The third session of the online academic series co-launched by Peking University (PKU), Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) and the University of Tübingen (UT) on area studies was held on November 26, 2021.

Alexander Libman, professor of Russian and East European Politics, Institute for East European Studies, FUB; and Xiao Bin, a research fellow of the Institute of Russian, Eastern European & Central Asian Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), delivered keynote presentations and made comments and answered questions from the audience. Shi Yue, an assistant professor of the School of Foreign Languages, PKU, moderated the webinar.

On the theme of “Understanding the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU): Regionalism in post-Soviet Eurasia between Area Studies and Comparative Regionalism Perspectives,” Prof. Libman reviewed the evolution of Eurasian regionalism and scholarly literature’s approaches to dealing with it. In his view, Eurasian regionalism emerged as a tool of reducing psychological resistance against the dissolution of the USSR and the loss of great power status and economic costs of disintegration. The bottom-up regionalization of the 2000s confirmed the importance of non-state actors, such as corporations and ethnic networks of migrants, as factors of region-building. Prof. Libman also cited the establishments of the Customs Union and the Eurasian Economic Union, respectively, in 2010 and 2015, to show that even regions populated by authoritarian regimes could create functioning economic regional organizations; meanwhile, the EAEU also showed the limits of regionalism.

Xiao Bin gave a presentation titled “Polycentricity and Central Asia’s Dependent Growth under Complex Systems” in which he discussed how Central Asia, as a peripheral region, achieved dependent growth. By applying Landscape Theory and concentrated comparison combined with statistical analysis, he expressed the view that Central Asia’s dependent growth was normal, but maintaining polycentricity was a necessary precondition for achieving economic growth. From his perspective, the polycentricity that contributes to Central Asia’s dependent growth is interactive. Central Asian economies are dependent on national centricity, global centricity and regional centricity in descending order, but the current level of dependency is changeable. As a peripheral region, Central Asia cannot achieve economic growth without dependency on polycentricity, and will pay more to do so than central regions.

After the keynote presentations, both presenters answered questions from the audience members, followed by closing remarks made by Shi Yue.