shanghai cooperation organization

These include Tajikistan (the first of all to sign such an agreement) and Kazakhstan. Other SCO countries also expressed support for the SREB in contacts with Beijing. It is clear that such a line would mean a scenario of reducing (I don’t want to use the term “marginalization”) of the role of, at least, economic cooperation in the SCO, which is not very successful anyway.
It is no coincidence that at two summits and two meetings of the SCO heads of government that took place after the Belt and Road Initiative emerged (including in 2015: July - Ufa, December - Beijing), the assessment given to the Chinese project has not yet more than the ceremonial nature of "polite approval". Without any attempt to bring its discussion to the "SCO" platform, which, we repeat, it would seem, is ideally suited in terms of the composition of participants for joint projects. But it is precisely such a joint undertaking that China is positioning its initiative.
How to solve this problem? It is unlikely that the situation is deadlocked. Another scenario is potentially possible, which is not realized overnight, but which, on the basis of a compromise, would take into account the interests of all the SCO member states, of course, first of all - the interests of the Russian Federation.
First, let's not forget that in May 2015, the PRC and the Russian Federation signed an agreement on pairing the EAEU and the SREB. On the way of conjugation of these two projects, there are the same discrepancies on the FTA as in the SCO. Therefore, it is important that the May agreement provides for the creation of a negotiating platform for a gradual, phased advance towards the creation of an FTA between the EAEU and the PRC. It is possible that this special dialogue, including with the participation of the SCO heavyweights - the PRC, Russia, as well as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, will help bring closer positions on the timing and scale of liberalization of regional trade and on the SCO platform.
By rapprochement (this is, however, more a question of specialists), it can be, apparently, the phased introduction of certain sectoral zones with more liberal, but acceptable to everyone, modes of circulation of goods, capital and services. China has another imperative to interact on the SREB topic with multilateral structures such as the EAEU and the SCO: it is potentially interested in moving its goods through the common customs space of the EAEU instead of delays at customs borders.
If this scenario prevails, the SCO will indeed be able to obtain new impulses and incentives for development, because the potential chances for such important areas as investment in infrastructure are really great.
Let's not lose sight of one more emphasis, which recently, including against the background of the One Belt, One Road initiative, began to be announced by a number of politicians and experts, including in the PRC. So, the component of the SCO's activities, which, along with the economy, was initially considered one of the two target pillars of the Organization's activities, namely, related to regional security, has become more actively discussed.
There are two reasons for this. One is sustained in the spirit of the first of the scenarios and may be associated precisely with a decline in interest in the SCO as an economic structure. In this case, if there is a desire to preserve the Organization, voluntary or involuntary attention to its second main task becomes inevitable.
Another reason may mean that, given the growth of international terrorist activity (Syria, Afghanistan, etc.), China, which is building big economic plans, is more forced to pay attention to protecting its interests here and, in this context, to the tasks of the SCO in the security sphere, which for a number of years has been paid attention to by Russian military experts, and in recent years - by official military representatives.
It is no coincidence that during his visit to Kazakhstan in 2014, Chinese Prime Minister K. Li said that the SCO "must become the defender of Eurasia." A year later, in Ufa, the President of the People's Republic of China Ts. Xi stressed that it is necessary to "strengthen the capacity and create a strong protective wall of security in the region." And as the Ambassador of China to the Russian Federation emphasized in December 2015: “Security and stability are the primary conditions for mutually beneficial cooperation and joint development of any region and any organization; cooperation in the field of security is invariably one of the main aspects of the work of the SCO. All this is happening against the backdrop of such events as the adoption of the Law on Terrorism in the PRC, which, in particular, gives the Chinese army anti-terrorist operations abroad.
It seems that the full-fledged development of the SCO as an organization, which, according to the Charter and the Charter, is “a structure of complex integration in the name of the prosperity of the member countries”, could be most effectively implemented along the way of combining both tasks - economy and security. Then the SCO would find itself as one of the important mechanisms for the implementation of the SREB and at the same time it would become a viable guarantor of both economic and military-political security in the region.

Conclusion

Thus, the following conclusions can be drawn.
In conclusion, it seems expedient to propose a number of recommendations aimed at increasing the economic efficiency of the Shanghai Forum, which is so necessary for the disclosure of its integration potential.
The economic efficiency of an international organization (IO) is a poorly developed question in world political science. According to the Russian expert E. I. Safronova, it can be interpreted as the effectiveness of the activities of the Ministry of Defense or as the degree of filling the economic needs of the member countries of the organization. "The degree of filling" can be represented as the ratio of the value of the results of economic activity of the MO to the cost of resources spent on their (results) achievement.
How to determine the costs of economic activities of the SCO? What are the costs of the work of its Secretariat, which coordinates, among other things, the economic activity of the SCO? (This value is extremely small. What are the costs, so is the result.) Or what is the cost of financial and other resources allocated by the participating countries for the implementation of joint economic projects? If so, then only China allocates funds for economic initiatives in the SCO (whether it is related lending to the Central Asian members of the Organization or the construction of a number of infrastructure facilities), since only it declares the "SCO" orientation of a number of its financial and production initiatives in the Central -Asian region.
The views of the member states on the results they want to get from the SCO activities also differ. The PRC and many Central Asian countries believe that even in the context of the complication of the situation with maintaining security, the economic sphere should be left at the head of the SCO's priorities. Russia, on the other hand, which has great comparative advantages in the field of defense cooperation and smaller (compared to China) in the field of economics, is not interested in the auxiliary character of military partnership. Moreover, it intends to pay close attention to its status as an economic agent in the Organization and in the APR as a whole. Thus, the President of the Russian Federation V.V.Putin, in his message to the Federal Assembly on December 3, 2015, called for the elaboration of the issue of creating a large-scale economic partnership between the EAEU countries, the SCO and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). According to V. Putin, at the initial stage, such a partnership could focus on the protection of capital investments, optimization of procedures for cross-border movement of goods, joint development of standards for products of the next technological generation and on the mutual opening of access to the markets of services and capital (which, in fact, implies a massive process of establishing free trade zones).
This raises the question: since calculating the value of the numerator and denominator of the key ratio is so problematic and it will be even more difficult if the Russian Federation intensifies its economic activity in the Shanghai Group, does this mean that the SCO is an organization with uncertain economic efficiency? Politically, the SCO is undoubtedly becoming an increasingly authoritative phenomenon in the world arena. But is this happening at the expense of its collective economic efficiency? I think not yet.
This is due to the obvious political relevance of the Shanghai Group by all of its members. However, if the SCO positions itself not as a structure serving the current interests of the member states, but as a viable long-term organization, then sooner or later the question of increasing its economic efficiency will rise to its full extent. The volume of the article allows us to list only some possible measures in this direction.
1. Obviously, in order to make the SCO more effective, it is necessary not so much to develop new cooperation programs (of which there are already quite a few), but to bring them to practical implementation. Therefore, the initial task is to eliminate inconsistencies in the approaches of the member states of the Organization on such basic issues as:
a) the general direction and main meaning of the SCO's activities for the foreseeable future (economic cooperation or military-strategic interaction, bilateral economic projects or multilateral complex undertakings);
b) competition between Russia and China on the hydrocarbon market from Central Asia. Transparent, frank consultations could smooth over the acuteness of potential rivalry between the two countries in the corresponding “field”;
c) diversification of transit capabilities of the Central Asian members of the SCO, in connection with which there is a risk that Russia will lose its transport (practically monopoly) positions in the region. Therefore, this issue also needs constructive agreement;
d) smoothing out the contradictions between the CA countries on the problems of water allocation and water use, border crossing, competition in foreign trade, rivalry in the world investment market, etc., increasing the potential for conflict within the Shanghai group;
e) imparting a clear character to the relations of the SCO with other organizations operating in the CA space - the CSTO and the recently formed EAEU, especially since some of the activities of these organizations and the SCO are "paralleled". This would also soften the PRC's concerns about its non-inclusion in the CSTO and the EAEU;
f) the peculiarities of the foreign policy of the Central Asian capitals, which, pursuing a line on a multi-vector foreign policy, not only maneuver between the Russian and Chinese "shores", but expand contacts with extra-regional forces - the US and the EU. This worries the key members of the SCO - the Russian Federation and China - and requires the removal of the corresponding "concerns." In other words, the SCO's top priority task is to turn it into an effective consultative mechanism.
Consultative interaction is especially important for the "core-forming" SCO members - Russia and China. After all, it is on them that the success or failure of the SCO's activities as such depends.
2. Debugging of cooperation processes within the SCO. Integration is a multi-stage process of economic intergrowth, to which the SCO is still very far away. And cooperation in areas of collective importance is a simpler process and, therefore, more achievable. Mechanical engineering (mainly agricultural) could become promising areas of collective cooperation, especially for the Russian Federation; development of production ties in non-resource sectors (primarily in infrastructure); modernization of production facilities; production of semi-finished products of non-ferrous metallurgy and nuclear energy (because the main industrially profitable reserves of uranium ores and non-ferrous metals of the CIS are located in Central Asia, and Russia has technologies available for Central Asia); cooperation in the textile industry, since without Central Asian raw materials, the Russian textile industry is doomed to decline.
3. Increasing the financial independence of the SCO through a complete transition to foreign trade settlements in national currencies, bypassing the dollar. This measure would remove the dependence of trade in the SCO on fluctuations in dollar quotes, accelerate the processes of trade and economic cooperation and reduce the cost of currency conversion, generally increasing the quality of foreign economic activity. However, it is also associated with the risk of the dominance of the yuan in "intra-Shosian" calculations. It is obvious that the Russian Federation needs its own strategy to find the "SCO" currency. Here it seems useful to analyze the issue of introducing a special unit of account of the SCO, similar in function to the “transferable ruble” of the Council for Economic Mutual Assistance (in 1964-1991).
4. Do not forget that for all its significance, the SCO "project" is for China only a special case of its regional policy. And the higher the economic activity of China in other international structures, the more obvious the question of the likelihood of "overflow" of the country's resources to other addressees will arise; and for the Russian Federation - the problem of increasing competitiveness in other world "sites". And this also requires the attention of experts.

List of references

Agreement between the governments of the member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization on scientific and technical cooperation dated February 13, 2013 // Collected Legislation of the Russian Federation. July 22, 2013. No. 29. Art. 3996.
Zadumkin K.A., Terebova S.V. International scientific and technical cooperation: essence, content and forms // Problems of territory development. 2009. No. 1 (47).
Kandakova G.V., Chirkova M. B., Malitskaya V. B., Pluzhnikova N. V. Development of international scientific and technical cooperation in the agrarian sphere of Russia: problems and prospects // Bulletin of the Voronezh State Agrarian University. 2016. No. 4 (51).
Morozov Y. Cooperation of the SCO countries in the humanitarian sphere: problems and possible ways of their solution. // Central Asia and the Caucasus, 2009, No. 4-5. P. 157.
Safronova E.I. Possible ways to increase the economic efficiency of the SCO. URL: http://www.ifes-ras.ru/images/stories/2012/safronova05_2012site.pdf
Sun Zhuangzhi. Shanghai hezuo zuzhi: ren zhong er dao yuan (Shanghai Cooperation Organization: great responsibility, but long way) // Xiendai shiji. 2012. No. 7. S. 122-129.

This position was expressed, in particular, by Professor of the Free University of Brussels D. Holslag. See: A. Artemiev, G. Makarenko, Window to Europe: How China Launched a New "Silk Road" bypassing Russia // RBK. M., December 15, 2015 http: // www.rbc.ru/politics/15/12/2015/56703a6d9a7947f88a89ae7d.
. Implementation of the concept of the economic belt of the Silk Road activates interaction in the SCO space // "People's Daily". Beijing, 24 February 2014 http://russian.people.com.cn/31521/8544855.html.
SCO, BRICS and EAEU: great conjugation? // Zvyazda. Minsk, July 21, 2015.http: //zviazda.by/be/news/20150721/ 1437428626-shos-briks-i-eaes-bolshoe-sopryazhenie.
Ufa Declaration of the Member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization // President of Russia. M., July 10, 2015 http://static.kremlin.ru/media/events/fi les / ru / PyhhPKOjP2Lj5IJmFSa5CWIgaHxRxkA6.pdf.
New tunes of the "Silk Road" // InfoSCO. M., May 15, 2015 http://infoshos.ru/ru/?idn=14115.












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