The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) leader-led summit was held in Samarkand in this September. It brought global attention to the group first established by Beijing at the start of the 21st century. Not only was it Xi Jinping’s first trip outside the country since January 2020, with the ongoing war in Ukraine, but the meeting was also an opportunity for a sit down between Xi and Putin on the margins of the summit. That meeting was the immediate point of interest for the global media. In Samarkand, India’s PM Modi was openly critical of Russia as he tried to carve out a leadership position for the South Asian republic. While commentators noted that PM Modi did not hold a bilateral with President Xi indicating that the warmth of 2018’s Wuhan Summit between the two has not yet been rekindled. Iran participated for the first time with the group now representing 40 percent of the world’s population and nearly a third of global GDP and all of which, barring India, are decidedly illiberal regimes.
While the SCO has more than two decades of existence, the summit is of interest not just because of the high-level leader diplomacy but on the peculiar qualities of a multilateral institution that is often neglected by Western scholars and analysts.
The SCO was established in 2001 by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with the intention of providing stability to the former Soviet Central Asian spaces with a particular focus on cooperation to combat what the members called the ‘three evils’ of terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. This initial motivation reflected China’s broader concerns about counterterrorism and Islamic extremism in the early 2000s as well as long term anxieties Beijing has had about the threat to the Communist Party of China (CPC) rule at the peripheries of the China.
The initial work of the SCO focused on coordinating the members’ security policies and sharing information, as well as conducting regular military exercises. The group added narcotic trafficking to its counterterrorism agenda and began to talk about economic collaboration and had periodic rhetorical flourishes about global governance and international order. From its initial membership of: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, the SCO has expanded to include India and Pakistan in 2017and now Iran.
While the SCOs public diplomacy has been wide ranging, the group was, and remains at its heart, interested primarily on matters of international and transnational security. Yet as many analysts point out, Beijing and the members often appear disinterested in many quite obvious regional security matters, the most immediate example of which is the deadly clash between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan taking place barely 200 km from the current Summit which elicited neither comment nor action from individual leaders or the group as a whole.
Multilateral institutions often serve both symbolic and substantive functions. With the former, symbolic functions provide the opportunity to signal intent, represent collaboration and more broadly to perform statecraft. But substantive functions can provide the means to advance actual policy coordination and, in their more advanced forms, bind members into strict policy commitments, most famously exemplified by the EU and WTO. Most initiatives provide a blend of performance and policy as well as offering a platform at which ad hoc diplomacy can take place, such as the China-Russia meeting this year.
The SCO today is, however, a grouping that is long on symbolism and short on substance. At first glance it appears to be a good example of institutional balancing, that is when states use international institutions to balance against the influence of major powers. In this case the intention is to use the SCO to ensure that the US and its allies’ influence on the geopolitical dynamics in the Eurasian heartland is blunted. From this perspective bringing India into the fold was intended to hedge against Delhi’s growing alignment with Washington.
More broadly, it also represents a desire for a more multipolar and multimodal international order in which the North Atlantic powers have less influence; and liberal values are diluted as well.
While the symbolism is strong, and in the current moment it has particular salience given the Ukraine war illustrating starkly the clash between authoritarianism and democratic systems, there is little sign of the SCO making any meaningful progress on the substantive side of the ledger. One might be tempted to view the SCO as a nascent Central Asian NATO, yet the preferences of the key SCO powers remain low on concrete commitments as well as exhibiting not inconsiderable tensions between various members. At least for now, it is unlikely that the SCO will take any steps to move beyond the symbolic.
It is tempting, therefore, to write off the SCO as another example of shallow diplomacy in which grand statements of intent and photo opportunities are confused for actual statecraft. That is certainly true right now, but in the building of the foundations for collaboration among influential and illiberal states in a geopolitically crucial zone of world politics, the members in general, and China in particular, have established a solid platform from which members may ultimately make good on their very real ambitions to transform the principles and practice of the regional order and possibly the international order.
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