EU and EAEU Security Strategies Toward Central Asia: Postcolonial Dimension

Introduction

The Munich Security Report (2020, 6) declared that the West “is in trouble”. The contemporary West, the stronghold of universal liberal democratic values, claims to be threatened by non-Western geopolitical systems of regional integration initiatives dominated by China and Russia. The problem arises in the overestimation of Western liberalism which was believed sooner or later to become the superior order of the world. The world is facing the global crisis of universalism of values, which occurs with security.

By 2016, security has become one of the buzzwords in European and global public rhetoric. It has changed dramatically from an important concept to an avant-garde one, although until recently the EU was seen as the safest place to live. The first generation of security narratives in the IR focused on ontological security derived from A. Giddens (1991) as “safety as being” rather than “safety as survival”. Security in such a context is understood as a shared freedom against anxiety and seeks to emphasize the idea of the nation-state's responsibility to protect individuals from existential threats. The extended description of development as a form of security made by the UN in 1994 binds the situation of ontological security with the normative right to protect and substitutes the anthropological notion of stability with the form of democratic development. Since the 2000s the concept of security moved to the next generation of narratives, from hardware, mostly military or nuclear guarantees of the nation-state, to the anthropological, “human” dimension of security (Kaldor et al 2018). A comprehensive approach to human security combines security and human rights, blurs boundaries between internal and external security, and colours up the security rationale with anthropological elements. This leads to speculations about the human dimension of “public security” as moral obligations and public order, which seem to be important extensions of community, solidarity and integration.

External insecurity is viewed as an existential threat from projects such as the Eurasian Union, Belt and Road Initiative, etc. along with the rise of Euroscepticism in public discourse are seen as challenges to the EU's integration seals. A brand new justification for the security programme resembles a mixture of conceptual-political and contextual-geographical dimensions: internal and external circles of security, and European and non-European approaches. By security programme is meant definition and redefinition of specific state policy of confrontation and cooperation, whereas regionalism is defined as a complex of ideas, norms and interests manifested at the regional level (Jervis 1982; Acharya & Johnston 2007). Such security regionalism is a model for explaining the security policies of the major powers that have been recognized since the end of the Cold War. It provides further impetus for continuing discussions on “security regions”, and Central Asia deserves an important place among them.

Central Asia (CA) serves as the reference object of the global actors’ scrutiny in Asia. The paper aims at determining the competing approaches of the EU and the EAEU that supranational actors implement over Central Asia and addressing the role and efficiency of such approaches in the regional self-identification and the security narratives. The paper highlights the European security strategy in Asia when implementing the “connectivity vision” and “principled pragmatism” approach; it also provides a comparative view of the EAEU as vis-à-vis the EU in the region. For doing this the twofold comparison is focused on the evaluation of the new EU Global Strategy instruments in Asia as in the ‘neighbours-of-neighbours’ region adjacent to the EU, and critical appraisal of the CA positioning as an integral part of the Great Eurasia project dominated by Russia-China nexus.