Description
Eurasia has become something of a buzzword for all manner of attempts to define regional identities, integration projects and the relationship between “old” Europe and “new” Asia. Among the state actors talking Eurasia, the Putin-regime in Russia has been the most active. For decades, Russian political discourse has flirted with the well-established Eurasianist worldview narratives advocated by certain Russian political actors, in which Russia’s central position in the Eurasian continent provides it with a unique role in the world. While the premier foreign policy project of third-term Putin was the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Most recently, the Russian political machine has begun promoting the notion of a Greater Eurasia arrangement, in which the EEU would operate as the institutional pivot in a transcontinental economic arrangement including the European Union and ASEAN. Against this background, this chapter investigates how the notion of Eurasia as a region, continent and abstract space operate within these Russian political discourses. It is argued that the notion of Eurasia functions as the conduit tying together a particular metageographical and scalar imaginary with more pragmatic attempts at instituting a political-economic spatial fix.
