Summit Fails to Deliver Roadmap for CIS Reform

As the latest summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States, CIS, failed to deliver a strategy for the post-Soviet grouping’s future. NBCentralAsia analysts say there are many reasons why the CIS remains stuck where it is: its members mistrust each other, opinion differs on how it should reform, and it has proved impossible to create an overarching governing body.



The CIS summit held on November 29 in the Belorussian capital Minsk had generated more than the usual interest beforehand as it was expected to decide the organisation’s future and set out a roadmap for reforms.



In the event, the meeting failed to live up to these hopes, and the future of the CIS remains unclear.



Sanat Koshkinbaev of the Institute for Strategic Studies in Kazakhstan believes the grouping will remain a forum for dialogue rather than becoming an instrument of political integration, because the Soviet legacy makes it impossible to establish the kind of supranational body that is needed to make integration work, as in the case of the European Parliament.



“The CIS is an inter-state organisation that cannot assume supranational functions like the European Union. It does not have a common foreign policy, nor could it have one,” he said. “This organisation was created to make cooperation work, not for the clearly impossible goal of integration.”



Muratbek Imanaliev, president of the Institute for Public Policy in Kyrgyzstan, says that when it comes to reforming the CIS, the main problem is that there are too many wildly differing views and approaches to how that might happen. Belarus, for example, sees no need to reform the grouping at all, but wants to see greater economic integration, which would basically give member states easier access to one another’s energy resources. Kazakhstan, on the other hand, is calling for fundamental reforms, including of the CIS’s executive structures. Then there is Georgia, which is critical of the grouping for failing to exert a positive influence on the troubled Georgian-Russian relationship.



“I think there is going to be a covert struggle between these different positions, as the CIS divides into two or three camps on the issue of reform,” said Imanaliev.



Kazakstan-based political analyst Dosym Satpaev says it is hard to envisage that reforms could be effective since there is no way of ensuring member states comply with CIS-wide agreements.



He recommends that a new CIS body be set up to monitor compliance, but warned, "it’s the most sensitive of issues – no one wants to cede sovereignty even partially". Without such a structure, though, Satpaev see the CIS remaining “an arena for formal talks – with no actual results.”



(News Briefing Central Asia draws comment and analysis from a broad range of political observers across the region.)