The uni-polar world order is unstable, perilous for mankind, and prone to dictatorship based on military power;

The global dominance of the liberal market model can result in a global economic imbalance, an intensification of the struggle over natural resources, and mass extinction due to famine, shortages and armed conflicts.

Correspondingly, our proposals were:

To establish a second pole of global power with a life philosophy and attitude to the environment different from those in the West, a pole assigning greater priority to spiritual and moral values, to collectivist tendencies;

To harmonise the relations between countries and civilisations;

To create a security system based on a balance of powers and potentials.

NATO’s aggressive policies

NATO’s aggressive politics, the tendency of the US to seek military-technological superiority over other countries, attempts to undermine the Missile Defence Treaty and SALT, etc were identified as the commonly faced threats in a joint statement of the defence ministers of the "five". Economic, informational, and ideological security issues were also examined.

Already during the consultations, the Russian side proposed to invite India and Iran to the new formation. The Chinese side suggested getting Pakistan involved. Later all the partners agreed to Mongolia’s membership in the SCO.

Alliance of five civilisations

Already at this phase, the contours of an alliance of five non-Western civilisations — Russian, Chinese, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist — began to materialise.

Their common features are asserting the priority of collectivism over individualism as well as rejecting the uni-polar world structure and the dominance of the monetarist ideology.

In designing the security configuration for the would-be SCO, we proceeded from the concept of the balance of powers both within the organisation itself and in East Asia. This aspect is of key importance to Russia, the Central Asian countries, and the relations in the China-India-Pakistan triangle.

I think that it was the SCO potential in the security sphere that made it possible to forge strong links between the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the EU, the OSCE, the League of the Arab States, and ASEAN, as well as to complement its own potential by interacting with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the CIS Collective Security Treaty (CST) organisation, and the Eurasian Economic Community.

Within years from now, the SCO has a chance to evolve into a basis for a collective security system in Eurasia and to influence the global security climate.

Even at present, the SCO with its "6+4" format (6 member-countries and 4 countries with the observer status) has enormous economic and human resources.

Rich natural resources

The territories of the SCO countries comprise 60% of Eurasia, their populations make 25% of the global population, or the majority of it, if the populations of the observer countries are taken into account. The SCO responsibility zone is extremely rich in natural resources, and its countries have the world’s fastest growing economies.

At the same time, the SCO countries face such problems as the recurrent poverty as well as ethnic and religious tensions.

In many cases, the philosophy of the SCO elites is focused on achieving high rates of economic growth rather than those of economic development.

Such orientation emphasising higher GDP and per capita incomes does not necessarily lead to the development of the countries and peoples, and often-times cannot improve the populations’ living standards in culture, science, education, the environment, etc.

The SCO was founded as "an organisation of a new type" (Evgeny Primakov), its informal prime objectives being to transform the modern world, to make it better and fairer, to arrest the perilous tendencies in global developments.

The SCO can and must have a security system of its own, distinct from NATO or any other military bloc.

The same is true of the need to espouse a distinct model of economic development and to maintain a particular SCO informational space.

A lot is already being done in this respect.

The SCO institutional development is in full swing, public organisations in its framework are emerging, and the decision-making process at all levels is growing more specific.

Meetings of the leaders, security council secretaries, defence, foreign affairs, and energy ministers of the SCO member-countries are institutionalised and take place on a regular basis. The SCO Business Council has a meaningful agenda.

Public healthcare, social support, telecommunications, and transportation projects are implemented. A public coordination council in support of the SCO is established, and the corresponding Russian language internet resources are available.

In the future, the architecture of the SCO international activities will comprise the following interactions:

regional and global formations;

bi-lateral interactions between the SCO and non-SCO countries, between the SCO as a whole and non-SCO countries;

interactions driven by specific interests.

The SCO has a number of features atypical for other regional integration formations.

Its model differs from those of the EU and the ASEAN in both the territorial scale and the spectrum of the tasks it addresses.

The SCO is supposed to be a special world without a clearly defined boundary, a world spanning the entire global space.

The quadrangle of the new global entity — Brazil, Russia, China, and India — is already taking shape. A triangle capable of consolidating the branches of Islam — Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey — is also becoming a reality. The above and certain other formations are related to the SCO.

Ideological foundation

It is a shortcoming of the SCO that it has no ideological foundation such as an inter-civilisational integration theory including the concept and the algorithms of structuring the organisation’s enormous space.

So far, most of the progress within the SCO is made in the economic and security spheres. Unfortunately, there are still no integration theorists in the SCO countries such as Jacques Maunet and Barry Buzan in the EU.

A special remark must be made on Russia’s place and role in the SCO. Russia is both a multi-ethnic country and the kernel of the Orthodox Christian civilisation.

Under its former name — as the USSR — it has already been one of the two global poles. Russia has a rich experience of socialist development and is gaining the experience of the capitalist one.

This is how the SCO is expanding.

From Strategic Culture Foundation January 2008

*The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a permanent intergovernmental international organisation the creation of which was proclaimed on June 15, 2001 in Shanghai (China) by the Republic of Kazakhstan, the People’s Republic of China, the Kyrgyz Republic, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Tajikistan and the Republic of Uzbekistan.

The main goals of the SCO are strengthening mutual confidence and good-neighbourly relations among the member countries; promoting their effective cooperation in politics, trade and economy, science and technology, culture as well as education, energy, transportation, tourism, environmental protection and other fields; making joint efforts to maintain and ensure peace, security and stability in the region, to move towards the establishment of a new, democratic, just and rational political and economic international order.

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