Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Search of Itself
BRUSSELS, Feb 19 (IPS Asia-Pacific) – The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) has acquired some heft since its birth in 2001. But how it picks its way across the minefield of different, at times conflicting interests -- in the shadow of giants China and Russia – remains its biggest challenge in the coming years.
The environment in which the SCO finds itself reflects many of the issues that have come to the fore in the decades after the Cold War -- the challenge of terrorism, how to address domestic issues, how to cooperate in the area of economics and freer trade, but also how to deal with touchy matters like hosting U.S. military presence, and which countries to have as future members.
As the European Union’s special representative to Central Asia Pierre Morel put it, the SCO – whose members are the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and China and Russia – is a “mirror of the new trends of an unstable world and a barometre of new relationships in the making in the Eurasian arena”.
Indeed, debate continues about the shape and direction of the organisation that was formed in Shanghai seven years ago.
Some see it as a venue where China and Russia flex their muscles in Central Asia. Others have called it a “NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) of the east”, as Richard Weixing Hu of the Brookings Institution and the University of Hong Kong noted at a seminar here on ‘Shanghai Cooperation Organisation: A New Regional Kid on the Block?’ Some see it as a challenge to the west, but others see its potential for strengthening cooperation in a region that is coming into its own after the Central Asian states’ independence from the Soviet Union nearly two decades ago.
Russia tends to see the SCO as more of a discussion forum, while China favours its becoming a formally structured organisation. The SCO’s formation, after all, was China’s first initiative in forming regional organisations like this.
At present, its leaders meet in summits and it has some 127 projects on different aspects of cooperation. It has an ambitious programme for a free trade association to be in place by 2023, from the Caspian Sea all the way to Shanghai.
The SCO has had its achievements, including settling border issues between China and its neighbours and setting in place mechanisms and regular meetings for security and other areas cooperation, according to Hu, who spoke at the seminar here on the SCO, organised by the European Policy Centre with the support of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation.
But he added that the SCO has been much less impressive in handling two crises – the divisive issue of hosting U.S. military presence in Central Asia as part of the U.S.-led ‘war on terror’ after Sep. 11, 2001 and the 2005 ‘Tulip Revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan, when mass protests in the capital Bishkek led to the ouster of the country's president, Askar Akaev.
“In the Tulip Revolution, the SCO failed to forge a common position except issue a statement which was quite indifferent to this,” Hu explained.
“These two crises show you that its mission is not very clear. The geopolitical implications and a lot of what outsiders speculate (about) was not really there.” After all, “it’s only six years old, still in the infant stage of development.”
But because SCO countries were not able to deal with addressing an ‘internal’ matter like Kyrgyzstan’s up front, Hu said: “It will face in the future another major test if one of the Central Asian countries encounters another colour revolution.”
Looking back at the reactions from Central Asia to U.S. military presence after the Sep, 11 attacks, Morel said: “It was a turning point. You could think that SCO was over” because China Russia reacted very differently to the matter.
At the time, Russia said that if the U.S. government put aircraft, it would the same. “This kind of poker play by Russia was to say ‘you have reason to be there but it’s not going to be a free ride’. By matching your forces we create pressure for you to shift gears,” Morel explained. This put China in a fix, but in the end it shrewdly roped in its concerns about its own separatist problems and argued that it too was involved in terrorism, he added.
“So what could have been a stop to SCO led to a pause, but then to a new start,” Morel continued. “(Since) then, SCO moved to expansion in political visibility.” The increase in this side of the SCO’s profile, he stressed, has been the most striking trend in the last few years.
In 2005, the SCO issued a statement calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. bases from the Central Asian republics, one that had many observers branding it an anti-U.S. one. It also held small-scale joint military exercises from 2003 to 2007.
Today, SCO members continue to have different positions on hosting foreign military presence. At last year’s summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, the summit statement did not even mention the matter of foreign troops because the government did not want the issue of U.S. air bases it hosts in Manas – close to the Chinese border of Xinjiang -- discussed.
Stepping back, Morel added that there was no “grand design” to the SCO, and that outsiders tended to attribute too much to theories of it being a foil to Western geopolitical blocs. What has been happening has actually been quite pragmatic, he says, pointing to “confidence-building measures” in the SCO that are similar to the European Union’s earlier support to Central and Eastern European countries.
For the European Union, its approach to SCO will be “operational”, seeking concrete cooperation in areas such as narcotrafficking that it considers a priority issue, Morel said. The EU has always had a “fairly relaxed” approach to the SCO, he noted.
Another challenge is membership in the SCO, because criteria for membership are far from established. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan and India have been identified as potential members, but how SCO expands – whether towards the Caspian Sea or toward South or South-west Asia, or towards a ‘Greater Central Asia’ – remains to be seen.
For now, what is clear, Morel said, is: “The SCO is still searching for its centre of gravity and even the leaders of the organisation recognise that.”
“There has been a lot of talking but we still don’t see substantive action (in many areas)” Hu pointed out. “The key challenge is what kind of regional architecture can we envision in the region?” (END/IPSAP/JS/ME/0308)
