What’s Next for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization?

In June the heads of state of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will gather in Qingdao to mark the group’s 18th anniversary. It is the fourth time that the annual summit has been held in China, and the first outside of Shanghai (2001 and 2006) and Beijing (2012). After nearly two decades, the international organization now boasts eight full members, four observers, and six “dialogue partners;” a permanent secretariat in Beijing; and a security outpost in Tashkent. The SCO presents itself as a multilateral organization of equal and diverse sovereign members, but China has been the driving force in its evolution, making the Qingdao summit an important moment to reflect on the organization’s trajectory, achievements, and enduring challenges.

Eighteen years after its founding, the SCO remains the object of regular geopolitical intrigue, unverified speculation, and at times hyperbolic commentary among Western and non-Western analysts. The organization, despite its mostly regional Central Asian focus, is often referred to as the most populous multilateral organization in the world, a pioneer in the rise of non-Western arenas for global governance, and even a new paradigm of international relations. Yet, many of the organization’s high-profile initiatives continue to be aspirational and unfilled – especially in the area of economic and energy cooperation – while the organization’s strong norm of consensus effectively means that the body is rarely used to “problem-solve” or host contentious debates among its members.

A careful analysis of the SCO’s history reveals that although the organization is important to both China and Russia, the two largest founding members differ over the organization’s exact purpose and scope. For China, the SCO has been viewed as a multilateral forum to ensure China’s regional security and economic interests in Central Asia, and to become a multilateral vehicle for channeling China’s role as an emerging public goods provider. For Russia, the organization takes a more global role, serving as a key forum for Moscow’s foreign policy revisionism and opposition to the U.S.-led global order, conducting joint military exercises, and issuing critical statements on international security issues such as the situation in Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, and U.S. plans for missile defense. Beijing, with a few exceptions, has been happy to support this agenda; however, Russia has balked at China’s economic initiatives in order to guard the primacy of its own regional organizations and cooperative architectures.

As a result, from its very first months, the organization has mostly reacted to, as opposed to driven, regional events and geopolitical developments. Maintaining the organization’s successful reputation, securing external partnerships, and heightening its international prestige have themselves become enduring goals, while its members have downplayed internal politicking, member disagreements, and unfulfilled agendas.

2001: Present at the Creation, But Then The World Changed

The SCO’s origins lie in the post-Soviet regional negotiating group known as the Shanghai Five – comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan – that served as a forum to resolve the long-standing Sino-Soviet border disputes with the now independent Central Asian states. Not only did the forum yield final border agreements, but, so the lore goes, the negotiations generated such goodwill and trust that the group started to discuss other security matters as well. All members agreed to establish a permanent regional body – with a staff and a rotating secretariat – that could provide the basis for enduring consultations and cooperation on regional issues.

On June 15, 2001 in the city of Shanghai, the five countries, plus Uzbekistan which accepted an invitation to joint the grouping, to great fanfare inaugurated the founding of the SCO. The founding declaration celebrated its so-called Shanghai Spirit – a norm that praised member states’ sovereignty and their mutual trust, respect, and civilizational and cultural diversity, a clear response to the “universal” principles imposed by Western counterparts. The ambitious statement laid out a broad range of areas for cooperation and emphasized that it would make “joint efforts to maintain and ensure peace, security and stability in the region and establishing new, democratic, just and rational international political and economic order.”

But only weeks into the afterglow of the organization’s emergence, the geopolitics of the region was upended by the attacks of September 11 and the U.S.-led mobilization of an international coalition to conduct a military campaign to oust the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Afghanistan. Quite unexpectedly, China suddenly found itself in the distressing position of possible exclusion from the new partnerships and regional security planning. Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately had offered his support to U.S. President George W. Bush, including sharing intelligence about the Taliban and approving the stationing of U.S. forces, on a temporary basis, in old Soviet Central Asian bases at Karshi-Khanabad (known as K2) in Uzbekistan and at Manas International Airport in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek. From a relatively quiet region, Central Asia had become the frontline in the U.S.-led Global War on Terror (GWOT).

These events triggered a flurry of activity by Chinese officials and statesmen, as they pressed Russian counterparts to deepen the SCO’s bureaucracy, staff, and institutional structures, as well as to flesh out the organization’s own security response to Washington’s Central Asian ambitions.  On January 7, 2002, the organization convened an extraordinary meeting of foreign ministers in Beijing that called for an SCO role in the “Afghan settlement process” as well as the United Nations and international meetings on the future of Afghanistan. By the Saint Petersburg summit of June 2002, the organization had finalized a 26-Article Charter, including outlining a number of permanent institutional structures, while Chinese officials joined with their Russian counterparts in the summit communiqué to call for a new global system of security, anti-terrorism, and “multilateral cooperation mechanisms” that rejected “double-standards.” By 2003, following the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the bypassing of the UN Security Council in the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Russian-Chinese unified front had been fully reconstituted in opposition to U.S. global unilateralism.

2006 and the Return to Shanghai: Fears of Color Revolutions and an Enduring U.S. Presence

In 2006, for its fifth anniversary, the SCO summit returned to Shanghai at a time of heightened concerns about regional political stability, regime security, and the U.S. role in the region. At the time, Afghanistan itself appeared relatively stable, but member concerns had shifted to the fragility of the post-Soviet regimes in the wake of Western-backed “color revolutions,” and concerns about street protests.

The summit’s fifth anniversary communiqué criticized the United States for its attempts to influence the region (a “Cold War mentality”) through promoting democratic norms and resulting “double standards” through the activities of international organizations that it effectively controlled.  One year earlier, during the Astana Summit, the SCO had issued a controversial communiqué that asserted foreign military bases in the region – understood to refer to U.S. and NATO facilities – should be placed on a concrete timetable for withdrawal. General Richard Myers, then U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the aftermath of the declaration blamed China and Russia for “bullying” the smaller Central Asian states into signing, but in reality it was the hard-nosed Uzbek President Islam Karimov who had proposed the statement, which Putin was happy to champion. The formal eviction by the Uzbek government of U.S. troops from its base at K2 was delivered by Uzbekistan in late July 2005, leading to widespread concern in Washington that the SCO had now become an anti-NATO group.

Karimov’s eviction request came after the U.S. and European governments rebuked the Uzbek leader when his security services ruthlessly cracked down on a street demonstration in the eastern city of Andijan in May 2005, killing hundreds and prompting an outcry among international human rights groups. The United States and the EU called for an international investigation into the events while, in stark contrast, Beijing and Moscow openly backed the Uzbek president.

The Andijan crackdown came in the aftermath of a series of election-day protests that had brought down post-Soviet governments, the so-called color revolutions, in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005). The latter, known as the Tulip Revolution, was especially concerning to both Tashkent and Beijing, as it highlighted the potential for unstable regime changes right on their borders and suggested that Western actors such as NGOs, democracy watchdogs, and media outlets had played a key role in mobilizing protestors.

In response, China and the SCO members moved to deepen cooperation among their security services, focusing on combating the “three evils” of terrorism, extremism, and separatism. The terms, drawn straight from Chinese policy, became the foundation for joint activities within the SCO’s Regional Anti-Terror Structure (RATS), which was established in 2004 in Tashkent. Among the main activities of RATS was the targeting and reciprocal blacklisting of individuals and regional groups deemed threatening. According to the first announcement put out by the RATS in 2006, 15 organizations and 400 individuals were listed, numbers that had ballooned to 42 organizations and 1,100 individuals by 2010.

This cooperation by internal security services also was institutionalized in the 2009 Anti-Terrorism Treaty, which allowed for expanded extraterritorial practices – such as the exchange of detainees in member states on an expedited basis and the conduct of investigations in another member’s territory – but has also been sharply criticized by human rights groups for bypassing international asylum procedures and humanitarian protections. The group also started sponsoring election observation missions, whose conclusions have been strikingly less critical of the quality of member state elections than their OSCE-ODIHR counterparts.

2012: Responding to Financial Crisis and New Sources of Instability

The SCO summit returned to China in 2012, this time in Beijing, and was characterized by a now familiar pattern. On international security issues, China and Russia used the occasion to craft strong statements of criticism against U.S.-led global security policies. Of pressing concern was the wave of regime changes brought by the Arab Spring, which, like the color revolutions, the United States had openly backed. The deteriorating situation in Syria was also a concern, especially in the aftermath of the “interventionism” shown by the U.S. and NATO in Libya that dramatically had ended the Gaddafi regime. The group also expressed concern about the announced U.S. deadline of withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014, calling on the SCO to play a greater role in the country.

But the fissures between Beijing and Moscow were starkly exposed in the economic arena. Throughout the organization’s history, as Russian scholar and diplomat Alexander Lukin has recounted in his recent book on the China-Russia partnership, Moscow and Beijing have been at odds over whether the organization should assume the functions of a multilateral economic organization, such as facilitating free trade and providing project lending. The issue was especially pressing in the wake of the global financial crisis, which had hit Central Asia hard. Beijing had promoted the idea of providing capital for an SCO “anti-crisis” fund, comparable to a Western international financial institution, to finance regional development projects. Moscow rejected several proposals for the fund – it regarded the institutionalization of China’s regional economic power as undercutting its own regional economic institutions, such as the nascent Eurasian Development Bank, as well as curtailing its ability to use crisis financing as a form of regional geopolitical leverage. For example, in February 2009 Moscow offered a $2 billion economic package to President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan to close the U.S. military base at Manas, which ultimately backfired as he promptly leveraged Moscow’s package to extract more rent from the United States.

But Chinese officials kept pressing the issue and viewed the 2012 summit in Beijing as an opportunity to create a standing SCO regional development bank that could serve these functions. Preparations appeared to be proceeding smoothly to allow for the announcement of the bank at the summit, when, just a few weeks before, Russian officials asked that the proposal be tabled for further study by technical committees. Moscow’s reluctance signaled that Beijing would have to pursue its investment and lending on a bilateral basis, without the formal channel of the regional organization.

Expanded Membership and More Assertive China

The 2018 summit in Qingdao now signals yet a new era in the organization’s development. This time, however, the major driving geopolitical development is not the position of the United States, fears of political instability, or the global financial crisis, but China’s own assertive new initiatives in the economic and security spheres.

Institutionally, Qingdao will be the first summit held under Chinese auspices with the expanded membership of eight that includes India and Pakistan, officially welcomed as new members at the 2016 summit in Tashkent. Membership expansion into the subcontinent affords the organization additional regional prestige and expanded geographic scope; however this has come at the price of admitting one of China’s greatest rivals, importing India and Pakistan’s territorial conflict and bilateral tensions, and further diluting the ability of the organization to find consensus and effectively govern.

Russia’s security agenda has also shifted dramatically in ways that have complicated the organization’s “three evil” security principles. The 2014 Ukrainian crisis and conflict led to a rupture in Moscow’s attitudes toward the West and the post-Cold War security order. But although behind the scenes Beijing lauded Moscow for confronting the West, it did not formally support (and neither did the SCO as a body) the annexation of Crimea or Russia’s support for separatism in the Donbas. Meanwhile, the sanctions regime imposed by the United States complicated the global activities of Chinese companies. Indeed, Putin’s inability to secure SCO backing for Crimea at the 2014 summit in Dushanbe echoed Russia’s unsuccessful 2008 effort, also in the Tajik capital, to secure the organization’s recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moreover, the SCO, despite Russian appeals, has also withheld its explicit backing of Russia’s military intervention in Syria – having previously criticized the unilateral interventionism of the United States – and only has expressed vague support for finding a “political solution to the crisis” and for the Astana peace process.

But the biggest change since the organization’s last summit in China is the ambitious new regional posture assumed by Beijing itself. The most well-known of these is the announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), through which China will pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the region to upgrade infrastructure. Major regional projects include $60 billion in Pakistan, via the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), to construct roads, energy plants and upgrade the port at Gwadar; a new high speed “Eurasian landbridge” traversing Kazakhstan and the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan-China railway; and the resumption of construction on line D of the Central Asia-China gas pipeline, which will bring all Central Asian countries, now including Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, into the Chinese transportation and distribution network. Since China dropped its plans for an SCO development fund, it has led the charge to create alternative financial vehicles for regional infrastructure projects including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the BRICS group’s New Development Bank (NDB).

But the SCO countries are also among the most concerned about some of the unintended consequences of the BRI. These include the question of whether Beijing will heed local concerns about the potential for new roads and railways to exacerbate local ethnic tensions, as is the case in Pakistan and southern Kyrgyzstan, and thorny issue of what demands China might make of highly indebted borrowers, such as local economic access or support for Beijing’s priorities at the UN. India remains opposed to the BRI altogether, not least because infrastructure projects will traverse disputed Kashmir, and refused to sign an SCO statement in April supporting the initiative. Plans to closely coordinate the development of the BRI and the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) remain largely theoretical. While China and the EAEU recently signed an agreement on trade and economic cooperation, they have made little material progress on the central challenge of adopting a common tariff.

Moreover, Beijing also appears to be pushing new regional architectures in the security arena. The most noteworthy is the Quadrilateral Cooperation and Coordination Mechanism (QCCM), formed in 2016 with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan, designed to coordinate counterterrorism activities such as joint training, capability-building, and intelligence sharing. Indeed, with recent confirmation that China will maintain a naval facility in Gwadar, Pakistan and reports that China is seeking access to security facilities in both Afghanistan and Tajikistan, the QCCM may well become the framework that allows for Chinese foreign security activities and access in these countries.

Which brings us back to the underlying unspoken agenda of Qingdao: will the SCO remain a forum that Beijing uses to place a multilateral face on its regional activities or, instead, might the organization now actually serve as a multilateral safeguard to some of Beijing’s economic and security ambitions? The summit is expected to announce a five-year plan to implement the Treaty on Long-term Good Neighborliness, Friendship, and Cooperation and to mark its graduation into a true international organization. But it is precisely China’s growing regional ambitions, coupled with an enlarged membership, that might prompt the other states to use the organization’s committees and maturing institutional structures to restrain Beijing’s integration plans.

Even under the best of circumstances, promoting international cooperation among self-interested states is difficult. One measure of whether the SCO has finally matured may well be that policymakers openly note areas of common interest and disagreement, without the need to constantly affirm the organization’s milestones, overarching spirit, and aspirations.