China's belt and road initiative and the Eurasian Economic Union: "Integrating the integrations"

Abstract

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), officially unveiled in 2013, has been promptly placed among the top priorities of China's foreign policy. One of the BRI's cooperation priorities is unimpeded trade, which implies the improvement of the investment and trade facilitation and removal of the recurrent investment and trade barriers. Despite its apparent flexibility and openness to embracing existing regional and multilateral platforms, there has been little debate on the compatibility of the BRI objectives with the existing economic integration projects. The paper is aimed at enriching this debate by addressing the relationship of the BRI with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), a regional economic grouping bringing together several of China's important BRI partners including Russia and Central Asian countries. The paper addresses the current progress in bridging the two grand economic projects and outlines the priority directions for further coordination between them.