News report on border checks for EEU countries

Word count: 501

Djanibekova’s article picks on a specific event that signifies a set of problems in the union – the intensification of border checks and the ban of certain Kyrgyzstani products by the Kazakhstani side. The crisis has demonstrated that the union’s supranational bodies lack the power to settle this kind of disputes, as a result, in reality, figures like Vladimir Putin step in as power brokers. The commentary of the scholars included in the article revolves around a common argument – in such cases of regional integration the regulation is highly dependent on the presidential administrations, not on supranational institutions; in the EEU with semi-authoritarian leadership and little subordination of domestic policies to supranational directives, this is especially the case.

In this matter, the theories of the EU integration and governance can shed a light on the EEU’s flaws. The EEU is a newcomer to the set of regional integration projects and its creation can easily be traced back. Hoffman’s intergovernmental approach to integration articulated in Bache’s chapter can definitely be applied to the Eurasian integration. Hoffman’s assumption is heavily based on realism and codifies a power as a key variable – in his view, the European integration trajectory has been predominantly shaped by national governments prioritizing national interests. In the Eurasian scenario, this has been the case up until today – key decisions are made by the higher echelons, namely, presidents. The Kazakhstani-Kyrgyzstani crisis described in the article signifies that domestic interest groups (in this case – exporters) have little power of lobbying their interests and making them heard in the supranational bodies – the final say is after the state leaders.

As for the governance within the EEU, the case in the article demonstrates how actors, i.e. the member states and their leaders, are driven by the principles of the rational choice model, seeking to maximize their benefits – economic gains. If to analyze the failure of resolving the Eurasian disputes through the Commission with a useful analytical tool, Mark Pollack’s principal-agent theory, it can be concluded that the principles, Eurasian leaders, have given not much autonomy to their agents so far – supranational bodies. The leaders prefer the negotiations more on the intergovernmental level, they have been following the logic of consequences with a costs-and-benefits analysis, not the logic of appropriateness. Moreover, the historical path-dependency can also explain the current state of affairs in the EEU. In fact, many of trade agreements of the treaty are not new, they were achieved before within the CIS framework. In other words, the preexisting conditions continue to structure the actors’ behavior today. In my opinion, it is also the reason why such disputes do not heavily undermine a larger deal [the union itself] – because of the relationships established long before the value is placed on this partnership between the states, the stakes made for the union are high. The future of the EEU, though, will depend much on how the members balance the quest for personal gains and how much authority and autonomy they will be giving to the body.

Bibliography

Bache, Ian, Stephen George, and Simon Bulmer. 2011. “Theories of European Integration,” in Id. Politics in the European Union. Oxford University Press.

Bache, Ian, Stephen George, and Simon Bulmer. 2011. “Theories of EU Governance,” in Id. Politics in the European Union. Oxford University Press

Djanibekova, Nurjamal. 2017. "Eurasian Economic Union: Many Problems, Few Solutions". Eurasianet.Org. https://eurasianet.org/s/eurasian-economic-union-many-problems-few-solutions