Mikhail A. Molchanov∗

Russia's foreign policy under Putin and now Medvedev's leadership is taking a decisively Asian turn. However, Eurasia is the theatre where the resurgent Russia encounters an increasingly powerful China. Sometimes their interests are parallel, and sometimes they are at odds. Cooperation for the sake of joint co-management of the region may be an area where the Chinese and Russian interests coincide. The Chinese quest for energy resources and the opposing visions of what energy security in Eurasia means can define an area of potential tensions. Regionalization is called upon to mitigate these tensions. Eurasian regionalism is a politically steered process of integration of several postcommunist states with widely varying degrees of global presence and exposure. Part of its impetus has been provided by the European experience of regional integration, which is envied by countries as different as Russia and Kazakhstan. Several attempts to institutionalize regional groupings on the Eurasian continent – from the Commonwealth of Independent States to the Eurasian Economic Community to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization – can be seen, against this background, as motivated by an idea to create a regional community capable of engaging the European Union economically. Through the analysis of regionalist aspirations of several states in Eurasia the paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the role that new regionalism plays in the postcommunist politics of development