Eurasian Integration as a Response to Neoliberal Globalization

Abstract

Underlying the radical reform proposals in the USSR were the assumptions that the backwardness of the Soviet economy and the lag in its capacity for innovation were due to its separation from the world economy, and that its centralized communist political formation was a hindrance to progress and political legitimacy. Joining the world economy and returning to its democratic European home became major objectives of the reform movement. Advocating a shift in the organizing principles of state socialism to globalizing ones were people from quite different backgrounds. Mikhail Gorbachev and reformers in the Soviet Union, advised by academics such as Manuel Castells, and prompted by organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), anticipated that the backwardness of the Soviet economy and its lag in capacity for innovation would be overcome following a movement to the world economy and the adoption of free-market economics. Immanuel Wallerstein, from a different point of view, regarded the move as the long-expected merging of the economies from the semiperiphery into the core of the world system. Others echoed Francis Fukuyama’s triumphal-ism: neoliberal globalization was the end point in human history. Many movers of the changes had an idealistic vision of the birth of a new era in world politics. George Bush described the ‘big idea’ as ‘a new world order where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind — peace and security, freedom and the rule of law’.¹

Keywords

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