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James Sperling, Sean Kay and S. Victor Papacosma (eds)Manchester University Press, Manchester and New York, 2003, 290pp.ISBN: 0-7190-6605-0 .
Eurasia and its heartland are once again becoming crucial for the shape of the international security system and especially for the prosperous West. After the end of the Cold War, the Atlantic security community has been successful in expanding its values and institutions eastward. Nevertheless, most of Eurasia does not share the benefits of this stable security governance and it is very questionable whether this process can easily continue further towards the states of Central Asia and East Asia where relations among states are still defined by jealously guarded sovereignty, a much higher degree of enmity and low prospects of forming a viable security community. Eurasia lacks both the necessary collective identity and other incentives in this direction due to the low level of economic interdependence and slow convergence of domestic values. It is therefore very timely to look into the implications of an anarchical Eurasia for the Atlantic security community. The present edited volume brings together a group of distinguished experts who focus on security dilemmas facing the states of Eurasia, the sources and types of threats posed to the European political space by Eurasia, and the role international institutions are playing and may play in the creation of a sustainable system of security governance encompassing the Eurasian land mass.
James Sperling introduces the main concepts related to the security governance approach and their possible application in the Eurasian political space, affected by a mixture of old and new security agendas, security dilemmas and different meanings and uses of boundaries as well as the role of international institutions. Part II then examines a broad range of threats to Eurasian stability and consequently to the European security order. Douglas Blum starts with the structural weakness of the Eurasian heartland, Central Asia, where a mixture of contested national identities and weak state structures has plagued the successor states to the former Soviet Union. He illustrates how mainly ethnic-based national identity projects, often combined with a curious official policy of multinational states, were pursued in most of Central Asia and how they affect the foreign policies of those states. He further explores how this process undermines the...