokurov 2018). By 2025, the members of the EAEU, according to the EAEU Treaty, should have a common market for all energy goods and a common financial markets regulator. Whether these objectives will actually be achieved is questionable; however, a customs union covering the majority of goods, as well as free space for movement of labor and investments, constitutes a regional organization with quite a substantial level of economic cooperation when compared to similar organizations (Vinokurov 2016).

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In addition to the official members of the EAEU, there are some territories which de facto seem to belong to the EAEU customs territory, although legally they are not recognized as part of the Union in any way. In the Southern Caucasus, in 2014 Abkhazia signed a strategic partnership treaty with Russia; this includes the requirement to harmonize the customs regulations of Abkhazia with the norms of the EAEU. In 2015, Southern Ossetia also signed an integration treaty with Russia which explicitly requires the customs authorities of Southern Ossetia to be integrated with their Russian counterparts according to the Customs Union law. Russia does not implement any trade restrictions on the borders with Abkhazia and Southern Ossetia. However, none of the other Customs Union members recognizes the independence of these two Caucasian de facto states, and thus no direct interaction between them and the EAEU is possible. The situation is more difficult for Nagorny Karabakh, which is not recognized by any other state, including Armenia. As of now, Nagorny Karabakh is part of the Armenian economic space; however, after the accession of Armenia to the EAEU, the organization specifically required Nagorny Karabakh to be excluded from the EAEU customs territory.¹ There is no information confirming that Armenia implemented this requirement or intends to implement it in any form in the future. The transition from the EurAsEC and the first Customs Union to the second Customs Union, the CES, and the EAEU poses an interesting challenge for students of the NDROs. We have argued in the theoretical and in the largeN analysis (in line with the literature) that the ability of the NDROs to advance functioning cooperation in the area of economic affairs is limited, primarily due to the low credibility of member state commitments. But why then did the EAEU turn out differently from its predecessors? As of now, two explanations for this exist. Libman and Vinokurov (2018) point out that the EAEU came into existence at the moment when the economic and political ties between its core member countries finally became weak enough for the costs of being manipulated by Russia to become sufficiently small, but at the same time the economic benefits of cooperation remained sufficiently high. Delcour and Kostanyan (2014) suggest a different argument, focusing on the pressure exercised by Russia, which by the early 2010s had much larger resources than at the beginning of the first decade of the 2000s, and hence was better able to achieve progress in terms of cooperation. In all probability, both explanations are valid, though they apply to different countries—while some joined because of their extreme dependence on Russia, others, especially Kazakhstan, made the decision to become part of the EAEU precisely because their dependence on Russia had decreased to some extent. In both cases, there are still major limits imposed by the authoritarian nature of the key member

¹ http://minval.az/news/48951, accessed July 20, 2018.

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states on further economic cooperation in the EAEU, which make any substantial progress by the organization doubtful (Roberts 2017).

1 0 . 2 . G O V ER N A N C E From the very beginning, the regional organizations we investigate in this chapter differed from the CIS in one crucial aspect: they did not allow for any form of opting out. All members had to comply with all the commitments they made within the organization’s framework. In reality, certainly, countries occasionally ignored the decisions of the governance bodies or misinterpreted them, but there was no opportunity to opt out in the legal framework. In addition, the decision making in the Customs Union, the EurAsEC and the EAEU evolved over time in two crucial respects: the extent to which members used a weighted voting scheme or consensus and the extent of supranationality. The highest decision-making body of the EurAsEC, the Customs Union, and the EAEU has always been a council of heads of states, though in various forms: the Intergovernmental Council of the EurAsEC, and the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council of the Customs Union, CES, and the EAEU. These institutions make their decisions by consensus and focus on the strategic development of Eurasian regionalism. For instance, most of the regional agreements described above were signed at the meetings of the heads of states and governments. In order to make the day-to-day decisions, the EurAsEC established the Integration Committee; the Customs Union, the Customs Union Commission; and the CES and the EAEU, the Eurasian Economic Commission. The Integration Committee and the Customs Union Commission included ex officio the deputy prime ministers of the member countries. The Eurasian Economic Commission consists of two bodies: the Council and the Board of the Commission. The Council, again, includes the deputy prime ministers of the member states. The Board, as of 2017, includes twelve ministers (two from each country), who are responsible for individual departments of the administration of the EurAsEC. The ministers do not occupy any position in the national bureaucracies of the member states, though they hold a rank equivalent to that of the national ministers. Thus, the Board’s model follows the EU Commission closely. Throughout its history, the Board has also occasionally included a number of commissioners with no specific departmental responsibility. The EurAsEC and the Customs Union used a weighted voting scheme in their decision-making institutions. In the EurAsEC, the decision had to be made by a two-thirds majority, with Russia having 40 percent of the votes, Belarus and Kazakhstan 15 percent each and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan

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7.5 percent each. In the Customs Union, the same two thirds majority was required: Russia had 57 percent of the votes and Belarus and Kazakhstan 21.5 percent each. The EAEU, however, abandoned this approach. The Council of the Commission makes decisions by consensus. The Board makes the decisions by qualified majority, where each member has one vote: the decisions, however, until 2018 have always been made by de facto consensus. There is, however, an important dimension in which the Customs Union Commission and the Eurasian Economic Commission differ from the Integration Committee: their decisions (within their jurisdiction) are binding for the national bureaucracies. For instance, the changes of the customs regulation introduced by the EAEU Commission come into force immediately without further approval by the national governments. The EurAsEC has already created a secretariat with about 100 officials. The Customs Union established its own secretariat. The transition to the EAEU signified a massive increase of the size of the executive bureaucracy: it consisted of about 600 officials in 2012 and in 2013 exceeded 1,000 officials. The reasons for this expansion are straightforward: the Eurasian Economic Commission has substantially more de facto responsibilities than the EurAsEC did. However, one has to note that the real power of the individual divisions of the Eurasian Economic Commission differs substantially. The trade commissioner exercises a crucial role in the decision making, since, as mentioned, all prerogatives regarding trade relations have been transferred to the supranational level. Other commissioners deal with areas where the Eurasian Economic Commission is weaker than the national governments. This situation can, certainly, change if the program of regional integration within the EAEU advances. Furthermore, since the establishment of the EAEU, the Eurasian Economic Commission has to use a strict quota system to appoint not only commissioners, but also lower-level bureaucrats (each country has a number of positions reserved). This weakens the supranationality of the Eurasian Economic Commission and makes it more difficult to find qualified personnel to fulfill Eurasian Economic Commission tasks. Finally, an interesting institution in the context of Eurasian regionalism is the court. The EurAsEC agreement stipulated the creation of a joint court, but it was never implemented: in 2003, the EurAsEC delegated the authority of its Board to the Economic Court of the CIS, an extremely weak institution. After the Customs Union was created, the EurAsEC re-established a special court. The initial regulations made the court of the Customs Union a powerful entity: it had the right to accept cases not only from governments, but also from private entities (both within the Customs Union and outside) which considered their rights to be challenged by the decisions of the EurAsEC. The first case (in 2012) ruled against the EurAsEC, which was mandated to change its regulations. However, as of 2017, there is no evidence that the economic actors have started using the court more actively or that it frequently challenges the

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authority of the EurAsEC; on the contrary, the authorities of the Court were somewhat reduced by the EAEU treaty, in contrast to the regimes which existed under the Customs Union and the CES (Karliuk 2015; Dragneva 2018). An institution which existed in the EurAsEC but disappeared after transition to the Customs Union, is the Interparliamentary Assembly (IPA). The IPA included representatives of the national parliaments of the EurAsEC countries and acted primarily in an advisory capacity to the Integration Committee; it also passed the so-called fundamental acts, used as models for the national legislations of the member countries (which, however, were not obliged to follow the IPA recommendations). Unlike the CIS, where, as discussed in Chapter 9, the IPA played an important role in the context of electoral monitoring, the political role of the EurAsEC IPA was always negligible. When the Customs Union was established, Kazakhstan blocked any suggestions of creating an interparliamentary assembly for this organization, fearing that it would make the Union more political and less economic—we will discuss this issue in what follows. Thus, the development of the governance of the sequence of regional organization we study seems to be determined by three contradictory trends: stricter adherence to the de facto consensus principle, the growing importance of the supranational bureaucracy, and the unstable role of the “non-technical” supranational institutions—the IPA and the court. The first tendency is entirely in line with the main argument we made in Chapters 2 and 3 and, to some extent, in the large-N analysis. We have argued that for nondemocratic political leaders it is essential to retain control over how the decision making in the regional organization is made—hence their direct involvement in key strategic decisions within the EAEU. At the same time, however, it is also difficult for non-democratic leaders to yield to a procedure which potentially lets them be overruled by the majority of other countries in the organization. This is a general concern for all countries (and the reason why the introduction of weighted majority voting is so difficult in most regional organizations), but for non-democracies there is an additional type of cost: their control over their countries relies on them sending systematic and credible signals of absolute dominance. If they do not do this, the bureaucracies have lower incentives to comply with the will of the political leadership, and the system can start to disintegrate. If a non-democratic leader is overruled through a voting procedure in the regional organization, it can be interpreted as a sign of weakness. During the EurAsEC era, this concern was less relevant for the member countries because the progress of regional integration was extremely slow. After the transition toward a more functioning economic regional organization with a potentially larger impact on economic policy making became more plausible, the willingness of the members to accept weighted voting reduced, as can be observed in the case of the transition from the Customs Union

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Commission to the EurAsEC. In addition, the extreme power asymmetry of the EAEU makes it even more difficult for both smaller countries and for Russia to accept weighted voting. Smaller countries can find themselves in a situation of extreme dependence on Russia—a topic which played a generally very important role in the evolution of Eurasian regionalism. For Russia, in turn, weighted voting does not guarantee the same level of control as Russian economic and political dominance in the Eurasian regional organizations—in both the Customs Union and the EurAsEC, Russia could have vetoed any decision, but required the support of at least one smaller partner to pass any new proposition. Stated another way, the very creation of a decision-making scheme in which Russian control was limited could have been interpreted by the Russian bureaucracy as a sign of weakness in the Russian political leadership, which was being forced to “share” power. The de facto consensus schemes are less transparent in this respect. The third trend is more complex: we have argued that democratic and nondemocratic regional organizations do not differ in terms of their likelihood of establishing an IPA because each of the organizations can assign certain functions to the IPA. In the case of the EAEU, however, the key problem in terms of legitimacy (as we will show in what follows) is not to provide an impression of democratic decision making but rather to prevent the impression that the organization is developing into a “political union”—an issue highly critical for both smaller members and external actors. This explains why the organization did not set up an IPA. As for the court, all countries of the EAEU have a legal system that is subject to intense political manipulation; it is therefore hardly surprising that supranational jurisprudence has only limited opportunity to develop. Probably, the second trend is the most difficult one to fit within the existing literature on non-democratic regimes and their foreign policy in general (see Chapter 2) and our analysis of NDROs in particular: the development of a supranational bureaucracy (at least to a certain extent and more so than in many other regional organizations). This is an issue which is also contested in the literature. There is a broad consensus among students of the EAEU that the supranational bureaucracy is important for decision making in areas where that decision making has been transferred to the Union. However, whether it is really independent, or merely acts on behalf of Russian political interests, is not clear. It is frequently stated that the bureaucracy of the Eurasian Economic Commission primarily follows Russian political dominance. However, on the Board of the Eurasian Economic Commission, there have been reported cases where the decisions made were not in favor of the Russian Federation. In fact, as of 2017, the opposite seems to be true: any disagreement of the member states results in decisions at the Eurasian Economic Commission level being shifted towards the political leadership, which makes the decisions by consensus: Eurasian Economic Commission is

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more of an overly cautious institution than a tool of Russian hegemony. If we look at a broader picture, the original customs tariff of the Customs Union was closer to the Russian tariff than to the tariffs of other members, but Mktrchyan (2013a) argues that Russian dominance in determining tariffs should not be over-estimated. Thus, there is at least some level of supranationality achieved by the EurAsEC. Why did the non-democratic countries—given the issues we have discussed above—agree to it? There are three possible explanations for this outcome. One is based on the fact that we need to look inside the “black box” of the non-democratic regime to really understand its foreign policy rather than to treat it as a single actor. The design of a regional organization is not merely an outcome of the will of the political leader: it is based on the work of multiple actors with various interests (Lake 2008; Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2012). One can show that in the Russian domestic political discourse there are multiple heterogeneous models which the EAEU could have been based on. The strong supranational bureaucracy would fit the preference of those considering the EAEU as a tool to modernize the member countries and to liberalize their economies. Hence, the first and second tendencies contradict each other because, in some sense, they are designed by different influence groups. We will return to this topic of conflicting images of the EAEU while discussing its ideological and geopolitical goals. Second, empowering the supranational bureaucracy could have been seen by the member countries as a tool to increase the credibility of the regional organization, given the past experience of Eurasian regionalism. Weak regional organizations such as the CIS and the EurAsEC, when unable to achieve their ambitious economic integration goals, and created substantial mistrust about Eurasian integration altogether. Strengthening the supranational bureaucracy of the EAEU could have served as a signal that this organization, unlike its predecessors, should be taken seriously in economic affairs. Finally, countries could have been interested in creating strong supranational institutions to limit the impact of their own domestic rent-seeking interest groups. However, we have to acknowledge that given the limited time period of the existence of the EAEU, more detailed investigation of how the supranational bureaucracy of the Eurasian Economic Commission functions is difficult—there is clearly a need for further empirical work on this organization.² ² We also note that while, at the level of the Board, each country is represented equally (although some commissioners are assigned less important departments), the bureaucracy of the Eurasian Economic Commission was originally mostly recruited from Russian citizens. This may also have an impact on the decision making of the Eurasian Economic Commission, giving Russia de facto greater leverage. As mentioned, the situation changed in 2017, with equal representation quotas for each country being created at lower levels of the Eurasian Economic Commission bureaucracy—this principle, however, creates problems in terms of finding suitable bureaucratic personnel.

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10.3. RELATIONS TO OTHER REGIONAL ORGANIZATIONS While originally the organizations we have described developed as one element of the broader integration efforts within the CIS, over time the ties between them and the CIS became less and less pronounced. As of 2017, the institutions of the EAEU and of the CIS are clearly separate from each other. All EAEU members are also part of the CIS Free Trade Agreement, which was, interestingly, signed not by the Customs Union as an entity, but by individual countries. The EAEU also maintains informal ties to two other organizations: the EDB and the CSTO, neither of which are, however, part of the EAEU legal framework. The EDB was created in 2006 by Russia and Kazakhstan, and currently incorporates all member countries of the EAEU, as well as Tajikistan. It is a development bank with the objective of funding projects related to Eurasian economic integration. A particularly important function of the EDB is associated with it being the managing organization for the EFSD (in 2018, EFSD was split from the EDB and became an independent international organization).³ The EFSD (originally called the EurAsEC Anti-Crisis Fund) was created during the global crisis of the early 2010s as a joint financial pool of the EurAsEC countries to be used to provide financial assistance to the organization’s members. The overall amount of financial resources of the EFSD is equal to US$8.5 billion. As of 2017, the EFSD has provided loans and financial assistance to the member countries to the tune of about US$6 billion, including a US$4.5 billion loan to Belarus for budget stabilization. Other recipients of EFSD funding include Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The EDB and the EFSD operations are legally separated from the EAEU, but in many cases they support the activity of the EAEU by focusing on market integration in Eurasia. For example, the allocation of EFSD funds is frequently associated with requirements to implement the structural reforms necessary to maintain the EAEU’s functioning. EDB and EFSD officially state that they coordinate their actions with the Eurasian Economic Commission and see themselves as part of the “Eurasian integration infrastructure” (on the EFSD see Fritz and Mühlich 2018). The CSTO emerged out of the CIS legal framework, which the Collective Security Treaty (or the Tashkent treaty) belonged to when it was signed in 1992. The separate organization was established in 2002 and currently includes six countries (five of the EAEU members and Tajikistan). Unlike the EAEU, the CSTO serves primarily as a military alliance based on a mutual defense clause and cooperation in military matters (including the

³ On the activity of the fund see http://efsd.eabr.org/e, accessed July 20, 2018.

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collective rapid reaction forces established in 2009). So far, the effectiveness of cooperation has been extremely limited: the most prominent example of the weakness of the CSTO was its reaction to the clashes between Uzbek and Kyrgyz ethnic groups in Kyrgyzstan in 2010, when CSTO refused to intervene, despite the Kyrgyzstani president’s request for them to do so. Legally, the CSTO does not cooperate with the EAEU in any form, but because their membership coincides, the high-level summits of the CSTO and of the EAEU are often combined or follow immediately upon another. The overall concern of the Eurasian countries over Russian foreign policy after the Ukrainian crisis makes a further strengthening of the CSTO unlikely (but, as some argue, even in its current form CSTO can contribute to the norm transfer between authoritarian states, see Yakouchyk 2018b).

10.4. HETEROGENEITY O F MEMBERSHIP AND HEGEMONY Since the set of members of the EAEU is similar to that of the CIS, most of the conclusions we reached in Chapter 9 are also valid for this organization. There are, however, several important distinctions. The number of EAEU members is smaller, and therefore they are less heterogeneous than the CIS members. This applies to both cultural heterogeneity and the heterogeneity of political regimes. In terms of cultural heterogeneity, of the “core” countries two— Russia and Belarus—are predominantly Christian Orthodox; Kazakhstan is Islamic, but, of all the countries of Central Asia, has probably been the most secularized over the last century. Of the smaller countries, Kyrgyzstan is similar to Kazakhstan, and Armenia is Oriental Orthodox. Thus, the organization does not include the relatively less secularized Islamic countries of Central Asia (if Tajikistan joins the EAEU at some point, this situation will change) and countries where there is a stronger presence of Western Christianity (Ukraine). In terms of political heterogeneity, one needs to distinguish between the core group of members (Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan) and the rest. As for the core countries, they exhibit substantial similarity in terms of their regimes: by the end of first decade of the 2000s, all of them were consolidated personalist autocracies. According to FH, Kazakhstan has had a score of 6 (on the political rights dimension) since the early 2000s; Belarus had a score of 6 until 2004, and a score of 7 since then; Russia had a score of 5 until 2003, and a score of 6 since that time. Polity IV evaluates the Russian political regime as more democratic, with a score of 6 until 2006 and 4 afterwards; Belarus is assigned a score of minus 7, and Kazakhstan a score of minus 6. The high democracy

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score Russia receives in the Polity IV data, as has already been mentioned, does not coincide with the assessments of the majority of the observers, who view Russia as developing into a consolidated autocracy under Putin. If we look at the smaller countries of the EAEU, however, the members of the organization become substantially more heterogeneous. Armenia, until recently, had a similar authoritarian regime to the other EAEU countries, but the extent of its control over politics and society was weaker. In 2018, as mentioned in Chapter 9, it experienced a peaceful revolution resulting in the resignation of the government and potentially paving the way for a more democratic governance system, yet a precise assessment of the changes is not possible at the time of writing. Kyrgyzstan has since 2010 been a country with a relatively democratic political system; this certainly stands out due to the lack of a strong presidency (as in the other EAEU countries; the Armenian transition to parliamentary democracy decided upon in 2015, as discussed, instead represents a case where political institutions were manipulated to allow the incumbent to stay in power beyond the expiry of the term limits) and a higher level of political competition. While there is discussion about Kyrgyzstan mimicking some of Russia’s anti-democratic acts (e.g. in dealing with NGOs⁴), the country is still very different from the rest of the EAEU: according to Polity IV, it has had a score of 7 since 2010; Armenia has a score of 5. In the FH data, however, both Armenia and Kyrgyzstan have had a score of 5 since 2010. The presence of Kyrgyzstan among the members of the EAEU is entirely in line with the results of the large-N analysis. The democratization process that this country has experienced since the revolution in 2010 did not in any way limit Russia’s willingness to accept it as one of the members of the EAEU—regime heterogeneity played a much smaller role than it would in a DRO. At the same time, the EAEU exhibits another interesting and unusual feature: it is among very few regional organizations which are not geographically contingent—Armenia has no common borders with the other countries. This was, in fact, the reason why Armenia did not participate in the EurAsEC; however, when the perception of geopolitical stakes went up in the 2010s (as discussed below), Russia insisted on it joining the EAEU. A lack of geographical connectivity typically reduces the advantages of a customs union; it also increases the heterogeneity of preferences (in line with the economics approach to regional integration discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) and thus makes the creation of a regional organization more difficult. Authoritarian leaders are less constrained by these considerations; thus, the fact that the EAEU is an NDRO may be one explanation for its specific territorial structure.

⁴ http://www.resurgentdictatorship.org/the-export-of-russias-foreign-agent-law/, accessed July 20, 2018.

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In terms of power asymmetry, the dominance of Russia in the EAEU is even more pronounced than in the CIS. Russia represents about 85 percent of the CINC of the organization vs. about 62 percent within the CIS. If we look at how the EAEU is discussed among the member countries, we see, however, that the possibility of extreme dependence on Russia is indeed recognized as one of the major potential problems in the evolution of the organization, and the member countries have put numerous precautions in place (e.g. at the level of institutions) to limit this risk. In the CIS, as mentioned, the approach used was “à la carte” regionalism. In the EAEU, the members used two strategies: one was a higher demand for consensus-based decision-making institutions, discussed in Section 10.3; the other a unwillingness to accept even a limited level of political integration, which we address in what follows.

10.5. OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIAL GOALS The official goals of economic regionalism in Eurasia have hardly changed since the founding of the first Customs Union in 1995 (and were, in fact, borrowed from the early goals of the CIS, when it was still perceived as a viable economic organization; see Darden 2009). In the early 1990s, there were two goals: to develop more advanced forms of economic integration and to mutually support the implementation of market reforms. Over time, the second goal became less important, since some of the Eurasian countries completed the main reforms they intended to implement and others openly refused to liberalize their economies any further (e.g. Belarus). Hence, the goal of economic integration became the more important; this, over time, took the specific shape of the Balassa sequence of integration steps—from customs union to common market (typically referred to as the CES in Eurasia) to economic union. The early stage of the free trade area, as mentioned, has de facto been achieved in Eurasia for most goods since the early 1990s. There has also been some discussion of monetary integration in Eurasia, but it has always remained purely hypothetical and has never reached a level of possible implementation (Kotlyarov and Alekseev 2014; Kuznetsov 2015).⁵ The EAEU clearly rejects any political goals—even at the lowest possible level. This is primarily a result of the strict position of Kazakhstan, which from the very beginning declared the EAEU to be merely an economic, and not a political project. Hence, the EAEU does not include even rudimentary symbolic elements of a commitment to certain values, as the CIS and the SCO do. ⁵ The situation was different in another regional organization in Eurasia—the Russia–Belarus Union—where the creation of a common currency was indeed put on the agenda. However, in this case too, no real progress has ever been made.

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The issues of domestic politics are never discussed in any form at EAEU level. The position of Kazakhstan, in turn, is hardly surprising—political integration can be seen as a “Trojan horse” allowing Russia to gain excessive influence or at least something that might be perceived as such by the population and bureaucracy. In sum, any progress of the EAEU in terms of economic integration has been feasible and accepted by the smaller member countries only because there have been no political goals in any form. The unofficial goals of the EAEU are more heterogeneous. As in the case of the SCO, which is discussed in Chapter 11, for many countries of the group the main objective is associated with bilateral relations with Russia rather than with the multilateral organization. This is probably particularly visible in the case of Belarus, which, due to the nature of its state-controlled economy, has generally very little interest in market integration and primarily uses the EAEU as a tool to obtain further subsidies from Russia. But for Armenia too relations with Russia are essential—here the decision to join the EAEU was related not only to economic ties with Russia (which currently controls major assets in the Armenian economy), but also to the security guarantee Russia provides to Armenia. Since the early 1990s, due to tense relations with Turkey and open conflict with Azerbaijan, Armenia has relied on Russia as the main provider of its security. This security guarantee is, strictly speaking, not tied to the EAEU but to the CSTO. However, for Armenia it is generally important to ensure that political ties with Russia remain free from any conflict, and, since Russia perceived Armenia’s membership in the EAEU to be extremely important, the country had to join. The situation is somewhat different for Kyrgyzstan, which, while being strongly connected to Russia, also exhibits intensive economic ties to Kazakhstan: ethnic, geographic, and cultural proximity are the reasons why, for example, labor migrants from Kyrgyzstan also work in Kazakhstan, and Kazakhstan invests heavily in the Kyrgyzstani economy. Another set of unofficial EAEU goals is associated with ideology and geopolitics. In this case, however, the situation is less clear than it is for economic goals. It appears that differences exist not only between countries, but also between individual groups in the elites of the countries. From this point of view, at least two images of the EAEU exist in Russia. On the one hand, a few observers consider the EAEU a “civilizational” project aiming to limit “Western” influence in Eurasia and the world. In the extreme version of this argument, the EAEU should become a power pole in global political affairs; a somewhat more moderate view suggests that the EAEU should be used as a protectionist instrument. The head of the secretariat of the Customs Union Commission, Sergei Glazyev, was known as a consistent opponent of liberal market reforms, and embraced the idea of making the EAEU a more protectionist entity (Aslund 2013). On the other hand, another influential point of view among Russian political elites and the expert community sees the

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EAEU as a building block for regional integration in the “greater Europe.” This is what, for example, Vladimir Putin explicitly referred to in his seminal article in the Russian newspaper Izvestiya in 2011,⁶ where, prior to his reelection for a third term, he expressed a clear political commitment towards the EAEU project. However, the Russian elites mostly view the EAEU as a tool for increasing the strength of Russia in the international arena and as a necessary element of ensuring its great power status. This is important for the subsequent discussion which will consider the indirect effect that the EAEU exercises on the regime transition trajectories of Eurasian countries. These far-reaching ideological and geopolitical goals are, however, mostly unrelated to the actual practices of the EAEU, which focus on much more narrow topics of economic cooperation between countries. As mentioned, the political agenda of the EAEU is extremely limited. The individual economic policy decisions of the EAEU also do not form a clear and sequential move towards protectionism. The discussion of common standards for the EAEU oscillates between adopting standards close to those of the EU and reintroducing the old Soviet GOST standards (the GOSTs themselves were reformed in the 2000s and adapted to international standards in many cases). However, for those focusing on geopolitical and ideological goals, the actual practices of the EAEU are in many cases irrelevant. What is more important is their ability to use this institution in their (anti-Western or liberal) rhetoric. An interesting question is, however, whether this “rhetorical” EAEU will at any stage in the future influence the “real” EAEU and its practices. Because the rhetoric also exists in a state of flux (especially because of the conflict between Russia and the EU), this remains to be seen.

10.6. OUTCOMES

10.6.1. Economic integration Since the main “official” goal of the EAEU is to foster economic cooperation, it is reasonable to start our discussion by looking at the role that the EAEU has played in this respect. Here, strictly speaking, two possible avenues of analysis exist. On the one hand, one can look at the trade relations between the EAEU countries and consider the implications the EAEU could have for them. On the other hand, we can go one step further and look at the implications of the EAEU for economic well-being in general. In this case, the central debate is whether the EAEU is primarily a trade-creating or a trade-diverting regional organization. ⁶ http://izvestia.ru/news/502761, accessed July 20, 2018.

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The first normative discussions about the economic effects of Eurasian regionalism in the form of a customs union (i.e. the main objective of all organizations we have discussed in this chapter) date back to the 1990s: Michalopoulos and Tarr (1997), in an influential paper, show that a customs union in Eurasia would reduce welfare, partly because of its dynamic inefficiency, preventing the adaptation of innovations. Yevstigneev (1997) shows that the general discourse about Eurasian regionalism is used by powerful economic interest groups to protect their domination from external competition. However, until the second Customs Union (2010) came into existence, any discussion of the effects of regionalism on economic relations was either hypothetical (because the customs union’s yardstick has never been achieved) or focused on how the rhetoric of the integration was influencing domestic economic policy. With the establishment of the second Customs Union, which actually became a functioning customs union, the literature began to analyze the effects this new body could have on trade and welfare. There have been numerous studies on this topic, using computable general equilibrium models to predict the effects of the Customs Union (World Bank 2012b; Carneiro 2013) or applying econometrics to evaluate the consequences of Customs Union for trade flows (Mogilevskii 2012; Isakova et al. 2013; Mktrchyan 2013b). Three conclusions stand out. First, the effect of the Customs Union on trade relations has been either quantitatively very small or insignificant (Isakova et al. 2013). The reasons for this are numerous. On the one hand, the Customs Union failed to remove non-tariff barriers between countries. On the other, the establishment of the Customs Union coincided with a major economic crisis hitting the countries of Eurasia in 2008–11, and later with the geopolitical crisis in Eastern Europe and the new Russian recession from 2014 onwards; hence, the creation of the regional organization simply turned out to be less important for the region than one might have expected. However, we also have to highlight that two key countries of the EAEU—Russia and Kazakhstan—have a trade and industry structure which makes them potentially not complementary; both export oil and gas to Europe (and recently to China). For smaller countries of the EAEU—Armenia and Kyrgyzstan—trade relations are in any case less important than other aspects of economic cooperation. Second, the effects of the Customs Union and the EAEU on economic wellbeing are small, but still mostly negative. There are only a handful of studies which see the EAEU as a wealth-creating organization (EDB 2012). In addition, the EAEU has created certain redistributive effects through its trade structure (Astrov et al. 2012). In terms of its static efficiency, the main conclusion seems to be that the EAEU could have produced better outcomes if the non-tariff barriers had been removed (Tarr 2012); the research, which finds positive effects of the EAEU on welfare, focuses precisely on this aspect (Mktrchyan 2013b). In terms of dynamic efficiency, the main problem is the

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obsolete economic structure of the EAEU countries and their lack of innovation. Third, however, the trade effects of the EAEU do not seem to be the most important aspect of this RO’s influence on the economy. Libman and Vinokurov (2012b) show that, generally speaking, for the bottom-up regionalization in Eurasia, investments and migration are more important than trade. In the case of the EAEU, for small countries (Armenia and Kyrgyzstan) the issue of migration is indeed the crucial economic benefit. For Kazakhstan, the particular advantages are associated with access to the Russian transportation infrastructure (pipelines, railroads, etc.). In the early 2010s there was an intensive discussion about Russian businesses migrating to Kazakhstan because of the more favorable regulatory environment in the country. Thus, Kazakhstan turned out to be a winner in its interjurisdictional competition with Russia (this effect did not last though: the most recent EDB report indicates that the interjurisdictional competition turned out to be weaker than expected, partly because of the very strong role of government-owned business in Eurasia; see EDB 2017a). After the onset of the Russian crisis in 2014, this issue became less relevant. However, these non-trade-related benefits could be the main way through which the EAEU is affecting the economies of its members. An obvious question which one has to ask in this case is why the EAEU was designed as a customs union, that is, with the focus on trade—especially because it is precisely this aspect of its design that has made it part of the geopolitical confrontation in Eastern Europe in the 2010s (we will explore this issue in greater detail in the subsection 10.6.4). There has been very little discussion of this issue in the Russian expert community (think tanks, academia, and policy circles), where some have advocated the idea of an “open regionalism” model for Eurasia instead of the customs union path the EAEU has taken (Kosikova 2010). One of the possible explanations for this is that the customs union could have been used by particular interest groups to extract rents. However, there is little evidence that business actually advocated the creation of the EAEU in the form in which it appeared. The main concerns appeared because of lacunae in the original Customs Union Customs Code and uncertainty associated with new customs procedures.⁷ While over time ⁷ For example, Aleksandr Shokhin, head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (one of the largest Russian business associations traditionally focusing on representing the interests of big companies) explicitly criticized the original Customs Code for containing numerous references to national legislation and other technical problems (Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 1 April 2010; Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 11 March 2010). Vladislav Korochkin, the vice-president of OPORA (another large business association representing mainly small and medium-sized businesses) also expressed his concern that the legal foundation of the Customs Union was insufficiently developed (Itogi 2010).

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the improvement of the regulatory framework of the EAEU has reduced the original problem of incompatible and poorly developed regulations (in 2018, after years of negotiations, the new EAEU Customs Code will replace the old Customs Code of the Customs Union), the fact that the Code with numerous lacunae was adopted still indicates that business was not the main force behind the development of the organization. Another, and more plausible explanation, looks at the development of the EAEU as yet another example of “downloading the global script”—the imitation of the EU, which is seen to be the most legitimate form of regional integration worldwide. For the EAEU—there is still suspicion on the part of international observers (politicians and experts alike) that the new organization is, in fact, the new reincarnation of the USSR⁸—it is especially important to rely on the EU’s experience as much as possible (on EU influences on the EAEU design, see Dragneva and Wolczuk 2015). Furthermore, the epistemic communities involved in the development of the Customs Union and design of the EAEU—especially in Russia—also perceived the EU as the only successful approach to regionalism, and hence tried to mimic it as far as possible.⁹

10.6.2. Democracy Large-N analysis: The EAEU, as mentioned, is frequently discussed as an example of autocracy promotion by Russia both within the organization and beyond. This is one of the main reasons why the organization is perceived with extreme skepticism by many observers (another is the view that the EAEU merely serves as a tool to implement Russian geopolitical ambitions and to ensure its power dominance in Eurasia). These frequent statements typically focus on the fact that, as mentioned above, the EAEU includes only authoritarian states: however, they do not outline the precise causal pathways explaining autocracy promotion through the EAEU. This is, however, not a trivial point; given the predominance of the economic agenda in the official goals of the EAEU (already mentioned), its contribution to autocracy promotion (if any) is not self-evident.

⁸ Expressed, for example, by the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; see http://www. rferl.org/a/clinton-calls-eurasian-integration-effort-to-resovietize/24791921.html, accessed July 21, 2018. ⁹ With the exception of those who were actually advocating a partial return to the planned economy instruments (at least in form of indicative planning). However, this approach was clearly unacceptable for Kazakhstan—which, in terms of market reforms (e.g. natural monopolies), is even more advanced than Russia—as well as to the more reform-oriented groups in the Russian elites.

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In line with the approach taken in Chapter 9, we start our discussion with the large-N analysis. In the case of the CIS, we utilized its specific institutional design to develop a proxy for the varying level of participation in the regional organization for each country in each year. For the EAEU and the EurAsEC, we cannot use this approach. Hence, we will apply a more traditional style of analysis to understand the drivers of their participation in the regional organization. Our dependent variable is a dummy for countries which were part of the EAEU in a year t (Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan since 2010, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan since 2015). We construct a sample of eleven post-Soviet countries for the period 2000–15.¹⁰ Thus, we obtain a balanced panel of 176 observations, which is sufficient for econometric analysis. As the main explanatory variable, we use the FH score of a country i in a year t (the average for civil rights and political liberties; using only political liberties does not change our results). The Polity IV score is used, as in the analysis of the CIS, as a robustness check. We also add various combinations of control variables. First, we control for GDP and GDP per capita (all in current US$, extracted from the World Development Indicators). Second, we control for the share of CIS trade in the total foreign trade (from the CIS Interstate Statistical Committee) and for the total share of foreign trade in GDP (from the World Development Indicators). Third, we control for a WTO membership dummy. These variables follow the same logic we applied while discussing the CIS; WTO membership is, as mentioned, an even larger issue for possible EAEU members than it was for the CIS. In addition, we also control for the share of military expenditure in the GDP—this is because in the second half of the 2000s Russia’s military activism became more pronounced, and the countries could have considered their military potential when joining the EAEU. It should be remembered that in the early 2000s the likelihood of conflicts such as that in Eastern Ukraine was generally considered extremely low by almost all observers. We do not control for the economic reforms score (this issue was less salient in the 2000s) and for the share of ethnic Russians (due to the EAEU’s pure economic focus). The baseline regressions, reported in Table 10.1, are estimated using a linear probability model (to simplify the introduction of fixed effects into the analysis) with the two-way fixed effects. The result in this case is strikingly different than it was in the case of the CIS: we find no evidence whatsoever that there is a correlation between political regimes and membership in the EAEU. If we run regressions for EurAsEC (Table 10.2), we

¹⁰ Our sample excludes Georgia: when the EAEU was created, the relations between this country and Russia had already been destroyed by the 2008 war, and its participation in the EAEU was not even under discussion. As for the choice of the time period for the analysis, we explicitly want to focus on the 2000s, when the alternative “subregional” approach to regional integration in the post-Soviet space was dominant.

Table 10.1. Impact of political regimes (FH) on membership in the EAEU, 2000–2015, two-way FE (1) Democracy (FH)

0.033 (0.074)

GDP

(2) −0.012 (0.060) 0.000*** (0.000)

GDP per capita

(3) −0.014 (0.052)

0.000*** (0.000)

Foreign trade to GDP

(4)

(5) −0.015 (0.080) 0.000*** (0.000)

−0.000 (0.002)

−0.002 (0.002) 0.011** (0.004)

CIS trade to total trade Military expenditures to GDP

0.06 (0.090) 0.000** (0.000)

−0.131 (0.106)

WTO Constant Observations Number of id R²

0.182 (0.396) 176 11 0.299

0.327 (0.341) 176 11 0.417

0.039 (0.311) 176 11 0.494

0.392 (0.422) 170 11 0.447

0.257 (0.514) 141 9 0.505

0.481 (0.474) 128 8 0.526

(7) −0.006 (0.063) 0.000*** (0.000)

−0.061 (0.115) 0.325 (0.337) 176 11 0.42

Note: robust standard errors in parentheses. Within R² reported. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%. Smaller number of observations in some of the regressions is due to the data availability

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−0.009 (0.061) 0.000*** (0.000)

(6)

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Table 10.2. Impact of political regimes (FH) on membership in the EurAsEC, 2000–2015, two-way FE (1) Democracy (FH) GDP

0.031 (0.054)

GDP per capita Foreign trade to GDP CIS trade to total trade Military expenditures to GDP WTO Constant Observations Number of id R²

(2)

(3)

0.025 0.028 (0.056) (0.055) 0.000** (0.000) 0.000 (0.000)

(4)

(5)

(6)

(7)

0.022 −0.014 −0.008 0.033 (0.061) (0.055) (0.051) (0.043) 0.000** 0.000** 0.000** 0.000** (0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000)

0.000 (0.002)

−0.001 (0.001) −0.003 (0.004) 0.021 (0.039)

0.285 (0.309) 176 11 0.356

0.304 (0.316) 176 11 0.36

0.274 (0.314) 176 11 0.358

0.32 (0.425) 170 11 0.36

0.795** 0.454 (0.311) (0.256) 141 128 9 8 0.579 0.512

−0.078 (0.053) 0.301 (0.266) 176 11 0.369

Note: see Table 10.1.

essentially find the same outcome, though one should notice that there is very little variation over time in our dependent variable (basically, the same five countries have been members since 2001, excluding the short-lived membership of Uzbekistan). Thus, in a nutshell, while the CIS appeared to be an organization selecting non-democratic countries or reinforcing non-democratic political regimes, EurAsEC and EAEU do not have this function. The results are confirmed in a variety of robustness checks reported in the Appendix. The intuition for the econometric findings can be easily established if we look at the kernel density estimates of the FH scores for the EAEU members and other CIS countries (see Figure 10.1). One can see that, on average, the EAEU and the non-EAEU countries have the same level of democracy. There are some relatively more democratic countries (Ukraine and Moldova) which did not join the EAEU, but there are also robust autocracies (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan), which did not become part of the EAEU either. Note that the result does not contradict our thesis of higher heterogeneity of NDRO members—we merely show that within the CIS the EAEU selected a group of countries with relatively more homogenous regimes than the overall set of countries in the group—but the EAEU as such, compared to DROs, still remains, as mentioned, highly heterogeneous.

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.8

Density

.6

.4

.2

0 2

3

4

5

6

7

FH score

Figure 10.1. Kernel density of FH scores for the EAEU and non-EAEU countries Note: The dotted line corresponds to all country–year observations from our analysis, which do not belong to the EAEU, while the solid line corresponds to all country–year observations which do belong to the EAEU

10.6.3. Qualitative evidence: three main mechanisms The results of the large-N analysis are not surprising if we look at the causal mechanisms linking regional organization membership and the political regimes. In terms of the selection mechanism (from political regimes to regional organization membership), our argument could essentially be the same as for the CIS with a number of caveats. For the EurAsEC, we probably do not need to modify this argument at all. The risks of manipulation and the dependence emerging from membership of the EAEU (an organization we are much more interested in than the CIS) is higher than in the case of the CIS, because of relatively stronger supranational elements and the higher level of implementation of agreements. (The debate surrounding the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) vs. EAEU membership is illustrative in this respect: none of the post-Soviet regional projects would really pose a problem for a country if it decided to join the DCFTA as well as the EU, except for the EAEU because it is a functioning customs union.) As a result, even non-democracies would be more willing to avoid such dependence, which would make self-selection into the EAEU less likely. In terms of the autocracy consolidation mechanism (from regional organization membership to political regimes), the role of the EAEU should be analyzed in greater detail, as is done below.

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In terms of its formal activities, neither the EAEU nor any of its predecessors (the Customs Union and the EurAsEC) has ever been involved in any activity in any way associated with the issues of democracy or human rights. This is strikingly different to the CIS, for which these issues are important. The EAEU does not make any effort to facilitate governance transfer or diffusion (e.g. through electoral monitoring). Its bureaucrats are very careful to avoid any politically sensitive statements. While a number of studies link the EAEU to some sort of anti-Western ideology (Pryce 2013; Lukin 2014), the organization itself, as we have mentioned already, clearly avoids any ideological rhetoric (as part of its general avoidance of political issues). This includes, paradoxically, even references to Eurasianism (Laruelle 2015), although the elites of the member states frequently attempt to interpret its functioning and its statements in this way (Mileski 2015). Hence, if one expects the EAEU to be significant for the development of political regimes in the member countries, the effect should come primarily from the indirect influences of this organization. Potentially, one could highlight three such influences: improving the legitimacy of the political leaders of the member countries; providing access to a larger market and thus insulating members from international pressures; and resisting the diffusion of EU democracy by limiting the opportunities for bilateral contacts between EAEU members and the EU. The first two mechanisms can be truly associated with autocracy promotion. The last mechanism is more correctly described as countering democracy promotion. In terms of the first mechanism, as discussed in Chapters 8 and 9, the idea of Eurasian regionalism enjoyed vast popularity in all member countries (this, as discussed below, applies much more to the genuinely functioning EAEU than to the purely rhetorical CIS). This popularity may be driven by various factors. Smaller countries such as Armenia and Kyrgyzstan expect tangible benefits to come from EAEU membership (especially a more liberalized regime for their migrant workers). Large states may be more prone to Soviet nostalgia (Karbalevich and Valliere 2001; Nikolayenko 2008; White 2010). There are still intensive social contacts between all member countries, which make people embrace the open borders the EAEU creates (EDB 2015b). Finally, as already mentioned, there are many in Russia who do see the EAEU through the lens of geopolitics, considering this organization to be essential for the creation of a new power pole (e.g, Vasilyeva 2015).¹¹ For other smaller countries, this interpretation of the EAEU is more problematic, since it implies their involvement in Russia’s geopolitical games, which are anything but popular in Eurasia: the idea of integration for the sake of geopolitics, however, does have its supporters in Belarus and Kazakhstan as well. ¹¹ Russo and Stoddard (2018) show that Russian and Kazakhstani elites use the EAEU as a tool for creating ontological security of the elites, defined as human being’s need to be part of a “stable collective entity.”

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Among the regimes of the EAEU, two (Kazakhstan and Belarus) have made Eurasian integration the key element of the ideology of their regimes. Kazakhstani president Nursultan Nazarbayev has always positioned himself as an “Eurasianist” (Cummings 2003); it was in his speech of 1994 that the idea of a Eurasian Union was first proposed.¹² Similarly, Lukashenka in Belarus has always embraced the idea of regional integration with Russia, at least at the rhetorical level (Frear 2013). The more interesting question is, however, whether the regimes really needed the EAEU in its current form—as a functioning economic organization—to extract the rhetorical benefits from Eurasian regionalism necessary to stabilize their regimes. Potentially, this result could have been achieved with a purely symbolic project, such as the EurAsEC or the CIS. We can go further: in a purely symbolic project there would be fewer concerns regarding the risk of loss of political control to Russia and thus less willingness to prevent the development of institutions such as the IPA, which, from the point of view of public opinion, could be very important. It is possible that in Eurasia two decades of failing attempts to establish a functioning economic regional organization made the possible benefits from a purely rhetorical organization negligible, and thus the countries had to move to a project with greater economic substance. Although the idea of the EAEU is very popular with the public, it finds less favor with the expert communities of the member states. Schiek (2016) shows that in Kazakhstan and in Kyrgyzstan there exists a vibrant expert discourse which is extremely critical of the EAEU, and that the regimes undertake substantial efforts to insulate their public from this discourse. We also have to mention the special case of Uzbekistan joining the EurAsEC, which we have described in previous chapters and which fits the first mechanism to some degree. Membership of EurAsEC did not provide any tangible economic benefits to the country; however, it provided the Karimov regime with an opportunity to counter-balance the sanctions imposed by the EU and the US. It is not clear whether the benefits extracted from joining the EurAsEC were associated primarily with maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of Uzbekistan’s population or, as is much more likely, with (parts of) the international community (the non-democratic states) and the Uzbekistani elites. In any case, EurAsEC’s willingness to admit Uzbekistan de facto reduced the “punishment” that the Western countries wanted to impose on the regime after the massacre in Andijan and thus strengthened the regime. But, again, most likely this was not the intention of the key players of the EurAsEC—instead, Russia was using the temporary isolation of Uzbekistan to strengthen its own influence in Central Asia (at least symbolically).

¹² http://presidentlibrary.kz/?p=2434&lang=ru, accessed July 20, 2018.

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The second mechanism could have been hypothesized during the relatively successful period of economic development of the EAEU members in the 2000s but is certainly questionable as of 2017. The creation of the EAEU could have served as a source of economic benefit for some countries without forcing them to implement the reforms required by potential external partners (such as the EU). For Belarus, as mentioned, joining the Customs Union and the EAEU was a major argument in its bargaining with Russia, and was used to extract further economic concessions—especially concerning the taxation of the export of crude oil to Belarus, which the country processes and exports to the EU (Knobel 2015). Paradoxically, the Customs Union has encouraged more trade between Belarus and the EU in that it has allowed Belarus to increase exports of petroleum products. There are other advantages for Belarus as well, for example, access for Belarusian industry to the Russian market (and, in the best possible case, to Russian public procurement). For Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, the gains are associated, as mentioned, with a more favorable migration regime. Free movement of labor within the EAEU can also serve to stabilize authoritarian regimes. Even if we accept the arguments of those who are skeptical towards the EAEU and suggest that the organization reduces welfare for its members, there remain some important interest groups which benefit from economic integration in Eurasia—and by supporting the EAEU the governments also secure the support of these groups as well (see also discussion in Section 10.6.4). From the point of view of this argument, the EAEU could be strengthening authoritarian regimes in the member states simply by implementing the function of economic integration. Integration creates economic benefits for at least some actors, and regimes translate these benefits into political support and so do not need to seek economic benefits elsewhere (i.e. they do not need to embrace cooperation projects with other countries, which, again, may set higher requirements in terms of democratization). At the same time, the advantage of the EAEU as described was more likely to be realized in the period when the Russian economy was relatively stable—that is, when Russia constituted an attractive goal for trade and migration and a potential source of redistribution. Since 2014, Russia, from the economic point of view, has been more of a liability than an asset for the EAEU countries. The economic crisis in Russia, triggered by the lack of structural reforms, international sanctions, and low oil prices has made it hard for the Russian leadership to engage in large-scale redistribution in the long run; the demand of the Russian economy for goods and migrants is also increasing. In addition, Russia has responded to the geopolitical and economic crisis with growing protectionism, which constitutes one of the major challenges for the development of the EAEU. For example, the Russian decision to impose a ban on imports of food from the EU caused a major trade dispute with Belarus in autumn 2014. The smaller countries of the Customs Union/EAEU refused

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to join Russia in imposing sanctions against the EU. As a result, because there are no customs borders between Russia and Belarus, the latter became an important gateway through which European food could still reach the Russian market. Some of these operations were based on the supposed transit of food from Belarus to Kazakhstan (with goods “lost” on the way through Russia); others were based on manipulations with customs nomenclature and with the alleged processing of goods in Belarus, which made it possible for them to enter the EAEU market (Telegina 2015). The conflict over this trade resulted in Russia and Belarus reinstituting customs checks at their border. The dispute was resolved in early 2015, but Russia still remains a source of major economic concern for the EAEU members—and, therefore, even if this second mechanism impacted their decision making, it has hardly exercised any significant influence as of 2017. Since there is a consensus among observers that the crisis will lead to long-term stagnation in Russia, the second mechanism will most likely not play an important role in the years to come either. The third mechanism, finally, follows directly from the design of the EAEU. This grouping is a customs union: as such, it prohibits its members from independently joining a free trade area with any other trade partner. This is particularly relevant for the countries in Eastern Europe, which potentially have a chance to develop closer economic ties with the EU. The EU’s main instrument for dealing with its eastern neighbors since the first decade of the 2000s has been the signing of Association Agreements, based on a DCFTA. Since the EAEU is a customs union, a member of this organization cannot unilaterally sign a free trade agreement with the EU (it can be done by the EAEU as a whole only). For the purposes of the discussion here, the most important feature is not just that joining the Customs Union and the EAEU affects trade relations; what is more important is that the DCFTA serves as an important tool for transferring good governance from the EU, eventually contributing to regime transition toward democracy. The members of the EAEU are isolated from this governance transfer. The key question is whether the EU can cooperate with EAEU countries without focusing on free trade: the establishment of a new partnership and cooperation agreement between the EU and Armenia in 2017 demonstrates that some level of cooperation is possible even under these conditions. Summing up, we cannot exclude the possibility that EAEU membership is indeed having a certain negative effect on democratization prospects in Eurasia. However, these effects are indirect at best and may be weakened by the economic crisis in Russia, forcing EAEU members to search for other external economic partners (in the case of Central Asia this partner is likely to be China, which in itself is hardly a democracy-promoting power, as Chapter 11 will argue). Hence, it is not surprising that our statistical analysis did not reveal any negative correlation between EAEU membership and a low level of democracy.

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10.6.4. Qualitative evidence: Russian foreign policy and political regimes The analysis of Section 10.6.3 does not take into account an important indirect effect associated with the EAEU.¹³ Our analysis concentrated on the performance of the EAEU itself. We also need to consider, however, how the EAEU is perceived by its hegemon (Russia), and how the hegemon adjusts its foreign policy due to the existence of the EAEU. In order to understand Russian behavior, one needs to consider the EAEU in the broader context of international politics. In the 2000s, the Russian leadership became deeply concerned with the potential EU impact in postSoviet Eurasia (Cadier 2014). In the 1990s the main concern of the Russian leadership was associated with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (and had primarily military-political connotations). Then, in the 2000s, closer cooperation between the post-Soviet states and the EU also became an issue Russian leaders were keen to prevent. On the one hand, Russian elites were concerned that more advanced ties with the EU would reduce Russia’s influence in the post-Soviet countries, seeing the EU as a geopolitical rival. While the EU itself clearly rejects the idea that it is looking to expand its influence in Eastern Europe through the Eastern Partnership, European Neighborhood Policy, and other similar tools, this is not what Russian elites believed (Gretskiy et al. 2014). On the other hand, the EU’s efforts toward democracy promotion (best achieved, in the mind of many EU politicians and experts, through expanding economic and political ties between the EU and Eastern European countries) could have triggered cascade effects threatening Russian authoritarianism. The failure of EU democracy promotion was therefore a priority for the Russian leadership. From this point of view, the EAEU became highly relevant for Russia’s foreign policy for yet another reason: as a tool of “marking” Russia’s control over the post-Soviet space and of preventing the countries of this region from drifting further away from Russia. EAEU decision-making is not under the full control of Russia, but symbolically the organization is perceived as being led by Russia, and this kind of symbolic politics is very important for the Russian leadership. In addition to that, in terms of keeping the post-Soviet states close to Russia, the incompatibility between the customs union and the DCFTAs (which we referred to in the previous discussion) compelled Russian elites to encourage post-Soviet countries to join the EAEU. In order to make the EAEU more attractive, Russia systematically provided various forms of indirect and direct subsidy within the EAEU (Knobel 2015). While legally there is no redistribution mechanism operated by the Eurasian

¹³ This section builds upon Libman and Obydenkova (2018b).

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Economic Commission, the organization can serve as a redistribution vehicle due to the existence of three tools. First, the allocation of customs duties revenue in the EAEU is skewed towards smaller countries (Armenia and Kyrgyzstan), which therefore benefit in terms of budgetary revenue. This mechanism is similar to that used by “regional paymasters” in other regional organizations with strong power asymmetry, such as SACU (Vinokurov and Libman 2017). Second, other Eurasian regional organizations—the EDB and especially the EFSD—provide financing in various forms to their members. Third, Russia often connects membership in the EAEU to bilateral economic concessions. Belarus, for example, effectively managed to lobby for lower gas prices and for a reduction or abolition of export tariffs for crude oil from Russia, requiring these concessions as a condition for agreeing to the next step of regional integration in the EAEU (the extent of the Russian subsidies to Belarus is discussed in Chapter 8). Seen in this way, the EAEU fits the “forces of attraction” argument by Davis and Pratt (2017), which we introduced in Chapter 2. As discussed, geopolitics is very important for the Russian calculus concerning which countries should be allowed to join the EAEU. Russia also is willing to admit countries where the economic motive for the membership is clearly inferior to security considerations (most notably, Armenia). At the same time, Russia provides substantial side payments to the countries in return for their membership in the EAEU. Essentially, for Russia, the EAEU is less relevant for its regional integration results but more for the opportunities it provides to subsidize loyal countries in exchange for their support in geopolitical issues that are relevant for Russia (and possibly punish these countries, e.g. by cutting them off from the EAEU market). In terms of this book, another possible by-product of Russia’s foreign policy regarding the EAEU is even more important. For authoritarian regimes, it is difficult to advance successful cooperation with the EU. While the EU does not always consistently support democracy and occasionally makes deals with authoritarian governments for the sake of stability or to achieve its foreign policy goals (Börzel and Van Hüllen 2014), autocracies are still less likely to develop high-level forms of cooperation with the EU (which require substantial adjustments of their norms and values). This is because, first, the EU is unlikely to offer these cooperation options to them (partly due to pressure from the domestic civil society), but second, the countries themselves do not seek these forms of cooperation, fearing that opening up to the EU too much will destabilize their authoritarian rule. Hence, if Russia aims to prevent countries from developing intensive cooperation with the EU (e.g. within the framework of the DCFTA), it should also support the post-Soviet authoritarian regimes—autocracy promotion is in this case driven by geopolitics. However, if a country is unable to develop close ties with the EU anyway (lack of interest on the part of the EU or very strong dependence on Russia),

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Russia’s geopolitical rationale for autocracy promotion disappears. On the contrary, it could even gain more leverage in weak pluralist regimes. The development of Russian foreign policy with respect to the EAEU membership of its neighbors confirms the “forces of attraction” logic. In what follows, we discuss Russian policy with respect to the membership of individual post-Soviet countries in the EAEU. We exclude two founding members—Kazakhstan and Belarus. Their attitude to the EAEU results from their lengthy participation in the earlier regional integration structures (starting with the Customs Union of 1995). In addition, these countries (especially Kazakhstan) made massive contributions to the institutional development and design of the EAEU and thus cannot be considered as simply being influenced by Russian foreign policy.¹⁴ Our main question is whether Russia used pressure and side-payments to force other post-Soviet countries (with the exception of Kazakhstan and Belarus) to join the EAEU (or the Customs Union as its predecessor organization) and whether it supported authoritarianism in these countries. We find four possible scenarios: (a) autocracy promotion and support of EAEU membership (Ukraine, to a smaller extent Armenia); (b) support of EAEU membership without autocracy promotion (Moldova); (c) no support of EAEU membership of authoritarian countries (e.g. Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan); and (d) no support of EAEU membership of countries with more pluralist politics (Kyrgyzstan, Georgia). Case (a) precisely fits the argument presented above: Russia is concerned about the possibility of post-Soviet countries developing intensive relations with the EU and thus moving out of Russia’s sphere of influence. Russia therefore both encourages their EAEU membership and supports authoritarian leaders, as these are likely to be less attractive partners for the EU. To some extent, we can refer to this case as the Belarusian scenario, which we have described in Chapters 2, 3, 8, and 9 (although Belarus itself, as mentioned, is excluded from this part of the analysis). Russia provides large subsidies to Belarus—a country which participates in most post-Soviet regional integration projects—and the Belarusian authoritarian regime uses these subsidies and the legitimacy from integration rhetoric to strengthen its rule. In Ukraine, Russia attempted to implement a similar scenario, but with much less success, during the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych (2010–14).¹⁵ Observers conjecture that Ukraine was seen by the Russian leadership as particularly important from the geopolitical point of view (Trenin 2017), which explains the substantial attention devoted by Russia to this country.

¹⁴ Of course, we do not want to deny other countries any hand in the process of the establishment of the EAEU at all, but still, it appears to be smaller than that of Kazakhstan. ¹⁵ However, the extent to which the Yanukovych regime concentrated its power prior to Euromaidan was certainly insufficient to classify it as an authoritarian regime, though the government in Kyiv did exhibit strong authoritarian tendencies; see Kudelia 2014.

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In 2007, Ukraine and the EU initiated negotiations on an Association Agreement (this is also the year when intensive negotiations on the Customs Union commenced between Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan). For Russia, it is frequently claimed, Ukraine joining the Customs Union (later the EAEU) would have been one of the main goals of the success of that project (e.g. Trenin 2017). Russia did not hesitate to use a wide array of sanctions and economic incentives to “persuade” the Ukrainian leadership. In spring 2013, for example, when the signing of the DCFTA became more likely, Russia changed the customs regime at the border with Ukraine—while, legally, it did not abolish the (then) existing free trade area, it requested its officials to toughen customs controls procedures. This effectively led to major delays at the Russian– Ukrainian border and Ukrainian companies incurred major damage.¹⁶ In autumn 2013, Russia offered a privileged loan to Ukraine (with the first tranche of US$3 billion having already been paid). This combination of “sticks” and “carrots” ultimately convinced Yanukovych to decline to sign the Association Agreement (though Ukraine did not join the CU). However, the more Yanukovych was inclined to follow Russian demands, the more Russia was inclined to support Yanukovych (although, as Obydenkova and Libman 2014 show, Russia did not support Yanukovych regardless of the circumstances—occasionally it sided with his rivals in the Ukrainian politics). The decision not to sign the Association Agreement triggered mass protests, which eventually led to a revolution and forced Yanukovych to leave the country in February 2014. Russia supported the Yanukovych government throughout the protests; the deposed Ukrainian president subsequently found refuge on Russian soil. After the Revolution of Dignity (another name for Euromaidan; the revolution in Ukraine in 2014, which led to the ousting of Yanukovych), Russia undertook an array of measures to systematically undermine the new Ukrainian government—from the annexation of Crimea and the military support to separatists in Donbass (including the involvement of regular Russian troops) to propaganda (Peisakhin and Rozenas 2018). There was no discussion during this period about Ukraine joining the EAEU. However, some members of the Russian elite suggested that Russia should force the Ukrainian leadership to accept a close association between at least part of the country (eastern Ukraine) and the EAEU, with western Ukraine possibly engaging in deeper cooperation with the EU.¹⁷ The post-Yanukovych government of Ukraine made a clear choice in favor of the DCFTA. However, in 2014, Ukraine agreed to postpone implementation ¹⁶ https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Экспортная_блокада_Украины_со_стороны_России_ (2013), accessed July 20, 2018. ¹⁷ http://www.politnavigator.net/novorossiya-stanet-uchastnikom-tamozhennogo-soyuzasovetnik-putina.html, accessed July 20, 2018.

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of the DCFTA in order to provide time to resolve the dispute through trilateral negotiations between the EU, Russia, and Ukraine. These negotiations turned out to be unsuccessful, partly due to the extreme resistance of Russia, which showed little signs of willingness to achieve a compromise. On January 1, 2016, the DCFTA came into force. As a reaction, Russia imposed economic sanctions on Ukraine (ending the previously existing free trade area between the countries). The case of Armenia appears somewhat similar to Ukraine’s, but in this instance the Russian effort to support an authoritarian regime was much less. Russia had had good relations with all Armenian governments since independence; Armenia is a military ally of Russia (with Russian troops stationed on its soil); and Russia is the main investor in the Armenian economy (TerMatevosyan et al. 2017). Over time, the Armenian government had evolved towards a “soft” authoritarianism. and Russia’s actions can be seen to be at least partly supporting this trend (though, as always, one should not overestimate the role of external factors as opposed to a domestic logic of regime transition; the effects could also be associated with a diffusion of authoritarian norms rather than with autocracy promotion, see Roberts and Ziemer 2018). However, after Armenia started negotiations with the EU, looking to sign an Association Agreement, Russia invested substantial effort to prevent this. Unlike Ukraine, where open sanctions were used, there is no evidence of such a policy in Armenia, probably because the Armenian government succumbed to Russian demands at a much earlier stage. In autumn 2013, Armenia abandoned the DCFTA agreement and instead declared its intention to join the Customs Union (and Armenia subsequently became part of the EAEU in 2015). Many observers consider this decision an outcome of diplomatic pressure from Russia (Grigoryan 2014). Some early discussions among Armenian experts even implied that Russia, after it achieved its goal of stopping Armenia’s negotiations with the EU, would not actually support Armenia’s membership in the EAEU (although Armenia did eventually join this organization).¹⁸ The reason why Armenia was much more compliant than Ukraine is associated with both the intensity of the ties between Armenia and Russia and—most importantly—with the lack of alternative foreign policy options for Armenia and the Russian security guarantee that we have already discussed in this chapter. Armenia’s decision not to sign the Association Agreement prevented a more intensive governance transfer from the EU and had the potential to cement Armenian authoritarianism (in a “softer” form than in other EAEU countries). Nevertheless, the autocracy promotion by Russia in Armenia is much less consistent than in Ukraine. First, occasionally Russian actors undertook measures that destabilized Armenian regime rather than supported

¹⁸ Kravchenko, V. (2016). Tamozhennyi Roman. Zerkalo Nedeli, July 19, p. 5.

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it. Thus, the protests the Armenian government faced in 2015 were driven by increases in electricity prices, which were decided by Inter RAO UES— a Russian conglomerate, which owns the Armenian electricity networks (and is itself state-owned). If the Russian goal were to stabilize the Armenian regime at any cost, one would not expect Russia to behave like this (in fact, low energy prices could be yet another side payment for loyalty). On the contrary, Inter RAO focused on revenue logic rather than on political considerations. After the protests forced the Armenian government to prohibit the price increase, it quickly sold its assets to a private Armenian-Russian investor.¹⁹ Second, when the protests resulted in a change of power in Armenia in 2018, Russia continued to cooperate with the new government (which immediately declared that it will fulfill all of its obligations within the EAEU framework).²⁰ This example also shows that the extent of authoritarian consolidation in Armenia prior to 2018 was not very high (there was very little resistance from the incumbent to the public protests). The reason why autocracy promotion is less important for Russia in Armenia than in Ukraine is precisely because of the very high dependence of Armenia on Russia. In Ukraine, the authoritarian nature of the government would constrain the leadership of the country and force it to cooperate with Russia, while in Armenia both democratic and authoritarian governments are forced to seek Russian support (as long as the conflict with Azerbaijan remains unresolved). Case (b) is represented by a single country—Moldova. In much the same way as Ukraine and Armenia, Moldova initiated negotiations about the DCFTA with the EU. And, similarly to the Ukrainian case, Russia used various tools to put pressure on the country to change its foreign policy alignment. In particular, Moldova became subject to frequent Russian economic sanctions (typically in form of phytosanitary measures, though the political rationale behind them was hardly disputable). In addition, Russia used its influence in Transniestria and in Gagauzia (an autonomous region in Moldova) to threaten to destabilize the country if it pursued further integration with the EU (Parmentier 2014). For example, in 2014 Gagauzia conducted a referendum, where 98.4 percent voted for more intensive cooperation with the Customs Union.²¹ Nevertheless, in case of Moldova, Russian pressure was unsuccessful,

¹⁹ Generally, the link between a Russian economic presence in a country and Russian foreign policy is frequently ambiguous: in some cases, Russian foreign policy is aligned with the economic interests of its companies, but in others it ignores them entirely. The conflict around Ukraine since 2014 has been a good example of the latter outcome. ²⁰ http://aurora.network/articles/163-zajavlenija/58876-pashinjan-armenija-budet-vypolnjatvse-dogovorennosti-eajes, accessed July 20, 2018. ²¹ Interestingly, CIS observers monitored the elections in Gagauzia in 2015. See http://iacis. ru/pressroom/news/mezhdunarodnyy_institut_monitoringa_razvitiya_demokratii/gruppa_ mezhdunarodnykh_nablyudateley_ot_mpa_sng_osushchestvlyaet_monitoring_vyborov_glavy_ gagauzii/, accessed July 20, 2018.

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and the country signed the DCFTA in 2014. Subsequently, as it did in Ukraine, Russia introduced new sanctions, abolishing the free trade area with the Moldova. However, a crucial difference between Moldova and the countries we included in group (a) is that in Moldova no systematic autocracy promotion was observed. Russia did use its “standard” foreign policy tools to influence Moldovan politics (e.g. through the activity of CIS electoral monitoring).²² However, autocracy promotion by definition implies the support of an established authoritarian regime or at least an incumbent with strong authoritarian tendencies (like Yanukovych). In Moldova, Russia failed to find a government that was even potentially willing to cooperate with Moscow, and hence had no incentive to provide support for it. In fact, Russia’s partners were more frequently found in the opposition (e.g. the Party of Socialists of Moldova, which, while it managed to become the largest faction in parliament in 2014, has not joined the governing coalition).²³ Under these circumstances, supporting authoritarian consolidation in Moldova does not fit the Russian foreign policy agenda and hence it was never pursued. More specifically, Russia did have certain hopes for establishing better ties with the Moldovan leadership in 2001, when the leader of the Communist Party Vladimir Voronin became president of the country. Voronin’s original agenda was strongly pro-Russian, and he even suggested that the country join the Union State of Russia and Belarus. However, after becoming president, Voronin never followed this agenda, instead spearheading the country’s policy toward European integration. At the end of Voronin’s term, Moldova was controlled by pro-European parties with no interest in cooperating with Russia or joining the EAEU. Interestingly, this pro-European attitude seems to have coexisted with very high corruption, oligarchic rule, or even selected anti-democratic practices (Kostanyan 2015). For example, the Moldovan leadership undertook various measures to prevent Moldovans living and working in Russia (a sizable group, as Chapter 8 has shown) from voting in the national elections, fearing that they would shift the balance towards proRussian parties. In 2016, the leader of the Socialists, Igor Dodon, became president of Moldova. Dodon repeatedly expressed a strong desire to reorient the country towards closer cooperation with Russia; and even managed to have Moldova declared an observer state in the EAEU.²⁴ (Dodn also suggested ²² In 2005, the Moldovan government even refused to admit Russian observers to national elections. ²³ The Party of Socialists maintains good relations with the Russian leaders. In 2015, the chairman of the State Duma, Dmitriy Naryshkin, introduced a delegation of the party as the most reliable partner of Russia in Moldova (http://www.vedomosti.md/news/naryshkin-partiyasocialistov-nadyozhnyj-partnyor-rossii, accessed July 20, 2018). ²⁴ https://ru.sputnik.md/economics/20180514/19190628/eaes-moldova-sochi-summit-putin. html, accessed July 20, 2018.

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that membership in the EAEU could be an attractive option.)²⁵ However, Moldova is a parliamentary republic with the president having very little or no power—therefore, most of Dodon’s actions remain purely symbolic (even Moldova’s association status with the EAEU was evidently agreed upon by Dodon personally and rejected by the Moldovan government).²⁶ Cases (c) and (d) include countries, where Russia did not employ substantial pressure to convince them to join the EAEU. Russia’s motivation is different in these examples. Georgia represents the most clear-cut case. After the war between Russia and Georgia in 2008, both Georgian elites and the public rejected any option of Eurasian regionalism and clearly supported developing integration with Europe. Therefore, Russia never considered Georgia as a potential EAEU member, and the country successfully signed the DCFTA with the EU (which did not trigger sanctions from Russia). From the very beginning, Azerbaijan refused to develop close ties to either the EAEU or the EU. Closer cooperation with the EAEU was impossible because Azerbaijan had no interest in joining a customs union and restricting its foreign trade policy to the extent required. For autocratic Azerbaijan, any form of governance transfer from the EU would be very problematic, making close ties impossible. Thus, while the country remained part of the Eastern Neighborhood Policy, it was never considered for a DCFTA; it also never discussed membership in the Customs Union or the EAEU. Since Azerbaijan did not aspire to a European option, Russia accepted that it had not chosen the Eurasian one. The case of Azerbaijan (a consolidated and stable autocracy, where the emergence of authoritarianism clearly happened without any support from or intervention by Russia) seems to reflect how Russia acts in Central Asia. Here, we see much less evidence that Russia puts pressure on countries to join the EAEU or supports autocracies. This, again, fits our argument. The involvement of the EU in Central Asia is rather limited (these countries have never been invited to negotiate an Association Agreement and any cooperation with the EU is only in specific areas such as energy). Russia is therefore not concerned about geopolitical competition from the EU in this region, and the cultural distance between Central Asian countries and Russia makes the contagion effects of democratization less likely. Central Asia provides two striking examples: one country where Russia accepted (and even to some extent supported) a democratic revolution and one country where Russia openly discouraged full membership in the EAEU. The first case is Kyrgyzstan. In 2005 and 2010, Kyrgyzstan experienced two revolutions, forcing the incumbent presidents out of the country. While Russia was more ambiguous about the revolution in 2005, in 2010, as already ²⁵ https://lenta.ru/news/2017/07/12/dodon/, accessed July 20, 2018. ²⁶ https://regnum.ru/news/2416738.html, accessed July 20, 2018.

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Table 10.3. Russian foreign policy, autocracy promotion, and the EAEU Pushes the country to join the EAEU Autocracy promotion No autocracy promotion

Ukraine Armenia (to some extent; autocracy promotion much weaker) Moldova

Does not push the country to join the EAEU

Georgia Azerbaijan Central Asia

mentioned, there seems to be some evidence of Russian support. The incumbent, President Bakiev, had turned out to be an unreliable partner for Russia while the opposition was willing to cooperate with Russia. (For example, Bakiev reneged on the original plans to close down the US airbase in Kyrgyzstan established during the US military involvement in Afghanistan.) As a result of the revolution of 2010, Kyrgyzstan became a pluralist country with strong democratic tendencies. Interestingly, in Ukraine Russia had fully backed the (equally unreliable) Yanukovych; but in Kyrgyzstan it was able to take a more pragmatic stance and offered no support to Bakiev. The second Central Asian example is Tajikistan. Russia has not insisted on this country joining the EAEU at all, as Tajikistan remains a country heavily influenced by Russia even while it is outside the EAEU. In fact, there are certain benefits for Russia if Tajikistan does not join the EAEU. Tajikistan’s economy, as we have already seen in Chapter 8, critically relies on remittances from migrants working in Russia. The EAEU requires all members to provide free access to their labor markets for all citizens of EAEU member states. Thus, if Tajikistan remains outside the EAEU, Russia has more opportunities to apply pressure by threatening to expel Tajiki migrants (the CIS migration provides more opportunities for Russia to do so) and thus to retain its control (Shlapentokh 2014). In 2018, Russia openly suggested that Tajikistan should seek only observer status in the EAEU, which does not imply any commitments or obligations from the observer country.²⁷ One can see that Russian policy is highly country-specific and depends upon the particular interests faced in individual cases. In terms of the EU’s eastern neighbors (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine), Russia is much more concerned about any increasing EU influence (since the EU is also much more active in this region). The only exception here is Azerbaijan, which maintains its distance from the EU. Being an energy-rich country, Azerbaijan shows little dependence on the possible EU assistance. Thus, if it is at all possible, Russia seriously encourages Armenia, Moldova, ²⁷ https://ru.sputnik-tj.com/russia/20180420/1025361648/rossiya-predlozhila-tajikistanustatstranoy-nablyudatelem-pri-eaes.html, accessed July 20, 2018.

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and Ukraine to join the EAEU (Belarus is, as mentioned, a founding member, which, however, also experienced substantial pressure from Russia and Kazakhstan in 2010, when the Customs Union agreement had to be implemented)—in the case of Georgia this is not possible. If supporting authoritarianism better suits this goal, Russia does it. In Central Asia, where the EU is less active, we see much less pressure from the Russian side as well. Table 10.3 summarizes the logic of our argument: note that we see no cases where Russia supports authoritarianism and does not encourage the countries to join the EAEU—this could again suggest that the support of authoritarianism is instrumental for Russia to achieve its foreign policy goals rather than ideological goals. In any case, we have to stress that, in terms of this chapter, the EAEU is merely a pretext for conflict which became relevant because the Russian leadership interpreted the organization in a certain way. The “real” EAEU—the set of international institutions, treaties, and decision-making procedures—does not, strictly speaking, make it an element of geopolitical confrontation in Eurasia. This point is extremely important, because it requires us to make an significant adjustment to our analysis. We have shown that Russia has occasionally supported authoritarian tendencies and exerted significant pressure on Eurasian countries to ensure their cooperation with the EAEU. However, for countries which have refused Russia’s offer and pursued European integration, the EAEU turns out to be an entirely different entity: it actually restricts Russia’s ability to sanction them and promote autocracy. The example of the Russian trade sanctions against Ukraine in 2014 clearly illustrates these limitations. On 30 June 2014, Russia suggested to two other members of the Customs Union—Belarus and Kazakhstan—that they abolish preferential trade with Ukraine. As an official justification, it used Appendix 6 to the CIS Free Trade Agreement, which allowed such measures where a threat of an increase of imports from one of the free trade agreement member countries would harm the economy of the importing state. In this case, the zero tariffs stipulated by the Free Trade Agreement should be replaced by the WTO tariffs. Russia claimed that after the implementation of the DCFTA there would be a real threat of just such a harmful increase of imports from Ukraine to Russia. However, Belarus and Kazakhstan rejected this proposal.²⁸ It was, in fact, the Belarusian vice prime minister Sergey Rumas, who publicly stated that, at the moment of Russia’s initiative, no real damage could have been observed, and that there is no way to assess whether such damage would happen in the future.²⁹ Since Ukraine agreed to postpone implementation of the DCFTA for one year to provide an opportunity for trilateral (EU, Russia, and Ukraine) ²⁸ Zerkalo Nedeli, July 19, 2014. ²⁹ https://newdaynews.ru/moskow/503171.html, accessed July 20, 2018; http://www.aif.ru/ money/economy/1198527, accessed July 20, 2018.

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negotiations, Russia also withheld the imposition of unilateral sanctions against Ukraine in 2014. The trilateral negotiations failed, and as of January 1, 2016, Russia abolished free trade with Ukraine. Belarus and Kazakhstan did not follow suit, and it became a major problem for the Russian economic sanctions. In particular, the geographic location of Belarus made it a perfect location for overcoming Russian trade restrictions. For example, in November 2015 Belarusian importers purchased 99.63 percent of fruit exports from Ukraine. According to an owner of a small logistical company, nobody doubts that these fruits, which we import, simply go further to Russia labelled as Belarusian production. . . . Look: our melons or peaches could be interesting to Belarusians, true (although not in such quantities). But for apples, plums, cherries and other pears there is already an oversupply on the local market. Therefore Belarusian intermediaries reselling fruit and vegetables to Russia, have only one problem—how to obtain certificates labelling them as produced in Belarus.³⁰

If the EAEU did not exist, it would be much easier for Russia to counteract these measures. Thus, the actual institutional design of the EAEU—the collective decision making on trade policy and open borders—does not make Russian autocracy promotion more effective. There are even elements of the governance of the EAEU which actually undermine authoritarian regimes in Eurasia. In any case, treating the EAEU as an organization primarily exercising its influence through autocracy promotion would be too simplistic and in many instances incorrect. Essentially, our analysis underlines the need to consider additional level of policies linking the regional organizations with the regime trajectories of their member states. Predominantly, research focuses on the formal goals of the regional organizations. Many authors highlight the need to look at the informal politics in the regional organizations: that is, how the bureaucracy and the leading state exercise policies not explicitly set out in the mandate and which create additional effects that result from membership of the regional organization. This chapter, however, indicates that one also has to look at what one could call the informal politics around the regional organizations: the actions powerful states undertake because they want to incentivize some states to join (or refrain from joining) the regional organizations, but which may be entirely unrelated to how the regional organizations actually function. The EAEU is a good example of this: the main problems associated with this organization emerge because of unilateral Russian political action based on the perception of the EAEU by Russian elites, and are entirely unrelated to what the EAEU as

³⁰ https://www.gazeta.ru/business/2016/12/26/10450733.shtml#page3, accessed July 20, 2018.

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Economic Regionalism: The EAEU Country joins the EAEU

Potential cooperation with the EU

Threat perception by Russia

Russia is not concerned about any threats

Democratizing impact of the EU goes down

Consolidation of autocracy

Institutional design of the EAEU makes Russian sanctions more difficult

Ambiguous role of the EAEU

Positive and negative incentives to join the EAEU

Country refuses to join the EAEU

No potential for cooperation with the EU

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Cooperation regardless of the political regime

Figure 10.2. Causal link between the EAEU and the authoritarian consolidation

organization does (or does not) do, both formally and informally. Figure 10.2 presents a graphical representation of the causal logic of our argument. The argument of this subsection was based on a very important premise: that the Russian leadership believes in the geopolitical importance of the EAEU. This appeared to be clearly the case in 2010–14 (during this period, Russia also repeatedly called for equal dialogue between the EU and the Customs Union, which would elevate the status of the latter, see Barabashin 2015). The question remains, however, whether the situation will change in the future. There are some signs of Russia paying less attention to Eurasian regionalism, being more concerned with other geopolitical ambitions—for example, the war in Syria. In 2017, Russia appointed Dmitriy Bel’yaninov the CEO of the EDB, another Eurasian regional institution. Bel’yaninov, the former head of the Russian customs organization, had to leave office after a corruption scandal (which included a search of his house by law enforcement in front of TV cameras).³¹ Thus, he is unlikely to be seen as a powerful actor sent to the Eurasian institutions to enhance their legitimacy or bargaining power. Rather, one can see this example as a sign that Russia attempts to use Eurasian regional institutions as a place of exile for Russian politicians—and this is inconsistent with seeing them as geopolitically crucial. If this is the case, one should expect Russian foreign policy to pay less attention to Eurasian regionalism—including demonstrating less willingness to promote authoritarian regimes to strengthen it. ³¹ https://www.gazeta.ru/business/2017/10/25/10957898.shtml, accessed July 20, 2018.

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10.7. CONCLUSION Eurasian economic integration, implemented by Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, alongside a small group of other countries, through a sequence of organizations—the first Customs Union, the EurAsEC, the second Customs Union, the CES, and the EAEU—provides us with a number of important observations regarding the functioning of NDROs. It confirms the main conclusions of our large-N analysis and the theoretical discussion in two important ways. First, it shows that modern NDROs are very heterogeneous in terms of their membership. Their leading states are unable to be too selective (because of the overall concerns associated with the membership in this type of regional organizations) and are unwilling to discriminate among regimes (because of the lack of any strong ideological foundation of their own regimes—Russia is a prominent example of such a system). Second, it shows that the main concern of the member countries in NDROs is, even much more so than in DROs, manipulation by the leading state, and this is why the smaller countries in the EAEU insist on consensus-based decision-making mechanisms and a clear lack of political integration in the organization. At the same time, the EAEU also demonstrates how complex the effects of an NDRO can be. These are particularly telling in terms of their influence on regime transition in the member countries—which are substantially more contradictory and counter-intuitive than in the case of the CIS. For the interplay of EAEU membership and democracy, our quantitative analysis reveals very weak effects (none if one takes country fixed effects into account)—and the qualitative analysis suggests that the EAEU, unlike the CIS, exercises only indirect and in many cases rather weak influence on political regimes at best.

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11 Security Regionalism The SCO

The SCO is different from the two organizations analyzed in Chapters 9 and 10 in two important ways. First, it has a bipolar hegemon structure, with Russia and China being the key members. Second, unlike the CIS and the EAEU, it has a very clear focus on the security agenda. In fact, the SCO has played an important role in a number of border security issues (e.g. resolving the border conflicts between Eurasian countries and China). While China has also shown some interest in advancing its economic and military agenda, Russia has consistently blocked this. Finally, it is also important to investigate the role of the SCO in terms of autocracy promotion: Central Asian regimes eagerly frame their pressure on domestic opposition as a fight against terrorism, and the SCO, with its security agenda, could play an important role in this respect.

11.1. DEVELOPMENT AND E XPANSION The SCO was initially founded in 1996 as the Shanghai Five, only five years after the disintegration of the USSR, “to resolve border disputes among its members” (Cohen 2006, p. 1). In the 1990s its members were China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Five years later, Uzbekistan also became a member state and the Shanghai Five was renamed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2001. It took fifteen years before the SCO considered the admission of two new member states, India and Pakistan, who became full members in 2017. From the very beginning of its existence in the 1990s, the SCO had a clear focus on security issues. It grew out of the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions, signed by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan in Shanghai in 1996. This was followed by another military-related

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treaty, the Treaty on Reduction of Military Forces in Border Regions (signed just a year later in 1997, in Moscow), followed by the Declaration of 1998 which expanded cooperation to such issues as the fight against religious extremism and fundamentalism, against terrorism and separatism, and against cross-border drug- and arms-trafficking. Coming only a year after the founding of the organization, the agreement of 1997 can be viewed as Russia’s diplomatic claim on its importance within the organization. In 2001, both Russia and China, on a bilateral basis, signed yet another treaty expanding the ambition of the organization to a broader range of the issues—the Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation. A year later, in 2002, in Russia (St. Petersburg), on a multilateral basis, the presidents of all the member states signed a proper Charter for the SCO. The Charter laid the ground for even more ambitious plans of action within the organization, outlining the structure, goals, and principles of the SCO. When the SCO was launched in 2001, the first step towards regional economic cooperation was taken by the signing by all six members of the SCO of a memorandum of understanding on economic cooperation. In 2003, the SCO adopted the Multilateral Trade and Development Program. During the 2004 SCO summit in Tashkent, this Program was further elaborated through the description of 127 projects on transport and energy cooperation, as well as on cooperation in science, technology, and education (e.g. Norling and Swanstrom 2007, p. 432). China became a sponsor of this initiative, announcing a grant of US$900 million for the implementation of this Program. The Program itself was implemented in the next summit in 2005 (in Moscow).

11.2. GOV ERNANCE STRUCTURE Article 4 of the Charter outlines the governance structure of the SCO and governing bodies: the Council of Heads of State (the supreme governing body of the SCO); the Council of Heads of Government (Prime Ministers); the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs; the Meetings of Heads of Ministries and/or Agencies; the Council of National Coordinators; the Regional Counterterrorist Structure; and the Secretariat. The Charter goes on to state that the provisions of the Council of Heads of State will govern all other bodies (except the Regional Counter-terrorist Structure) (Article 4, Provision 2, of the Charter). Provision 3 of the same Article specifies that the Council of Heads of State has the power to create new bodies of the SCO. The Council has a wide array of powers, including the ability to take major decisions with regard to “fundamental issues of its internal arrangement and functioning and its interaction with other States and international organizations, as well as [to] consider the most topical international issues” (Article 5). The Council meets once a year.

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The meetings of the Council are the SCO Summits held in the capitals of member states. Each meeting is chaired by the Head of State organizing the meeting. The next governing body, the Council of Heads of Government (Prime Ministers) seems to have less importance in terms of decision making. The main task of this Council is to decide on the budget of the organization and the economic issues of its functioning. Its meetings also take place once a year and are chaired by the Prime Minister of the state hosting the meeting. The location of the meeting is decided by the Prime Ministers themselves. The functions and obligations of other governing bodies—the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, the Meetings of Heads of Ministries and/or Agencies, the Council of National Cooperation, the Regional Counter-Terrorist Structure, the Secretariat—are all outlined in the subsequent Articles 7–11 and summarized in Table 11.1. Table 11.1 clearly demonstrates the hierarchy of power within the SCO— with the Council of Heads of member states (presidents) as the main decisionmaking body. Given that there is almost no rotation, if any, of the presidents in the member states of the SCO, the composition of the Council of Heads can be considered permanent. This is in line with the findings of Chapter 5, which discovered that one of the dominant characteristics of NDROs is their interpresidential level of negotiation and decision making. The presidents without rotation in their office can be safely described as autocrats. The power of autocracy united within a regional organization and defining its politics and strategy in the world arena can be called “authoritarian regionalism.” Some studies have analyzed the Charter of the SCO within the law governing international organizations outlined in the Charter of the United Nations, which stresses the presence of such principles as the maintenance of peace and security in the region involved (Al-Qahtani 2006, p. 132). However, another set of studies have taken a more critical stance towards the SCO

Table 11.1. Political regimes of member states in 2015 Member state

Year of joining

China (Founder) 1996 Russia (Founder) 1996 Kazakhstan (Founder) 1996 Kyrgyzstan (Founder) 1996 Tajikistan (Founder) 1996 Uzbekistan 2001 Pakistan 2015 India 2015 Observers: Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus, Mongolia

Level of democracy in 2015 Not Free: 6.5 Not Free: 6.0 Not Free: 5.5 Partly Free: 5.0 Not free: 6.0 Not free: 7.0 Partly Free: 4.5 Free: 2.5

Source: Adjusted from https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world-2015/table-country-ratings.

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Charter specifying that the accent on “stability” is a substitute for dynamic development and democratization (Ambrosio 2010). Further on, Article 16 of the Charter of the SCO specifies the procedure of decision taking “by agreement without vote.” Decisions will be considered “adopted if no Member State has raised objections during the vote (consensus).” At the same time, the same article offers flexibility in terms of member states being able to choose whether or not to join certain agreements: “Should one or several member States be not interested in implementing particular cooperation projects of interest to other member States, non-participation of the above said member States in these projects shall not prevent the implementation of such cooperation projects by the member States concerned and, at the same time, shall not prevent the said member States from joining such projects at a later stage” (Article 16 of the Charter of the SCO). This implies that a member state can actually abstain from participation in a project without actually damaging its membership status. With this flexibility in terms of depth of participation and flexibility of commitments to agreements and initiatives within the SCO, membership presents an attractive and lucrative option for potential member states. However, Article 17 specifies the control over compliance with not only the Charter of the SCO but also with other agreements and decisions adopted within the organization. This combination of formal flexibility and formal control over compliance raises questions concerning the predominance of informal agreements between member states and the leading states on their actions and the level of actual participation in the organization (that is, “consensus,” instead of voting).

11.3. MEMBERSHIP The conditions for membership of the SCO are outlined in Article 13 of the Charter of the SCO. Membership may specify the region targeted by an organization or may leave this option open. For example, the Treaty of the European Economic Community (Article 237) specifies the region of potential member states (Al-Qahtani 2006, p. 138). In contrast, the SCO does not specify the “region”, so that practically any state can become a member or an observer, should the SCO approve. Indeed, Article 13 states that membership is open to other states in the region “that undertake to respect the objectives and principles of this Charter and to comply with the provisions of other international treaties and instruments adopted in the framework of SCO.” The third paragraph of the same Article specifies that a member state “violating the provisions of this Charter and/or systematically failing to meet its obligations under international treaties and instruments, concluded in the framework of SCO, may be suspended by a decision of the Council for Heads

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of State adopted on the basis of a representation made by the Council of Ministers of Foreign Affairs.” This can be followed by the expulsion of a state from the organization. On the other hand, leaving the organization is not particularly quick or easy. If a member state wishes to withdraw from participation in the SCO, it should communicate its decision to leave the organization a year in advance (during this year it must obey the Charter and related rules). This condition of membership may partly explain the relatively slow expansion of the SCO in terms of increasing the number of its member states. For example, there were no new members admitted in the period 2002–16. In this context, however, it is remarkable that the Summit held by the SCO in Shanghai in 2006 actually did consider publicly promoting oil- and gas-rich Iran from the status of observer state to full member state (see Brummer 2007). Should it be accepted, Iran would be able to use the SCO as an opportunity to improve its developmental infrastructure, technology, investment, and trade through becoming more deeply involved in the trade network within the SCO. However, the promotion of Iran has not been accepted until now. The permanent decision was put on hold and two new observers—India and Pakistan—acceded to membership before Iran. Until 2016, the political regimes of the member states of the SCO were essentially homogenous in terms of increasing autocratic tendencies. However, it is important to note that political regime heterogeneity was significant when launching both the Shanghai Five and the SCO itself. In the 1990s and up to 2001, Russia had been given an increasing rating of democratization (according to Freedom House). At the end of the 1990s and in 2001, scholars were still speaking about Russia as a state in the process of democratization. From the early 2000s onward Russia started to display increased autocratic trends, and these have continued to develop to the present day. Two new member states (India and Pakistan) might make the organization more heterogeneous in terms of both political regime (with India being a democracy) as well as cultural-religious coexistence. Table 11.1 presents data on the level of democracy across the SCO member states. Table 11.2 summarizes the religious heterogeneity of the member states. Note that the role of religion as such in different countries is highly distinct. In China, religion is excluded from any form of politics and in most cases is not the predominant self-identification marker (except for some groups); atheism is widespread. For India and Pakistan, on the contrary, religion has important political connotations and is crucial for self-identification. In Russia, there is a gap between self-identification in terms of a certain religion and religious practices: many Russians, while describing themselves as Orthodox, do not practice religion and use this label only to stress their ethnic, national, or even political identity. The question that arises from the summaries in Tables 11.1 and 11.2 is how it is possible that so culturally and religiously heterogeneous states can

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Table 11.2. Main religions of actual and potential member states Member state

Year

Religion

China (Founder)

1996

Russia (Founder) Kazakhstan (Founder) Kyrgyzstan (Founder) Tajikistan (Founder) Uzbekistan Pakistan India

1996 1996 1996 1996 2001 2016 2016

Chinese syncretic religion (Confucianism; Taoism; Buddhism) Orthodox Christian* Islam (Sunni and Hanafi Schools) Islam (Sunni)** Islam (Sunni and Hanafi Schools) Islam (Sunni and Shi’ite) Islam (Sunni and Shi’ite) Hinduism***

* The table indicates the significant presence of religion, which might differ from official and legal claims. For example, the Russia Law on Diversity of 1997 claims the historical importance of four religions: Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism. Statistically, there are about 42.5% of all Orthodox Christians and about 5.8% of non-Orthodox Christians; Russia has only 6.5% Muslims and 0.5% Tibetan Buddhists. ** In many other cases, the legal side does not reflect the actual state of things: for example, the Constitution of Kyrgyzstan acknowledges the freedom of all religions, separation of religion and state, and prohibits discrimination. However, the state poses obstacles to the establishment and registration of non-Islamic religious organizations. The Muslims make up about 80% of the population of the state. *** In India, according to data for 2011, about 79.80% of population were practicing Hinduism; and only 14.23% practicing Islam. Other minorities include Jainism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, as well as Christianity.

constitute the membership of the same regional organization. The membership of India and Pakistan seems to increase the already existing heterogeneity among member states: uniting three historically rival religions (Islam and Christianity; Islam, Confucianism, and Buddhism). What are the real goals and motivations behind this cooperation? Only a few years ago, in 2007, scholars were arguing about the problems associated with the hypothetical possibility of India and Pakistan becoming member states of the SCO. Given the example of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), “where conflict between India and Pakistan has brought the entire organization into deadlock, both China and Russia will probably think twice before admitting these countries, especially as the Central Asian member states have the destabilizing effect of Pakistan’s support of the Taliban fresh in mind” (Norling and Swanstrom, 2007, p. 436). Despite all these reasons and despite India’s resistance to welcoming Chinese membership into the SAARC, India and Pakistan are now member states of the SCO. However, the difference in the charters and regulations of the SCO and SAARC may explain the risk taken by the SCO in welcoming two states which are in conflict with each other. The summits and decisions of the SAARC could be boycotted by the simple absence of any member state from the summit. In contrast, the absence of any member state from an SCO summit is not an impediment to decision making and implementation, while the presence of all member states is neither required nor specified by the SCO Charter.

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11.4. THE MOTIVATIONS AND GOALS BEHIND THE C OLLABORA TION OF INDIA AND P AKISTAN The examples of India and Pakistan as two new members of the SCO indicate the pragmatism behind the choices made concerning the admission of new members and the criteria for admission.¹ India is looking to benefit from the energy sources located in Central Asia (Pradhan 2015). To this end, India has been trying to establish connections with both Central Asia and Afghanistan to gain access to the energy supply projects that go through Afghanistan as well as to establish cooperation with Pakistan. Membership of the SCO presents a unique opportunity for India to develop links with Central Asia as well as with another new member, Pakistan (Rahman 2011). With somewhat similar strategic goals as India, Pakistan is also trying to benefit from the transit of energy from Central Asia to India and China. The official multilateral framework of the SCO represents a convenient step towards developing and deepening bilateral relationships with individual Central Asian states and facilitating negotiation within the multilateral forum of the SCO. A further factor which seems to play a critical role in India’s decision to join the SCO is that membership reaffirms the country’s foreign policy identity. Wagner (2016) justly points out that India’s foreign policy agenda is much more focused on engaging in non-Western blocs and organizations than on Western organizations. This development is driven primarily by domestic political considerations, specifically the widespread criticism of the West by both left-wing and nationalist factions of Indian politics. In fact, India’s engagement in non-Western alliances can be traced back to the Non-Aligned Movement. From this point of view, joining an explicitly non-Western (but not anti-Western) regional organization such as the SCO fits the general profile of Indian foreign policy: it is welcomed domestically as a further step towards closer cooperation with the non-Western world. Even if there were no real economic or political benefits to be gained through cooperation in the SCO, India would still benefit from joining it from this perspective. Besides, from the Indian point of view, in spite of the fact that the country is democratic, the non-democratic nature of the SCO is essentially irrelevant. Although democracy as the governance systems enjoys broad acceptance in India, there is no desire from the Indian leadership or population alike to ¹ In an interview conducted by the authors, an expert on Indian politics anonymously shared his opinion regarding India’s reasons for gaining membership of the SCO: “The reasons for the membership of India are and always have been driven by pragmatism. It has purely financial and economic and energy strategic advantages, India gains or might gain from this membership. It does not care for political regime and related non-democratic issues. It cares for [what is] best for its economy. China in that sense had always been a beneficial partner of India. China is the reason of Indian membership and entry into SCO” (the interview took place at Columbia University, New York, February 2016).

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engage in any form of democracy promotion or even to recognize the issue of political regimes in its foreign policy (Mohan 2007). Thus, while for a European or a Northern American country joining a coalition of nondemocracies would be perceived as problematic (and would require substantial gains to offset the possible costs), India does not perceive this choice as problematic at all (interview with a German expert on India, Berlin, April 2016). Looking at China’s motivation for becoming involved with India, their strategy has been described as a method of power projection “through infrastructural developmental aid, especially with regard to maritime infrastructural projects in the Indian Ocean” (Sliwinski, 2015, p. 10). One motivation might be as a preventive strategy against the possibility of India developing into a neighboring superpower in the region that would present a potential competitor to China. Having India as a member of the SCO facilitates development of the “Maritime Silk Road” for China as well as a negotiation forum for massive investment in the ports in the Indian Ocean (especially two ports in a “dialog partner” of the SCO, Sri Lanka). China clearly has the goal of expanding its presence and influence in the Indian Ocean. Behind these developmental and economic targets, the actions are also viewed as fostering the Chinese security agenda in the region (Sliwinski 2015, p. 13). Pakistan has received significant financial aid from China to invest in infrastructural development. In 2015, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, visited Pakistan in person and announced investment of $46 billion in energy and infrastructural development in the country.² Pakistan’s own goals for this collaboration are to solve energy shortages and deal with public unrest. The Chinese interests are to strengthen its western provinces, but above all to secure its investment in a port in Gwadar that would make it possible to import oil and gas from the Middle East (Sliwinski 2015, p. 13). This aim implies establishing and fostering a route uniting the Middle East, Central and South Asia—the “Silk Road” (specifically, the “Maritime Silk Road”, which would provide a sea connection between China and Middle East). Again, given the deep interest on the part of China in Pakistan, it is likely that China was a driving force behind the membership of Pakistan in the SCO, along with India. China’s investments in ports may have an ambiguous intention. Singh (2015) suggests that a trade port can be converted into a military station port, should it be needed: China “has the ability to upgrade a commercial port to support military operations in conflict scenarios.” Thus, behind the economic commercial goals and rhetoric of developmental tasks, some studies have come to the conclusion that the real motivation for this generous financial aid and abundant loans is fostering security outside the

² http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/16/china-invests-billions-in-its-all-weather-friendship-with-pakistan-silk-road-gwadar-indian-ocean, accessed July 20, 2018.

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Chinese borders and within the SCO, whose membership is composed of China’s geographically closest states. In both potential and actual Central Asian member states, as well as India and Pakistan, China has adopted a strategy of providing generous financial aid to the states prior to and during their membership. This strategy has been interpreted as creating an obligation for recipient states to respect and sometimes to adjust to Chinese strategic goals, given that “aid disbursements of various sorts come with strings attached, be that explicit loan conditionality measures, memorandums of agreement that complement aid packages or even tacit expectations of support and accommodation” (Sliwinski 2015, p. 17). Indeed, Vreeland (2011) demonstrates that when wealthy states have provided foreign aid to poor states, the poor states are eventually expected to pay back their debt, for example in the form of providing political support to their sponsor within a multilateral organization.³ Increasing economic interdependence also raises the costs of conflict. Given the existing intensive dialog and some collaboration between Russia, Iran, and Central Asia, on the one hand, and China, India, and Pakistan, on the other, is there really any need to introduce a multilateral framework of collaboration in the form of the SCO? The involvement and expansion of the SCO was seen as a demonstration to the West of existing and increasing ties in the region. It can also be seen as a demonstration on the part of China to Russia of the existence of alternative allies both from within and beyond the post-Soviet states (which are dominated by Russia). By accepting new members and observers (especially a country such as Turkey), Russia’s role is diminished within the organization. Moreover, apart from the member states, the SCO also has a certain tradition of unexpectedly welcoming non-democratic guest states as observers (e.g. Iran). One examples of this was the participation of Iran in the summit in 2005. What lay behind this hospitality? Why did increasing cooperation with Iran start precisely after the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan and the Andijan events in Uzbekistan, and against the background of a worsening relationship between the former Soviet states and the West? Should welcoming Iran be considered a demonstration of an alternative to the Western allies of the SCO? Some scholars point to the fact that Russia and Iran have the largest reserves of gas on the planet: “a Russian-Iranian hydrocarbon cartel could cause a major power shift” (Cohen 2006, p. 52). Similarly, historically an enemy of Russia, Turkey, is also a regular guest at summits of the SCO as an observer. Given that Turkey’s membership in the EU is now close to impossible, ³ Vreeland proves his hypothesis through the analysis of the case of Switzerland and the support it provided to Central and Western Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe in return for their support for Switzerland within the Bretton Woods institutions (2011). For further discussion on the topic, see Willett (2011).

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Turkey has increased its cooperation with the SCO. This cooperation can be interpreted as a demonstration to the West of Turkey’s geopolitical alternatives that may effectively counter-balance not achieving EU membership.

11.5. HEGEMONY AND THE SCO The SCO was launched by China, and this state and its role as a leading state is inevitably the main focus of any analysis of the organization. Russia has assumed an ambiguous position within the SCO—both as an ally but also as a competitor (as further analysis will demonstrate). The power of a leading state can be investigated through several categories: military power, economic power, technological capacity (e.g. Brooks and Wohlforth 2015). The components are obviously interdependent: a strong economy is an important precondition for the development of both military and technological components; technology fosters further economic development; and both contribute to military power. In its turn, “military capability also can have spinoffs in both the economic and technology arenas” (Brooks and Wohlforth 2015, p. 16). Comparing these components of power across the two hegemons of the SCO thus presents a focus of special interest for this chapter. An excellent and detailed composition of the three aspects of power is presented in Brooks and Wohlforth (2015). In the following discussion, we replicate only the main issues involved. The data presented in Table 11.3 demonstrates Chinese efforts to improve the state of its security/military defense sector. Its military expenditures per year are more than double those of Russia; and almost triple in terms of a percentage of defense expenditure world-wide. However, this does not seem to be a burden for Chinese GDP, as the share of China’s GDP spent on military expenditure is half that of Russia. Though the present quality of China’s defense sector is considered to be of lower quality than Russia’s, China’s continuous efforts may eventually result in some real progress in improving its defense sector. Table 11.4 presents some of the components for measuring the quality of the technology of the two rival states. Interestingly, unlike the military component, the index actually demonstrates a clear superiority of Russia in terms Table 11.3. Military expenditure of the two hegemons, 2014 State China Russia

Defense expenditure ($ billion)

% World defense expenditure

Defense expenditure (% of GDP)

216.0 84.5

12.0 4.8

2.1 4.5

Source: Replicated and Modified from Brooks and Wohlforth (2015).

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Table 11.4. Technological component of the two leading states, 2014 State

Gross expenditure on R&D* (as a Share of GDP %)

Information & communication technologies 2014**

1.84 1.09

36.1 60.6

China Russia

*R&D stands for Research and Development, provided for 2011. **Index 2014 Score (out of 100). Source: Replicated and modified by the authors from Brooks and Wohlforth (2015).

Table 11.5. Economic power of the two hegemons, 2014 State China Russia

GDP CP* ($billion)

% World GDP, CP*

Public debt (%GDP)

10,380 1,857

13.4 2.4

15.1 13.4

*CP stands for “Current prices”. Source: Replicated and Modified from Brooks and Wohlforth (2015).

of technological achievements. Given the differences between the GDPs of Russia and China, the gross expenditure on research and development in Russia is not radically low when compared to China. What is more impressive is that the quality of Russia’s information and communication technologies is almost twice as high as that of China (60.6 for Russia and only 36.1 for China). To sum up, Russia has a strong advantage in terms of technological achievements in comparison to China. However, in this case the dynamic analysis, as well as a qualitative comparison of the quantitative data may reveal different results. Chinese research and development potential has been systematically growing over recent years. Russia, on the other hand, still relies on the legacy of Soviet education in mathematics and sciences, which will dissipate over time. From this point of view, it is highly questionable whether Russia will remain a leader in technology in the years to come. Finally, in line with our discussion in Chapter 5, we compare the CINC index of Russia and China, which, as mentioned, aggregates the military and the economic potential of the country alongside its population and other characteristics. From this point of view, our results appear unequivocal: for China, the index in 2007 (the last year for which data are available) has a value of 0.19858, while for Russia it is 0.03927, reflecting the clear superiority of China in the SCO. While to some extent, this is a consequence of enormous differences in the size of the population, other characteristics also play out in favor of China. Table 11.5 demonstrates the differences in economic power between Russia and China. China clearly deserves its reputation as a growing economic actor in the world and clearly dominates Russia in terms of its GDP and as percentage of world GDP. However, China’s public debt is higher than Russia’s.

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11.6. THE OFFICIAL AND UNOFFICIAL GOALS OF THE SCO All the official goals of the SCO are outlined in the Charter of the organization, signed in 2002 (on the goals of the SCO, see also Lanteign 2006; Aris 2011).⁴ The preamble mentions in the first lines that the organization is “based on historically established ties between their peoples.” It then goes on to confirm the “adherence to the goals and principles of the Charter of the United Nations” and acknowledges the “principles and rules of international law related to the maintenance of international peace, security and the development of good-neighborly and friendly relations, as well as cooperation between States” (Preamble of the Charter). Article 1 then proceeds with a broad description of the official goals and tasks, such as “multidisciplinary cooperation in the maintenance and strengthening of peace, security and stability in the region and promotion of a new democratic, fair and rational political and economic international order; jointly counteract terrorism, separatism and extremism,” as well as the fight against crime and illegal migration and so on. The agenda for cooperation broadly outlines a number of issues “in such spheres as politics, trade and economy, defense, law enforcement, environment protection, culture, science and technology, education, energy, transport, credit and finance, and also other spheres of common interest” (Article 1 of Charter 2002). The description of the official goals and tasks leaves the door open for extension of the objectives and the interpretation of those listed. According to the Charter, there are two official languages of the SCO, Russian and Chinese (Article 20), which reflects the presence of the two powerful leading states. Despite officially declared broad goals, the SCO was initially primarily focused on a security agenda against the “Three Evils” of “terrorism, separatism and extremism” and its members conducted a number of joint military exercises as well as the creation of a joint counter-terrorist center in Uzbekistan in 2003 (Cohen 2006). The SCO invests Chinese resources in Central Asia as well as intelligence experience—for example, the SCO’s Regional AntiTerrorist Structure (Frost 2009). The objective of fighting “separatism” has a special meaning for China and for the SCO. China itself regularly faces the challenge of separatist movements (for example, uprisings in the Chinese region of Tibet or the East Turkistan Islamic Movement); Central Asian states also need to deal with their own separatist movements, as well as with the political Islam (e.g. Hizb ut-Tahrir). It is on the idea of separatism, and its justification or rejection, that unofficial

⁴ http://www.sectsco.org/EN123/show.asp?id=69, accessed June 15, 2016.

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disagreement takes place between Russia and China within the SCO (for example, with regard to separatist regions of Georgia). The official goals, as outlined in the Charter, were described as “conservative” (Ambrosio 2008). In contrast to many modern international organizations, such as the EU, for example, the Charter of the SCO does not mention support for democratic values or human rights, nor for the market economy or modernization and development. In contrast, it highlights the preservation of stability as the foundation for the SCO. Even though the security agenda is one of the important official goals, it is useful to consider the real security threats that exist in the region. Among these security issues are inter-ethnic disputes and tensions (e.g. between Kyrgyz and Uzbek in Southern Kyrgyzstan; in Tajikistan; previously on the borders of Kazakhstan). The drug trafficking transit route also passes through Central Asian states and is directly related to cross-border controls and security. Among less traditional security issues, other problems are often mentioned, such as climate change, environmental problems and water, with the latter related to cross-border distribution of resources (Rahman 2011, p. 73). While these issues are clearly recognized as being important challenges to security in the region, the strategic solving of the problems remains to be seen. Energy-driven goals. Some studies point out that “[A]nti-terrorism and anti-separatism were the key driving forces behind the establishment” of the SCO (officially), as well as “securing access to Central Asia’s vast energy potentials” (unofficially) (Yuan 2010, pp. 868–9). According to Cohen, oil and gas “constitute the most essential economic strategic reasons for China to engage with the Central Asian states” (Cohen 2006, p. 56). China has also been quite successful in achieving its energy strategy goals. For example, in 2005 it opened jointly with Kazakhstan a new pipeline to deliver oil from Kazakhstan to China. China also provided financial assistance in the form of a US$600 million loan to Uzbekistan to develop a gas pipeline connecting Uzbekistan’s gas resources to the Kazakhstan–China gas pipeline (Cohen 2006, p. 56). Energy transfers across the former Soviet states have been controlled by Russia (as part of the historical legacies of the USSR and Soviet infrastructure). As Cohen (2006, p. 57) concludes, “as these states are increasingly dependent on China as source of both investment and security, the likelihood of China intervening into their domestic affairs will grow.” Rahman (2011, p. 68), among others, also points to the importance of energy access for China: “China’s main interest lies in meeting the energy demands of its growing economy”. This explains the massive Chinese investment in pipeline projects with Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. The pipeline starts in Turkmenistan, passes through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, and on to China (bringing about the end of Russia’s unilateral access to gas exports in Turkmenistan). According to studies, the Russian Gazprom used to control about 90 percent of

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gas exports of Turkmenistan (Rahman 2011). China presents a competitor to Russia in terms of increasing its own access to energy sources in the Central Asian states. Yet another unofficial objective of the foundation of the SCO, according to many studies, is that the SCO is a Chinese tool utilized to reduce the US military presence in Central Asia and to “limit democracy promotion abroad” (Cohen, 2006, p. 54; see also Ambrosio 2009). The Chinese and Russian collaboration to reduce the US military presence in the region has become noticeable. As Russia is deeply involved on both bilateral and multilateral levels with Central Asian states, its influence and presence are also favorable to China to some extent. For example, it took the joint efforts of Russia and China using the multilateral framework of the SCO to persuade Uzbekistan to demand that the US leave its American station in Uzbekistan (the KarshiKhanabad base). Uzbekistan made this demand to the US in July 2005, two months after the Andijan massacre in May 2005. According to an interview with Uzbek officials quoted by Cohen (2006, p. 55), Russia and China “managed to convince Uzbek president Islam Karimov that the U.S. somehow had supported the insurgents.” The SCO supported the regime of Karimov after the Andijan massacre in Uzbekistan in 2005. The Andijan events were interpreted as a fight against “religious extremist forces” and against terrorism by the SCO (Ambrosio 2008; Frost 2009) (as noted, the Charter of the SCO lists the fight against “religious extremism” as one of its main targets). The case of Kyrgyzstan may serve as another success of the SCO and the combined efforts of Russia and China. Kyrgyzstan increased the rent it charged the US from US$2.7 million to US$150–200 million annually in 2006 (Cohen 2006, p. 55). At the same time, the Russian military base in Kyrgyzstan was supplied free of charge to Russia. In contrast to the increasingly unwelcome US military presence, China attempted to establish its own station in Kyrgyzstan. However, in this instance, Chinese efforts were blocked by Russia (Cohen 2006, p. 55).

11.7. ALLIES OR RIVALS? These examples demonstrate that both Russia and China are willing to collaborate with each other on many issues of common security, such as reducing and eliminating the military presence of the US in Central Asia. However, this collaboration is not always straightforward and the goals of the two states are not always compatible. In some cases, the military- and defenserelated issues have been the cause of dispute. The SCO was set up by China and since its inception, the country has been the major actor and sponsor of the organization. Though Russia is legally a

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member of the organization, China is considered to be the main power in the SCO (Frost 2009). To counter-balance this unofficial lack of equilibrium, Russia established its own military defense regional organization without China: the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization). The SCO allows China to develop not only multilateral but also bilateral links with Central Asian states, thus excluding Russia’s participation. In its turn, Russia regularly points out that the SCO is not a military organization and its Charter does not make reference to a mutual defense policy (Frost 2009, p. 99). The presence of two states also explains the bilateral relationship within the SCO. For example, in 2005, Russia and China signed the bilateral declaration “World Order in the 21st Century,” highlighting the principles of “mutual respect of sovereignty, territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression and noninterference” (Cohen 2006, p. 54). Both Russia and China attempt to use the SCO to achieve their own (unofficial) goals. Interestingly, only some of these goals are compatible with one another. Russia also uses the SCO to restrict China’s activities and to block Chinese initiatives offered through the SCO (Song 2014). Being a full-fledged member of the SCO gives Russia the power to control some of the proposals coming from China. Table 11.6 outlines the main unofficial goals of the two hegemons within the SCO and evaluates their compatibility and likelihood of confrontation. Table 11.6. Unofficial goals of the two hegemons of the SCO and the issue of their compatibility China

Russia

Reducing and eliminating the US military presence in Central Asia

Compatible

Developing access to oil and gas states

Incompatible

Increasing own military presence in the region

Opposed/Blocked by Russia

Developing Western Chinese territories (Xingjian)

Compatible

Neutral

Increasing own military presence in the region

Increasing economic cooperation and trade in the region

Opposed/Blocked

Anti-separatism: China is opposed to separatist movements and counteracts them

Incompatible: Russia supported separatists regions of South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. At the same time Russia and China share their concern over Islamist movements; in this case goals are (currently) compatible)

Non-interference

Partly incompatible (intervention of Russia into the affairs of its smaller neighbors is regular); partly compatible (both China and Russia reject intervention by Western powers)

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11.8. COOPERATION W ITH OTHER INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS According to the Charter of the SCO, it “may interact and maintain dialogue” with other states and international organizations, including as a partner or observer (Article 14: Relationship with Other States and International Organizations). The SCO’s relationship to democratic organizations such as the EU is ambiguous. On the one hand, the EU clearly cannot support autocratic regimes flourishing within the SCO; neither can it support China per se. On the other hand, the EU needs access to energy resources from Central Asia to provide for its European customers and member states. To this end, the EU tries to minimize Russia’s control over the Central Asian states. This would contribute to the much-needed diversification of energy supplies to the EU. Therefore, the EU realizes its need to establish good working relationships with Central Asian states and the SCO can serve as a gateway to these. At least on the official level, the EU shares many security issues addressed by the SCO, such as drug trafficking across borders, anti-terrorism, and anti-smuggling (Bailes 2007, p. 15). Thus, there are some official goals that sometimes unite the SCO and the EU. The closest organization to the SCO in terms of goals, objectives, strategy, and geopolitical location, as well as having partly overlapping member states, is the CSTO and the two organizations have surprisingly similar goals in the region. The CSTO is described as providing “effective coordinating, training, and delivery systems to assist the Central Asian states in fighting terrorism, religious extremism, and narcotics production and smuggling” (Frost 2009, p. 84). It is remarkable that even the vocabulary of the CSTO is very similar to that used for the goals described in the Charter of the SCO, mentioning the fight against terrorism and religious extremism. It would only be natural to expect that both organizations would work side by side on these issues or even merge their activities toward achieving them. However, this has not happened. Some studies have concluded that despite overlapping goals and officially stated mutual interests, the two organizations are actually competitors for the dominance of military defense security in the region: the SCO is a tool of Chinese influence in Central Asia (shared with Russia as a member of the SCO), while the CSTO is an exclusive tool of Russia (not shared with China). Moreover, China has expressed repeated interests in joining or at least collaborating with the CSTO as a state or through the SCO. Despite Chinese efforts to develop real collaboration, the CSTO has been extended with very different new potential members and observers, excluding China from membership yet again: in 2013, the CSTO welcomed as observers Serbia and Afghanistan, and even discussed the possibility of accepting Iran as a new member. Should this

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extension of membership be successful, Iran will become the first non-former Soviet state to be a member of the CSTO. China’s membership has remained out of the question until now, as has even its acceptance as an observer in the CSTO. Thus, the SCO remains the only RO where both non-democratic hegemons coexist and cooperate. The Central Asian states are members of both the CSTO and the SCO. Given different attitudes to “separatism” in China and Russia, Central Asian states do not demonstrate a clear standing on various separatist conflicts within former Soviet states (e.g. with regard to Abkhazia, Southern Ossetia, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine). Separatism is viewed as an evil by the SCO and the Charter of the SCO states its clear opposition to separatism, highlighting the principle of “non-interference.” In contrast, separatism in these four former Soviet regions has been supported by the CSTO. Therefore, the coexistence of these two regional organizations of non-democracies with overlapping membership is an example of their counter-balancing each other as competitors for military dominance in the region. In 2005, the Secretariat of the SCO signed a Memorandum of Understanding with both the CIS and ASEAN (Zhao 2006, p. 120). The 2006 SCO summit culminated with the signing of cooperation documents between the SCO and the ASEAN, and between the CIS and the EurAsEC. With the latter, the Memorandum of Understanding was signed in May 2006. It states “reiterated that SCO is ready to forge similar ties with other organizations and financial institutions on the basis of equality and mutual respect.”⁵ In contrast, this summit did not achieve similar cooperation between the CSTO and the SCO. The CSTO and the SCO have another shared goal, that is, the fight against terrorism. The difference between the two organizations is that the task of the SCO (through the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure) is “to collect and analyze information related to terrorism, not military action” per se (Zhao 2006, p. 121). Military action is the task of the CSTO, which is stronger in terms of a military defense action strategy. It would be logical to see the CSTO as a continuation of the SCO if it were not for a different dominant rival state as the head of it. The lack of Chinese membership in the CSTO is illustrative in this case. More interesting is to trace the relationship between the SCO and NATO. The efforts of the CSTO to manage the withdrawal of an American presence in Central Asia did not result in success. However, calls to withdraw NATO forces from the region forged by the SCO were more successful (Frost 2009, p. 97). The 2005 Summit of the SCO in Astana became famous for its call for members to set a timeline for the withdrawal of their militaries from Central Asia. As Frost (2009, p. 97) stated, the “SCO clearly has an anti-U.S. ⁵ Full text of Joint Communique can be found at http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/ meeting/171590.htm, accessed January 11, 2017.

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slant based on its repeated statements opposing a single hegemonic world order and its silence regarding U.S. requests to be admitted to the organization as an observer.” Also in 2005, the SCO Peace Mission demonstrated disagreement about the US’s interests in South Korea and Taiwan.

11.9. F AILED M ULTILATERALISM OR SUCCESSFUL BILATERALISM? The SCO was known primarily for its efficiency in solving border disputes when it was initially founded as the Shanghai Five group. In 2005 the SCO established a “Peace Mission,” that is, a military program for an anti-terrorism policy that is meant to be a joint collaboration (China and Russia). Two years later, the Central Asian militaries joined to participate in Peace Mission 2007 (Frost 2009). The SCO was described as “a tool for Chinese penetration of a region that Moscow considers its backyard” with “overlapping security mandates” (Frost 2009, p. 85). Adjusting to the challenges of the twenty-first century, the leaders of the SCO adopted a common strategy on information security (Summit 2006). The SCO seems to be quite dynamic and efficient in promoting its security agenda. The organization was founded only a few months before the 9/11 events in the USA that radically changed the international security landscape. The US was granted permission to establish a military base in Central Asia (in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) to counter-attack Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. This might have contributed SCO to strengthening its security agenda from its inception and broadening the security issues it would address from tackling border disputes to more encompassing issues of soft security and the development not only of security cooperation but also of economic and political cooperation. However, it is the security aspect of the SCO that has evolved more successfully compared to the other tasks of the SCO. Among the most famous events, international attention was drawn to the “Peace Mission 2007” of the SCO, which, according to reports, involved a large number of troops and aircraft (see, e.g., Germanovich 2008). The SCO, unsurprisingly, is against a US military presence on the territory of member states of the SCO, and is pictured as a counter-balance to NATO (Germanovich 2008: 20). In terms of the efficiency of implementing its goals, it seems that the SCO has made real progress and has consolidated its security agenda as well as smoothing its way towards better contacts with Central Asian states. However, Russia’s establishment of the CSTO without China as a member calls into question the actual results that China has achieved so far. Another arguably successful program implemented within the SCO is the fight against international terrorism and increasing security—this has been

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implemented by developing the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (established in 2005). However, as previously noted in this chapter, the Charter of SCO only allows for terrorism to be confronted through the gathering and processing of information, not through actual military action. This is what is practically missing from the SCO—a military wing and the possibility for rapid military action. The main explanation for this is the weak military sector of China itself. Separately, Russia, which does have a better developed military infrastructure, does not wish to make this contribution to the SCO. Instead, Russia chose to establish a more traditional military alliance in the form of the CSTO without Chinese membership. Thus, in terms of military action, the SCO can be perceived as partly unsuccessful. How much success has there been for some of the other objectives set out in the SCO’s agenda? Given the total period of existence of the SCO since 2001, the success of multilateral trade policy has been relatively moderate (in contrast to flourishing bilateral economic cooperation within the SCO). However, trade could have been more successful were it not for the efforts of Russia in trying to counter-balance the ambition of China to develop strong trade ties with former Soviet republics in general and in Central Asia in particular. If one looks at the first seven years of the SCO, 2001–2008, then the rapidly increasing dynamic of foreign trade within the SCO is obvious. For example, according to statistics, in 2005 foreign trade between China and the SCO’s member states increased to US$38 billion, that is, up 212 percent from 2001.⁶ Also since the launch of the SCO in 2001, Russia’s foreign trade with all other member states of the SCO has almost doubled in size, from US$26 billion in 2001 to US$S 41 billion in 2005 (Norling and Swanstrom 2007). According to the Chinese Customs Service, the increase of trade between China and other member states of the SCO also coincided with the development of the organization itself. For example, in 2002, the level of trade was US$2.4 billion and increased to US$4.1 billion only three years later, in 2005 (Norling and Swanstrom 2007). Most of these trade ties were, of course, built on a bilateral rather than on a multilateral basis. However, the framework of the SCO seems to provide for a relatively more secure and convenient platform to launch bilateral trade ties and to increase overall foreign trade among the member states. What is notable is that former observer states of the SCO, India and Pakistan (currently members), were excluded from this increased foreign trade. In the period 2001–05, while foreign trade between member states of the SCO almost doubled, foreign trade between Central Asian states and India and Pakistan remained “almost nonexistent making up less than 1 per cent of both countries’ foreign trade despite substantial trade complementarity and ⁶ For an overall summary of trade statistics, see the analysis by Norling and Swanstrom (2007, p. 434).

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geographic proximity” (Norling and Swanstrom 2007, p. 434). On the other hand, estimating the success of trade development is not straightforward. The SCO does not have any permanent body that facilitates and encourages the development of multilateral trade ties among member states. Trade deals take place on a mainly bilateral basis between individual member states (e.g. between Russia and China, China and Central Asian states), and separately among the SCO observer states (Iran, India, and Pakistan). However, the relationship between observer states and the SCO began to changing from the end of the first decade of twenty-first century, when China took the initiative towards India and Pakistan in the form of various developmental plans and infrastructure construction projects, thus paving the way towards full membership for those countries. However, trade negotiations have an ad hoc format as supplements to the annual summits of the SCO, and bilateral agreements and treaties dominate on the multilateral platform. For example, the SCO was definitely a successful tool in bilateral negotiations that gained access for China to individual oil- and gas-rich Central Asian states, mainly through the development of bilateral relationships (e.g. with Kazakhstan). It is remarkable that the contacts with Pakistan, Iran, and India have increased since 2005, the year of the Andijan events in Uzbekistan, the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, and worsening relationships with the West. This year marked a new stage in the development of the SCO. The engagement of these three states had been viewed as establishing a counter-balance to US unipolarity on the world stage, but also as potentially beneficial for cooperation across Asian states to overcome a lack of interconnection due to poor infrastructure (Norling and Swanstrom 2007). As these authors also point out, “Any development promoting increased regional dialogue about trade and other issues may promise to have conflict-preventive effects in this conflictprone region” (2007, p. 430). This statement supports the quantitative findings: indeed, the level of foreign trade and the level of internal conflicts between member states within an NDRO seems to be similar to those within a DRO. The international organization provides greater opportunities for trade and decreases the likelihood of internal conflicts (the latter due to the high costs of conflict with trading partners and also partly due to regular meetings that allow for disputes to be discussed). In that sense, the SCO presents a classic example of our theoretical assumptions as well as the results of the quantitative chapters. Although the SCO is officially a multilateral organization, its most efficient actions and decisions take place on a bilateral level (the previously discussed China–Russian bilateral negotiations; or between China and India, or China and Pakistan). Scholars point out the bilateral nature and efficiency in the functioning of the SCO, especially when it comes to the governmental elites of the SCO member states (Bailes 2007, p. 14).

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However, there are other issues raised within the SCO where the organization has not been as effective in their implementation as they have claimed. One example is the strengthening of multilateral economic ties, fighting crossborder drug trafficking, fighting the spread of contagious diseases, and environmental management in the region. According to some studies, the SCO has identified more than a hundred potential areas of cooperation, but all of them remaining at the stage of proposals and not being enforced or implemented (Zhao 2006, p. 112). Even in its main area of cooperation—collaboration on security issues and military activities—the SCO is often described as ineffective. For example, the summit in 2007 culminated with broad discussion of and the signing of yet another new treaty by the SCO’s members on “good-neighborly relations, friendship and cooperation” (the SCO summit in August 2007, in Bishkek). Bailes (2007), for example, pointed out that even the joint military activities of SCO members will be developed within the framework of the SCO–CSTO partnership (given that China is neither a current nor a prospective member in the CSTO, it seems like this military cooperation between the SCO and the CSTO will be dictated exclusively by Russia).

11.10. IMPACT ON POLITICAL REGIMES

11.10.1. Large-N evidence Let us now proceed to the key point of our analysis: the political effects of NDROs. As we have already mentioned, the existing research does highlight the ability of the SCO to contribute to the consolidation of authoritarian regimes, primarily through promoting common norms and values (Ambrosio 2008; Lewis 2012; Jackson 2014; Allison 2018). At the same time, Central Asia, where the SCO should have the most profound impact, is also a region where internal conditions in the post-Soviet countries are particularly conducive to the development of authoritarian regimes (e.g. Collins 2002). Therefore, in this chapter we take a different approach from that of Chapters 9 and 10: instead of studying how the membership of the regional organization (Chapter 10) or intensity of that membership (Chapter 9) is correlated with political regimes, we focus on how membership in the regional organization affects the duration of tenure among authoritarian leaders. The analysis reported in Chapter 5 already has shown us that leaders of authoritarian states belonging to NDROs survive in power for a longer period of time than those who do not belong to NDROs. Chapter 3 developed some of the theoretical arguments explaining this correlation. We will now look at whether we can replicate this result for post-Soviet Eurasia, differentiating

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between members and non-members of the SCO. We understand that the sample of leaders in post-Soviet Eurasia is rather small, and thus the analysis reported in this section is suggestive rather than truly theory testing. Our purpose, however, is not to provide unambiguous evidence, but rather to find out whether for the SCO in Eurasia we can confirm the same regularities as those reported in the global sample. If that is the case, one can start “digging deeper” investigating further to identify any possible causal mechanisms. If the results are not replicated, analyzing the impact of the SCO on the duration of tenure will be problematic. Again, as was the case in Section 6.4, we are cautious about the direction of causality, but will address this issue in the qualitative analysis. We construct a dataset of twenty-six presidents who ruled twelve postSoviet countries (including Georgia) in 2000–16 (including all leaders who were in office as of 2000; leaders who came to power in 2016—in Moldova and Uzbekistan—are not included; acting presidents are not included). We then perform an analysis of their duration in office and the link between this survival and SCO membership. Sixteen observations are right-censored (ten presidents were in power as of 2016; for Uzbekistan and Moldova, as mentioned, we have no right-censored observations, because there was a change of leader in 2016). First, we plot the Kaplan–Meier survival function for the presidents of countries which belonged to the SCO vs. those which have never been SCO members (Figure 11.1). One can see that in the subset of SCO countries (four Central Asian states except Turkmenistan and Russia) the likelihood that the president survived in power after a longer period of rule is higher than in other countries: 75 percent of SCO member presidents stayed in power for 15 years vs. somewhat more than 30 percent of non-SCO member presidents. The long-rank test for the equality of survival function is marginally significant (p-value of 0.0919), rejecting the hypothesis that the survival functions for SCO and non-SCO states are the same. The analysis therefore provides some evidence in favor of the conjecture that in the last fifteen years SCO membership has been associated with the longer durability of presidential rule in the post-Soviet world (typically characteristic of authoritarian regimes in this region). In the second step, we estimate Cox hazard regressions (see Table 11.7). We report regression coefficients instead of hazard ratios. The small size of the sample precludes us from using a large set of covariates: thus, we run two specifications. In the first, we use only one covariate: a dummy for SCO members. In the second specification, we also control for a dummy for Central Asian states—to make sure that we do not pick up the generally higher propensity of Central Asian countries to create consolidated authoritarian regimes due to a weak civil society, lack of ties to Western countries, and the absence of an independent democratic tradition. In both cases, the

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1.00

2 1

0.75

2 0.50

1 1

2 0.25

1 0.00

0

5

10 15 analysis time sco = 0

20

25

sco = 1

Figure 11.1. Kaplan–Meier survival estimates for the sample of twenty-six post-Soviet presidents, 2000–2016 Table 11.7. Cox hazard regressions, survival of post-Soviet presidents, 2000–2016

SCO membership

(1)

(2)

−1.057 (0.675)

−0.822 (0.670) −0.412 (0.523) 0.52 (p-value: 0.772)

Central Asian country Proportional-hazard assumption test

0.37 (p-value: 0.543)

Note: robust standard errors in parentheses. * significant at 10% level.

SCO dummy is negative (implying a lower hazard ratio, i.e., higher survival probability), but is marginally insignificant. Again, we have to highlight that the small number of observations makes the analysis suggestive; it also limits the number of control variables we are able to take into account in our analysis. Overall, however, it appears that there is some evidence that SCO membership goes hand in hand with a longer tenure for presidents (although, again, we have to stress that the coefficient is insignificant in the regression analysis—this could be linked to the very small number of cases we included in the regression). We still cannot exclude the possibility that the effect is determined by an omitted variable, which influences both tenure and willingness to join the SCO (to deal with this, more control variables or panel data would be needed, but cannot be obtained given

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the small number of observations). Thus, in the next step, in the qualitative analysis, we develop and trace the causal mechanism explaining how SCO could strengthen authoritarian leaders. In the previous chapters we have highlighted the role of legitimacy provision through electoral monitoring (CIS) and indirect effects associated with the change of Russian foreign policy (EAEU); in case of the SCO our argument will focus on the trust-building effect of the organization, which is particularly important given that the SCO contains not only post-Soviet countries but also China. The next subsection develops this argument in greater detail.

11.10.2. Honor among thieves: SCO and trust-building among autocracies To briefly reiterate the theoretical discussion of Chapter 3, we have to point out that existing studies have discovered a number of domestic national factors accounting for the length of tenure of autocratic leaders, such as cooptation (Gandhi and Przeworski 2007); international conflicts (Bueno de Mesquita and Silverson 1995); foreign direct investment (Bak and Moon 2016); and domestic interaction between national elites (Svolik 2009), among others. How can membership in a regional organization account, if at all, for the length of tenure of autocratic leaders? Following the theoretical discussion in Chapter 3, we advance the national causes of prolongation of tenure previously identified in the literature to consider their role at the international level. As a starting point for the discussion, Table 11.8 outlines national domestic causes of the length of tenure already identified in the literature and contrasts these with hypothetical unknown causes generated by membership in regional organization. For instance, membership in any international organization can be associated with certain economic benefits that contribute to the economic strength of the state, prevent revolution, and increase the well-being of the population. Membership in general may also increase the legitimacy of the current leader in the eyes of the population, thus contributing to his/her reputation as a ruler through international recognition. More importantly for membership in autocratic regional organization is the interaction between elites at the international level—this implies the functioning regular communication and an opportunity for leaders to learn from other member states. International learning may lead to the “right” policy choices being made at a national level by leaders. Therefore, membership in a regional organization composed of non-democracies intuitively corresponds to length of tenure. To untangle these intuitive interconnections, in what follows, we look in detail for causal mechanisms of the impact of membership on the length of tenure of autocratic leaders in the SCO. In a nutshell, we suggest the following. The constant

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Table 11.8. National causes of tenure versus hypothetical international impact Identified national factors

Analogous impact of the membership in an NDRO (international factors)

Economic strength of the state

Membership in an NDRO is associated with increasing foreign trade and increasing FDI among members (even more so in the case of the SCO)

Internal stability

Military and economic security guarantee (e.g. embargos can be imposed through the regional organization)

International conflicts

Regional organization directly relates to intermember conflict mitigation; membership is associated with diplomacy, building trust, and leads to reduction of probability of conflicts among member states

Interaction between domestic elites at national level (leads to consensus and understanding)

International interaction between elites (leads to learning about consolidation of power and optimal policy choices)

Legitimacy in the eyes of the population is an important factor of strong power

Membership in regional organizations increases the legitimacy of the executives; signals international recognition

interaction of authoritarian leaders in an NDRO has the potential to increase trust among leaders; this is in line with the general psychological literature linking interaction and trust (Nugent and Abolafia 2006). This trust building is especially important in the environments where the original level of trust is very low. We have already indicated that authoritarian regimes, due to the lack of credibility of commitments, should be characterized by lower trust levels than democracies (Chapters 2 and 3). However, in some cases trust is in particularly short supply because of historical precedents and lack of contact. The SCO is indeed an example of such a case and thus the creation of this NDRO was in fact instrumental in overcoming the problem of the trust deficit among countries, which put in motion a set of other mechanisms strengthening authoritarian leaders. Importance of being a good neighbor: a newcomer or an intruder? The importance of being a good neighbor cannot be over-estimated—neighbors are the nearest source of help in cases of emergency, they can guarantee your security and peaceful sleep over night (preventing barking dogs and disturbing parties). In other words, neighbors are the guarantee of your stress-free, comfortable, and secure life. But what does it take to be a good neighbor? The social protocol dictates: if you are new to a neighborhood, you take the trouble to meet your new neighbors; bring them gifts; get to know each other; and above all, communicate with them! By these standards, China has been an

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impeccable newcomer. In the early 1990s, China was trying to move into a new neighborhood of post-Soviet Central Asia where it was initially perceived with suspicion, with prejudice, inspiring fear from the immediate neighbors. China followed the neighborhood protocol step by step: starting with small gifts and, above all, showing respectful recognition of the Head of the Neighborhood (Russia). The process of getting to know the neighbors began slowly: informal and formal meetings, communication, elite interactions, and most importantly, the building of trust—the trust that paved the way to an admirably ambitious strategy in China’s new neighborhood. The neighborhood protocol is something of a spoiler to the otherwise intriguing question: why did China need to launch a regional international organization, the SCO, instead of approaching individual Central Asian states at the bilateral level? China is famous for its successful economic partnerships at the bilateral level, government-to-government, on numerous occasions all over the world (though recently multilateralism seems to have been given higher priority in Chinese foreign policy, see the discussion in Wang 2000 and Wu 2007). Within bilateralism, it is also possible to achieve interaction between elites, establishing economic and mutually beneficial projects that increase learning among elites and improves their status in the eyes of their populations, that is, increase their legitimacy. So, why was the regional organization as a framework for collaboration with Central Asia needed at all? Trust among states (or, more specifically, among their elites) is a starting point and an indispensable element of international cooperation and this is even more the case for membership within the same international organization (as described by Kantian peace theory in Chapter 2). Trust among states explains why democracies cooperate with each other, but not autocracies. Thus, trust is an essential ingredient for successful membership and other forms of cooperation. For cooperation between democracies, trust is a prerequisite. For cooperation among autocracies, trust might instead be a goal to achieve through multilateralism. Autocracies inherently lack this trust of each other. In Eurasia, at the time of the end of the USSR, the situation was even worse: the former Soviet republics perceived China as one of its most dangerous external enemies. The roots of this mistrust were very deep. In the 1960s, the once allied People’s Republic of China and the USSR became bitter rivals and even engaged in a short-term military confrontation in 1969 (see also Lüthi 2010). China maintained territorial claims to many Central Asian nations (which were precisely those subject to the Shanghai Five negotiations). Even now, alleged Chinese claims are likely to become the object of public protests. For example, in April 2016 a reform of the Land Code of Kazakhstan resulted in mass protests because people believed it would open the door for China to

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gain control over Kazakhstani land.⁷ Similar protests occurred in 2009, when rumors spread that Kazakhstan had agreed to lease to China 1 billion hectares of agricultural land.⁸ In addition to territory and land, the migration of Chinese workers to Kazakhstan also became something of a widespread phobia among the Kazakhstani population; although the majority of the Kazakhstani population still held a neutral attitude towards Chinese migrants, the share of those disapproving grew constantly over time (Sadovskaya 2013). Some Kazakhstani political analysts even discussed the danger of China establishing full control over the country in the long run, with Kazakhs following the destiny of Uyghurs.⁹ In Kazakhstan, China consistently ranks first or second in public opinion surveys listing “unfriendly” countries.¹⁰ But even without these particular issues, China would find it more difficult to cooperate with Central Asian countries simply because of a lack of experience and knowledge: whereas Russia (which is also frequently viewed with a lot of skepticism) has an advantage of language and culture, as well as century-long historical ties, China is perceived as a clearly alien power which still needs to gain access to the Central Asian countries. The SCO was therefore a necessary framework on which to build trust as the foundation for future cooperation (at both bilateral and multilateral levels). Being an outsider to post-Soviet space, China needed to gain trust and acceptance among the family of former Soviet republics. Establishing a multilateral regional club and inviting their Russia (an acknowledged hegemon of the post-Soviet space) to join, China established an excellent basis for building trust from scratch, one which has facilitated countless bilateral projects with SCO members. According to a Kazakhstani expert, “Kazakhstan would never make a deal with the SCO or China if the deal had been opposed by Russia. Russia would have been against the SCO initiative, if it had not been invited by China to join the SCO.”¹¹ By extension, one considers it is likely that the entire membership of the former Soviet Central Asian states within the SCO might have been highly contentious without Russia’s membership. From this perspective, the SCO can be interpreted as an intelligent and sophisticated strategy by China to engage more closely with its neighboring Central Asian states by including Russia, thus, initiating interaction between elites and building trust. Should Russia have been excluded from the SCO, other former

⁷ https://www.bbc.com/russian/international/2016/04/160429_kazakhstan_land_rent_protests, accessed July 25, 2018. ⁸ http://www.islamsng.com/kaz/analytics/10648, accessed July 25, 2018. ⁹ http://asiarussia.ru/articles/4464/, accessed July 25, 2018. ¹⁰ https://www.ritmeurasia.org/news–2015-09-20–v-kom-kazahstancy-vidjat-druzej-19672, accessed July 25, 2018. ¹¹ Interview with a Kazakh economist was given to the author on February 12, 2016 (Cambridge, MA).

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Soviet Asian states might have abstained from joining the organization as well (at least in the 1990s and at the beginning of the 2000s).¹² Indeed, recalling the origin of the SCO described in detail at the beginning of this chapter, the Shanghai Five was created in 1996, the same year as the “Treaty of Deepening Military Trust in Border regions” [italics added] was signed by China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. The Shanghai Five took a year to seed trust in the region and in 1997 a new treaty was signed for the reduction of (former Soviet) military forces on border regions in Central Asia. The SCO provided a multilateral platform for the interaction of the political elite at an international level where they could start to build trust. Describing the main achievements of the SCO, its secretary general Rashid Alimov explicitly stated in 2016 that the organization “reached an unprecedented level of interaction and trust in the sphere of politics and security.”¹³ Figure 11.2 outlines the causal mechanism and identifies the interaction of elites and building trust as initial stages in the process of the consolidation of political regimes. Importantly, the interaction of national elites was previously identified by studies on the length of tenure of presidents. This chapter takes the argument to the next level—arguing that the interaction of elites at the international level may lead to the same result—consolidation of a regime—through further development of trust; the resolution of territorial disputes (conflicts and disputes may endanger presidential tenures); by preparing the ground for bilateral economic cooperation (contributing to the well-being of the population, at least in the short-run, thus preventing appraisal and revolutions); switching on the mechanism of the limiting factor (described in Chapter 3 and also below); enabling interaction between elites to facilitate mutual learning and leading to optimal (from the point of view of regime survival) policy choices (e.g. in the area of cyber-security). In what follows, we focus on some of the causal mechanisms linking membership of the SCO and the tenure of presidents depicted in Figure 11.2: on the development of intensive economic cooperation between China and the SCO member states (using the multilateral platform of trust for the development of bilateralism); on the SCO’s rhetorical support for member states; on using a regional organization to create an image of a “united front” as a demonstration to the West; and on the learning about policy choices among the member states as an outcome of elite interaction within the SCO.

¹² This can also explain why Russia was not expelled from the SCO when it clearly violated the main principles of the Charter such as “anti-separatism” (by supporting separatist regions) and non-interference in another state (when Russia actually did interfere on numerous occasions in Georgia and Ukraine). However, despite this, Russian membership was never called into question within the SCO, nor were its actions criticized by the SCO. ¹³ http://www.infoshos.ru/ru/?idn=16065, accessed July 25, 2018.

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Building trust

6 SCO

1 Interaction of elites

3B

2A 3C

2B

5

Authoritarian learning: obtaining information about policy choices

3A

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Resolution of territorial conflicts Economic cooperation

4A

Economic resources

4B Emergence of limiting factors

Longer tenure of the autocrats

Rhetorical support and cooperation of security services: Three Evils Legitimacy provision

Figure 11.2. Causal mechanisms of the SCO impact on the duration of tenure of autocrats

Economic cooperation: contribution to economic strength and the limiting factor. The SCO provided a multilateral platform for the interaction of elites and for building trust from scratch. Regular meetings and the interaction of elites were the seeds of development for bilateralism. Not only were territorial disputes solved on a bilateral basis between China and the state in question, but economic bilateralism also became a dominant mode of cooperation. In terms of economic cooperation, foreign direct investment by China in Central Asia, foreign trade, generous subsidies, and loans came to be bilateral and these dominated the multilateral framework. Economic cooperation with China has certainly contributed to the economic survival and in some case prosperity of Central Asian autocracies and became one of the important factors of the survival of incumbent presidents. Here, Central Asian states can be split into two groups: those that enjoy economic support coming from China and those states that became completely dependent on China for their economic development (developed mechanisms of the limiting factor as an extreme form of support for economic dependence).¹⁴ In both cases, economic cooperation became a strong contributing factor to presidents remaining in office, through increasing the well-being of the population, preventing appraisal and revolution, and augmenting higher expenditure on national forces (such as maintaining a police force loyal to the government-, for example). One example of Sino–Central Asian cooperation potentially leading to the improvement of the economic situation in the countries of Central Asia, but ¹⁴ The mechanism of the limiting factor is described in detail in Chapter 8.

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also leading to greater dependence on China, is Chinese lending. China eagerly provides financial assistance to other countries, following what it calls a pragmatic approach—without any consideration of the nature of political regimes. As of 2017, China held 41 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s foreign debt and 53 percent of Tajikistan’s foreign debt.¹⁵ According to some sources, Kyrgyzstan’s debt to China has increased almost 200 times in the last ten years.¹⁶ Multiple Central Asian states accumulated large foreign debt to China, though the role of Chinese lending differs from country to country. Although seemingly high, China is still only in fourth place in terms of Kazakhstan’s external debt: Kazakhstan’s debt of to the Netherlands is US$167.5 bln, to the UK it is US$27.7 bln, to the USA it is US$13.2 bln, and to China is “only” US$12.6 bln. A second state in debt to China is Kyrgyzstan (whose total external debt for 2018 was estimated as US$4403, of which US$1711 mln. is debt to China.¹⁷ As of 2016, Tajikistan’s debt to China accounted for 17 percent of its GDP, and for Kyrgyzstan this figure was 23 percent of GDP (Hurley et al. 2018), with some of this money provided as part of privileged Chinese loans to SCO countries (Kassenova 2009). This dependence is likely to increase in the years to come because of lending through the Belt and Road Initiative institutions. In contrast, Uzbekistan—one the larger but also most closed and nontransparent states—has the smallest debt to China among Central Asian states. However, after the death of president Islam Karimov in 2016, this situation is likely to change in future. Debt dependence is unlikely to represent a case of a limiting factor logic for most of the Central Asian countries: while foreign financing does assist their budget situation, the main source for economic performance remains the remittances of labor migrants (Tajikistan and to some extent Uzbekistan) or natural resources (Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan). In one case, however, dependence on China could have become an example of the limiting factor logic: the role of cross-border trade between China and Kyrgyzstan. The geographic location of Kyrgyzstan made it a perfect “entrepot” for Chinese consumer goods into the economy of Central Asia and the post-Soviet space in general. The mechanism functions as follows: because of the poor quality of border control at the Sino–Kyrgyzstani border, Chinese goods flow into Kyrgyzstan and are resold at the large bazaars (like Dordoy in Bishkek)— while the creation of the EAEU was supposed to close these loopholes, as of 2018, this has not happened to a full extent. After that, they are exported to Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet countries using the open borders between these states and Kyrgyzstan (within the CIS and later the EAEU framework).

¹⁵ https://thediplomat.com/2017/12/can-central-asias-poorest-states-pay-back-their-debtsto-china/, accessed July 25, 2018. ¹⁶ http://www.fergananews.com/articles/9902, accessed July 25, 2018. ¹⁷ The data cited in this section are adjusted from http://www.fergananews.com/articles/9902, accessed on July 15, 2018.

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The level of goods imported via this channel through Kyrgyzstan exceeds two or three times the Kyrgyzstani GDP (Kaminski and Raballand 2009; Libman and Vinokurov 2011). Any interruption in the trade flow causes major losses for the economy of the country, as happened in 2017.¹⁸ One could therefore cautiously claim that trade relations with China turned into a limiting factor for the Kyrgyzstani economy, potentially affecting its political development. In addition to lending and trade, China plays an important role as a foreign investor for Central Asian countries. This applies even to countries with closed political regimes and very limited interaction with the outside world, such as Turkmenistan. The case of Turkmenistan is quite peculiar as almost no data are available on its economic cooperation with China. It is known, however, that China generously financed gas exploration and infrastructure in Turkmenistan in exchange for a majority of the gas produced (25 out of 30 milliards of cubic meters of the annual production of gas is meant supposed to be delivered to China after implementation of this agreement). Turkmenistan’s GDP relies heavily on the gas industry and its immediate and potential customers are Russia, Iran, and China. However, occasionally, trade disputes between Turkmenistan, on the one side, and Russia and Iran, on the other, make China the only customer of the Turkmenistani gas industry.¹⁹ As of 2014, 60 percent of Turkemistani gas was exported to China.²⁰ In Kazakhstan, as of 2016, Chinese FDI accounted for US$21.5 bln, with the majority of this investment going into the country’s oil and gas industry (EDB 2017c). The lion’s share of Chinese money goes to building energy infrastructure, including but not limited to oil and gas production and pipelines (in addition to different building and construction projects). It is safe to say that these generous levels of credit, loans, and investment, not to mention a vast and bilaterally developed foreign trade is a strong contributing factor to, at least, the short-term economic development of these states, strengthening sitting presidents and the political regimes within these states. Demonstration to the east and rhetorical support. Another causal link demonstrated in Figure 11.2 is the provision of rhetorical support to nondemocratic states by the SCO. The background document of the SCO that outlines its frameworks, values, and principles does not explicitly mention any of the democratic values such as human rights, political freedom, and development. Ambrosio (2008) examines the rhetoric of the organization and shows how it attempts to undermine democracy in the region. He argues that the SCO is formed on a set of principles, norms, and values that are ¹⁸ https://www.gazeta.ru/business/2017/10/27/10960994.shtml, accessed July 26, 2018. ¹⁹ http://www.fergananews.com/articles/9902, accessed July 25, 2018. ²⁰ Averchenko, M. (2015), Kak Kitay Otvovoevyvaet u Rossii Zentral’nuyu Aziyu. Vedmosti, October 25, https://www.vedomosti.ru/economics/articles/2015/10/26/614254-kitai-aziyu-rossii, accessed August 29, 2018.

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opposed to democratic ones, thus helping the SCO to defend the consolidation of autocracies among its Central Asian states. By prioritizing stability, the SCO sustains existing authoritarian Central Asian regimes (see also Cooley 2013). Indeed, the Charter of the SCO could be perceived as rhetorical were it not for the actual support provided on the part of the SCO for the consolidation and stability of regimes in Central Asia. The example of so-called “colored revolutions” that could have turned the path of regime development towards democratization in the region is among the most obvious and studied phenomena (for a detailed discussion see Ambrosio 2008; Matveeva and Giustozzi 2008; Albright 2009). The most prominent example is the political regime of Islam Karimov, president of Uzbekistan since the disintegration of the USSR. From the 1990s, with no executive turnover of power, Uzbekistan has witnessed the gradual consolidation of autocracy in Karimov’s regime. There was a challenge in the form of a mass uprising in May 2005, known as the Andijan events, when around 20,000 people revolted against the government (we have already referred to this in when discussing short-term Uzbekistani membership in the EurAsEC). The event and its actual implications, the number of participants, and their motivations are all still the subject of debate and there is no clarity or agreement in the studies on what actually happened. The Uzbekistani government responded by suppressing the uprising with military and police forces, resulting in hundreds of deaths (this number also remains unclear). The US and the EU criticized Uzbekistan for abuses of human rights and threatened the state with sanctions. In response to this criticism, Uzbekistan asked the US to withdraw its military base from Uzbekistani territory. Uzbekistan was supported rhetorically by the SCO and by both China and Russia individually. In this example, the impact of the SCO on the consolidation of a strong autocracy in Uzbekistan is obvious. The SCO’s goal was to achieve the withdrawal of the US military from Uzbekistan. By providing legitimacy and support to the ruling elite in Uzbekistan, the SCO achieved this goal, and the US military left the country. Another notable event had taken place two months earlier in Kyrgyzstan and became known as the Tulip Revolution. During an uprising in March 2005, a governmental opposition did manage to overthrow the regime of President Askar Akaev. Despite different outcomes of these two revolutions, the SCO behaved the same way, holding to one of its main principles—“noninterference” in internal affairs. Only two months later, in July 2005, the SCO summit gathered in Astana. Neither Uzbekistan nor the events in Kyrgyzstan in March 2005 were explicitly mentioned at the 2005 summit. However, the references to “stability,” “peace,” and “security” in the region became more prominent than ever. Remarkably, Kyrgyzstan was actually a member state of the SCO and retained its membership after the Tulip Revolution. In that specific case, the SCO had barely any impact on political regime change in

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the state. In contrast, the Uzbekistani government gained an advantage from the rhetorical support of the SCO, which led to the request by the Uzbekistani government to initiate the withdrawal of US military forces from the state and provided some protection should the US and EU sanctions be imposed. Overall, the provision of rhetorical support and increasing the legitimacy of presidents in office are the causal mechanisms best studied in the literature so far. Rhetorical support through the concept of “Three Evils” is one of the main legitimation tools for the SCO’s actions vis-à-vis its members in terms of providing support to authoritarian leaders. The definition of the Three Evils (terrorism, separatism, and extremism) is broad enough to describe almost any regime-critical activity as an example of one of the evils. It applies in particular to extremism, which in the Shanghai Convention on combatting terrorism, separatism, and extremism is defined, among others, as “a violent encroachment on public security.”²¹ The Three Evils language can easily be used, for example, against ethnic minorities,²² any protests against the existing political order, or it can justify the exchange of information by security services against dissidents. HRIC (2011) provides an extensive study showing how SCO countries share information on opposition groups with each other and how the Three Evils doctrine is used to justify extraditions and denials of asylum. The definition of the groups targeted under the fight against the Three Evils is determined by individual member states, which can therefore easily use this tool against any opposition. FIDH (2012) offers a number of examples of extraditions, which happen under the mere suspicion of terrorism reported by one of the member states and is used for politically motivated prosecution. The 2018 Qingdao declaration explicitly forbids any interference in the affairs of other nations based on the pretense of fighting terrorism.²³ Thus, the Three Evils doctrine has a similar function to the rhetoric of “free elections” in the CIS case: it is based on the manipulation of an internationally recognized concept (in this case, the fight against terrorism), which is interpreted in a way that justifies authoritarian cooperation. But while electoral observers of CIS merely supported elections conducted with obvious violations, the SCO’s Three Evils approach also serves as a basis for cooperation among security agencies and facilitates direct prosecution against individuals.²⁴

²¹ https://eurasiangroup.org/files/uploads/files/International_legal_documents/Conventions/ The_20Shanghai_20Convention.pdf, accessed July 25, 2018. ²² https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/policy-04072011123330.html, accessed July 25, 2018. ²³ http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-06/10/c_137244992.htm, accessed July 31, 2018. ²⁴ Note that, as already described in Chapter 9, the SCO is also involved in electoral monitoring.

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Demonstration to the west. Yet another causal link between membership in a regional international organization and the strength of non-democratic regime is related to the creation of an image of the “united front” of nondemocracies. One examples of such a demonstration and of alliance is the potential SCO membership of Iran. Iran’s most apparent virtue and potential contribution to the SCO would be its enormous oil and gas wealth, which would provide the SCO and its members (China in the first place) with the possibility of exclusive energy deals. However, Iranian membership might pose a problem for Russia, as yet another rival for the dominance of oil and gas deals in the region. While the former Soviet energy-rich states look up to Russia in terms of their energy policy, Iran would be freed from this pro-Russian gain influence. Iran might create an alternative energy policy, possibly leading to the restructuring of energy geopolitics in the region (not necessarily to Russia’s advantage). In the words of Brummer (2007, p. 195): “Russia may feel more threatened than appeased by Iran’s significant oil and gas reserves. Russia is presently the leader in natural gas exports, with clear dominance over European markets. The flow and export of both oil and gas from the Caspian is also under direct control of Moscow. With Iran in the SCO, and the subsequent development of its energy assets, Russia would perhaps stand to lose a portion of its regional hegemony. For instance, Caspian resources now under the thumb of Russia would gain an alternative route for export—south through Iran to the Persian Gulf.” There are also a number of other reasons to believe that membership of Iran in the SCO was from the very beginning out of the question for both Russia and China as leaders of the SCO. The SCO posed itself as an anti-terrorist organization, and Iran is famous for being one of the origins of the international terrorism movement and radical Islamism. It is therefore doubtful that the SCO was seriously considering its inclusion as a full member. However, its presence at the discussion table transmitted a clear world-wide demonstration of the existing options for survival and potential expansion of the SCO, should it be threatened in any way by Western forces. It is especially important to highlight that this discussion took place at a summit of 2006, only a year after the Andijan events of 2005, when the relationship between the West, on the one hand, and Uzbekistan and SCO, on the other, deteriorated. Thus, rhetorical mechanisms (speeches, charters, documents) worked well with demonstration mechanisms (the consideration of expansion and the inclusion of new member states, such as Iran). The proposal of Russia to initiate the SCO Energy Club (an informal platform for the cooperation of SCO countries on the global energy market) can be another demonstration (though one more feasible to implement than membership for Iran). The proposal was viewed as a direct threat to OPEC. Again, the proposal was not implemented but served as a good

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demonstration to the West of what could be achieved within the SCO multilateral framework. This demonstration was accompanied by the mechanisms of financial aid and generous loans from China and in some cases Russia, creating links of obligation among the member states of SCO to support the sponsors in decision making should this be necessary. Learning about “optimal” policy choices. The final aspect of authoritarian cooperation in the SCO concerns the issue of mutual learning among the authoritarian regimes. As always, it is extremely difficult to find empirical evidence on these processes. Yet one example where the SCO could serve as a focal point for mutual information exchange between authoritarian leaders is the issue of Internet control. In fact, the idea that China and Russia could implement concerted actions resulting in the fragmentation of the global Internet and establish control over the specific Russian and Chinese segments by the state is not new:²⁵ Dickow (2016) offers an interesting discussion of the possible scenarios of this process. We have to point out that most of the initiatives we discuss are primarily an outcome of Russian– Chinese interaction rather than of institutionalized action on the part of the SCO. This is, however, precisely the point—the main contribution of the SCO is to create a platform for trust building, which can then be advanced along different dimensions, depending upon the countries’ preferences. In terms of cooperation around issues of Internet control, two aspects stand out. On the one hand, there is a set of formal measures undertaken or supported by China and Russia, which in the long run are likely to lead to the establishment of greater governmental influence on the Internet. Some of them actually do happen within the SCO framework, but not all of them. Thus, in 2007 the SCO passed a long-term plan of measures on information security; in 2009 an international agreement on this issue was signed. In 2015, the SCO provided some (although limited) funding for the project (US$4 million for a four-year period). The SCO has declared its willingness to establish a code of conduct in the information security area, which would prevent individual countries from using their cyber capacities to harm others. Practically, however, the main argument of the SCO is to increase government control over the Internet (as opposed to the “liberal” approach attributed to the US) (Tolstukhina 2017). This code should ultimately be approved by the UN.²⁶ In an authoritarian context, obviously, such a set of policies could be abused to increase regime security. Yet numerous measures take place within the bilateral Sino–Russian relations. In 2016, for example, the first Sino– Russian Internet Forum took place, which, among other things, featured

²⁵ https://teiss.co.uk/information-security/russia-china-and-cyber-what-a-divided-internetmeans-for-the-world/, accessed July 26, 2018. ²⁶ https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/3496533, accessed July 26, 2018.

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discussions about closer cooperation between the two countries, including not only Internet governance, but also limiting the impact of Western media on the domestic landscape (the last topic was initiated by the Russian state-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya).²⁷ In 2015, China and Russia signed a cyber security pact, which emphasized the concept of cyber sovereignty as a key approach to governing the Internet.²⁸ On the other hand, there has been speculation about informal cooperation (very similar to the informal cooperation of the security services within the Three Evils doctrine). An investigation by the Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov speculates that since 2015 there has been an active exchange of information about how control over the Internet can be organized between the two countries: while Russia is learning from the conceptual, technological, and institutional aspects of the Great Chinese Firewall, China is also copying some of Russia’s initiatives (e.g. data localization requirements). Further aspects include joint control over domain names, as well as Chinese provision of the technology necessary for the implementation of Russian Internet monitoring initiatives (e.g. the so-called Yarovaya Act, requiring all Russian telecom companies to keep records of all e-mails and phone conversations for a particular period). According to Soldatov, this interaction is organized by a different set of people than those responsible for the official cyber-security initiatives.²⁹ Again, we have to point out that no systematic fully reliable evidence exists on this point: yet the circumventional evidence available indicates intensive (and growing) cooperation between Russia and China in these matters.

1 1 . 1 1. CO N C L U S I O N Our discussion of the Chinese case has revealed patterns that are, to some extent, similar to those we observed in other NDROs in Eurasia and are, to some extent, strikingly different. As most other NDROs, the SCO is highly heterogeneous in terms of its membership and emphasizes personal contacts between elites rather than formal bureaucracies (even the EAEU, which declared its attempt to create a supranational bureaucracy, did not really succeed in this matter). The SCO does play a role in the stabilization of the rule of authoritarian leaders, and this role is specifically tailored to the unusual ²⁷ https://ria.ru/east/20161029/1480281593.html, https://ria.ru/east/20161029/1480271544. html?inj=1, https://ria.ru/east/20161029/1480268810.html?inj=1, accessed July 26, 2018. ²⁸ https://news.sky.com/story/russia-and-china-tighten-internet-controls-10968696; https:// theglobalobservatory.org/2016/12/russia-china-digital-sovereignty-shanghai-cooperationorganization/, accessed July 26, 2018. ²⁹ https://www.svoboda.org/a/28152347.html, accessed July 26, 2018.

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feature of the SCO as opposed to the CIS and the EAEU—the presence of an external power center (China). While China was (and still is) perceived with a great deal of mistrust in Eurasia, the SCO serves as a focal point for discussions and exchange of information contributing to creating trust among regimes. This trust then facilitates their interaction and support of authoritarian leaders (Chinese lending to Central Asia, the interaction of security services, etc.). The Three Evils rhetoric facilitates some of this interaction (e.g. regular refusal of asylum and deportation of opposition leaders or interaction in the area of Internet governance). In other Eurasian regional organizations, no external actors were present, and thus the trust building issue is less important. Returning to Figure 11.2, we can identify the main causal mechanisms associated with the impact of the SCO. First (arrow marked 1 on Figure 11.2), the SCO increases the intensity of elite interaction (Vinokurov and Libman 2017 for this reason attribute the SCO to the group of “talking clubs” in their typology of international organizations, i.e. structures where elite interaction plays an important role). This (arrow 2A) leads to higher levels of trust among elites, as well as (2B) elicits new opportunities for authoritarian learning. Trust initiates further effects: the resolution of territorial conflics (3A: this is traditionally seen as the main success of the SCO, but it is also a factor reducing external tension and thus possibly contributing to the survival of authoritarian leaders) and access to Chinese economic assistance (3B). In some cases, this leads to the increase of economic resources at the disposal of the current leader (4A) and occasionally even creates effects of the limiting factor (4B, Kyrgyzstani case). Finally, the Three Evils rhetoric can be used to increase the legitimacy of the regimes and act as a pretext for security service interaction (5). Trust building is important for authoritarian learning (as it increases the countries’ willingness to adopt each other’s experience, 3C) and for cooperation between security services (not depicted on the graph due to lack of space). As a final remark, we have to stress that the role of the SCO can also change over time, because of the strengthening of the Belt and Road Initiative, which has become China’s main tool of economic foreign policy (in particular, today it is more likely that autocracies will receive support through the Belt and Road Initiative rather than through the SCO). While the SCO failed to create a common financial institution, AIIB and the New Development Bank were created in the Belt and Road Initiative and in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) group. It remains to be seen how much attention the SCO will receive in the future given the presence of these alternative initiatives. At the same time, the key idea of the Belt and Road Initiative is to incorporate (not to exclude) old multilateral organizations and institutions (such as the EAEU or SCO), which means that the SCO could remain an important NDRO in Eurasia.

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12 Conclusion This section summarizes the main findings of the book. We do so in three steps. First, we look at the results of the large-N analysis obtained for the world-wide sample and describe the key results we obtained in terms of the specific features and the impact of non-democratic regional organizations. Second, we consider post-Soviet Eurasia and look at the specifics of NDROs in this part of the world, as well as our ability to generalize from the Eurasian findings. Third, we discuss the implications of our study for understanding global politics and outline the agenda for future research.

12.1. AUTOCRATIC REGIONALISM AS A P HENOMENON AN D I TS IMPACT

12.1.1. Non-democratic regional organizations as a new type of regionalism It has long been recognized that the modern world can be seen as a “world of regions” (Katzenstein 2005). The proliferation of regional organizations resulted in the emergence of numerous groupings and projects world-wide. The research agenda of comparative regionalism (Börzel and Risse 2016) focuses on studying this diverse landscape of regions, understanding both the origins of the regional organizations and their distinctive impact. The core argument of this book is that, in order to understand that impact, we need to acknowledge the existence of a particular type of regional organization—non-democratic organizations (NDROs), that is, regional organizations created by autocracies or led by an authoritarian hegemon. One of the key trends in the development of comparative regionalism studies was to move away from the focus on the EU as a benchmark for regionalism and to acknowledge the variety of different ways that regional organizations can emerge and influence the policy outcomes. The EU is comprised of only democratic states. This featured

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prominently in the theorizing about regionalism and regional organizations in different parts of the world. The main idea of this book is that at both the theoretical and the empirical levels the research should acknowledge that NDROs can be strikingly different from DROs, and that this difference should be subject to thorough analysis. The first NDROs (the COMECON and the League of Arab States) emerged at the onset of the era of modern regionalism, that is, after World War II. Over time, global waves of democratization diminished the number of NDROs, as their members became democratic and adapted new policies and strategies for their states (e.g. the ASEAN or the SACU). However, and this is particularly important for us, recent decades have witnessed a new proliferation of NDROs, associated with the growing activism of non-democratic powers in the global arena. Russia and Venezuela became the cores of networks of regional organizations, frequently used to provide assistance to friendly authoritarian regimes and to insulate them from the democratizing pressure of the West. Organizations like the Russia-led CIS, the Venezuela-led ALBA, or the SCO co-led by Russia and China (together with the GCC led by Saudi Arabia, which was established several decades earlier) are important examples of the contemporary generation of NDROs. Unlike their ideological predecessors (like COMECON), most of them imitate DROs, declaring the same goals and objectives. However, behind the façade of these official goals, hides a different set of unofficial targets, associated with a number of implications for world politics. From this point of view, the first finding of the book is that NDROs constitute a sizable group of regional organizations world-wide, and that, particularly in the modern era of growing geopolitical activism by authoritarian powers, they should not be ignored. Yet our analysis not only documents that the number of NDROs in the modern world is sufficiently large (and that in some parts of the modern world NDROs are especially important), but also shows that these organizations are different from the DROs in terms of a number of crucial characteristics, which are outlined in what follows.

12.1.2. Democratic vs. non-democratic regional organizations: how different are they? How do NDROs differ from the DROs? We find that there are a number of common characteristics that the NDROs of the post-Cold War era share. Three of these findings originate from the large-N analysis we performed and concern the heterogeneity of their membership, power relations, and the governance of NDROs. We add a further important observation, which can be derived from the qualitative analysis: the role of values and ideologies in the NDROs.

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Heterogeneity. A striking feature of modern NDROs is that they contain much more diverse countries than their democratic counterparts. This diversity refers to economy, politics, and culture. In NDROs we frequently find countries with very different levels of development: democratic organizations try to restrict access for countries that are substantially less developed than their average. While in NDROs we regularly find individual democratic countries, finding a non-democracy in a democratic organization such as the EU, for example, is impossible or at least much less likely. Moreover, most of the democratic organizations are made up of member states that share a culture or even a religion (e.g. the EU is combined of only Christian states; the discussion surrounding Turkey’s membership is a good example of how difficult it is to admit a state with a clearly different religious background). In contrast, cultural and religious similarities are not an issue at all for the formation and development of NDROs. The CIS, EAEU, and the SCO, for example, all include both Muslim and Christian countries. Interestingly, cooperation has developed faster and more easily between Christian Russia and Muslim Kazakhstan than between two religiously homogenous states, such as between Christian Belarus and Russia, or between Ukraine and Russia. How can we explain this heterogeneity in the NDROs? Three arguments stand out. First, the leaders of non-democratic countries are less concerned about public disapproval: while in democracies integration with less developed nations may cause public outcry, in non-democracies such decisions could be driven purely by geopolitics or the rent-seeking motives of the leading regimes. In NDROs, as long as the elites are not bound by public attitudes, heterogeneity does not restrict cooperation—thus, NDROs can sometimes demonstrate greater progress toward cooperation than we would expect from comparably heterogeneous bodies (e.g. in the EAEU, the presence of the much less developed Kyrgyzstan has not precluded the countries from moving toward creating a relatively advanced customs union). In some cases, as mentioned, NDROs institute redistribution schemes (ALBA or EAEU), but their leaders also have more freedom to design such schemes than in democratic organizations because they do not need to consult the general public. Second, in case NDROs are driven by the geopolitical power ambitions of their leading states, these leaders could be interested in admitting very heterogeneous countries if it suits their geopolitical goals. This argument relies on the powerful thesis of Davis and Pratt (2017), suggesting that economic international organizations can be effectively used as redistributive coalitions ensuring loyalty to the leading state. Third, personalized decision making in NDROs allows them to afford more heterogeneous membership, as the risks that the supranational bureaucracy passes a decision damaging the interests of any particular country is smaller—leaders have to approve of any decisions and thus can block the undesired outcomes.

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Power asymmetry. Yet another defining feature that makes authoritarian regional organizations different from democratic ones is that they are typically characterized by lower power asymmetry. This is because joining an NDRO with an extreme power asymmetry is much riskier for small countries than joining a democratic regional organization. Democracies are more inclined to follow the rules and therefore the risks of being subject to manipulation (i.e. abuse of its dominant position by the leading state, as was discussed by Stone 2011) for weaker countries are less. If small countries join a regional organization with a very powerful non-democratic hegemon, this is most likely to happen because of coercion by the latter: smaller countries are simply presented with an offer they cannot refuse. There are, however, also examples of coercive organizations dominated by a single hegemon. In the “intermediate” cases of power asymmetry (a leading country, which, however, does not qualify as a hegemon), non-democracies are unlikely to create a regional organization because they should be particularly concerned about the risks of dependence. There are some NDROs which manage to overcome this problem, typically by designing a very specific governance mechanism (postSoviet Eurasia is an example of this). The causality between power asymmetry and the choice of greater integration in an international organization can run in both directions. On the one hand, and quite frequently, NDROs have one particularly strong member from the very beginning. This has been true since NDROs began to be formed: for example, the USSR in the COMECON, Russia in the CIS, Saudi Arabia in the GCC, and Venezuela in ALBA are all instances of one member state dominating a regional organization. In these cases, the power of the leader (or even the hegemon) was clearly not derived from the NDRO. In fact, some NDROs became possible only because of coercion by the leader or because of the leader’s decision to act as a regional paymaster (this concept was introduced by Mattli 1999), sponsoring similar regimes in other countries. On the other hand, by creating NDROs, leading countries frequently intend to strengthen their global or regional influence: first, by marking the members of their international organizations out as an exclusive zone of influence (this is clearly the objective of Russia in Eurasia); second, by restricting any intervention—military or ideational—in their region from outside (this is the case in the SCO with two dominant countries Russia and China); and third, by gaining legitimacy for their global political agenda through the alleged support of their partners in the NDRO (as in Venezuela’s use of ALBA as a tool to strengthen Bolivarian Socialism). Governance. Acharya’s (2001) analysis of ASEAN postulates that a key feature of the governance of this regional organization was based on informal elitebased interaction and socialization (rather than on formal bureaucracies and the involvement of large social groups). Our analysis of a world-wide sample

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of regional organizations confirms that NDROs are much more likely to use governance institutions focusing on the interaction of leaders (e.g. councils of the heads of states) than their democratic counterparts. This is not surprising, as informal politics in general is more important for authoritarian countries: furthermore, the lack of credible commitments in international relations makes it more difficult for them to develop formalized bureaucratic governance structures. Political values. Democratic regional organizations frequently emphasize the importance of democratic values (in the case of the EU, there are even legal obligations on member states to adhere to these values in foreign policy, although whether the member states comply is debatable). NDROs differ in this respect, as older organizations of the post-World War II era and earlier were based on coherent ideologies (e.g. communism in the COMECON). Modern NDROs typically show no commitment to any form of ideology or present themselves as being as democratic as the established democracies. The leadership may have informal values that influence the behavior of these bodies. Yet in most cases these informal values are not systematized and presented as a coherent narrative (which is a necessary prerequisite for an ideology). Rather, they include general sentiments of mistrust towards the West (which compels authoritarian leaders to focus on resisting the possible diffusion of democracy from outside, see Koesel and Bunce 2013). These sentiments may or may not be openly articulated: in many cases NDROs emphasize their pragmatism or their purely economic nature rather than a specific ideology. By doing so, these organizations benefit from the overall legitimacy economic regionalism enjoys world-wide. Sometimes NDROs proclaim, as their core tenet, protection of the full sovereignty of their members in domestic policy matters (Söderbaum 2007); this statement alone hardly qualifies as an ideology, although it differentiates these organizations from their democratic equivalents, where certain requirements regarding domestic governance are typically present. This shift toward pragmatism in NDROs reflects the overall change in the nature of authoritarianism world-wide, with a growing role of competitive and electoral authoritarian regimes, as opposed to the traditional autocracies. In the absence of ideology, factors which keep the autocratic leaders together include common external and internal threats (the diffusion and promotion of democracy, possible unrest in their own domestic populations), economic gains from cooperation that the regimes can extract (and use to stabilize the basis of their own power), and, finally, for some countries, an attempt to strengthen their geopolitical influence by recruiting allies and increasing their bargaining power in the global arena.

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12.1.3. The importance and implications of the NDRO as a new type As its main contribution, this book has identified a new type of regional organization and singled out in which ways this new type—the NDRO—is different from “traditional” democratic regionalism. The next challenge addressed by the book is: in which ways, if at all, is this new type of regionalism important? How and why does it matter? What are the implications of the existence of autocratic regionalism for its member states and for the world? This became the second target of our book—to uncover the hypothetical impact of NDROs on the member states and their respective regions. The logic is simple. Given that there is abundant evidence of the democratizing impact of democratic regional organization (e.g. Pevehouse 2005), should not we expect that non-democratic regional organizations may have an autocratization impact on their member states as well as their regions? The impact and significance of the NDRO can be analyzed under two different categories (see Table 12.1). The first category is the expected benefits of any regional integration (such as, economic integration, a common labor market, open foreign trade among the members, decreasing and eliminating violent conflicts among member states, along with the democratic peace theory of Immanuel Kant, and so many other inspiring studies on perpetual peace outlined in Chapter 2). However, the second type of potential impact of NDROs is unique to specifically non-democratic regional organizations—their hypothetical impact on the consolidation of autocracy in the region. Following the logic outlined in previous paragraphs, we were intrigued to establish whether autocratic regional organizations have any role at all in the autocratization of their respective regions. The literature on the first set of expected outcomes from regional integration, we find that unlike DROs, NDROs are unable to achieve substantial progress in terms of trade integration. We are unable to unambiguously Table 12.1. Impact of regionalism Impact

On political regimes On trade across members On migration across members On conflicts and wars between member states

Differences in impact Democratic regional organizations

Autocratic regional organizations

Democracy reinforcing No impact (in some cases) Increased Typically no impact, increase in some cases No difference between ROs

Autocracy reinforcing No impact (in some cases) No impact Increased (some evidence from the large-N analysis)

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attribute this to the regulation they create or to the implementation of this regulation, as our proxy for trade integration is actual trade flows. In contrast to democracies, autocracies are not interested in liberalizing foreign trade and, in fact, are more concerned about the preferences of protectionist interest groups. This last finding is in line with Kantian peace theory, but also with modern research on the link between democracy and trade liberalization (Mansfield et al. 2002). However, we also find some tentative evidence of NDROs’ success in other areas of economic integration, in particular labor markets (migration). This is most likely linked to the greater autonomy NDROs enjoy from public pressure on their policy making: even if the public disapproves of liberal migration policies, NDROs are able to ignore this for strategic or power reasons. Yet another peculiar discovery of our study is that there seems to be no difference at all between democratic and non-democratic regional organizations in terms of the promotion of peace and conflict management. This is quite unexpected as the Kantian argument points toward a correlation between democracy and peace (or at least a decrease in conflicts)— the absence of violent conflicts among its member states would indeed be the expected result for a DRO. Our initial intuition was that within autocratic regional organizations, violent conflicts might be more regular than in democratic ones. However, as Chapter 7 demonstrates, the contemporary generation of the NDROs is a relatively new phenomenon that emerged on the nexus of the twentieth–twenty-first centuries (and differs in many important respects from the NDROs which existed in the Cold War era). Thus, the actual implications and consequences of this newly emerged type of regionalism will remain on the agenda for further studies. A particularly important question to study is whether NDROs strengthen the authoritarian path of their members. This is, as mentioned, the key concern the literature frequently expresses about NDROs: yet to our knowledge, there exists no systematic evidence supporting or undermining this claim. To some extent, this is understandable: since NDROs are defined as those consisting of non-democratic states, studying their effect on the democracy or lack thereof of their members appears to be tautological—echoing a similar dilemma for the studies of the democratizing impact of DROs, such as the EU. However, our book offers a novel approach that allows us to shed some light on this research question: we investigate whether membership in an NDRO affects the duration of tenure of authoritarian leaders (e.g. presidents). The survival of dictators is important from two perspectives. First, with the exception of very few highly institutionalized autocracies with systematic leadership turnover, in most non-democracies a leader’s tenure is a very clear sign of the stability of the regime. While the change of leadership is, of course, not a guarantee of democratization, it at least offers a window of opportunity for political change. Second, survival in presidential office is a key goal of authoritarian leaders: thus, we can investigate whether membership

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in an NDRO supports this goal of the autocrats. Our main finding is that the tenure of presidents of member states of NDROs was significantly longer than the tenure of presidents of non-member-states in an NDRO (Chapter 6). Thus, the book demonstrated that a state’s membership in an NDRO has a significant political impact on the survival of the president in office. In the case studies presented in Chapter 11, we trace the particular mechanisms explaining this effect. We acknowledge, however, that there are limits to our ability to interpret quantitative results as causal evidence—we see our finding regarding the link between NDRO membership and the tenure of autocrats as a possible avenue for further research, in particular for detailed process-tracing studies. What are the causal mechanisms NDROs could use to support authoritarianism? The book tackles this question as well. First, NDROs are crucial for providing legitimacy to authoritarian leaders. Precisely because of the broad acceptance of regionalism as a legitimate form of international relations, creating NDROs can be a helpful tool to legitimize various forms of interaction between autocracies and to shield them from criticism by democratic actors (both states and regional organizations). For example, NDROs can elevate the international status of authoritarian regimes, making them appear well respected and recognized. They can also explicitly criticize the promotion of Western democracy and endorse non-democratic practices, as well as signal to the West the existence of a united front of authoritarian leaders (Cooley 2015; Whitehead 2015). Second, NDROs can be used to redistribute resources (and even military assistance) provided by some autocracies to others. Importantly, while in many cases there is a leading country, which is assisting weaker authoritarian states, NDROs can be pioneered and supported by smaller authoritarian states to a larger extent than by the big ones—because precisely smaller autocracies are in greater need of recognition and support. At the same time, we do not argue that all NDROs unequivocally support authoritarianism. While democratic regional organizations in general have been acknowledged to play an important role in promoting and stabilizing democracy (Pevehouse 2005), not all of them do so with equal effectiveness (and some of them fail to exercise significant impact, for example because of poor governance structures or a lack of commitment by their members). NDROs, equally, can fail to support authoritarian regimes (or even lack the goal of autocracy promotion in the first place). Furthermore, there is a fundamental question about the limits of autocracy promotion (as well as of any external influence on political regimes, see Way 2015): how important are external influences as opposed to the domestic factors of regime transition? The small-N evidence of this book sheds additional light on these research questions as well. Two observations reported in this and the preceding sections—the autocracy promotion effect and the heterogeneity of NDRO membership—create an interesting puzzle. Authoritarian regionalism seems to be driven by two

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tendencies. On the one hand, pragmatic considerations make authoritarian states invite various countries—including democratic ones—to join their clubs to promote economic or geopolitical goals. On the other hand, the functioning of the NDROs is conducive to the consolidation of authoritarian regimes— partly this is due to the socialization of the elites and mutual learning in an authoritarian context. For different NDROs, the relative importance of one of these tendencies seems to differ, and this is yet another important issue one has to take into account while studying this particular type of regional organization.

1 2 . 2. T H E E U RAS I AN E NI G M A

12.2.1. Post-Soviet Eurasia as a hub of authoritarian regionalism Our book’s qualitative empirical focus is on the countries of the post-Soviet Eurasia. The region is comprised of twelve former Soviet Union republics and is one of the most prolific in terms of the number and spread of NDROs. To a large extent, this can be attributed to the historical legacies of communism (Beissinger and Kotkin 2014; Pop-Eleches and Tucker 2017). Eurasian regionalism started immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union (in fact, the first proto-regional agreement was signed before the Soviet Union was officially dissolved, and the first regional organization in Eurasia—the CIS—was set up by the same agreement which liquidated the USSR). After that, the number of regional organizations in Eurasia only grew. Historically, the hegemonic state in Eurasia—Russia—was very active in using regional organizations to mark what it perceived to be a privileged sphere of influence. In the early 1990s, there were a high hopes of a potential democratization in Eurasia. By the early 2000s, it became clear that in many Eurasian states, including Russia, hybrid regimes were being replaced by consolidated autocracies (Fish 2005; Frye 2010; Gel’man 2015). As a result, Eurasian regional organizations turned into NDROs (according to the definition applied in this book) and became potential tools for autocracy promotion and diffusion. The extent to which they exercised this role, as well as the general outcomes of their functioning, depend upon the particular design of the regional organizations and their objectives—both formal and informal. In this book, we have investigated the three most important post-Soviet regional organizations from the point of view of their potential contribution to autocracy promotion. These three organizations represent the three possible policy domains in which a regional organization could operate—politics, security, and economy.

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The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was the oldest Eurasian organization in existence, having emerged in 1991. Being originally designed as a multi-purpose organization with a strong economic core, it did not fulfill this function due to contradictions among its member states (Abdelal 2001; Darden 2009; Hale 2009). However, its original design included strong commitments to promoting political values—this became the foundation for the development of a particular autocracy promotion mechanism the CIS assumed since the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU)’s first predecessor, the first Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia, emerged in 1995 as an attempt to advance an economic regional integration agenda among a smaller group of Eurasian countries than that of the CIS membership. In 2010, the Customs Union of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan became the first Eurasian regional organization to produce actual policy effects in terms of economic integration. Finally, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) differs from two other regional organizations because it has two core states—Russia and China. Starting with a pure security agenda (the Shanghai Five and the issue of border disputes), over time it became a full-fledged regional organization with a variety of tasks, but security remains its core issue. We do not claim that Eurasian regionalism is representative of the world of NDROs: in fact, Eurasian NDROs evolved under very specific circumstances, which can be attributed to the Soviet legacy, the proliferation of ethnic conflicts and secessionism, as well as the strong role of what we refer to as the “limiting factor”—the strong dependence of the economy on a particular resource or type of economic relation. But in spite of this specificity, Eurasia confirms many of the general claims made in the large-N analysis of this book. Eurasian NDROs are immensely diverse: they include both rich and poor countries, countries with different religions, and heterogeneous political regimes (the majority of Eurasian states are non-democratic, however Eurasian regional organizations also include a few democracies). For example, the democratic revolution in Armenia in 2018 has not influenced this country’s membership in the EAEU. One can see that the leaders of Eurasian states are much more tolerant about implementing measures that look attractive from the foreign policy perspective even if they are unpopular at home. Thus, Russia keeps its borders open for migrants from Central Asia, which is conducive to Russian influence in this region, but is opposed by a large part of Russian society. A democratic country would rarely manage to implement such a policy. Furthermore, in two of the NDROs we study—the CIS and the SCO—informal leader-level interaction is much more important than formalized bureaucracy. The EAEU attempted to develop a strong international bureaucracy, but even these bureaucrats tend to shift all the questions they are unsure about to the political leadership. Eurasian organizations either explicitly refuse to use any value basis (EAEU, which presents itself as a purely

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economic organization), or use the rhetoric of democracy while filling its vocabulary with a different content (CIS), or concentrate on security and sovereignty as the main values (SCO). Eurasia does differ from other NDROs as it represents a series of cases where a leading state is powerful enough to create concerns about manipulation, but not strong enough to coerce other countries into membership. In case of the EAEU and the CIS, this issue is particularly pronounced. We have argued that some institutional designs could assist authoritarian states in overcoming this problem. In case of the CIS, it was the “à-la-carte” regionalism allowing each state to opt out of any agreement. Thus, essentially, each CIS member decides for itself how far it wants to go in terms of regional integration: this should lessen the risk of manipulation. In case of the EAEU, smaller countries resisted any politicization of the organization: Kazakhstan, which was essential for the creation of the EAEU in the first place, was also essential for blocking any political elements (citizenship, ideology, parliament, etc.) from becoming part of its framework.

12.2.2. Autocracy Diffusion in Eurasia The most important question for us, however, is how the Eurasian NDROs affect the authoritarian regime consolidation among their members. In what follows, we briefly summarize the main mechanisms present in each of the NDROs, which we unveiled in this book. Table 12.2 summarizes the main findings of our analysis. It distinguishes, first, between direct and indirect mechanisms. Direct mechanisms are associated with the activity of the NDRO itself as an organization—this is what is typically studied in comparative regionalism research. Indirect mechanisms are associated with the actions of the member countries, which are triggered by the existence of the NDRO. Importantly, we do not claim that the Eurasian NDROs possess “actorness” in the sense typically attributed to the EU—the ability to act independently of the will of the national governments. Still, there is a difference between cases, when the impact is “produced” by the NDRO bodies and institutions themselves, and Table 12.2. Political impact of Eurasian NDROs NDRO

Type of impact

Unofficial goals

Instrument/mechanism

CIS EAEU

Direct Indirect

Legitimacy provision Geopolitical security

SCO

Direct and indirect

Multilateral trust-building to achieve success in bilateral cooperation

Electoral observers’ missions Sanctions and economic assistance Economic, security, and rhetorical cooperation with China

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when the NDRO is a pretext (or a cause) for the change of the policy of member countries, which in turn results in (conscious or unconscious) autocracy promotion. The CIS represents a case of direct impact. Given that the organization has very limited impact on economic or security issues, the main area where it has potential to engage in autocracy promotion is legitimacy: using rhetoric, which could be useful for authoritarian regimes. Our book has discussed one particular example of this rhetoric, associated with the activity of the CIS Observers Mission. Since the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, the CIS massively developed its capacities in electoral monitoring. By doing so it, first, created an alternative interpretation of many of the norms and principles of electoral monitoring from democratic international organizations (such as the OSCE): for example what the main threats to free elections could be, how much “respect” to “national specificity” should be shown, etc. Second, the CIS observers routinely approve of any non-democratic electoral practices in Eurasia and provide authoritarian leaders with an argument in favor of continuing their practices. The use of similar language by the CIS and the OSCE dilutes the impact and the legitimacy of international observers and strengthens the authoritarian regimes in Eurasia. The SCO displays a mixture of direct and indirect impacts. The main feature of the SCO as opposed to the CIS and the EAEU is that this organization includes China—an external actor, which is viewed with a lot of mistrust by most Eurasian countries. Thus, an important task of the SCO is through regular contacts and socialization among authoritarian leaders to promote trust between them. This trust building provides opportunities for direct interaction between countries (which may be embedded in the framework of the SCO meetings and summits, but can also operate on a bilateral basis), providing support to authoritarian leaders: for example, economic support or exchanging information between intelligence services. In addition, the SCO serves as a platform for authoritarian learning (e.g. the Sino–Russian exchange on Internet governance partly happens within the SCO framework). Finally, the SCO’s rhetoric of the Three Evils is an excellent foundation for using antiterrorist and anti-extremist activities against any opposition: for example by deportating opposition activists from one country to another or through an exchange of information. The EAEU, finally, offers an example of indirect effects. If one looks at the organization as such, it limits its attention only to economic issues and does not deal with politics; sometimes it even constrains Russian actions, making it more difficult to implement unilateral foreign policy choices. But, at the same time, the EAEU’s high importance on the Russian foreign policy agenda (at least until recently) triggers changes in Russian foreign policy. To press the countries of Eurasia (in the regions Russia sees as subject to geopolitical competition with the EU) to join the EAEU, Russia uses an intricate web

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of sanctions and economic incentives, which in many cases promote authoritarian leaders. However, in other parts of Eurasia, where the geopolitical competition is perceived with less urgency, Russia refrains from doing so. The case of the EAEU shows us that the comparison of the organizations themselves may be insufficient to study their impact: one needs to investigate indirect and subtle effects associated with the change of governmental policies as well. Our analysis of Eurasian NDROs reveals yet another important observation, which has to be taken into account while studying this topic. In many cases, students of regionalism avoid studying regional organizations, which appear to be “defunct”—that is, do not produce policy output, which is proclaimed in their charters and founding documents. The CIS, for example, has had very limited results in terms of economic cooperation; the SCO, while it did manage to achieve impressive results in terms of security, fails to demonstrate similar outcomes in economic affairs (because of Russia’s concerns regarding deeper integration with China). However, the NDROs are still important, first, because they constitute a different type of regionalism; second, because of their importance for the evolution of political regimes studied in this book.

12.2.3. What can we learn from post-Soviet Eurasia? What are the main lessons we can draw from studying Eurasia? The research on the regional organizations, and comparative regionalism in general, can be seen as a particularly fruitful area for combining generalist approaches of International Relations and Comparative Politics with the insights from area studies. Regional projects of integration in different parts of the world all bear a number of unique features: regional organizations, ultimately, are large units of comparative analysis (as compared to nation states or subnational regions as units of analysis). Large units of comparative analysis make the development of specific and unique features unavoidable. From that perspective, any regional integration project is unique in its own way, starting with the EU. Thus, studying any region, one has to acknowledge the uniqueness of its development and the impact of history. To reiterate, we do not treat the Eurasian case as “representative” and the book exercises a lot of caution while making any claims about other parts of the world where NDROs cluster (Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East). The Eurasian example can be seen as a testing playground for revealing different mechanisms and channels of autocracy promotion through authoritarian regionalism simply because of the multitude of NDROs in this part of the world. Our research has identified a variety of instruments, which are used for this purpose. We do not want to claim that the same instruments are

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applied in all parts of the world where NDROs are present, or that they are going to be equally effective elsewhere. For example, a specific feature of Eurasia is that Soviet nostalgia makes regionalism very popular in many countries: this allows their authoritarian leaders (e.g. Lukashenka of Belarus) to use regionalist rhetoric to increase their domestic legitimacy, portraying their opposition as “enemies of integration.” But the Eurasian case has still allowed us to capture most of the mechanisms and tools our book is interested in (with the exception of military interventions, which, however, constitute a very rare and specific form of “governance transfer” (Börzel and van Hüllen 2014) in the modern world. More importantly, despite its uniqueness, Eurasian regionalism has demonstrated the presence of the main characteristics of the NDROs world-wide which were discovered through the large-N analysis of all regional organizations at the global—the presence of heterogeneous members (economic, cultural, political), governance structures, and the impact on migration, trade, conflicts, and political regimes. Some of the mechanisms identified at the global level of analysis (e.g. the impact on the tenure of presidents of member states) was also found at a regional level in Eurasia. Therefore, despite the challenge comparative regionalism studies face due to the specificity of the units of analysis, the book links theoretical claims at global and regional levels of analysis and tests the existence of a new type of regionalism as well as its impact from both global and regional perspectives.

12.3. WORLD-WIDE IMPLICATIONS The regional organizations established and sponsored by autocracies are becoming increasingly important for three reasons. First, NDROs have an important role in initiating, contributing, or responding to global political crises. The GCC, for example, played a key part in the authoritarian response to the Arab Spring (as discussed in the Introduction to this book). The conflict over the membership of Ukraine in the EAEU (founded by Russia) contributed to the emergence of the Crimean crisis of 2014 and the subsequent war in Ukraine. This shows that not only the actual functions performed by the NDROs, but also their perception by the members and non-members and discussion about their development could play an important role in international politics. Second, NDROs have an increasing influence on the structure of international economic ties, challenging and modifying the existing order created by global organizations such as the WTO and the IMF. The advancement of the AIIB, led by China, and the protectionist policies of the EAEU are good examples of these changes. Both cases represent relatively new phenomena, so providing clear-cut assessments is difficult. However, some preliminary

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assessments indicate that, for example, the AIIB (as well as other new financial institutions, such as the New Development Bank of the SCO and the Silk Road Fund) will provide access to loans to countries that do not implement the institutional reforms required by the IMF and the World Bank, thus reducing the pressure of conditionality associated with traditional international financial institutions (Liao 2015). These organizations could potentially institutionalize the spheres of influence of large non-democratic states.¹ Empirical research on the experience of the regional organizations that already exist should be helpful in understanding the possible implications of establishing new NDROs. These new organizations could also create new rules governing international trade, restricting some trade flows and promoting others. Calder (2012), for example, refers to the “New Continentalism” in Eurasia as an alternative set of rules for the international trade emerging in this region. For instance, instead of relying on universal systems of rules and regulations applicable to all governmental and non-governmental actors, the new approaches promoted by authoritarian states concentrate on implementing specific projects (e.g. infrastructure) and frequently provide benefits to selected companies with close ties to the state. Rules are seen as a nuisance. Whether and how global economic organizations will manage to coexist with NDROs remains to be seen. Third, NDROs offer autocracies an attractive alternative to regional integration with the West. There are only a few non-democracies which are able to maintain a distance from all regional organizations and chose to do so; the majority of them are involved in some regional organizations to a certain extent. The existence of NDROs offers them a choice of which organizations to participate in. This could play an important role for the overall democratization process world-wide and constrain the effectiveness of democracy promotion. Indeed, NDROs delegitimize the DROs, by providing an alternative for countries to join without making any political commitments or by explicitly or implicitly criticizing the activity of DROs (e.g. by reinterpreting the main concepts such as democracy, human rights, sovereignty, free and fair elections, or terrorism). The influence of NDROs on political regimes, combined with the growing importance of these organizations in several parts of the world, has become a major cause of concern for policy makers in the US and the EU. The EU, for example, has for decades implemented a systematic agenda of promoting regionalism world-wide, engaging regional organizations all over the globe. In the case of authoritarian regionalism, this policy could strengthen its ¹ Empirically, we have to acknowledge that it is not clear how the AIIB, for example, will perform: it could turn out, as discussed, to be a challenger to the established organizations, mimic them in its funding strategies, or cooperate with them.

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legitimacy and hence its negative effects on regime transition among its members. Thus, it is important to look beyond the smokescreen of official goals declared by the NDROs and to carefully examine the possible impact of these bodies, determining whether interaction with these organizations should be pursued. However, so far, this concern has rarely been coupled with a thorough investigation of how NDROs actually function and whether they contribute to the persistence and survival of non-democratic regimes in certain parts of the world. Our book does not suggest that all NDROs have the same policy outcomes. Certainly, it is important not to depict all organizations, including authoritarian countries, in the same light. We do not argue that all organizations created by authoritarian states have been established to exercise regime-boosting— rather, that one needs to carefully analyze the diverse policy effects of these organizations and, importantly, acknowledge that regionalism can often become an obstacle to democratization rather than a factor supporting it. We also do not claim that any NDRO should be subject to a policy of “containment” and “non-recognition” by the West—this may well turn out to be counter-productive. Instead, the book suggests that the NDROs should be recognized as a very unique new type of regional organization and, as such, they should become the subject of careful analysis by both scholars and policy makers rather than be reduced to simplified assumptions or ignored. This book is the first step in this direction.

12.4. AGENDA F OR FUTURE RESEARCH As the final remark, we would like to draw the attention of researchers to a number of potential further topics of investigation associated with NDROs. In particular, three areas appear to call for more detailed studies from our point of view. First, while the empirical focus of our book was on post-Soviet Eurasia, it would be useful to devote further attention to studying NDROs in other parts of the world: in particular the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. While we have made some remarks about these NDROs in this book, we understand that only thorough investigation with deep regional expertise could shed sufficient light on this topic—and argue that such analysis would be highly beneficial for the literature and policy practice. Second, our attention was on the impact of NDROs on political regimes (and to some extent on trade, conflicts, and migration)—but how do NDROs differ from their democratic counterparts in other policy areas? For example, what are the effects of NDROs in the area of the environmental policies of their member states? How do they deal with financial crises? How does membership in these

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organizations impact on the political and social trust of people? These and other topics call for future investigation. Finally, while we worked with a singular concept of “authoritarian regionalism” in this book, we acknowledge the diversity of policy effects, objectives, and designs of NDROs. If referring to a “non-democracy” is equivalent to talking about “non-elephant animal” (as we stated in Chapter 2), so that NDROs could also be called “non-elephant regional organizations,” a more detailed typology based on a variety of typologies of authoritarianism (as well as other factors) could be of great importance. In other words, what are the sub-types within NDROs? How are they significant? These questions are not rhetorical and have important implications for policy. In other words, some types of NDRO can be easier to deal with and can even be used to adjust democratization process. In contrast, other types of NDRO are strong and consolidated actors on the stage of world politics and might have very different implications for diplomacy and international relations. While our book has offered some comments on this issue, more research is warranted. Indeed, there have been cases when an NDRO has transformed into a DRO and, as such, obtained new policy goals and new governance mechanisms. For example, the abolition of the apartheid regime in South Africa changed the design of SACU, which moved from a hegemonic structure with weaker nations delegating their authorities to South Africa to a more equitable arrangement. The Asian crisis of 1997 changed both the political nature of the ASEAN countries (with the collapse of the authoritarian regime in Indonesia) and the goals of ASEAN itself, making it much more proactive in terms of economic integration. These changes within regional organizations, the trends from autocracy to democracy among their member states are of great significance not only for scholars but also for policy makers. Yet, they remain heavily under-researched and often misunderstood. This book is the first attempt in the field of comparative regionalism to shed light on the phenomenon of NDROs from both global and regional perspectives. It calls for attention to be paid to an increasingly important and under-researched phenomenon of authoritarian regionalism and its transformation. These issues should remain on the agenda for further studies by students of comparative regionalism and politics.

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APPENDICES I. Extended econometric analysis: Tables Table A.1. Impact of the type of RO on regime heterogeneity, OLS (1) Average polity score

−0.195** (0.097) −0.039* (0.020)

−0.067 (0.043) −0.056*** (0.014)

0.224 (0.428) −0.009 (0.019) 5.640*** (0.697) 54 0.4

−0.034 (0.410) −0.007 (0.019) 5.510*** (0.731) 54 0.306

Polity score of the hegemon GDP p.c.

(2)

GDP Population Age Constant Observations R²

(3) −0.248** (0.096)

−0.045 (0.057) 0.797 (0.773) −0.013 (0.020) 5.415*** (0.843) 54 0.33

(4)

−0.098** (0.049) −0.114** (0.050) 1.143 (0.815) −0.014 (0.022) 5.111*** (0.854) 54 0.174

Note: robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

Table A.2. Impact of the type of RO on religious heterogeneity, OLS (1) Average polity score

−0.015 (0.018) −0.004 (0.004)

−0.011 (0.016) −0.005 (0.004)

0.904*** (0.123) −0.005 (0.004) 1.591*** (0.199) 54 0.422

0.873*** (0.131) −0.005 (0.004) 1.605*** (0.221) 54 0.423

Polity score of the hegemon GDP p.c.

(2)

GDP Population Age Constant Observations R²

(3) −0.011 (0.017)

−0.031** (0.016) 1.198*** (0.203) −0.006 (0.004) 1.549*** (0.196) 54 0.449

Note: robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

(4)

−0.013 (0.015) −0.034** (0.013) 1.191*** (0.202) −0.006 (0.004) 1.580*** (0.222) 54 0.456

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Appendices

Table A.3. Impact of the type of RO on income heterogeneity, OLS (1) Average polity score

−545.160*** (181.967)

Polity score of the hegemon GDP p.c. GDP Population Age Constant Observations R²

325.796*** (51.631)

(2)

−484.026*** (124.709) 298.484*** (49.165)

(3) −222.888 (271.646)

(4)

−317.807* (159.548)

704.234*** 648.687*** (119.434) (126.463) 3,382.195*** 2,089.260** −4,271.106*** −4,528.144** (1,184.810) (891.903) (1,374.965) (1,701.841) 54.188 56.843* 93.498 92.633* (38.850) (32.717) (56.378) (51.734) 3,210.394** 4,066.074*** 5,311.303** 6,157.750*** (1,514.027) (1,472.884) (2,120.023) (2,098.798) 54 54 54 54 0.538 0.605 0.264 0.317

Note: robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

Table A.4. Impact of the type of RO on power asymmetry, OLS (2) Average polity score

−0.001 (0.007)

Polity score of the hegemon GDP p.c. GDP Population

(4)

Observations R²

(8)

0.002 (0.007)

0.002 (0.002) −0.049 (0.057) −0.003 (0.003)

0.011** (0.005) 0.002 (0.002) −0.028 (0.054) −0.003 (0.002)

0.614*** (0.087) 54 0.083

0.567*** (0.081) 54 0.166

Age Constant

(6)

0.012** (0.005) −0.091 (0.112) −0.002 (0.002) 0.003 (0.008) 0.628*** (0.089) 54 0.062

Note: Robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

−0.067 (0.098) −0.002 (0.002) 0.004 (0.007) 0.577*** (0.082) 54 0.16

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Table A.5. Effect of the type of RO on governance structure, logit Specification Dep.var.: council of the heads of states Average polity score

(2) −0.234** (0.100)

Polity score of the hegemon Dep.var.: council of the ministers of foreign affairs Average polity score

0.074 (0.127)

Polity score of the hegemon Dep.var.: council of the ministers of trade Average polity score

−0.097 (0.102) 0.003 (0.068)

Dep.var.: Parliamentary assembly

0.013 (0.046)

Dep.var.: Secretariat with the right to initiate decisions

−0.028 (0.061)

−0.017 (0.047)

−0.039 (0.062)

−0.003 (0.068)

0.033 (0.076)

Polity score of the hegemon

−0.250** (0.123)

0.028 (0.057) −0.072 (0.083)

−0.015 (0.130)

Polity score of the hegemon

Polity score of the hegemon

0.061 (0.102)

0.008 (0.052)

Dep.var.: Commission with supranational authorities

Average polity score

−0.377*** (0.144)

(8)

0.092 (0.071)

−0.01 (0.110)

Polity score of the hegemon

Average polity score

−0.026 (0.064)

(6)

0.03 (0.052)

Dep.var.: Commission

Average polity score

−0.211** (0.088)

0.199** (0.093)

Polity score of the hegemon

Average polity score

(4)

−0.013 (0.083)

0.001 (0.045)

−0.018 (0.086) 0.041 (0.056)

0.008 (0.053)

Note: All covairates of Table A1 are included; coefficients not reported due to space constraints. See also note to Table A1.

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Table A.6. Impact of the type of RO on trade integration, OLS (1) Average polity score

0.439* (0.221)

Polity score of the hegemon GDP p.c.

(2)

0.05 (0.071)

Age Constant Observations R²

6.111* (3.107) 0.033 (0.041) 0.102 (2.093) 49 0.25

(4)

0.208 (0.167) 0.035 (0.146) 0.098 (0.080)

GDP Population

(3)

6.416* (3.247) 0.028 (0.042) 0.966 (2.188) 49 0.2

0.075 (0.096)

0.862*** (0.205) −1.659 (2.269) 0.048 (0.036) 0.917 (1.578) 49 0.524

0.919*** (0.230) −1.978 (2.385) 0.049 (0.036) 1.242 (1.712) 49 0.515

Note: Robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

Table A.7. Impact of the type of RO on integration in the area of FDI, OLS (1) Average polity score

0.347 (0.444)

Polity score of the hegemon GDP p.c.

0.286* (0.156)

(2)

−0.219 (0.241) 0.339** (0.154)

GDP Population Age Constant Observations R²

11.284** (5.319) 0.193** (0.093) −7.644* (4.314) 52 0.37

11.036** (5.172) 0.189** (0.089) −5.996 (4.305) 52 0.369

(3) 0.247 (0.350)

1.618*** (0.471) −4.344 (4.038) 0.242** (0.101) −5.013 (3.593) 52 0.569

Note: robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

(4)

−0.069 (0.220)

1.691*** (0.501) −5.130 (3.972) 0.244** (0.102) −3.894 (3.541) 52 0.565

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Table A.8. Impact of the type of RO on integration in the area of migration, OLS (1) Average polity score

0.780 (0.639)

Polity score of the hegemon GDP p.c.

(2)

Age Constant Observations R²

(4)

0.017 (0.799)

−0.750*** (0.137)

0.668* (0.379) −0.709*** (0.118)

8.587 (5.410) 0.184 (0.164) 34.566*** (7.964) 54 0.311

10.389** (4.793) 0.18 (0.162) 33.445*** (7.742) 54 0.322

GDP Population

(3)

0.274 (0.464) −1.561*** (0.426) 25.679*** (7.041) 0.095 (0.151) 29.772*** (7.950) 54 0.169

−1.564*** (0.379) 26.317*** (7.098) 0.095 (0.154) 28.488*** (7.927) 54 0.173

Note: Robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

Table A.9. Impact of the type of RO on the likelihood of conflicts, logit (1) Average polity score

−0.178 (0.195) −0.392 (0.332)

−0.100 (0.119) −0.445 (0.419)

2.297* (1.316) −0.029 (0.034) −0.409 (1.439) 54 0.360

2.072 (1.434) −0.028 (0.028) −0.239 (1.244) 54 0.370

Polity score of the hegemon GDP p.c.

(2)

GDP Population Age Constant Observations Pseudo R²

(3) −0.414 (0.259)

−1.600 (1.520) 8.499* (4.847) −0.054* (0.029) −1.081 (1.072) 54 0.539

Note: Robust standard errors in parentheses. *** significant at 1% level, ** 5%, * 10%.

(4)

−0.221 (0.146) −1.236* (0.732) 7.250** (3.394) −0.044** (0.018) −1.441 (0.959) 54 0.562

Table A.10. Determinants of the number of acts of the CIS unconditionally accepted by individual member states, 1991–2010, dep.var.: number of acts accepted, negative binomial estimations

Democracy (Freedom House) Economic reforms (EBRD) GDP per capita GDP Log GDP Foreign trade to GDP Share of CIS trade WTO member Share of ethnic Russians

(2)

(3)

(4)

0.143*** 0.134*** 0.124*** 0.154*** (0.027) (0.031) (0.029) (0.029) 0.909*** 0.904*** 0.897*** 0.887*** (0.110) (0.111) (0.111) (0.104) 0.000 (0.000) 0.000*** (0.000) −0.257** (0.108)

(5)

(6)

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

Observations McFadden R² McFadden adjusted R² Cragg & Uhler R² ML R² LR test Note: see Table 6.2.

(12)

0.160*** 0.108*** 0.156*** 0.110*** 0.106*** (0.031) (0.029) (0.028) (0.029) (0.032) 0.919*** 0.960*** 0.870*** 0.946*** 0.821*** (0.124) (0.147) (0.109) (0.155) (0.096)

0.060* (0.034) 0.836*** (0.144)

0.131*** (0.038) 0.835*** (0.145)

0.092*** (0.033) 0.847*** (0.140)

−0.193* (0.102) 0.001 (0.001)

0.163 (0.166) −0.001 (0.001) 0.010** (0.005)

−0.131 (0.151)

0.079 (0.155) −0.000 (0.001) 0.008** (0.003)

0.038 −0.252** 0.043 −0.015 (0.126) (0.108) (0.123) (0.152) 0.000 0.000 (0.001) (0.001) 0.012*** 0.012*** (0.004) (0.004) 0.03 0.025 (0.021) (0.019) −0.042*** (0.007)

−0.042*** (0.008)

Share of titular ethnicity Constant

(11)

−0.202 −0.193 −0.076 5.902** 4.188* −1.213 5.796** −1.315 1.486 −3.096 (0.529) (0.531) (0.542) (2.415) (2.460) (3.298) (2.398) (3.232) (3.586) (4.375) 288 288 288 288 288 270 288 270 240 234 0.190 0.191 0.191 0.191 0.191 0.190 0.191 0.190 0.188 0.185 0.174 0.173 0.174 0.174 0.173 0.170 0.173 0.169 0.166 0.161 0.844 0.844 0.844 0.845 0.845 0.845 0.845 0.845 0.839 0.836 0.844 0.844 0.844 0.845 0.845 0.845 0.845 0.845 0.839 0.836 534.255*** 534.439*** 534.832*** 536.104*** 536.371*** 503.112*** 536.162*** 503.154*** 437.962*** 423.200***

0.013*** 0.010** (0.004) (0.004) 2.139 −2.512 (3.479) (4.077) 248 238 0.185 0.185 0.164 0.161 0.834 0.835 0.834 0.835 444.869*** 428.829***

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(1)

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279

II. Selected observations for the FH data

.2

Density

.15

.1

.05 1

2

3

4 Mean FH score

5

6

Figure A.1. Distribution of the average Freedom House scores of the ROs

Kernel density estimate .2

Density

.15

.1

.05 0

2

4

6

8

FH score of the leading country kernel = epanechnikov, bandwidth = 0.8198

Figure A.2. Distribution of political regimes of the leading countries of ROs according to Freedom House

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Appendices 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% FH

Polity DRO

NDRO

Figure A.3. Share of democratic and non-democratic ROs in our sample

6

RBK CU CEMAC SCO EURASEC IGAD GCC OAPEC CEPGL CAEU, GAFTA CIS LAS ECCAS

MRC

Average regime of the members

ECO OMVS ASEAN CILSS OMVG

5

4

NBA LCBC EAC

COMESA AU WAEMU

MSG GUAM ECOWAS

BIMSTEC D8 SAARC SADC

BSEC SACU

3

CACM TPSEP/P4 ACT CAN MERCOSUR CEFTA DR-CAFTA LAES ACS CEI SPARTECA Pacific Alliance

2

NAFTA

ALBA

APEC

CARICOM

CBSS

EU EFTA NC UEB

1 0

2

4

6

8

Regime of the leader

Figure A.4. Political regime of the leader and of the members of the RO (Freedom House)

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5

4.5

4

3.5

3

2.5

1975

1985 Average FH

1995

2005

Average FH world

Figure A.5. Average Freedom House score of a member of a regional organization and of a country in the world, 1975–2005

4.8

4

4.6

3

4.4 2 4.2 1 4 0

1975

1985

1995

2005

–1

3.8 3.6 3.4

–2 Average Polity hegemon

Average FH hegemon

Figure A.6. Average Freedom House and Polity IV score of the leading country of the RO, 1975–2005

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90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

1975

1985 NDRO (FH)

1995

2005

NDRO (leading state, FH)

Figure A.7. Share of NDROs according to different criteria, 1975–2005

III. Extended econometric analysis: Robustness checks Robustness checks to Tables 9.2 and A.10 1. Including fixed effects in non-linear estimators and, in particular, a negative binomial, has been subject to intensive debate in the econometrics literature. Typically, the inclusion of fixed effect dummies in the regression should cause an incidental parameter problem if each of the sub-groups is small enough. Hausman et al. (1984) developed a conditional fixed effects negative binomial model for count data; this, however, was criticized as being incapable of capturing all time-invariant effects. Hence, Allison and Waterman (2002) advocate the use of a negative binomial with dummies, claiming that they can find no evidence of incidental parameter bias. In this book, we estimate negative binomial regression with fixed effect dummies as the baseline specification, but also conditional fixed effects negative binomial regressions, and Poisson regressions, which according to Cameron and Trivedi (1998) do not suffer from incidental parameter bias (similarly to OLS). Our results remain robust to these modifications. In addition, Allison and Waterman (2002) suggest that, while using negative binomial regressions with dummies, one has to adjust standard errors by multiplying them by the square root of the ratio of deviance to its degrees of freedom.

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We have performed this exercise for specification (1) for all three democracy measures (deviance was obtained using the fitstat routine in Stata); the results for democracy and economic reforms remain significant. 2. A further set of robustness checks includes the following elements. First, we reestimated all regressions while replacing the FH democracy indicator with the Polity IV indicator. The results remained exactly the same in terms of the significance and robustness of our findings. We also replicate our results for the FH Nations in Transit indicators, which are available only for a short period of time: the result is mostly robust as well (more so for OLS than for negative binomial). Second, we took the log of the dependent variable and ran OLS regressions. Again, the results remained robust. Third, we applied six modifications to the regressions we ran: (a) excluding country fixed effects; (b) excluding area fixed effects; (c) excluding time period fixed effects; (d) excluding all fixed effects; (e) clustering standard errors by country and area; and (f) using non-clustered standard errors. The results remain mostly robust for all three modifications. Fourth, we re-ran all regressions excluding each of the countries one by one. The results remained robust for this transformation, meaning that our findings are neither driven by the inclusion of Russia in the baseline dataset (for Russia as the leading state, the predictions of our hypotheses could be questionable), nor by the inclusion of Georgia (which, as mentioned, left the CIS; see Chapter 9), nor by any other country outlier. Fifth, we extended our measure of agreements by including agreements signed with a caveat or reservation (which, as discussed above, could have different implications) into the count of agreements we use as our dependent variable. The results do not change, possibly because the set of agreements signed with reservations is rather small. 3. A more serious problem can be associated with how we pool our data. We include data for all six areas where agreements could have been signed in the same regression. Our theoretical analysis of Chapter 2, however, suggests that the effect of our key explanatory variables should vary across different types of agreement. Furthermore, it is likely that the effects of control variables could vary as well. To resolve this problem, we applied a two-step approach. First, we relaxed the assumptions of the initial model, allowing for policy area-specific slopes. Specifically, instead of regressing the dependent variable on the FH index, we regressed it on a set of five variables, each equal to the FH index if the observation belonged to a particular policy area, and 0 otherwise. We used the same technique to obtain policy-specific slopes for the democracy variable and also ran regressions allowing for policy-specific slopes for both democratization and marketization. We do not find any difference between different policy areas in this approach in negative binomial regressions; the results are less robust in OLS. Second, we went further and also assumed that control variables and country and time fixed effects have different effects for different policies. This means that we re-estimated our regressions for each of six policy areas one by one. Now our results change: for the FH measure of democracy our findings remain significant and robust for OLS and negative binomial only for two areas: economic cooperation and the organization of the CIS. For the negative binomial, the results are also significant for military cooperation, and for OLS, the results are significant for political and legal cooperation. For the Polity IV measure, the results are significant for military cooperation and the organization of the CIS, and in negative binomial for economic cooperation.

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4. Furthermore, as discussed above, the use of five-year increments for our analysis could be questionable because the division of the periods was conducted arbitrarily (we merely divided a 20-year period into four equal parts). Therefore, we also applied alternative periodizations. In doing so, we replicated our regressions, using each year as a separate observation, for five four-year increments and for seven three-year increments (here we divide the sample into six three-year periods and one two-year period for 2009–2010). The results remain robust with this change, as well as when combined with a change of estimation techniques and measures of democracy. Furthermore, we also aggregated the number of agreements signed by each country in all areas and estimated regressions with annual data, entirely confirming the results reported above for all measures of democracy. 5. Ultimately, we have to remark that the econometric tests suggest that the model is of adequate quality. For specification (1), for the negative binomial, the likelihood ratio test suggests that the model performs significantly better than the intercept-only model in predicting the number of agreements signed. Cragg and Uhler’s R² is close to 1, suggesting that the fit of the model is good as well. The maximum likelihood R² also supports this prediction. The McFadden R² is also close to 0.2, which indicates model sufficiency (this is true for the adjusted McFadden R², penalizing the model for the inclusion of additional controls). For OLS, both R² and adjusted R² are above 0.7, suggesting that the explanatory power of the model is high enough for us to consider its results meaningful. The likelihood ratio test again suggests that the model significantly outperforms the intercept-only model. Robustness checks to Table 10.1 We extend our analysis by a number of robustness checks. First, we replicate all regressions after dropping Russia (which could follow a different logic in terms of its membership decision)—the results do not change. Second, we use Polity IV instead of FH data, but this only confirms our findings. Third, we estimate regressions without time dummies—again, confirming our main result. Fourth, we use regressions without country fixed effects. Now, for both EAEU and EurAsEC, we establish a significant correlation between FH index and democracy: a high FH value (i.e. a low level of democracy) makes EAEU membership more likely (for the EAEU the result does not hold if we control for GDP per capita). If we use the random-effects panel data probit model (with year dummies) to account for the binary nature of the dependent variable for the EAEU, in specifications (1)–(4) we find no significant effect of the FH score on membership in the EAEU, in (5)–(6) the effect is marginally significant (a high FH score—i.e., low democracy—is correlated with EAEU membership), and specification (7) does not converge. For the EurAsEC we find significant correlation in specifications (2), (4), and (7) and insignificant correlation in others (specification (6) does not converge); note that the panel data probit does not account for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity in the way that country fixed effects linear probability model does. This means that while it is still possible that there is a negative correlation between the level of democracy and membership in the Eurasian ROs, it cannot be distinguished from country-specific, time-invariant characteristics, which could also drive the result. Unlike the CIS, no conclusive evidence can be found.

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IV. List of organizations included in the large-N analysis of this book 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Association of Caribbean States Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples’ Trade Treaty Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Association of South-East Asia Nations African Union Bay of Bengal Initiative for MultiSectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation 8. Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation 9. Central American Common Market 10. Council of Arab Economic Unity / Greater Arab Free Trade Agreement 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

Andean Community Caribbean Community Council of the Baltic Sea States Central European Free Trade Agreement Central European Initiative (Eastern Partnership) Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel Commonwealth of Independent States Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa Developing 8 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement East African Community Economic Community of Central African States Economic Cooperation Organization Economic Community of West African States European Economic Area European Free Trade Association European Union Eurasian Economic Community 2011–15 Gulf Cooperation Council GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development InterGovernmental Authority on Development League of Arab States Lake Chad Basin Commission Southern Common Market Mekong River Commission Melanesian Spearhead Group North American Free Trade Agreement Niger Basin Authority Nordic Council Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries Gambia River Basin Development Organization Senegal River Basin Development Authority Pacific alliance Russian Federation–Belarus–Kazakhstan Customs Union 2010–14

ACS ACT ALBA APEC ASEAN AU BIMSTEC BSEC CACM CAEU/ GAFTA CAN CARICOM CBSS CEFTA CEI CEMAC CEPGL CILSS CIS COMESA D8 DR-CAFTA EAC ECCAS ECO ECOWAS EEA EFTA EU EurAsEC GCC GUAM IGAD LAS LCBC MERCOSUR MRC MSG NAFTA NBA NC OAPEC OMVG OMVS PA RBK CU

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South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation Southern African Customs Union Southern African Development Community Shanghai Cooperation Organization South Pacific Regional Trade and Economic Cooperation Agreement Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement Benelux Economic Union West African Economic and Monetary Union

SAARC SACU SADC SCO SPARTECA TPSEP/P4 UEB WAEMU

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Index Akaev, Askar, see Kyrgyzstan 170–1, 250 Africa 13, 39, 68, 94 ALBA—Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America 5–6, 15, 60, 100, 109, 117 Arab League 104, 109 Arab Spring 5, 56, 269 Armenia 43, 94, 151, 168, 183, 190, 191, 204, 265 relations to Russia 182, 193, 210–11 relations to the EU, see DCFTA 205, 210–11 Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) 15, 255, 269–70 Asset specificity, see Limiting factor 130, 132, 137 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) 12, 14, 235, 259, 272 ASEAN Way 12, 162 Authoritarianism ambiguity of the concept 20–4 and ideology 5, 22–4, 30, 54, 55, 56, 60, 62, 85, 91–2, 107–11, 117, 118, 129, 218, 257, 260 consolidation of 4, 6, 14, 28, 29, 34, 35, 49, 50, 54, 67, 74, 114, 116, 125, 132, 133, 136, 138, 142, 166, 168, 201, 211, 212, 217, 239, 250, 264, 266 competitive 21–2, 71, 107, 260 electoral 21–2, 46, 71, 107, 165, 260 hegemonic 21 legitimacy of 5, 15, 24, 30, 46, 48, 57, 58, 60, 113, 125, 141, 142, 163–5, 169–70, 171, 173, 174, 176, 177, 202, 203, 208, 242, 244, 250–1, 255, 263, 267, 269 Authoritarian learning 27, 47, 69, 242, 244, 253–4, 255, 264, 267 Autocratic peace theory 18–20, 42 Autocracy diffusion 11, 24, 28–33, 35, 46, 70, 127, 139, 210, 264 Autocracy promotion 8, 11, 24, 28–33, 35, 46, 47, 54, 55, 64–5, 96, 98, 124, 139, 141, 142, 163, 174, 176, 179, 180, 197, 202, 207–16, 263–8 Azerbaijan 94, 133, 140, 141, 145, 151, 154, 172, 214 membership in the EAEU 213

Bakiev, Kurmanbek, see Kyrgyzstan 51, 214 Belarus 38, 44, 48, 52, 54, 96, 127, 129, 132, 135–6, 137, 138, 149, 162, 169, 172, 174, 176, 181, 189, 193, 203, 204, 205, 207, 215–16, 269 Russian subsidies 134–6 Union State with Russia 123, 136, 212 Belt and Road Initiative, see China 15, 45, 248, 255 Bel’yaminov, Dmitriy, see EDB 217 Bolivarian Socialism, see Venezuela 5, 15, 259 Central Asia, see Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan 30–1, 39, 48, 71, 112, 116, 122, 123, 134, 136, 138, 140, 143, 145, 146, 162, 190, 203, 205, 213–14, 215, 219, 224, 225, 227, 230–42, 244–54, 255, 265 China 3, 21, 45, 55, 60, 72, 82, 172, 195, 205 lending to Central Asian states 48, 247–9 relations to Russia 23, 44, 109–10 role in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization 124, 175, 219–55, 267, 268, 269 Christianity 60–1, 82, 108–9, 146, 190, 224, 258 CIS-Electoral Monitoring Organization (CIS EMO) 69, 166–72 Cold War 20, 23–4, 31, 111–19, 262 Colonial empires 13, 16–17, 35, 110–11, 117 political legacy of 16–17 Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) 51, 123, 189–90, 233 Common Economic Space (CES) 179, 182 Communism 23, 24, 60, 118, 128, 260 Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) 121–2, 144–78, 265 CIS Economic Union 149, 151, 173 CIS Free Trade Area 150–1, 189, 192 economic effects 150–3 effects on regime stability 49, 155–72, 267 effects on security 153–5 electoral monitoring by 1–2, 49, 69, 125, 142, 162–72 governance of, see a-la carte regionalism 148–50 membership in 144–7 peacekeeping by 140, 153–5

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Index

Communist nostalgia 48, 129, 202, 269 Comparative regionalism 11–17, 26, 28, 30, 35, 42, 46, 62, 69, 142, 256, 266, 268, 269, 272 Composite index of national capabilities 72 Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) 17, 44, 56, 62, 108, 109–11, 116, 118, 257, 259, 260 Council of the heads of states 63, 82–3, 90, 148–9, 154, 184, 220–1, 260 Credible commitments 24–5, 174 by autocracies 25–6, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 78, 260 by democracies 27 Customs Union (2010) 123, 124–5, 128, 180, 181–2, 183, 184–8, 195–7, 204, 209, 210, 211, 215, 217 Customs Union (1995) 123, 180–1, 192, 208 Customs union (generic) 139, 150, 191, 201, 205, 206, 265 Democracy promotion 2, 26–7, 30, 85, 202, 206, 260, 263 Democratic peace theory 18–19, 27, 28, 261 Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) 201, 205, 206, 207, 207–15 Dictatorial peace theory, see autocratic peace theory 18–20 Dodon, Igor, see Moldova 212–13 Eastern Partnership 206 Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), see Iran 30 Electoral monitoring democratic 1–2, 171 non-democratic, see the Commonwealth of Independent States 1–2, 49, 69, 125, 142, 162–72, 212, 251 Ethnic conflicts 120, 139–41, 143, 190, 231, 251, 265 Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) 123, 189, 207, 217 Eurasian Economic Commission 54, 180, 182, 184–5, 187–8 Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) 87, 100, 123, 124, 128, 176, 179, 181–3, 184–8, 191, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 218, 235 Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) 123, 179–218 and ideology 193–4, 202–3 economic effects 195–7 effects on regime stability 49, 193–4, 197–217, 267–8 governance of 54, 184–8

impact on the Russian foreign policy 206–17 membership in 190–2, 206–17 perception by Russian elites 129, 206 public opinion on 129–30, 203 Eurasian Fund for Stabilization and Development (EFSD) 48, 189, 207 Eurasianism 202 Euromaidan, see Revolution of Dignity 209 European Free Trade Area (EFTA) 109, 111, 117 European Union (EU) 3, 4, 42, 46, 52, 59, 62, 85, 94, 112, 127, 134, 147, 162, 172, 205, 207, 209, 210, 211, 213, 215, 227–8, 231, 234, 256, 260 conditionality 100 cultural homogeneity of 60–1, 86, 258 democracy promotion by 2, 26–7, 30, 36–7, 100, 206, 250 dialogue with the EAEU 4, 217 imitation by other organization 12, 46, 93, 122, 124, 184, 194, 197 European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) 206 Extremism 151, 220, 230, 232, 234 Focal point for authoritarian interaction 47, 253, 255 Foreign direct investments 28, 57, 93–5, 98, 176, 182, 196, 226, 231, 242, 247, 249 Freedom House 71, 77, 80, 86, 88–9, 95–8, 100, 101, 106, 116, 145, 171, 190–1, 221 Free trade area 5, 44, 49, 122, 124, 140, 150–1, 181, 192, 205, 209–10, 212 Frozen conflicts 139–43, 154, 167, 235 in Abkhazia 140, 141, 155, 168, 175, 183 in Nagorny Karabakh 94, 140, 183 in Southern Ossetia 127, 140, 154–5, 175, 183 in Transiestria 140, 154, 211 Gagauzia, see Moldova 211 Georgia 122, 129, 142, 145, 155, 157, 170 possible EAEU membership 213, 215 war against Russia 51, 140, 145, 146, 175 Glazyev, Sergei 180, 193 GUAM 141 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 4–5, 58 and the Arab Spring 5 and the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Qatar 5 Hegemon 9, 15, 44, 68, 71, 80, 88, 110, 119, 129, 147, 150, 171, 173, 176, 177, 178, 188, 192, 206, 219, 228–9, 233, 235, 245, 252, 256, 259, 264

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Index Heterogeneity of members in a regional organization 9, 59–65, 81–2, 84–6, 88–9, 91, 177, 200, 218, 257–8, 265, 269 cultural 59–65, 86, 146, 190, 223–4 economic 59–65, 147 political 59–65, 85, 96, 117–19, 145–6, 190–1, 223, 263–4 Historical legacies 83, 120 material 126–7, 231 of Communism 10, 68, 121, 125–30, 137, 141, 145, 147, 166, 229, 264, 265 pre-Communist 147 Historical memories 126, 128–9 of Communism 126, 128–9 Holy Alliance 108–9 Historical institutionalism 121, 127 Human rights 21, 51, 52, 110, 127–8, 148, 153, 162, 165, 202, 231, 249, 250, 270 India 94 membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization 219, 223, 224, 225–8, 237, 238 Interparliamentary assembly 63, 82–3, 90–1, 186 of the CIS, see Commonwealth of Independent States 1–2, 149, 163, 165, 186 International Institute for Monitoring Democracy Development, Parliamentarism and Suffrage Protection of Citizens (IIMDD), see Commonwealth of Independent States 163 Internet governance, see Shanghai Cooperation Organization 253–5 Islam 23–4, 45, 60–1, 63, 82, 102, 104, 146, 190, 224, 230, 252, 258 Iran 24, 28, 29–30, 45, 96, 223, 227, 234–5, 249, 252 Karimov, Islam, see Uzbekistan 203, 232, 248, 250 Kazakhstan 52, 54, 61, 133, 136, 137–8, 145, 147, 153, 154, 164–5, 169, 190, 191–2, 195, 197, 202, 203, 231, 238, 244–5, 248–9, 258 role in the Eurasian Economic Union 176, 180–6, 189, 192–3, 196, 208, 215–16, 266 Kyrgyzstan 49, 51, 53, 72, 129, 133, 136, 146, 149, 154, 170, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 202, 203, 204, 213–14, 227, 231, 232, 236, 238, 248, 250, 255, 258 entrepot for Chinese consumer goods 248–9

317

Large-N analysis 8, 67–70 Latin America 5, 101, 109, 110, 140 Limiting factor 141, 143, 255–65 theory of 50, 130–1 in Eurasia 120, 121, 131–9, 246–9 international trade as 134–5 Lukashenka, Alexander, see Belarus 135, 169 regime legitimation 48, 203, 269 Middle East 2, 5, 7, 10, 23, 24, 77, 79, 80, 85, 92, 104, 226, 268, 271 Migration 93–4, 95–6, 230, 245, 262, 269, 271 and stability of authoritarian regimes 49, 96–8 and Russian power 214 in the post-Soviet Eurasia 136–8, 151–2, 196, 204 Mixed methods research 9, 66–70 Moldova 72, 129, 146, 171, 200, 211–13 relations to Russia 49, 136, 151, 163 relations to the EU 211–13 Nazarbaev, Nursulta, see Kazakhstan 203 Non-democratic regional organization governance 63, 89–91 impact on tenure duration 55–9, 100–6 trade 94–8 regimes 26–32, 44–55, 98–100 migration 94–8 membership 59–66, 83–9, 117–19 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 80, 88, 206, 235, 236 Organization of American States (OAS) 85, 110 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) 1, 163–5, 169, 170–1, 267 People’s Trade Agreement, see ALBA 5 Polity IV 70–1 Power structure in regional organizations 43–4 Propaganda 124, 126, 165, 175, 209 Putin, Vladimir, see Russia 1, 44, 60, 71, 129, 153, 170, 172, 191, 194 Regionalism 111–18 actorness of regional organizations 30, 53–5, 266 a-la carte 128, 149, 156, 192, 266 hierarchical 13–14, 35, 43, 109 new 12 plutocratic 14, 111 protective 35

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318

Index

Regime-boosting, see autocracy promotion 5, 13, 14, 69, 113–14, 129, 140, 142, 165, 271 Remittances, see migration 136–7, 214, 248 Revolution 56, 126, 242, 246 colored 170, 250 Orange revolution in Ukraine 166, 170, 174, 175 Revolution in Armenia in 2018 146, 265 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, see also Euromaidan 51, 209 Tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan 51, 170, 191, 213–14, 227, 238, 250 Russia autocracy promotion by 206–17 foreign policy of 206–17 as a regional hegemon 144–8, 190–1 Sanctions 47, 57, 172, 176, 203, 250–1 against Russia 204 by Russia against other countries 204–5, 209–10, 211–12, 213, 215, 216, 268 Saudi Arabia 5–6, 22, 28, 45, 257, 259 intervention to Bahrain 5, 7 Secessionism, see frozen conflicts 141, 154, 265 Security services 48, 53, 251, 254, 255 Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) 51, 79–80, 124, 219–55 economic effects 44, 48, 247–9, 268 electoral monitoring by 165, 170 effects on regime stability 49, 175, 239–54 interaction with other regional organizations and actors 4 membership in 222–4 trust-building by 242–6 Shanghai Five, see Shanghai Cooperation Organization 219, 223, 236, 244, 246, 265 Small-N analysis 8, 67–70 South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) 94, 140, 224 Southern African Development Community (SADC) 13, 14, 280, 286 Southern African Customs Union (SACU) 14, 111, 116, 207, 257, 272, 280, 286 Supranational institutions 90, 149, 186, 188 Tajikistan 6, 48, 49, 127, 129, 133, 136–40, 145, 146, 150, 154, 155, 161, 168, 169, 176, 179, 180, 182, 184, 189, 190, 200, 208, 214, 219, 221, 224, 231, 246, 248

Tenure of authoritarian leaders 55, 74, 262 Terrorism 219, 220, 230–2, 234–7, 251, 252, 270 Trade liberalization 49, 98, 262 Three Evils, see Shanghai Cooperation Organization; Terrorism; Extremism; Secessionism 124, 230, 251, 254, 255, 267 Trust 18–19, 49, 61, 86, 89, 90, 131, 188, 219, 242, 272 among authoritarian leaders 242–55, 266, 267 Turkmenistan 97, 122, 133, 136, 145–6, 149–51, 164, 169–70, 200, 208, 231, 232, 240, 248, 249 Tymoshenko, Yulia, see Ukraine 51 Ukraine 3, 4, 5, 51–2, 61, 68, 87, 94, 122, 129, 135, 140–51, 154, 159–69, 171, 174–6, 190, 198, 200, 233, 235, 246, 258, 269 relations to Russia 180, 208–16 Orange revolution 166, 170, 174, 175 war in Donbass 141, 151 USSR 13, 23, 44, 60, 97, 110, 111, 114, 118, 122, 125, 128, 131, 137, 144, 151, 152, 153, 197, 244, 250, 259, 264 collapse of 127, 141, 149, 153, 172 disintegration of 119 legacies of, see historical legacies 126, 231 Uzbekistan 127, 133, 134, 136, 137, 140, 145, 147, 149, 150, 151, 154, 169, 174, 179, 200, 219, 221, 224, 230, 231, 232, 236, 240, 248, 250, 251, 252 and Andijan events 175, 181, 203, 227, 232, 238, 250, 252 membership in the Eurasian Economic Community 87, 175–6, 181, 203 Venezuela 5, 6, 15, 45, 78, 100, 257, 259 and ALBA 5–6, 15, 45, 60, 68, 78, 80, 100, 109, 117, 257–9 Voronin, Vladimir, see Moldova 212 World Religions Database (WRD) 81–2 World Trade Organization (WTO) 181, 182, 198, 215, 269 Yanukovych, Viktor, see Ukraine 51, 87, 164, 170, 208, 209, 212, 214 Yeltsin, Boris, see Russia 71