Two Roads Through the Steppe: How EU Rules and Chinese Rails Split Central Asia’s Integration

Central Asia was supposed to be a showcase for globalization. Straddling the land bridge between Europe and Asia, the five post-Soviet republics have spent the past decade absorbing an unprecedented wave of external engagement: billions of dollars in Chinese infrastructure financing on one side, and a steadily deepening architecture of European regulatory cooperation on the other. According to conventional theories of regional integration, all this outside attention should have knitted the region together into a coherent economic and institutional bloc. Instead, a new study argues, the opposite has happened. The very competition between Europe’s rulebooks and China’s railroads is fragmenting Central Asia into uneven, sector-by-sector pieces.

The research, published in Frontiers in Political Science, introduces a concept its authors call Dual External Regionalism, or DER. Political scientists Khamida Aripkhanova and Bolat Zhumagulov of Abai Kazakh National Pedagogical University in Almaty designed the framework to capture something existing theories miss: what happens when two fundamentally different models of externally driven integration are projected into the same regional space at the same time. Competitive regionalism theory predicts that states will eventually pick a winner among rival projects. Overlapping regionalism and regime-complexity scholarship catalog the resulting institutional clutter but say little about how distinct integration logics interact. DER, by contrast, treats the interaction itself as the engine of regional outcomes.

The two models in question could hardly be more different in their mechanics. The European Union advances what the authors term a regulatory-institutional model, built on governance reform, regulatory harmonization, and multilateral cooperation. Its instruments include the 2019 EU Strategy for Central Asia, the Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreements, the Global Gateway connectivity program, and sustained technical assistance aimed at transparency, administrative capacity, and rule-based cooperation. China pursues an infrastructure-bilateral model centered on the Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013: transport corridors, logistics hubs, energy systems, and industrial facilities, negotiated almost entirely through state-to-state agreements tailored to each partner rather than through any regional governance framework.

To trace how these logics collide and combine, the authors employed a qualitative comparative design paired with process tracing, using Kazakhstan as a critical case. Kazakhstan is the region’s largest economy, its central transit hub, and the state with the deepest formalized relationship with the EU as well as being a principal recipient of Belt and Road investment. Under its multi-vector foreign policy, Astana signed the Enhanced Partnership and Cooperation Agreement in 2015, which entered into force in 2020, while simultaneously aligning its national Nurly Zhol infrastructure program with China’s Silk Road Economic Belt. Evidence from Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan is used illustratively, not as a systematic cross-national test.

The process tracing identified three causal mechanisms through which the dual engagement produces fragmentation. The first is institutional incompatibility. EU-linked sectors such as customs administration, environmental regulation, and digital governance progressively absorb European regulatory standards and institutional practices, while rail transport, logistics, and industrial development develop under China’s flexible, project-based arrangements. The two systems do not necessarily conflict directly, the authors stress; rather, parallel governance structures emerge that operate by different norms and implementation practices. Over time, comprehensive region-wide harmonization becomes progressively harder to achieve.

The second mechanism is incentive divergence, and it explains why Central Asian governments keep both suitors rather than choosing between them. The EU offers long-term rewards: institutional modernization, regulatory upgrading, capacity building, and policy learning. China delivers immediate, visible gains: infrastructure financing, transit revenues, logistics development, and expanded market access. Because these benefits address different domestic priorities, governments engage selectively with each framework, allocating cooperation sector by sector to maximize opportunity while avoiding dependence on any single partner. The result is a patchwork in which different policy domains are embedded in different external frameworks.

The third mechanism, bilateralization, may be the most consequential for the region’s institutional future. Chinese cooperation is overwhelmingly organized through bilateral agreements, which allow rapid project delivery and accommodate diverse political contexts, but which simultaneously weaken incentives for multilateral coordination and regional institution-building. European initiatives, by contrast, encourage regional dialogue and collective engagement. The asymmetry means economic integration with external markets advances faster than political or institutional coordination among the Central Asian states themselves, reinforcing uneven development and limiting the emergence of cohesive regional governance.

The empirical record bears this out. China’s share of Central Asian merchandise trade surged from roughly 13 percent in 2010 to 24.1 percent in 2024, while the EU and Russia remained major partners, with EU trade turnover reaching 52.8 billion euros in 2023. Intra-regional trade, though modestly improved, still accounts for only around 8 percent of exports and 7 percent of imports. Belt and Road corridors and the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route have integrated Central Asian economies into interregional and global value chains rather than fostering dense intra-regional production networks. Connectivity, in other words, has been built outward, not inward.

Kazakhstan’s experience illustrates the full causal sequence. During the 2010s, the country simultaneously deepened both partnerships: BRI investment transformed its transit role through projects such as the Khorgos dry port and railway modernization, while the EPCA expanded European cooperation across trade, customs, environment, digital transformation, and public sector reform. Rather than converging toward a single integration model, governance-oriented sectors aligned with European frameworks while infrastructure and logistics became embedded in Chinese networks. The outcome, the authors find, was not failed integration but fragmented integration: asymmetrical connectivity, institutional incoherence, and selective alignment, each traceable to the interplay of the three mechanisms.

The study’s broader lesson challenges a durable assumption in international relations scholarship: that more external engagement means deeper regional integration. When influential actors promote fundamentally different pathways, their interaction can generate fragmentation instead of convergence. Just as importantly, the authors emphasize that Central Asian states are not passive recipients of external influence. Their governments actively manage, adapt, and combine competing partnerships in pursuit of development and strategic autonomy, and their choices co-produce the region’s uneven trajectories. In Central Asia, the new silk roads and the European rulebook are not converging into a single order. They are building two parallel ones, sector by sector, across the steppe.

Subject of Research: How competing EU and Chinese external integration models produce fragmented regionalism in Central Asia

Article Title: Dual External Regionalism and fragmented integration: EU normative power and China’s geo-economic statecraft in Central Asia

Article References: Dual External Regionalism and fragmented integration: EU normative power and China’s geo-economic statecraft in Central Asia. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1947698

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1947698

Keywords: Central Asia, European Union, China, Belt and Road Initiative, regionalism, Kazakhstan, integration, external governance, connectivity, geo-economics, Eurasia, Dual