Page 23 - bne IntelliNews newspaper 14 July 2017

Opinion
July 14, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 23
The EEU will keep Russia in the Chinese OBOR game
Tom Adshead of Macro-Advisory
From the point of view of the Russian government, the map of the Chinese Belt and Road strategy (OBOR) looks like a deliberate snub. If one of the goals of OBOR is to reduce Chinese dependence on the South China Sea as the main conduit for
its exports, then not including the cheapest and fastest land route to Europe can only be explained by a political desire not to include the Russians. At its most ambitious, OBOR is a plan to re-design the world’s economic geography for the next cen- tury, linking China with Africa and Europe. Russia is reduced to a role that would likely be limited to the supply of raw materials as and when needed.
The Russian response has been pragmatic. They accept that if they were China, they would do things the same way. The Russians have learned from their experience with gas pipelines to Europe that dependence on single export routes creates both economic and political risks. Once a pipeline is in place, it is as much a hostage as a lifeline. They un-
derstood that the only way to persuade the Chinese to give Russia a more fruitful role in OBOR would be to bring something to the table, and that some- thing was the Eurasia Economic Union (EEU).
When President Putin referred to the break-up of the Soviet Union as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, he may have been harking back to the Ancient Greek origins of the word “catastrophe”. In Greek tragedy,
the catastrophe is the denouement at the end of the play when the circumstances overcome the central motive, creating a sudden change in circumstances. Only later has the word come to mean a disaster.
One aspect of this catastrophe was that the eco- nomic development that had been permitted by the integration of the countries of the former Soviet Union was rapidly reversed by the political desire of each member country to go their own way. Since