Security Challenges in Eurasia
Gulnara Alimbayeva, SPP, MPA 2015 reports
Last summer I had a chance to attend the meetings of statutory bodies of the Council of Europe. My key observation was that no matter what subject was discussed, whether it was the rights of religious minorities, restriction of humanitarian assistance, convention on the manipulation of sports competitions, or state of democracy, certain countries always ended up on opposite sides: Armenia-Azerbaijan, Greece-Cyprus, and Russia-Ukraine. It is clear that confrontation veils frozen territorial conflicts that remain unresolved and wounds that are still bleeding.
The session “Security Challenges in Eurasia” was based on recent articles by Henry Kissinger, “To settle the Ukraine Crisis, Start at the End” and Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Putin’s Three Choices on Ukraine.” Kissinger strives for involvement and concession, while Brzezinski’s main emphasis is on isolation.
During the session, participants were asked to vote for one of the two approaches to resolve the conflict. Although the majority voted for concession, almost as many were for isolation. CEU Associate Professor Matteo Fumagalli noted that the latter tendency is growing. The fact that once friendly neighboring countries are now completely alienated from each other means that countries in the region have to face many security issues related to energy, counter-terrorism, NATO borders, and trade.
All of this reminded me of the G-Zero world, a scenario in which countries become increasingly protectionist as a result of the decline in Western influence. As the world has become more multi-polar, security is not constrained in the same way that it once was.
Fumagalli kept challenging the participants on how to deal with the issue of sovereignty, which led very nicely to the open, sincere, and honest presentation by Professor Nina Belyaeva from the Moscow Higher School of Economics at the Russian National Research University. To me, it made a small and yet also a large contribution toward reconciliation between the people of Ukraine and Russia, between ordinary people who consider themselves brothers, who are victims of the propaganda machine, who are not for West or East, and who are able to look into each other’s faces without hate.