Gurjit Singh | SCO At 25: A Mirror Of Eurasian Chasms

The 25th anniversary summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) was held in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on August 31 and September 1. Instead of reflecting a celebration, it manifested a mirror of the strategic cleavages within Eurasia.

Twenty-five years ago, the Shanghai Five was a local arrangement aimed at stabilising post-Soviet frontiers and dealing with the main anxiety around regional extremism. It has since enlarged into a weightier strategic institution, now gathering around 40 percent of the global population in its fold.

However, as leaders of its 10 members arrived in Bishkek to attend the summit and the opening of the biannual Nomad Games, the SCO expressed a basic anxiety that lies at its core: can such a body be an effective umbrella for rivalries among its members and yet be a stable balancer to the liberal, Westernised global order?

For China and Russia, the summit was an important event to manifest unity and to be seen as leading a multipolar alternative global system. Moscow used the SCO to show that Western sanctions and attempts to isolate it have not really succeeded across the Global South and Eurasia, as was also evident in the case of the Russia-Asean summit.

China, however, manifests economic capacity and uses its BRI to be the unrivalled contributor to infrastructure development in Central Asia. Its commitments are coalescing around important trade corridors such as the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway. China continues to promote trade settlement in local currencies to circumvent the US dollar and make China the primary economic locomotive for the region.

Both China and Russia intend to institutionalise economic arrangements through an SCO development bank, with a parallel SCO development fund. These could make important differences in the region beyond what China has achieved through the BRI.

At Bishkek, these were discussed as important mechanisms to fund regional infrastructure and support members from the impact of Western sanctions, which is important for Russia and Iran in particular.

Progress remains slow because of internal differences. China seeks another version of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, where there would be weighted capital allocations to the members. This would be in China’s favour, given the size of its economy. Russia and India, for instance, prefer a body where voting rights are equally distributed, as is the governance, so that China does not become the dominant force in these institutions.

Due to this, a political consensus around the necessity of a development financial institution has grown, but the idea of the bank is still under discussion and cannot be seen as a functional alternative to global lenders at present.

With regard to security, the summit emphasised the importance of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS), based in Tashkent, which has long provided the SCO with a strong basis. RATS is supposed to deal with the SCO’s main anxieties of terrorism, separatism and extremism. Given the low level of achievement of the SCO, RATS remains its most functional institution.

To its credit, intelligence sharing, growing unified watch lists and common exercise frameworks, which could deal with extremist networks across Central Asia, have been working to some extent. The efficiency and impact of RATS, however, are constrained by regional rivalries and the inability to have common basic definitions and accept counterterrorism measures without pointing out national political repression by members. This remains a challenge to its work.

Cleavages among member states have prevented seamless intelligence integration, which would make RATS more useful. However, to blame India and Pakistan, who have only become members relatively recently, is to overlook the fact that these problems persisted in the years before their membership and affected RATS’s efficacy as well.

These national priorities and strategic rivalries were taken advantage of in India’s participation. India showed that it would not be simply co-opted into an anti-Western bias, meticulously maintaining its strategic autonomy.

At Bishkek, India asserted its national priorities on security. Prime Minister Modi clearly criticised state-sponsored terrorism, double standards in dealing with cross-border violence, and cautioned against such activity.

On connectivity, India supported regional infrastructure but said it must respect national sovereignty and territorial integrity, referring to the CPEC under the BRI running through Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. Mr Modi’s emphasis on digital public infrastructure (DPI), cultural diplomacy and trade stability showed that India intended to be a stabilising, autonomous bridge rather than a passive participant in a China-led enterprise with Russian support.

The Central Asian republics, four of five of whom are members, since Turkmenistan is permanently neutral, were dealing with the summit pragmatically, understanding the geopolitical atmosphere in which they operate.

Kyrgyzstan, as host, leveraged the summit to seek higher levels of investment, diversify trade and overcome the dominance of larger neighbours like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. For these countries, the SCO is not a choice in a new Cold War, but a choice they make for their own autonomy and economic interests.

After 25 years, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation has shown that it is durable, but its focal aim remains unsettled. The Bishkek summit manifested clearly that while the SCO is a great convening platform for a shared Eurasian security and economic network, its cleavages remain deep.

Unless it transforms itself into a development institution, it will not really be able to build the Eurasian identity that it now seeks.

China and Russia would prefer to have the SCO as a challenge to the liberal West, but India is not comfortable with junking the West for Chinese suzerainty. Hence, the SCO remains a web of complex, competing visions rather than a monolithic power arrangement.

Gurjit Singh is former ambassador of India to Germany and author of The Durian Flavour.