By Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Yakovenko.The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) obviously occupies a special place among regional structures trying to implement the idea of multipolarity.
Its predecessor until 2001, the Shanghai Five (comprising Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan), was initially set up to settle border issues under agreements on enhanced military trust, and mutual troop cuts in border areas. Over the years it has turned into a dynamic and influential international organization. Uzbekistan joined it in 2001, while Mongolia, India, Pakistan, and Iran now have observer status.
Sri Lanka, Japan, ASEAN, the United States and the European Union have shown interest in the SCO, which is only natural because it is an open partnership oriented at maintaining regional peace and stability, and at developing broad international cooperation. An alliance including two global powers, China and Russia, which entered the 21st century as strategic partners, is being built in the center of Eurasia, the heart of the planet, embracing countries with vast mutually complementary potentials.
Using the successful experience accumulated by the SCO members in resolving difficult and even dramatic political and military issues, the mutual trust forged in earlier years, a tradition of intercultural respect, dialogue, and a search for common avenues of progress - in other words, what is sometimes referred to as the Shanghai spirit - we have every right to expect common strategic achievement from our regional cooperation in diverse areas.
The SCO members began to realize when they were still the Shanghai Five that economic cooperation was a must for further progress. The first steps in this direction were taken in 1998. At their very first summit in September 2001 the SCO members signed a memo on the main goals and areas of regional economic cooperation, and on facilitating trade and investment.
The SCO took a major step in this direction in 2003 by adopting a program for multilateral trade and economic cooperation. In the long term (until 2020) this program aims to create the most favorable conditions for mutual trade and investment, the best possible use of regional resources, and a gradual transition to free movement of goods, money, services, and technologies.
Tellingly, on a par with power engineering, transport, telecommunications, and the credit-and-bank sector, the program puts cooperation in education, science, state-of-the-art technologies, health care, and agriculture high on its list of priorities. This means that our program has a serious social orientation. In essence, it is a program for the joint development of the region’s countries in the first half of the 21st century.
These formidable tasks require meticulous effort. One should primarily create stable and transparent terms or “rules of the game,” implement a package of legal measures at the national and international levels, and agree on the first steps - common pilot projects that can become the engine of cooperation.
The discussion of these tasks at the SCO summit in Bishkek in 2004 produced a specific plan of action consisting of 127 points, out of which only about a quarter were institutional and legal issues. A section on fuel-and-energy cooperation had 19 common projects, and that on transport had 20 projects. Almost a third of the plan was devoted to cooperation in education, science, and technologies. This means that the SCO members set themselves ambitious goals of modernization.
There are undoubtedly grounds for optimism. In the last few years, all SCO countries have registered stable economic growth of 6%-8%. Experts believe that SCO members will maintain this rate in the next five to seven years, and not only owing to China’s stable economic advance (with GDP growth ranking second in the world), or to Russia’s economic rebirth, but also due to the rapid advance of Central Asian SCO members.
Cooperation in fuel, energy and transport may bring great benefits. Potentially, SCO members can pool their efforts in geological prospecting, and jointly develop Central Asia’s vast resources. There are plans to implement major oil and gas projects on laying pipelines, for instance, from Central Asia to China’s Xinjiang Uigur autonomous region, and stipulating a thorough reconstruction of Kyrgyzstan’s pipeline network.
Construction of a pipeline from Russia to China may be one of the projects of the century. It is not surprising that Russia’s American partners are following these projects closely. On the one hand, they are sometimes a bit jealous of our special relations with SCO members, and on the other they would like to take part in promising projects in SCO countries, for example, by buying controlling interests in their companies.
The SCO has decided to cooperate in the building and reconstruction of facilities in Tajikistan (the Rogun hydroelectric plant) and Kyrgyzstan (the Uch-Kurgan and At-Bashi hydroelectric plants) with a view to creating major energy networks in the region. Regional hydroelectric engineering is an untapped sphere, and we are ready to solve complicated multi-disciplinary problems at a new level.
The SCO members are discussing the idea of a common transportation space. They are already working to upgrade auto-transport corridors, and studying possibilities of mapping out new itineraries, for instance, for trains from western China to Europe.
The strategic significance of new transport corridors that can create totally new possibilities in regional economies is obvious. There are reasons to believe that before long they will exert a beneficial influence not only in Central Asia but also in adjacent countries. Free access to seaports opens the door to new development resources, new markets, and new relations.
Eventually, this avenue of development will be the most reliable and effective instrument for overcoming current problems that have engendered and will engender for a long time to come intercultural suspicion and mistrust, extremism, separatism, and terrorism.
In this context the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a unique political opportunity, and a fundamentally new model of geopolitical integration. It embraces almost two thirds of mainland Eurasia, uniting countries with different civilization backgrounds. Its magnitude and diversity of interests, its trans-regional status that bring many civilizations together are unprecedented. This new approach guarantees the future of the SCO.
