The linchpin of Eurasia: Kazakhstan and the Eurasian economic union between Russia’s defensive regionalism and China’s new Silk Roads

Abstract This paper analyses the extent to which Kazakhstan’s agency in its interaction with China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative is shaped not only by Russia and China’s outward projection, but also de-centring practices at the regional and sub-national level. The Kazakhstani government has embraced China’s Silk Road economic belt (SREB—the land-based ‘belt’ of the BRI) and has aligned its ‘Nurly Zhol’ domestic stimulus programme with the SREB. At the same time, Kazakhstan’s membership in the Eurasian Economic Union increases Russian leverage over Kazakhstani trade and tariff policies. The advent of the BRI thus exacerbates, but has not caused, a partially competing logic behind Russia’s defensive regionalism and Kazakhstan’s professed multi-vector foreign policy. Contrasting the latter with Russian and Chinese geopolitical constraints imposed on the sociopolitical fabric of Kazakhstan, the paper examines how Kazakhstan is a microcosm for the dynamics of a new Eurasian order in the making.