Why Is the ‘Post-Soviet’ Regionalism Post-Soviet? Historical Legacies and Regional Integration in Eurasia

The goal of the paper is to systematically review the variety of arguments describing how the Soviet past influences the development of the Eurasian regionalism. While many references to the ‘post-Soviet’ regionalism imply that history should matter substantially for its evolution, to our knowledge, the arguments about particular effects of the historical legacies are scattered throughout the literature and rarely compared with each other. We argue that the historical legacies can matter for the Eurasian regionalism in two instances: by affecting the environment for the development of regional organizations and through the path-dependent evolution of organizations themselves. The paper concludes that the development of the Eurasian regionalism should indeed differ from that observed in many other parts of the world because of the Soviet legacies.