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Asia-PacificJuly 2 2012

Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus open economic borders

Closer economic integration of countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States has been discussed for many years without practical progress. The launch of a single economic space between Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus may be about to change that.
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Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus open economic borders(From left to right) Kazakhstan’s president Nursultan Nazabayev, Russia’s then-president Dmitry Medvedev and Belarus’s president Alexander Lukashenko enter a December 2011 economic summit, in which they discussed plans to create closer economic ties between the three countries

Plans to build closer economic relations between the former states of the Soviet Union have been afoot almost since the day the organisation itself was disbanded on December 8, 1991. Remarkably, that was the same day that EU leaders signed the Maastricht Treaty to create the European single market. For 20 years, however, the leaders of states that had once been a single political unit seemed unable to emulate their colleagues to the west, with an attempted customs union in 1995 and putative Eurasian Economic Community in 2000 both falling flat.

But since the creation of a narrower customs union between Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan in 2010 that harmonised tariffs between the three countries, things have moved so quickly that there is still some uncertainty about how to translate the name of the organisation that will come into force in July 2012 – a common or single economic space.

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