Ten heads of state gathered in Bishkek for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s twenty-sixth summit on 1 September,. There, Xi Jinping pledged support for the bloc as a pillar of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Bishkek succeeded Tianjin as host of the previous year’s summit, at which member states adopted a ten-year development strategy and proposed a development bank of their own. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan attended each summit, their delegations dwarfed by China and Russia though indispensable to the SCO’s founding purpose.
Its architects never designed the SCO to replicate the European Union’s courts or its shared currency. Its ambition remains narrower than Brussels’s, however, which makes it easier to attain in practice. The SCO seeks to give the states between Moscow, Beijing and Delhi a room where no one power sets every term, letting economic output do the rest of the talking.
Their output has already overtaken the West’s. The International Monetary Fund’s own data put the grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, known as BRICS, at roughly 40% of global output measured by purchasing power. Its membership has since expanded to eleven, with the accession of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The Group of Seven industrial economies account for closer to 28%, a gap their growth rates of little more than 1% a year are unlikely to close. India’s economy alone is expanding at over 6% annually.
Ageing populations and weak productivity growth across Germany, France and Italy explain part of the divergence, but demography only decides outcomes for governments that fail to build alongside it. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan have chosen to build.
Corridor Worth Courting
Central Asia’s five republics hold minerals every industrial power now competes to secure, giving them an unusually strong position for states of their size.
Kazakhstan alone produces nineteen of the thirty-four raw materials Brussels classifies as strategic to its economy, and remains the world’s leading uranium producer.
Geologists believe a deposit disclosed in the Karagandy region last year holds close to a million tonnes of cerium, lanthanum, neodymium and yttrium. It could rank the country third globally, behind China and Brazil, once feasibility work concludes. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have since agreed a joint working group on geology, backed by a combined investment target of a billion dollars.
Ursula von der Leyen has called the region’s holdings large enough to supply 40% of the world’s manganese, lithium and graphite reserves. Brussels adopted this stance less through foresight than through China’s near-total grip on processing capacity, a dependency European manufacturers can no longer treat as tolerable.
Two Suitors, One Region
The EU answered a year before Bishkek. Its first summit with the five Central Asian republics, held in Samarkand, committed twelve billion euros to transport, energy and mineral projects under the Global Gateway programme.
Three billion euros target the Trans-Caspian corridor, which already carries goods out of western China, across Kazakh ports, towards the Caspian Sea. Two and a half billion more back the raw materials partnership itself.
This does not displace China’s B&R financing in the region, which began decades earlier and built the railways Kazakhstan now uses to send goods into Europe.
The two projects advance alongside one another, and Central Asian governments have displayed little inclination to choose between them.
A parliament further west offers a telling example of how such choices actually unfold. Armenia’s recent tilt towards the EU occurred after years of Russian inertia, with little campaigning needed from Brussels. It confirms former Soviet states drift towards whichever patron turns up with capital and follow-through.
Under Construction
The SCO will not replace Brussels as a legal or monetary authority, because its founders built it as a forum for coordination, not a governing power, over its members. It offers instead a venue where Central Asian states can extract commitments from Beijing and Moscow without surrendering the leverage drawn from also courting Washington and Brussels.
Practical leverage explains why Kazakh and Uzbek diplomats have spent the past eighteen months signing memoranda with the United States, the EU and China in close succession.
Central Asia’s task now is to keep enough distance from every patron for its mineral wealth to fund its own development instead of merely rerouting someone else’s supply chain.
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