Macroscope | Rising ‘United States of Eurasia’ will need a development bank to support it

From Eurasia’s vast potential to growing new development banks, emerging market economies are carrying more weight in a global economy

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The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) ninth annual conference in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Photo: AIIB

Published: 4:30pm, 4 Jan 2025

Unlike the 50 states that make up the United States, the 93 nations that comprise Eurasia are not all connected by culture, language or even a common transport system. The latter deficiency is being remedied, however, and this is likely to aid the emergence of a United States of Eurasia.

This will have enormous economic and political implications, and perhaps helps explain US hostility towards the integration of a potentially rival continent. In particular, it hints at why Washington has opposed China’s Belt and Road Initiative from the outset.

Forging a continental whole from nations covering 55 million sq km (over 21 sq miles) of land with a total population of over 5 billion – compared to the US with a land area of 9.1 million sq km and 345 million people – needs vision but also huge amounts of financing.

This is where China’s apparent game plan in announcing its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, followed a few years later by the launch of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), appeared logical. The AIIB, it was widely assumed, would finance the Belt and Road Initiative.

But AIIB president Jin Liqun emphasised in 2016 that the bank would remain at arm’s length from the initiative, a move meant to burnish its image as an independent multilateral institution and not China’s creature.

While this was no doubt a prudent judgment – and AIIB financial securities did go on to achieve investment quality status internationally – it seemed a golden opportunity to meet the world’s great infrastructure challenges was missed. But Jin’s term as AIIB head will end in 2026 and the bank is expected to offer increasing financial support to the Belt and Road Initiative thereafter.