Authoritarian regionalism in Eurasia revisited. Global entanglements and norms transformation in the economic sphere

The paper aims at discussing and conceptualizing the entanglements between the global and the Eurasian region in the field of economy and development. It starts from the assumption that current research on authoritarian regionalism in Eurasia too often highlights the conflictive nature of this interaction and therefore creates artificial divides between the “Western” and “non-Western”, here Eurasian, world. The reason for this is that research mainly emphasizes the idea of “illiberal order” as the main driver of authoritarian power and repression as its most important source. This in turn causes primary attention to the fate of liberal norms and illiberal counter-practices in the political realm of the post-Soviet integrational universe. Without wanting to relativize the illiberal impetus and its visible negative consequences on the freedoms of the populations, I argue that this biased perspective creates only a limited understanding of the transformative dynamics connected with authoritarian regionalism. The paper, therefore, discusses ways of how to transgress territorial/spatial reifications and gain more fine-tuned answers to the question of when and how a topic turns into an issue of regional concern and under what conditions authoritarian regions embrace global norms, contest or outright reject them as antithetical to their domestic rule. Empirically, it will concentrate on the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). With the EAEU, the authoritarian regimes of the region have developed a new integrational space, where they particularly deal with and negotiate economy- and development-relevant issues. In the economic field, however, authoritarian states mainly safeguard their rule through output legitimacy, i.e. the extent to which a government’s performance meets the welfare expectations of the population. Failure in fulfilling these demands can quickly turn into regime-threatening public upheavals, as could be recently observed in Kazakhstan. In many cases, the governments of the EAEU states need international support and cooperation for creating growth and economic stability and therefore might be willing to embrace some global norms that help create a favorable environment for producing public domestic consent. Does the variance in the regime-survival logic in different policy fields change the level of permeability to international norms and the power-practices promoted via regional organizations, and in what way does this alter the constitutive interaction of the regional institutions with global and inter-regional counterparts?