THE EURASIAN ECONOMIC UNION, GEOPOLITICAL UNION

Today a new year has started and The Grandma hopes it will be better than the last one. She has done the typical things of every January. She has listened to the New Year Concert from Vienna and she has watched the ski jumps of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. After this, she has been reading about latest news about Brexit and new ones about the development of another great geopolitics structure, the EurasianEconomic Union, that comes into effect on a day like today in 2015.

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is an economic union of states located in Eastern Europe, Western Asia, and Central Asia.

The Treaty on the Eurasian Economic Union was signed on 29 May 2014 by the leaders of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, and came into force on 1 January 2015.

Treaties aiming for Armenia's and Kyrgyzstan's accession to the Eurasian Economic Union were signed on 9 October and 23 December 2014, respectively. Armenia's accession treaty came into force on 2 January 2015. Kyrgyzstan's accession treaty came into effect on 6 August 2015. It participated in the EAEU from the day of its establishment as an acceding state.

The Eurasian Economic Union has an integrated single market of 180 million people and a gross domestic product of over Int$5 trillion. 

The EAEU encourages the free movement of goods and services, and provides for common policies in the macroeconomic sphere, transport, industry and agriculture, energy, foreign trade and investment, customs, technical regulation, competition and antitrust regulation. Provisions for a single currency and greater integration are envisioned for the future.

More information: Geopolitica

The union operates through supranational and intergovernmental institutions. The Supreme Eurasian Economic Council is the supreme body of the Union, consisting of the Heads of the Member States. The second level of intergovernmental institutions is represented by the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council, consisting of the Heads of the governments of member states. The day-to-day work of the EAEU is done through the Eurasian Economic Commission, the executive body of the Union. There is also a judicial body -the Court of the EAEU.

In the 1990s, Russia and the Central Asian republics were weakened economically and faced declines in GDP. The member states of the union underwent economic reforms and privatisation.

The process of Eurasian integration began immediately after the break-up of the Soviet Union. When the USSR began to fall in 1991, the presidents of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia of the founding republics signed the Belavezha Accords on 8 December 1991, declaring that the Soviet Union would cease to exist and proclaimed the Commonwealth of Independent States in its place.

To promote further economic integration and more cooperation, in 2000 Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan established the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) which Uzbekistan joined in 2006. The treaty established a common market for its member states. The Eurasian Economic Community was modelled on the European Economic Community. The two had a comparable population size of 171 million and 169 million, respectively.

A Treaty on a Single Economic Space by Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine was signed in 2003 and ratified in 2004, but the process was stalled after the Orange revolution.

In 2007, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia signed an agreement to create a Customs Union between the three countries.

The Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia now the Eurasian Customs Union came into existence on 1 January 2010. The Customs Union's priorities were the elimination of intra-bloc tariffs, establishing a common external tariff policy and the elimination of non-tariff barriers. It was launched as a first step towards forming a broader single market inspired by the European Union, with the objective of forming an alliance between former Soviet states. The member states planned to continue with economic integration and were set to remove all customs borders between each other after July 2011.

On 1 January 2012, the three states established the Eurasian Economic Space which ensures the effective functioning of a single market for goods, services, capital and labour, and to establish coherent industrial, transport, energy and agricultural policies.

On 29 May 2014, the presidents of Kazakhstan, Belarus and Russia signed the treaty on the Eurasian Economic Union, which came into effect on 1 January 2015.

More information: The Guardian

Every piece of geopolitical strife that's happening
in the world today is revolved around energy,
either trying to grab resources or people
using resources to fund radical groups.

Mark Ruffalo