The post-Soviet area is the arena for multiple initiatives of regional integration, which create new platforms for cooperation among the former Soviet republics and external actors, and which eventually lead to diffusion of institutions, norms and values. While the EU’s regional initiatives (e.g., Black Sea Synergy, Eastern Partnership and the Partnership with Central Asia) aim to enhance democratic diffusion, the regional initiatives driven by Russia and China seem to have another normative load. Russia and China are the most suspected “disruptive others” (Delcour 2011b), “democracy brakemen” (Melnykovska et al. 2012) or “autocracy promoters” (Ambrosio 2009; Bader et al. 2010; Burnell and Schlumberger 2010; Tolstrup 2009). In the recent years, they have initiated a large number of regional integration projects (e.g., the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEc), the Customs Union and the Eurasian Union), which give birth to the regional cooperation framework and governance structures to trigger authoritarian diffusion and promote stability and persistence of the post-Soviet authoritarian regimes.
While increased regional engagement of Russia and China is widely recognized, the research on their “soft” (combined with “hard”) and “transformative” powers to promote authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet area is very young. Based on external democratization, Europeanization and diffusion research, the paper develops a conceptual framework to analyze authoritarian diffusion; indentifying the particularities of authoritarian diffusion, it helps to draw a more comprehensive approach of institutional, i.e. democratic or authoritarian, diffusion. The paper elaborates substances (what is exactly diffused), mechanisms (rationalist, constructivist, discursive strategies and tools of influence) and effectiveness of authoritarian diffusion in regional integration initiatives. Thereby, the paper concentrates on the integration initiatives in the Black Sea Region and in Central Asia, where the influences of Russia and China are expected to be most prominent.
