Eurasia or Europe?

At the Customs Union summit in Kazakh capital of Astana an agreement was signed on the transformation of this organization into the Eurasian Economic Community. The word economic seems to me conditional. The European Union also was called the European Economic Community for many years, though important agreements of political, social, and military content were signed by its members. However, it is the economy that was the basis for European integration. As soon as it appeared that EU could not accelerate but quite the contrary could be an obstacle to the development of the European countries’ economies, an army of Eurosceptics appeared immediately. In the Eurasian case everything will be different. The Russian economy at least is an economy of oil rubles. The Kazakh one is also based on fossil fuels. Kazakhstan possesses less of them, there were no economic reforms, and it has the corresponding economic level. What kind of economies do Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan have? This makes it quite clear that what is being created is not an economic but a political union, a pseudonym for Russia’s sphere of influence. It promises privileges for those who agree to Russia’s age-old political dream of being the center of the universe, if only on its periphery.

However, it is obvious that once a declaration of the Eurasian Economic Community has been made, Ukraine will find a host of politicians trying to convince us that we finally have a choice, that no one will accept us in Europe, while Eurasia will do so with pleasure, because our whole economy is directed toward the Eastern market. Don’t listen to them! We understand that the road to Eurasia is one to poverty, to the eternal priority of politics over the economy, to declaration instead of deeds. We have no alternative but Europe. Let us become a country of Eurasiasceptics. The announcement of the Eurasian Economic Community just makes our choice easier.