Toward a Greater Eurasia

The map of the big Eurasian supercontinent is currently being shaped by three separate regional initiatives, the European Union (EU), a Eurasian Union proposed by Russia, and the plethora of fast-developing Asian groupings. In addition, Europe and Asia are flanked by two intercontinental developments across both Euro-Atlantic and Asian-Pacific areas, which effectively cut the Eurasian supercontinent in half. By contrast, the present article examines the case for a Greater Eurasia, which would embrace all of Europe and Asia. Eurasianism on a smaller scale already has several variants with long historical roots in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey, but these are addressing Lesser rather than Greater Eurasias. Concretely, there is already an important agenda of issues of concern for the whole of the Greater Eurasia: security around post-2014 Afghanistan; transcontinental transport connections; energy supplies and transit to both west and east; rationalization of the proliferating free trade areas; and Arctic cooperation, to name just a few. But there are also overarching long-term issues of political, economic, societal, and even philosophical nature facing this Greater Eurasia. The question is whether these immediate and longer-term issues need to be treated holistically with a growing sense of common Greater Eurasian identity, with a deepening institutional network of overlapping but differentiated bodies and arrangements. This Greater Eurasia is going to account for much of the advanced world far into the twenty-first century. It should, therefore, rise in significance as a strategic space alongside the current set of regional, intercontinental, and global groupings.