Eurasian Union meant to be link between EU, east Asia - Lukashenko
MINSK. July 2 (Interfax) - The emergent Eurasian Union, an association to bring together Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, is intended as a link between the European Union and "dynamic Asian economies," Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said on Monday.
"[The Union] is not being created as a new edition of old empires but as 21st-century integration association," Lukashenko said during a celebration of Independence Day.
It is planned as an entity where "there will be none of the mother countries and colonies that we know about from history books" but where "there will be equal rights and opportunities," he said. "If anyone tries to impart a different character to it, Belarus will always be against this."
"Many believe that, for politicians in our countries, creating the Eurasian Union is a backward-looking effort - that for Kazakhstan the idea of Eurasianism is something like the reincarnation of the steppe empire of Genghis Khan, that for Moscow it means the revival of the empire of Russian tsars, and that for Belarus it means going back into a slightly renovated USSR," Lukashenko said.
There are also allegations that the Eurasian Union "aims to become some kind of aggressive center of power, that it will be a counterweight or barrier to someone, or that it will be something of the kind," he said. "In actual fact, all supporters of this association are inspired with completely different ideas."
He argued that two extremely powerful global economic poles are coming into being - the European Union and eastern Asia.
"For this reason, it seems that geography itself dictates to us that a link must emerge between the poles. The unified Eurasian space is a powerful, global, but only the first, step. We are building it not to create a closed market, not for the sake of confrontation with anyone, not for the sake of isolation, but for further integration with the European Union in the west and dynamic Asian economies in the east," he said.
"And that is what makes the new Eurasian project essentially different from the well-known historical analogues - the Mongol Khanate, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union," Lukashenko said.