MINSK. June 22 (Interfax) - A senior expert at the United States' World Security Institute argued on Monday that the West would welcome the emergence of a planned customs union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan as a way to teach the three countries willingness to compromise and "tolerance" and an attempt to "revitalize" post-Soviet countries.
"By and large, Europe in particular and the West as a whole needs the customs union," Nikolai Zlobin, director of the institute's Russian and Eurasian programs, told Interfax in Minsk.
"A customs union is a good training site for three countries that have no ability at all to make compromises, that don't know the word 'tolerance,' for which 'your word, Comrade Mauser,' is the first response to whatever doesn't coincide with their views," he said.
"Your word, Comrade Mauser [make of a pistol]," is a phrase from "The Left March", a militant pro-revolution poem by Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.
"To the West, any attempts by countries of the former Soviet Union to compromise means raising the level of tolerance. Attempts to come to an understanding on various issues, to go back on one point in order to come to an understanding on another, are something that is fundamentally important and has great potential economic effects," Zlobin said.
Nor does the West need a post-Soviet territory that is a "hellhole" whereas "today it is a hole, a tremendously vast miserable, depressing post-Soviet space that everyone wants to pull out of," he said. "There are hopes in the West that this space will be revitalized at least a little bit via the customs union."
"Anything that revitalizes this space, so that crowds of hungry armed people with no moral constraints stop rambling around it, is seen as a positive thing by the West," the analyst said.
"I think that quite a skeptical attitude is taken there [in Europe] to what is happening on the territory of the customs union. Because all attempts to set anything up in post-Soviet space, whether it's the Shanghai [Cooperation] Organization, the CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] or the Collective Security Treaty Organization, remain so much ink on paper. They don't work in critical situations. They haven't worked in the case of Kyrgyzstan, they haven't worked in the case of Abkhazia, the CIS has fallen apart," Zlobin said.
"One is getting the impression that post-Soviet countries are crawling away in all directions as a lot of cockroaches. And the West would, indeed, be very pleased to see at least something that brought them together. And if the customs union makes those centrifugal forces at least a little slower it will be seen in the West as positive development," he said.