Regionalism in Eurasia and West Asia

Most accounts of regionalism are written from the European case, where regional organisations are built to integrate markets and, through markets, to make war between members impossible. Eurasia and West Asia do not fit that template, and the interesting thing about them is that they do not. Here regional organisations are instruments for managing great powers and for protecting incumbent regimes. The bodies that result are consequential without being integrative, which is precisely why they are the sharpest test of what “regional integration” is supposed to mean.

Two regions, one analytical puzzle

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• The organisations of Eurasia and West Asia are real, durable and consequential, and almost none of them integrate anything. The CIS supervised the largest peaceful state dissolution in modern history; the CSTO deployed troops that saved a government. None has pooled sovereignty in any sense a European lawyer would recognise.
• Two distinct logics generate this pattern, and they are worth separating at the outset.
  • Imperial management. The post-Soviet bodies exist because a multinational empire collapsed and its successor states had to divide an army, a currency, a debt, a border regime and a nuclear arsenal. Regional organisation here is the administrative residue of dissolution, plus Russia’s attempt to convert that residue into continued influence.
  • Regime security. In the Arab world the state system was created by external partition, and its rulers have faced their gravest threats not from other states but from transnational ideologies — pan-Arabism, Nasserism, political Islam — that appeal directly to their own populations. Arab regional organisations were built to contain those ideologies, not to advance them.
• What makes the region analytically valuable is that it also contains the two clearest counter-examples, both falling far short of their blueprints for reasons unrelated to institutional design.
  • The Eurasian Economic Union is a genuine customs union with a supranational commission and a court copied from European forms; the Gulf Cooperation Council has a customs union and real freedom of movement for its citizens.

Where Europe built institutions to escape its own history, Eurasia and West Asia built them to manage it.

• A note on the word “region”. This unit’s concept of a region is normally geographic. West Asia forces a departure: the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation defines its region by faith and spans four continents.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the birth of the CIS

The Commonwealth of Independent States is the only regional organisation in the world created for the express purpose of terminating a state. Understanding it requires holding two contradictory intentions in mind at once, because both were present at the creation and neither was ever resolved: it was built simultaneously to end the Soviet Union and to preserve something of it.

Belovezha and Alma-Ata

• The Belovezha Accords were signed on 8 December 1991 at a hunting lodge in the Belovezhskaya Pushcha forest in Belarus by the leaders of the three Slavic republics — Boris Yeltsin for Russia, Leonid Kravchuk for Ukraine and Stanislav Shushkevich for Belarus.
  • Its operative sentence declared that the USSR “as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality ceases to exist”, and the three signatories founded the CIS in its place.
  • The legal claim rested on the fact that the three were founding parties to the 1922 Union Treaty and could therefore dissolve what they had made. Whether this was constitutionally sound is disputed; politically it was decisive, because it removed the Union’s largest republics.
• The Alma-Ata Protocol of 21 December 1991 converted a Slavic arrangement into a general one. Eight further republics — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — joined as founding members on an equal footing.
  • Georgia joined only in 1993; the three Baltic states never joined at all, holding that their incorporation in 1940 was an illegal annexation.
  • The Alma-Ata Declaration contains the single most important sentence in the CIS’s history: the Commonwealth “is neither a state nor a supra-state entity.” Everything the organisation can and cannot do follows from that clause.
  • The same meeting settled the succession question: Russia would take the USSR’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council and its treaty obligations, while all fifteen republics would be recognised as separate states in their existing administrative borders.
• Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991 and the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin that evening. The CIS was, in the most literal sense, the instrument of the transfer.

Two purposes in one organisation

• Both purposes were satisfied for exactly as long as the mechanics of dissolution took.
  • The states that wanted a divorce got one; the state that wanted a union found that a body built on the Alma-Ata principle could not deliver it, and turned to other vehicles.

The 1993 Charter and the problem of legal status

• The CIS Charter was adopted on 22 January 1993 and entered into force a year later. It is the document that gives the Commonwealth what institutional shape it has, and also the document that guarantees its weakness.
• The Charter distinguishes founder states from member states. A founder state is one that signed and ratified the Belovezha Agreement and the Alma-Ata Protocol; a member state is one that has also ratified the Charter within a year of signing. The distinction is not decorative.
  • Ukraine signed the Alma-Ata Protocol but never ratified the Charter, and so was a founding and participating state without ever being a member state in the Charter’s sense. Successive Ukrainian governments treated this as deliberate.
  • Turkmenistan likewise never ratified, and in August 2005 formally reduced itself to associate status, consistent with the permanent neutrality the UN General Assembly recognised in 1995.
• The decisive provision is the one on decision-making. Decisions in the principal CIS organs are taken by consensus, and any state may declare that it has no interest in a given question — a declaration which does not block the others but does not bind the declaring state either.
  • The practical consequence is that CIS decisions bind only those who sign them, and that a state can remain a participant while opting out of essentially everything.
  • There is no supranational authority anywhere in the structure. No CIS body can make law that applies in a member state without national re-enactment; no CIS court can strike down a national measure; there is no common external tariff, no common citizenship and no direct effect.
• This is the answer to the question of the CIS’s political and legal status: the ambiguity is not an accident but the design.
  • Russia has repeatedly tried to build binding structures on it and each time had to leave the CIS behind for a smaller body — the CSTO for security, the EAEU for trade.

The CIS has no supranational authority, its decisions bind only those who sign them, and two of its founders never ratified its Charter: its status is not unsettled by accident, it was built that way.

Structure

• The Council of Heads of State is the supreme body, meeting normally twice a year, and takes decisions on all questions of principle.
• The Council of Heads of Government coordinates cooperation among the executive branches in economic, social and other fields.
• Sectoral councils of Foreign Ministers, Defence Ministers and Border Troop Commanders sit beneath them, with an Economic Council added in 1999.
• The Executive Committee, based in Minsk, is the permanent administrative organ; it services meetings rather than proposing policy, and has nothing resembling a right of legislative initiative.
• The Inter-Parliamentary Assembly, at St Petersburg, issues model laws — harmonisation recommendations with no binding force whatsoever.
• The Economic Court, also in Minsk, resolves disputes on economic obligations; its jurisdiction depends on the parties’ consent, and it is nothing like the European Court of Justice.
• The CIS Free Trade Area Treaty was signed at St Petersburg on 18 October 2011 and entered into force in September 2012, replacing a tangle of bilateral agreements.
  • It is a free trade area in the narrow sense only — extensive exemptions, no common external tariff, and progressive hollowing out by the parallel construction of the EAEU and by successive denunciations.

The record: successful at dissolution, weak at everything after it

• Judged against the task it was actually given, the CIS was a striking success. The Soviet Union dissolved into fifteen states with an enormous conventional army, four nuclear weapons states on its territory, a single currency and a completely integrated industrial economy, and the process produced no general war.
  • Borders were accepted in their Soviet administrative form rather than renegotiated, which removed the single most dangerous class of dispute at the outset.
  • External debt and Soviet assets were divided, with Russia eventually assuming the whole of the debt in exchange for the whole of the foreign assets under the “zero option” arrangements.
  • The nuclear inheritance was consolidated in Russia through instruments that belong to the arms-control literature and are treated in the note on nuclear non-proliferation — the 1992 Lisbon Protocol and the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine transferred warheads to Russia and acceded to the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states.
• Judged against anything else, the record is thin. The rouble zone collapsed by 1993; a proposed CIS common army was abandoned almost immediately; the Economic Union treaty of 1993 and the customs union agreements of 1995 produced very little; and CIS peacekeeping in Tajikistan, Abkhazia and Transnistria was in substance Russian peacekeeping under a Commonwealth label.
• The organisation has been unable to address a single conflict among its own participants, from Nagorno-Karabakh to the Russian–Georgian war to the war in Ukraine — the last of which was fought between two founding signatories of the Belovezha Accords.

Exit and erosion

• Georgia withdrew after the August 2008 war, announcing its departure days after the fighting and completing the process in August 2009 under the Charter’s one-year notice requirement.
• Ukraine ended its participation in 2018, recalling its representatives from CIS bodies and closing its mission in Minsk by presidential decree in May of that year; because it had never ratified the Charter, it had no membership formally to renounce.
  • Kyiv completed the legal separation in 2026. Presidential decrees in February withdrew Ukraine from a first tranche of CIS agreements, and on 26 March 2026 the government approved the termination of 116 further treaties with Russia, Belarus and the CIS framework — the great majority of them Commonwealth instruments, including the integrated air-defence arrangements.
• Moldova has now followed. Having denounced agreements piecemeal since 2023, its Parliament voted on 2 April 2026 to withdraw from the CIS founding agreements themselves, with notification reaching Minsk on 8 April 2026 and the withdrawal effective in April 2027 after the mandatory year’s notice. Chișinău intends to remain in the CIS free trade arrangement.
• What is left is a body of nine participants with one associate, dominated by Russia, retaining genuine value in the low-politics business of migration, pensions, transport documents, qualifications recognition and law-enforcement cooperation, and almost none in high politics.
• The pattern of exit is itself the argument. States leave the CIS at the point at which they choose a different external orientation, and the fact that leaving costs them so little — no tariff wall, no legal disentanglement of the kind Brexit required — is the clearest available proof of how shallow the integration was.

The Collective Security Treaty Organisation

• The Collective Security Treaty was signed at Tashkent on 15 May 1992 by six CIS states — Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan — with Azerbaijan, Belarus and Georgia acceding the following year. It entered into force in 1994 for a renewable five-year term.
• Its central provision, Article 4, is a collective defence clause: aggression against one participant is to be regarded as aggression against all, obliging the others to render assistance including military assistance. On paper it is modelled on the North Atlantic Treaty.
• The treaty’s first crisis came at its first renewal. In 1999 Azerbaijan, Georgia and Uzbekistan declined to extend, and three of the nine walked out — a loss of a third of the membership before the organisation even existed.
• The organisation proper was created at Chișinău on 7 October 2002 and became operational in 2003, with a Secretariat and Joint Staff in Moscow, a Collective Rapid Reaction Force established in 2009 and regular exercises. Uzbekistan rejoined in 2006 and suspended its membership again in 2012, leaving the present six: Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

The credibility problem

• In more than three decades the collective defence clause has been activated exactly once, and not against an external aggressor. In January 2022, after violent unrest in Kazakhstan that began over fuel prices, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev requested assistance, and a CSTO force of roughly two thousand troops, overwhelmingly Russian, deployed between 6 and 19 January 2022.
  • The deployment was justified as a response to external aggression, which is what Article 4 requires, but the disturbance was domestic. What the CSTO demonstrated was a capacity to stabilise an incumbent government against internal challenge.
  • This is the regime-security logic appearing in the post-Soviet space, and it is the closest structural parallel between the CSTO and the Gulf’s Peninsula Shield Force, which deployed to Bahrain in 2011 for materially the same purpose.
• Against that single activation stands a sequence of non-responses to a member under attack.
  • In the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, Armenia received no CSTO assistance; the organisation’s position was that the fighting was on Azerbaijani territory and did not engage Article 4.
  • In September 2022, when Azerbaijani forces struck targets inside Armenia proper, the CSTO despatched a fact-finding mission and declined to send forces or even to name an aggressor. Yerevan refused to sign the summit declaration that year.
  • In September 2023, when Azerbaijan’s operation ended the Karabakh Armenian entity and produced a mass exodus, the CSTO did nothing.
• Armenia froze its participation in 2024, declining to host or join exercises, refusing to nominate officials to allotted posts, and ceasing to pay its contributions.
  • It has not withdrawn. As of 2026 the CSTO Secretary General’s position is that Armenia remains a member de jure while standing outside the organisation de facto — a formulation that captures the whole institution.
• The analytical point is about alliance credibility, not about paperwork. A collective defence guarantee works by deterring an attack that never happens, and its value is destroyed the moment a member is attacked and the guarantee is not honoured. The CSTO’s record is that it protects governments from their populations and not members from their neighbours.

The Eurasian Economic Union

The EAEU is the most institutionally ambitious regional body outside Europe, and it was built by people who studied the European model closely and copied its forms with some care. It is also, measured by any independent test of integration, one of the least effective. Holding those two statements together is what makes it worth studying.

From the 1995 customs union to the Treaty of Astana

• The 1995 Customs Union agreements between Russia and Belarus, joined immediately by Kazakhstan and later by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, were the first attempt and produced almost nothing in practice.
• The Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) was established in 2000 as a treaty organisation with a formal structure; it too failed to deliver a working customs union, and was wound up in 2014 once its successor existed.
• The Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan became operational on 1 January 2010 with a genuine common external tariff, followed by a shared Customs Code and the removal of internal customs controls in 2011 — the first real transfer of competence.
• The Single Economic Space took effect on 1 January 2012, extending coordination to competition policy, subsidies, technical regulation and the movement of services and capital, and creating the Eurasian Economic Commission as a permanent executive body.
• The Treaty on the Eurasian Economic Union was signed at Astana on 29 May 2014 and entered into force on 1 January 2015. Armenia acceded on 2 January 2015 and Kyrgyzstan on 12 August 2015, giving the present five members: Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. Moldova, Uzbekistan and Cuba hold observer status.

Institutions consciously modelled on European forms

• The Commission is genuinely supranational in form. Its Board members are appointed to act in the Union’s interest rather than their states’, a large body of its decisions takes effect directly in the member states without national re-enactment, and it administers the common external tariff and the customs code.
• The Treaty promises the four freedoms — goods, services, capital and labour — and the labour freedom is the one that most nearly works, with mutual recognition of qualifications, access to social security and no work-permit requirement for citizens of member states.
  • For Kyrgyz and Armenian migrant workers in Russia this is the Union’s single most valuable provision.
• The Court, by contrast, is where the copy fails. It has no doctrine of direct effect and no doctrine of primacy, and has developed nothing resembling Van Gend en Loos. Supranational institutional architecture without supranational law does not produce supranational outcomes.

The asymmetry problem

• Russia is roughly 85 per cent of the Union’s combined GDP and about four-fifths of its population. Few regional organisations anywhere are as lopsided; Brazil’s share of Mercosur and India’s of SAARC are both smaller.
• The consequence is that formal equality in the institutions cannot produce actual equality in outcomes. Members retain a veto and use it — Kazakhstan and Belarus have blocked proposals for a common currency, a parliament and foreign-policy coordination — but the agenda and the external tariff reflect Russian preferences, because the Russian market is the prize.
• Smaller members therefore practise a consistent defensive strategy: take the market access, block the political superstructure. Kazakhstan under both Nazarbayev and Tokayev has insisted that the Union is an economic project only, and has publicly refused to allow it to acquire political competences.
• The bloc’s external trade agreements are correspondingly modest — Vietnam (2015), Serbia, Iran (an interim arrangement from 2019 replaced by a full free trade agreement signed in 2023 and in force from 2025), Mongolia and others — and its total internal trade turnover remains a small fraction of members’ trade with the outside world.

Sanctions, re-export and the war

• The 2022 invasion of Ukraine turned the EAEU’s customs union into a sanctions problem for its own members. A customs union means goods circulate freely once inside; when one member is under comprehensive Western sanctions and the others are not, the union becomes a channel.
  • Russia legalised “parallel imports” in 2022 — importation of trademarked goods without the rights-holder’s consent — and imports of sanctioned Western goods routed through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia rose sharply, as did those states’ recorded exports to Russia in exactly the categories subject to export controls.
  • Armenia’s and Kyrgyzstan’s headline growth figures in 2022–24 were substantially a re-export phenomenon, along with the arrival of Russian capital and skilled migrants.
  • Secondary sanctions pressure from Washington and Brussels then fell on the intermediaries rather than on Russia, forcing Kazakh and Armenian banks to police transactions their own union membership was designed to make frictionless. Moscow’s own response in 2026 was to impose higher duties on parallel imports routed through EAEU partners, which undercuts the customs union’s founding logic.
  • This is the deepest problem the EAEU faces and it is structural: a customs union whose largest member is under sanctions cannot be both a functioning customs union and a compliant one.

Armenia’s two commitments

• Armenia joined the EAEU in 2015 under evident Russian pressure, abandoning an Association Agreement with the EU that it had already negotiated. After 2020 and 2023 it concluded that its security guarantor had not guaranteed its security.
• Its National Assembly adopted an EU accession law in March 2025, signed into law the following month — a domestic statute declaring a direction of travel rather than an application, and Armenia is not a candidate country.
• The two commitments are legally incompatible, and Armenia has resolved the incompatibility by refusing to choose. It has not applied to the EU and it has not left the EAEU; its government has confirmed that continued EAEU membership remains its programme.
  • The material reason is that roughly a third of Armenian trade and the great bulk of its energy supply run through the Union, and its migrant workers depend on the labour freedom.
  • Russian pressure has been applied through trade rather than argument — successive restrictions on Armenian agricultural and dairy exports from 2025 — and through public statements that simultaneous membership of the EAEU and the EU is impossible.
  • At the EAEU summit at Astana on 29 May 2026 Armenia sent its deputy prime minister rather than its prime minister, and the incompatibility question dominated the meeting without being resolved.
• Armenia is the test case for whether the EAEU can hold a member that wants to leave. So far it holds them by making departure expensive, which is a description of dependence rather than of integration.

An organisation that keeps its members by raising the cost of exit has not integrated them; it has trapped them.

• India and the EAEU signed the Terms of Reference for free trade negotiations in Moscow in August 2025. India–EAEU trade turnover was about $69 billion in 2024, overwhelmingly India–Russia and overwhelmingly energy; the talks matter to the Union as evidence that it can act externally as a single legal person.
• For the EAEU the talks matter as evidence that the Union can act externally as a single legal person, which is the clearest thing its supranational form actually buys it.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation

From the Shanghai Five to a ten-member body

• The Shanghai Five emerged from border demilitarisation, not from any integration ambition. China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions at Shanghai in April 1996, followed by an agreement on the reduction of forces in border areas in Moscow in 1997.
  • The problem it solved was real: the collapse of the USSR had turned one Sino-Soviet frontier into four separate borders with four new states, all of them undelimited.
  • China’s second interest was energy and market access to Central Asian hydrocarbons, and its third was to deny the region to movements it associated with unrest in Xinjiang.
• The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation was founded on 15 June 2001 when Uzbekistan joined the five, and on the same day the members signed the Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism — the “three evils” formula that remains the organisation’s core security vocabulary.
• The Charter was signed at St Petersburg in 2002 and entered into force in 2003, giving the SCO legal personality, a Secretariat in Beijing and a rotating chairmanship.
• The Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) was established at Tashkent and became operational in 2004. It is an intelligence-sharing and database body rather than an operational force, maintaining lists of proscribed organisations and individuals and coordinating the biennial “Peace Mission” exercises. It is the SCO’s only permanent security organ and its most concrete achievement.
• The “Shanghai Spirit” is the organisation’s declared normative content: mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for civilisational diversity and the pursuit of common development.
  • In substance it is a restatement of sovereignty and non-interference, drafted by authoritarian governments to exclude external comment on their internal affairs, and it functions as the Eurasian counterpart to the ASEAN Way — with the important difference that ASEAN’s consensus norm serves small states resisting great powers, while the SCO’s serves the great powers themselves.
• Enlargement took the SCO from six to ten.India and Pakistan acceded together at Astana in 2017, Iran in 2023 at the New Delhi summit, and Belarus in 2024 at Astana.
  • Afghanistan and Mongolia remain observers, and a long list of dialogue partners now includes Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
• The result is an organisation covering roughly two-fifths of the world’s population and a large share of the Eurasian landmass, containing four nuclear-armed states and two permanent members of the Security Council.

Tianjin, Bishkek and the limits of size

• The 25th Heads of State Council met at Tianjin on 31 August and 1 September 2025 and adopted the Tianjin Declaration, the largest gathering in the organisation’s history; Kyrgyzstan took the rotating chairmanship, and the summit produced a ten-year development strategy and a Chinese proposal for an SCO development bank.
• The 2026 Heads of State Council is due at Bishkek on 1 September 2026, marking the organisation’s twenty-fifth anniversary, with a Bishkek Declaration prepared by the foreign ministers in July and Pakistan expected to take the chair.
• The organisation’s constraint is not its size but the dyads inside it. The SCO contains the India–Pakistan rivalry and the India–China boundary dispute, and its consensus rule means either can block a text.
  • India has consistently refused to endorse the Belt and Road Initiative in SCO documents, on the ground that the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor passes through territory India claims, leaving successive declarations recording that all members but India support the initiative.
  • At the SCO defence ministers’ meeting at Qingdao in June 2025 India declined to sign the joint statement because the draft omitted the Pahalgam terrorist attack while referencing unrest in Balochistan — a public demonstration that the counter-terrorism language the SCO exists to produce can itself be blocked.
• The comparison with SAARC is exact and instructive. Both contain the same dyad and both require consensus; SAARC has not held a summit since 2014 while the SCO meets annually and grows.
  • The difference is that the SCO is large enough that the India–Pakistan relationship is one file among many, and that two great powers have a standing interest in convening it.
• The honest assessment is that the SCO is a real organisation with a narrow product: counter-terrorism intelligence cooperation, a summit calendar that keeps Asian great powers talking, and a platform for displaying an alternative to Western-led order.
  • It has no free trade area, no dispute settlement and no capacity to act in a crisis, as its silence during the Kyrgyz–Tajik border clashes showed.

NATO and Russia

NATO is the one body in this article that was never an integration project of any kind, and the relationship between it and Russia is the clearest case anywhere of a regional organisation whose enlargement became the central security question of its neighbourhood. The wider argument about NATO as an instrument of American primacy belongs to the note on unipolarity and American hegemony; what follows is the institutional history.

The alliance and its post-1991 identity problem

• The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in Washington on 4 April 1949 by twelve states.
  • Article 5 provides that an armed attack against one is an attack against all, with each party to take “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force” — a formulation deliberately weaker than an automatic commitment, inserted to satisfy the US Senate.
• The end of the Cold War removed the alliance’s stated purpose and did not dissolve it, which is itself the analytically interesting fact. Alliances built against a specific threat normally lapse when the threat does; the Warsaw Pact dissolved in 1991 and NATO did not.
• NATO’s answer was to redefine itself around crisis management, partnership and enlargement across the Strategic Concepts of 1991, 1999 and 2010, taking on out-of-area operations in the Balkans and later Afghanistan. Each of these redefinitions was read in Moscow as expansion in search of a rationale.

The architecture of engagement

• The Partnership for Peace was launched in January 1994 as a framework of individually negotiated bilateral cooperation programmes open to all European and post-Soviet states. Russia joined in 1994, along with virtually every Central Asian state.
  • It was designed with genuine ambiguity: to give Central and Eastern European states a relationship with NATO without promising membership, and to give Russia a relationship that did not look like exclusion.
• The NATO–Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security was signed in Paris on 27 May 1997, days before the Madrid summit that invited the first post-Cold War members.
  • It created a Permanent Joint Council, declared that the two sides did not consider each other adversaries, and contained NATO’s political undertaking that it had “no intention, no plan and no reason” to deploy nuclear weapons on the territory of new members and no intention of permanently stationing substantial combat forces there.
  • It is a political instrument, not a treaty, and the difference has been contested ever since.
• The NATO–Russia Council replaced the Permanent Joint Council in May 2002 at Pratica di Mare, upgrading the format so that Russia sat as an equal with the individual allies rather than facing NATO as a bloc. It worked on counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, theatre missile defence and submarine rescue, and produced real cooperation on Afghan transit.

Enlargement and the disputed assurances of 1990

• The rounds are the substance of the grievance: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999; the largest round of seven including the three Baltic states in 2004; Albania and Croatia in 2009; Montenegro 2017; North Macedonia 2020; and Finland in 2023 and Sweden in 2024.
• The Russian claim is that assurances were given in 1990, during the negotiations on German unification, that NATO would not expand eastward, and were then broken. The dispute over this is genuine and should be stated as a dispute.
  • The case for the Russian reading rests on the record of the February 1990 conversations, in which US Secretary of State James Baker put to Gorbachev the formula that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift “one inch eastward”, and on similar language from West German and British ministers.
  • The case against is that the conversations concerned the territory of the former East Germany within a unified Germany, that no assurance was reduced to writing, and that the Two Plus Four Treaty of September 1990, the binding instrument, contains no such limitation. Gorbachev later said enlargement beyond Germany “was not discussed at all” in 1990.
  • The honest position is that assurances were given orally about a situation that no longer existed within eighteen months, and that they were never converted into a legal obligation. Whether that makes the Russian grievance a fabrication or a real breach of faith is the political argument, and it is not resolvable from the documents.
• The institutional counter-argument is that enlargement was demanded, not imposed. Central and East European states applied, campaigned and legislated for membership, and their reasons were drawn from their own experience of Soviet domination. A theory of enlargement that treats these states purely as objects of great-power decision reproduces exactly the assumption they joined to escape.

From Kosovo to the rupture

• Kosovo, 1999. NATO’s air campaign against Yugoslavia was conducted without Security Council authorisation and over Russian objection. Moscow suspended the Permanent Joint Council; the episode established the conviction that NATO would use force outside its treaty area and outside UN authority.
• Bucharest, April 2008. The summit declined membership action plans for Georgia and Ukraine but declared that they “will become members of NATO” — the worst of both outcomes, offering neither protection nor exclusion.
• Georgia, August 2008. The five-day war followed within four months; NATO suspended NRC meetings.
• Crimea and Donbas, 2014. NATO suspended all practical civilian and military cooperation with Russia in April 2014 while keeping political channels open, and began the eastward force posture — the Readiness Action Plan, then the Enhanced Forward Presence battlegroups in Poland and the Baltic states from 2017.
• The full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 ended the relationship. The 2022 Madrid Strategic Concept named Russia “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security”, reversing the 2010 language of strategic partnership.
• The clearest strategic consequence was the accession of two states that had stayed out for seventy years. Finland joined on 4 April 2023 and Sweden on 7 March 2024, doubling NATO’s land border with Russia and turning the Baltic into an alliance sea.
  • An invasion justified by the danger of NATO enlargement produced the largest enlargement in a generation.

The burden-sharing dispute

• At the Hague summit of 24–25 June 2025 allies committed to spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence and security by 2035 — 3.5 per cent on core defence and 1.5 per cent on infrastructure, cyber and resilience — with national roadmaps due by mid-2026. Spain secured an effective exemption.
• The dispute since has been institutional rather than rhetorical: what counts toward the 1.5 per cent, whether the American conventional presence in Europe will be drawn down as European spending rises, and whether alliance planning targets or national budgets set the pace.
• The European response has run through the European Union rather than NATO, in the rearmament and joint-procurement instruments adopted from 2025, which belong to the article on the European Union. The institutional question this raises for NATO is duplication: two organisations with overlapping membership, one with the command structures and one with the money.
• The deeper point is that a security organisation’s cohesion is a political variable, not a treaty one. Article 5 has not changed since 1949; what has changed is members’ confidence in each other’s willingness to invoke it — the variable on which the CSTO has already failed.

The Arab League and the fate of pan-Arabism

Founding and structure

• The Pact of the League of Arab States was signed in Cairo on 22 March 1945 by six founders — Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria — with Yemen acceding weeks later. Preceding the United Nations Charter by three months, it is the oldest surviving regional organisation in the world.
• Membership is now twenty-two, including Palestine, and stretches from Mauritania and the Comoros to the Gulf. The Secretariat is in Cairo.
• Its principal organs are the Council, in which each member has one vote regardless of size, meeting at foreign-minister level twice a year and at summit level annually since 2000, together with specialised ministerial councils and technical agencies.
• Article 7 of the Pact is the League’s defining provision and its defining weakness: unanimous decisions of the Council bind all members, while majority decisions bind only those states that accept them. A body that cannot bind a dissenting member cannot compel anything, and the Arab League has never claimed otherwise.
• The Joint Defence and Economic Cooperation Treaty of 17 June 1950 added a mutual defence clause and a Joint Defence Council with a two-thirds majority rule. It has never produced coordinated Arab military action, and the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973 were fought by coalitions assembled outside it.

Pan-Arabism and its one experiment

• Pan-Arabism held that the Arabs are a single nation divided by borders drawn by European powers, and that the proper end of Arab politics is political unity. It was the dominant ideology of Arab politics from the 1950s to 1967, and its greatest exponent was Gamal Abdel Nasser.
• The United Arab Republic, formed on 1 February 1958 between Egypt and Syria, is the only case in which two sovereign Arab states actually merged. It dissolved on 28 September 1961 when Syrian officers seized power in Damascus.
  • The reasons for the failure are the reasons Arab regionalism has failed generally: Cairo dominated the union completely, dissolved Syrian political parties, imposed Egyptian officials and Egyptian economic policy, and treated the junior partner as a province. Union in practice meant absorption, and the Syrian elite that had asked for it withdrew.
• The 1967 defeat broke pan-Arabism as a governing ideology. What survived was pan-Arabism as a rhetorical constraint — a language in which Arab rulers had to justify themselves to each other’s publics, without any corresponding obligation to act.
• Michael Barnett’s account in Dialogues in Arab Politics is the standard treatment, and it is more subtle than the usual “the Arabs failed to unite” story.
  • He argues that Arab politics was constituted by an ongoing normative debate about what Arabism required, that the debate constrained rulers because it could be used against them domestically, and that its outcome was the victory of sovereignty.
• The League is therefore weak by construction, not by accident. Its members’ overriding interest is regime survival; a strong League would be an instrument other members could turn against them; so they built one that cannot.

The record

• Egypt was suspended from 1979 to 1989 after signing the Camp David treaty with Israel, and the headquarters moved from Cairo to Tunis for a decade — an effective sanction, and the League’s most consequential act.
• The Arab Peace Initiative was adopted at the Beirut summit in March 2002, offering full normalisation with Israel in exchange for withdrawal to the 1967 lines, a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a just settlement of the refugee question.
  • It remains the collective Arab position, unsuperseded even by the states that have normalised outside it.
• The Greater Arab Free Trade Area was agreed in 1997 under the League’s 1981 trade facilitation agreement and completed tariff elimination on 1 January 2005, covering eighteen members.
  • It is a goods-only free trade area with extensive exemptions, and it has not been extended to services or to non-tariff barriers. Intra-Arab trade remains around a tenth of the members’ total trade — better than South Asia, far below ASEAN, and largely accounted for by the Gulf.
  • The obstacle is not tariffs but the structure of the economies: hydrocarbon exporters and labour exporters trade with the world rather than with each other, and there is little complementary manufacturing to trade.
• Syria’s membership was suspended in November 2011 after the regime’s suppression of the uprising, and restored at the Jeddah summit in May 2023 — a readmission driven by Gulf and Egyptian judgements about Iranian influence and the captagon trade rather than by any change in Syrian conduct.
  • The fall of the Assad government in December 2024 changed the question again, and Syria’s new authorities have been engaged by Arab states with an eagerness that reflects the same regime-security calculus in reverse.
• The Gaza war has been the League’s most exposing episode. It has convened repeatedly — an emergency summit in Cairo in March 2025 adopting an Egyptian reconstruction plan as an alternative to the American proposal for displacing Gaza’s population, the 34th ordinary summit at Baghdad on 17 May 2025, and an emergency Arab–Islamic summit at Doha in September 2025.
  • The declarations were unanimous, forcefully worded and without operational consequence. The ceasefire framework, the transitional arrangements for Gaza and the disarmament negotiations of 2026 have been conducted by the United States with individual Arab states as guarantors and mediators — not by the Arab League, which has no seat in the mechanism its members are financing.
  • This is the League’s condition in a sentence: it is where Arab states register a common position, and it is not where anything is decided.

The Gulf Cooperation Council

• The GCC’s charter was signed at Abu Dhabi on 25 May 1981, and the timing is the explanation: the Iranian revolution of 1979 had produced a revolutionary republic claiming to speak for the region’s Shia populations, and the Iran–Iraq war had begun the previous September.
• Its six members — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman — are hereditary monarchies of comparable social structure, hydrocarbon dependence and external alignment, which gives the GCC a homogeneity no other body in this article possesses.
• Its organs are a Supreme Council of the six rulers, a Ministerial Council, a Secretariat-General at Riyadh, and a dispute-settlement commission never used for a serious dispute.
• The Peninsula Shield Force, created in the early 1980s and based in Saudi Arabia, is a standing joint formation. Its one significant deployment came in March 2011, when Saudi troops and Emirati police entered Bahrain to help suppress protests — the Gulf’s own statement that internal challenges to a member monarchy are a collective security matter.

Economic integration: the real record

• On free movement of citizens the GCC has gone further than any other body in the developing world — a Gulf national may live, work, own property and practise a profession in any member state on national-treatment terms.
• Everything else stops short of the blueprint. There is no supranational commission, no court with compulsory jurisdiction, no common budget of consequence, and the rail network linking the six has slipped for two decades.
• The Qatar crisis of 2017–21 showed what the organisation cannot survive being asked to do. Three members, with Egypt, severed relations with a fourth and closed land, sea and air links.
  • The GCC’s own dispute-settlement machinery played no part, and mediation fell to Kuwait and the United States. The Al-Ula Declaration of January 2021 restored relations without resolving the disagreement.
• Current Gulf politics is de-risking, and it runs mostly outside the GCC. Saudi Vision 2030 and comparable Emirati programmes aim at diversification; China is the largest customer for Gulf oil and mediated the Saudi–Iranian normalisation of 2023.
  • The 46th Supreme Council at Sakhir in December 2025 adopted a declaration about the common market, digital infrastructure and AI rather than deeper political union.

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

• The OIC was founded at Rabat in September 1969, convened after an arson attack on the Al-Aqsa Mosque; it was renamed from “Islamic Conference” to “Islamic Cooperation” in 2011.
• With fifty-seven members it is the largest intergovernmental organisation after the United Nations, headquartered at Jeddah, with an Islamic Summit every three years, an annual Council of Foreign Ministers and a General Secretariat.
• Its basis is religious rather than geographic, and that is analytically important for this unit: a “region” here is a community of faith spanning Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, including states with Muslim minorities such as Suriname and Guyana. It is the clearest available case that regions are constructed rather than given.
• Its most substantial institution is the Islamic Development Bank, established at Jeddah in 1975, which finances development and trade on sharia-compliant terms across the membership and is the OIC’s one body with real operational capacity.
• Enforcement capacity is otherwise minimal. The OIC has no binding decision procedure and no sanction; on Palestine, on the Rohingya, on Nagorno-Karabakh and on the persecution of Muslims in member states it issues resolutions.
• India’s grievance is specific and long-standing. The OIC maintains a Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir and its Council of Foreign Ministers passes resolutions on Kashmir that India rejects as factually incorrect and as interference in its internal affairs, holding that the OIC has no locus standi.
  • Against that stands the exception. India attended the 46th Council of Foreign Ministers at Abu Dhabi in March 2019 as guest of honour, on the UAE’s invitation and over Pakistan’s objection; Pakistan boycotted the session in protest.
  • The episode matters because it shows the OIC’s resolutions are the product of Pakistani agenda-setting within a body whose largest members increasingly transact with India directly. India has the world’s third-largest Muslim population and no OIC seat, and has periodically sought observer status without success.

The Madrid Conference and the road not taken

The West Asian Peace Conference at Madrid was the moment at which a regional order for the Middle East was seriously attempted. It followed a war, was co-sponsored by two superpowers one of which was weeks from dissolution, and produced a framework that survived long enough to yield two agreements and then collapsed.

• The conference met at the Royal Palace in Madrid from 30 October to 1 November 1991, co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union. It was the last significant act of Soviet diplomacy.
• The enabling conditions were the 1991 Gulf War — which had split the Arab world, discredited the PLO’s alignment with Iraq, made Arab states dependent on American protection, and given Washington unmatched leverage — together with the Soviet collapse that removed the Arab states’ alternative patron.
• Its legal basis was Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the principle of land for peace.
• Participation was engineered around Israeli conditions. Israel refused to negotiate with the PLO or with East Jerusalem residents, so Palestinians took part through a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation composed of West Bank and Gaza figures, with PLO-linked advisers coordinating from outside the hall.
  • The device let both sides attend without conceding their positions, and it is the conference’s most-copied innovation.

Two tracks

• The bilateral track put Israel opposite each of Syria, Lebanon and the Jordanian–Palestinian delegation, continuing in Washington from December 1991. It produced nothing directly: the Syrian track deadlocked on the Golan, and the Lebanese track was held hostage to it.
• The multilateral track, opened at Moscow in January 1992, is the part that matters for this unit. It created five working groups — water resources, the environment, arms control and regional security, refugees, and regional economic development — with participation from Arab states, Israel, and a wide range of outside donors.
  • This was the closest West Asia has come to a regionalism project: functional cooperation across the conflict line on precisely the technical, low-politics subjects that functionalist theory predicts should generate habits of cooperation.
  • It failed on every track. Syria and Lebanon boycotted the multilaterals from the outset, refusing normalisation before a settlement. The arms control group collapsed by 1995 when Egypt insisted on placing Israel’s nuclear programme on the agenda.
    • The economic development group produced regional economic summits from Casablanca in 1994 and a development bank agreed at Amman that was never capitalised.
  • After Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995 and the change of Israeli government in 1996, the multilaterals were suspended and never revived.
• What Madrid did produce came through the door it opened rather than the room it built. The Oslo channel, negotiated secretly in Norway between Israel and the PLO, produced the Declaration of Principles of 13 September 1993; and the Israel–Jordan Treaty of Peace was signed at Wadi Araba on 26 October 1994.
• The lesson is the inverse of the European one. Functional cooperation in Europe was possible because the political question — German power — had been settled by defeat and occupation. In West Asia the technical working groups were asked to run ahead of a political settlement that never arrived, and they could not.

Madrid tested whether functional cooperation can precede political settlement in a region defined by an unresolved conflict, and the answer was no.

• The line from Madrid to the Abraham Accords of September 2020 is the line from a comprehensive regional framework to a set of bilateral deals that bypass the Palestinian question altogether. The UAE and Bahrain normalised relations with Israel in September 2020, followed by Sudan and Morocco, and by Kazakhstan in November 2025.
  • Saudi Arabia has not joined, maintaining that normalisation requires concrete movement toward Palestinian statehood.
  • Since October 2023 the accords have persisted formally while cooling in substance — ambassadors recalled or downgraded, air links cut, few new agreements — and the diplomacy of the Gaza war has been conducted through ad hoc American-led mechanisms rather than through any regional organisation, Arab or otherwise.

ECO, BSEC and the corridors

• The Economic Cooperation Organization, founded in 1985 by Iran, Pakistan and Turkey as successor to the Regional Cooperation for Development of 1964, expanded in 1992 to ten members with Afghanistan and the six post-Soviet Muslim-majority states.
  • Headquartered at Tehran, it has a trade agreement that has never come fully into force and members who trade very little with each other.
• The Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation began with the Istanbul Summit Declaration of 25 June 1992 and gained legal personality in 1999.
  • Its thirteen members include states simultaneously in the EU, in NATO, in the EAEU and at war with one another; since 2022 it has been the clearest case of a regional organisation immobilised by containing both sides of a war.
• The International North–South Transport Corridor, agreed by India, Iran and Russia in 2000 and now counting thirteen participants, is a multimodal route from Mumbai through Iran to Russia and northern Europe, cutting transit time and cost against the Suez route.
  • Its western branch depends on the missing Rasht–Astara rail link through Iran, agreed with Russia in 2023 and still unbuilt.
• The India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor was announced on the margins of the G20 summit in New Delhi in September 2023 by India, the US, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, France, Germany, Italy and the EU.
  • It has an eastern maritime leg from India to the Gulf and a northern rail-and-sea leg across the Arabian peninsula to the Mediterranean.
  • Its premise was Israeli–Gulf normalisation, and the war that began weeks after its announcement removed that premise. As of 2026 there are no firm funding commitments and no construction timetable for the missing rail segments, and renewed regional hostilities have further weakened the logistics case.
  • IMEC and the INSTC are competing answers to the same question — how goods move between South Asia and Europe without passing through territory controlled by a rival — and India is inside both, which is the clearest single illustration of its regional strategy.

India in Eurasia and West Asia

• India’s engagement with both regions is membership-driven rather than integration-driven. It joins to be present, to shape language and to keep options open; it does not pool sovereignty, and it has not sought to.
• The SCO is the clearest case. India joined in 2017 partly to balance Pakistan’s simultaneous entry, partly for Central Asian access, and partly because staying out of a body containing Russia and China would have left the field to them.
  • It uses the SCO to secure counter-terrorism language it can cite elsewhere, to maintain a Russia channel, to hold structured contact with China outside the bilateral relationship, and to block the writing of the Belt and Road Initiative into the organisation’s documents.
  • It refuses the SCO any role in the India–Pakistan relationship, consistent with its position that bilateral disputes are bilateral.
• The EAEU negotiation launched in 2025 is India’s attempt to broaden a largely energy-based trade relationship, and it sits uneasily beside the agreements India has concluded with Western partners.
• Central Asia is where India’s ambition exceeds its access. The Connect Central Asia policy of 2012, the India–Central Asia Dialogue at foreign-minister level, and the first India–Central Asia Summit in January 2022 established the political relationship; India has an air base arrangement in Tajikistan and substantial development and training programmes.
  • The obstacle is geography plus Pakistan. India has no land access to Central Asia because Pakistan refuses transit, and the workaround has been maritime: the Chabahar port in Iran, where an Indian state company signed a ten-year operating agreement in May 2024, feeding the INSTC.
  • The workaround is itself hostage to sanctions. The American exemption that had shielded Chabahar was revoked with effect from September 2025, restored for six months, and allowed to lapse in April 2026, leaving the project’s future unresolved. India’s Central Asian connectivity therefore depends on a third country’s relations with a fourth.
• The Gulf is India’s most consequential regional relationship in this article and it is conducted almost entirely bilaterally. The region supplies a large share of India’s crude and LNG, hosts around nine million Indian nationals, and is the largest regional source of the remittances that make India the world’s biggest recipient.
  • The India–UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, signed in February 2022 and in force from May 2022, is India’s fastest-concluded trade agreement, and the India–Oman CEPA entered into force on 1 June 2026. Negotiations for an India–GCC free trade agreement have been resumed and unresumed since 2006 and remain unconcluded.
  • India participates in I2U2 with Israel, the UAE and the US, and in IMEC — minilateral formats, not regional organisations, and chosen for that reason.
• On the OIC India’s position is unchanged: it rejects the organisation’s Kashmir resolutions, works around it bilaterally with individual members, and treats the 2019 Abu Dhabi invitation as the demonstration that the bilateral route works better than the multilateral one.
• The pattern across all of it is consistent. India accepts membership where it buys presence and information, avoids commitments that constrain policy, and prefers bilateral agreements and small plurilateral formats to regional institutions — a coherent strategy for a rising power that belongs to none of its neighbours’ integration projects.

What these organisations tell us about the concept

• Regional organisation is not the same thing as regional integration, and this is where the distinction is most visible.
  • On any measure of depth these bodies sit low on the ladder — a customs union in the EAEU and the GCC, a partial free trade area in the CIS and the Arab League, nothing at all in the SCO or the OIC.
• Institutional design is not the binding constraint. The EAEU has a supranational commission and a court and remains shallow; the GCC has a customs union and has abandoned its currency. What is missing is political willingness.
• Asymmetry deforms every one of these bodies. Russia is about 85 per cent of the EAEU; Saudi Arabia dominates the GCC; Egypt and the Gulf states contest primacy in the Arab League. Where one member can supply the public goods alone, the others’ rational strategy is to take the benefits and refuse the constraints.
• Regime security explains more of the variance than economics does. The Peninsula Shield in Bahrain and the CSTO in Kazakhstan are the same act; the Arab League’s suspensions and readmissions track threats to incumbents rather than principles; the SCO’s “three evils” formula is a licence for internal repression written into a security treaty.
• Overlapping membership is the norm, not the exception. Armenia is in the EAEU, the CSTO and the CIS while legislating for EU accession; Turkey is in NATO, ECO, BSEC and the OIC and a candidate for the EU.
  • Kazakhstan is in the EAEU, the CSTO, the SCO and the Abraham Accords. These are not stages on a single ladder but simultaneous hedges.
• The counterfactual is worth stating. The relevant comparison for the CIS is not the EU but the other twentieth-century imperial dissolutions, and against that standard a framework that divided an army, a currency and a nuclear arsenal without a general war is a substantial achievement.

Conclusion

These organisations are best read as answers to political problems rather than as failed economic projects. The CIS was asked to dissolve a state and did so; the CSTO was asked to protect regimes and did that rather than defend members; the Arab League gives sovereign rulers a common language without common obligations. What has changed most since 2022 is that the post-Soviet framework is visibly contracting while the SCO grows without deepening. For India the implication is direct: presence is bought through membership, and results are obtained bilaterally.