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От Большой Европы к Большой Евразии: что несет миру коренной геополитический сдвиг
After the end of the Cold War, the USA was probably in the most favorable geopolitical
conditions in which a great power has ever found itself during the whole history of the world. The Eurasian
continental massif – the “world island”, as it was called by Halford Mackinder – turned out to be
dissected into “flanks” and “center”, where the leading powers focused on their macro-regions problems
and less interested in the fate of their neighbors. During two decades, the Russian leadership has been
looking for a foothold on one of these flanks – the European one, formulating its policy through the prism
of the concept of building a “Greater Europe” - a territory that includes all European and EAEU member
countries. Economically, Greater Europe was supposed to create a common market from Lisbon to
Vladivostok, where there are no barriers to business and there are common rules that are clear to everyone.
However, in recent years, the nature of Russian politics has undergone fundamental changes – Russia
began to demonstrate its desire to act as a “collector” of the single geopolitical space of the Eurasian
continent. In this article, the authors analyze the structural prerequisites that caused the gradual departure of
Russia's foreign policy from the concept of building a Greater Europe in favor of the formation of a new
geopolitical and geo-economic structure – Greater Eurasia. This conceptual framework of geopolitical,
geo-economic and geostrategic rapprochement of states is aimed at turning Eurasia into the center of
world economy and politics. In their study, the authors give a brief overview of foreign and domestic
works on the geo-economic consolidation of Greater Eurasia.
Greater Eurasia is a joint project of its member states, ready to go towards a common goal. One of
the projects, to which this article is devoted, is the analysis of Russian-Chinese rapprochement, whose actions
in the SCO were previously constrained by the desire to restrain each other's influence, as well as
the reaction to it from the United States.