In this paper, we try to discuss how the Siberian part of the Russian territory can present advantages and disadvantages for Russian foreign policy. Situated in the center of the Eurasian geography, Siberia offers many economic opportunities and energy reserves as well as a strategic value for Russia, whose population and interests are mostly concentrated in the western provinces. Long considered as an isolated continent for exile for political dissidents, Siberia has become nowadays a center of the economic strategies of the Russian administration, in relation with its foreign policy perspectives. As an energy source for natural gas and oil and transit corridor toward China and Kazakhstan, Siberia is now supported through governmental policies of restructuration and labour migration. This new perspective can lead to a new policy of regionalism in connection with foreign policy interests. For the federal center, there is an unavoidable correlation between the domestic and foreign policy stakes with Siberia’s integration in world and regional politics.
In this paper, we try how the idea of economic regionalism has developed within the framework of the interests of the Russian foreign policy, which adopted a Eurasianist rhetoric for nearly fifteen years. As the trends of globalisation spread over the world after the end of the Cold War period, the regional integration movements also gained speed with different forms and contents. Meanwhile the countries in the post-Soviet geography adopted different political approaches towards regionalisation and globalisation by taking into consideration their own capabilities and interests. At its own side, Russia was in search of integration within the world economy by trying to implement its own regionalist policies both at the level of the CIS area and with the neighbouring countries like China and the EU. The Eurasianist discourse has no doubt such impact on Russian leadership’s choices of partners and orientations for economic regionalisation. At this point, we want to discuss if it is possible to talk about some “Eurasianist model of regional integration” as a new idea which can combine, at one side, the institutional integration process within the CIS area and, at the other, the strong regional cooperation with the Asian economic partners like China. This model can be also Russia’s answer to embrace both globalism and regionalism by preserving its own hegemonic expectations after the Soviet legacy.
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