Competing for Peace?: Explaining the Rise of the Eurasian Economic Union as a Non-Liberal Norm Entrepreneur

What happens when a region is exposed to both liberal and non-liberal influences, and more importantly, when these normative projects are competing with each other for primacy? This has been the case of the post-Soviet space, where tensions and conflicts have often emerged from the collision between the European (liberal) and Russian (statist) normative visions. By zooming in to the different conceptions of peace, order, and legitimacy put forward by the EU and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), the paper examines the role of regional institutional initiatives in defining what is “normal” in regional interstate relations. Employing qualitative content analysis method to analyze key texts and speeches, the study investigates how Moscow has strategically advanced the EEU project as an alternative normative project to support, legitimize, and promote “Russia-like” regimes in its neighborhood. The study traces the origin of these illiberal norms to the statist, top-down model of domestic governance practiced in Russia, and argues that non-liberal governments can also promote “like-minded” regimes in their regions. In this regard, regional organizations play a strategic role for championing and institutionalizing illiberal norms: the regional level of analysis is critical here, precisely because a region may emerge as an “illiberal enclave” even at the time when liberal norms have defining influence at the global stage. By taking advantage of the prominence of liberal influence, EEU policymakers creatively transformed liberal ideas into illiberal norms: for instance, authoritarian practices are often justified in terms of “pluralism” and “sovereign equality” that democratic and non-democratic states should be treated “equally” without any discrimination. The paper concludes that an inter-regional mechanism to bridge the normative agendas of EU and EEU would be necessary to prevent further normative divergence in the common neighborhood, and to manage the process of creating a peaceful and stable regional normative order.