25 years of CIS and new economic opportunities for cooperation

Abstract

The article assesses the integration and disintegration trends at different stages of the CIS formation and development, emphasizing that comprehensive integration ensured to preserve the Commonwealth as a common consultative platform for the member states. However, the Commonwealth has turned out to be deprived of a single ideology, clear objectives and authority and with weak and contradictory institutional and legal base. In some cases, the hostility and noncoordinated actions of the CIS member countries has increased.

Special attention is paid to the more successful integration project within the CIS – the Eurasian economic community, which includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan. The features of the EAEU functioning under the macroeconomic pressures related to the strengthening of the Western anti-Russian position are disclosed. The directions to overcome the global challenges and internal contradictions within the Eurasian economic community and its forms and mechanisms of economic, cultural and defense integration are justified. Moreover, the ways to create similar mechanisms for economic regulations, conducting the consensual taxing, monetary, credit, financial, trade and customs policy, and scenarios of possible expansion of the Eurasian economic community and its interaction with other international unions are considered.