On the one hand, one could often see an unfortunate trend (both inside and outside Eurasia) of depicting the Eurasian (re)integration efforts as an endeavour to bring back the Soviet Union. Such simplification thus undermines the ability to analyze its features, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in a manner that would be comprehensive and truly critical. On the other hand, there is no shortage of serious and detailed books on key aspects of Eurasian integration, approaching the phenomenon from a variety of angles. In this respect, the works by Evgeny Vinokurov and Alexander Libman, Rilka Dragneva and Kataryna Wolczuk, Yulia Vymyatnina and Daria Antonova, Katarzyna Czerewacz-Filipowicz and Agnieszka Konopelko, and numerous others immediately come to mind.1
What Anna Aseeva and Jędrzej Górski propose to readers is however different from the current expert and scholarly works in several ways. First and foremost, most of the current literature is in either economics or politics, with only a secondary focus on legal and institutional matters. Secondly, and consequently, the book that Aseeva and Górski are offering is accessible and relevant to readers both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the boundaries of the Eurasian area: not only geographical boundaries, but also legal, geopolitical, geoeconomic, cultural, and, indeed, disciplinary boundaries.
Drawing on international, transnational, and comparative legal scholarship, this rich volume features several chapters offered by a plethora of leading international scholars in economics, institutional theory, area studies, international relations, global political economy, political science, and sociology. The contributors come from four corners of the globe, including Asia, Europe, and North America.
To know how to apply better the concept of regionalization in Eurasia in theory and practice, one should also know its actual and potential weaknesses, at both regional and global levels, and from different disciplinary and cultural perspectives. In a nutshell, this insightful thirty-chapter volume edited by Aseeva and Górski outlines the key tensions of Eurasian regionalization discussed throughout.
Professor Julien Chaisse
School of Law, City University of Hong Kong
Advisor & partner to the United Nations artnet on fdi
Evgeny Vinokurov and Alexander Libman (eds), Eurasian integration: Challenges of transcontinental regionalism (Palgrave Macmillan 2012); Rilka Dragneva, Kataryna Wolczuk (eds), Eurasian economic integration: law, policy and politics (Edward Elgar 2013). Piotr Dutkiewicz and Richard Sakwa, Eurasian Integration – The View from Within (Routledge 2014); Yulia Vymyatnina and Daria Antonova, Creating a Eurasian Union: Economic Integration of the Former Soviet Republics (Palgrave Macmillan 2014); Roman Petrov and Peter Van Elsuwege (eds), Legislative Approximation and Application of EU Law in the Eastern Neighbourhood of the European Union (Routledge 2016); Katarzyna Czerewacz-Filipowicz and Agnieszka Konopelko, Regional Integration Processes in the Commonwealth of Independent States: Economic and Political Factors (Springer 2017); Kaj Hober and Yarik Kryvoi (eds), Law and Practice of International Arbitration in the CIS Region (Kluwer 2017); Roman Petrov and Peter Van Elsuwege, Post-Soviet Constitutions and Challenges of Regional Integration—Adapting to European and Eurasian integration projects (Routledge 2018); Andrey Kotelnikov, Sergey Kurochkin and Oleg Skvortsov (eds), Arbitration in Russia (Kluwer 2019).