Huseyin NurluEurasia is no longer just a geopolitical chessboard where great powers compete; it has become the workshop where a new global order is being built from the ground up.
In recent years, the supercontinent has witnessed a flurry of flexible coalitions, cross-regional summits, and infrastructure projects that bypass old hierarchies.
What might look like chaos – overlapping summits, rival trade routes, shifting alliances – is actually an emerging pattern of order through negotiation and development.
Eurasia today serves as a laboratory for global multipolarity: an early glimpse of how world politics might operate in a more decentralised, multipolar era.
From multilateralism to minilateralism
One key trend across Eurasia is a shift from traditional multilateralism to nimble “minilateral” groupings.
These minilateral formats are more agile and interest-driven, allowing nations to cooperate on specific goals without requiring broad ideological alignment.
In practice, legitimacy and problem-solving flow through targeted coalitions instead of universal treaties.
A prominent and recent example is the first-ever EU–Central Asia Summit, held in April 2025, which builds on Germany’s earlier Z5+1 initiative and is followed by Italy’s 5+1 format.
In September 2023, former US president Joe Biden, for the first time, convened a joint meeting with all five Central Asian presidents in the “C5+1” format.
This inaugural C5+1 leaders’ summit focused on practical cooperation, from counterterrorism to trade and critical minerals, rather than grand ideological rhetoric.
It underscored how even a superpower like the US engages through specific regional formats instead of blanket policies.
Besides the major powers, others are also creating minilateral coalitions.
For example, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) + Central Asia held its first summit in 2023, followed by a second in 2024.
Similarly, formats like a proposed “3+3” Caucasus platform, the three South Caucasus countries plus Russia, Türkiye, and Iran, have been discussed to address regional conflicts and projects, illustrating the general trend toward focused engagements.
The rise of multilateralism indicates a wider global transition.
During the Cold War and its aftermath, the region’s affairs were structured around big alliances or global institutions; today, as power diffuses, many countries prefer flexible alignments over fixed alliances.
These smaller groups can respond faster and tailor solutions to specific issues, whether it’s coordinating disaster relief, building a railway, or negotiating a ceasefire.
Agency of regional actors
Another striking feature of Eurasia’s emerging order is the growing agency of regional middle powers, especially the nations of Central Asia and the South Caucasus.
These countries are actively shaping outcomes by pursuing multi-vector foreign policies and balancing relationships on their own terms.
For decades, states like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Azerbaijan have learned to protect their sovereignty through carefully balanced engagement with external actors practising what scholars call a multi-vectored approach.
Now, as global rivalry intensifies, these strategies are paying off with greater freedom of manoeuvre.
These states have long avoided putting all their eggs in one basket; they welcome investments and security ties from Russia, China, the US, Europe, the Gulf, and others simultaneously.
In response to the war in Ukraine, Central Asian governments refrained from aligning uncritically with Russia, opting for neutrality on sanctions and diversifying their external partnerships to ease reliance on Moscow.
Rather than isolating themselves, they have become more open, reaching out to the Gulf states, South Asia, and East Asia to expand their strategic options.
In the South Caucasus, a similar logic is at work. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia have found that the entrance of new players, such as China, India, the US, European states, or Arab states, gives them more room to manoeuvre.
The recent Washington-brokered deal illustrates this: Azerbaijan secured backing for the Zangezur corridor, while Armenia gained recognition of its growing significance through a more pragmatic stance.
Overall, the agency of these regional actors means Eurasia is not a simple arena for great-power competition, but a complex bargaining table where the local players wield real influence.
Eurasia is demonstrating that even in a landscape of giants, the nimble steps of regional actors can significantly shape the dance.
Connectivity as Destiny
Perhaps nowhere is Eurasia’s new cooperative ethos more tangible than in the furious race to build new transport and energy corridors across the continent.
Competing corridor projects, whether for freight trains, pipelines, or fibre-optic cables, are more than mere lines on a map or geopolitical vanity projects.
They carry enormous real-world stakes: Whose goods get to market faster? Whose energy exports find buyers? Which countries become crucial transit hubs, reaping fees and investment?
The answers to these questions will determine which economies flourish, whose populations find employment, and which nations build strategic resilience in the years ahead.
At the EU–Central Asia Summit in 2025, all sides highlighted the Middle Corridor as a shared priority for investment.
China’s Belt and Road also continues to bankroll various Eurasian links, including a planned China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway to shorten the route to the Middle East.
Energy infrastructure is another area where connectivity projects involve high stakes. Consider the issue of how to export the extensive gas reserves of Central Asia and the Caspian Basin.
The vast projects are gaining momentum, like the idea of a Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline to carry Turkmen gas under the Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan, and from there into Türkiye and Europe via the Southern Gas Corridor.
China, on the other hand, is continuously investing in pipelines that bring Caspian hydrocarbons eastward.
Crucially, these corridors are not limited to east-west trade.
Eurasia is also knitting together north-south routes and other directional links, creating a web of connectivity. For instance, the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) is another megaproject connecting Russian and European hubs to South Asia via Iran.
Uzbekistan, together with Afghanistan and Pakistan, has fast-tracked plans for a Trans-Afghan railway that would finally link Central Asia to the Indian Ocean. It would allow landlocked Central Asia to send their products to sea, and conversely give Pakistan overland access to Eurasian markets.
In other words, the region isn’t just relying on one corridor; they are furiously building all possible corridors, east-west to Europe, north-south to Iran and India, and southward through Afghanistan, to ensure they become an indispensable crossroads of the emerging multipolar economy.
They determine not just trade routes, but the future winners in the global supply chain competition. Development corridors here aren’t just responding to geopolitics; they are creating geopolitics by forging new patterns of interdependence.
In Eurasia’s negotiated order, connectivity is destiny.
Global significance
What is unfolding in Eurasia is not isolated to one region; it offers a preview of how a multipolar world may function at large.
As US unipolarity wanes, Eurasia points to a multipolar order of fluid coalitions, pragmatic development, and careful balancing to prevent conflict.
Firstly, the pattern of flexible coalitions we see, the minilateral summits, regional forums, and cross-regional partnerships, is resonating worldwide.
Instead of a universal consensus, often impossible in today’s polarised climate, nations are solving problems through coalitions of the willing. We see echoes of this in groupings like the Quad, in the Indo-Pacific, or the African Union’s ad-hoc mediation teams.
This mirrors the stance of many countries in the Global South today, from Southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America, who do not want to be forced to choose sides in a US–China or West–Russia rivalry, but instead want multiple partnerships.
Secondly, Eurasia’s focus on development over dominance carries a powerful message. The core thesis emerging from the region is that connectivity, investment, and economic growth, not military might or ideological crusades, are the keys to influence in the 21st century.
This ethos is exemplified by initiatives like China’s Belt and Road, which built its influence through railways and ports rather than bases and bombs. Likewise, the EU is engaging Central Asia through infrastructure financing and trade deals, not by expanding a military alliance.
The US, too, in its C5+1 engagement, talked less about democracy versus autocracy and more about economic resilience, sustainable development, and cooperation on critical minerals.
This marks a shift in what major powers emphasise: tangible development projects that benefit the region, to win hearts and minds.
Finally, Eurasia’s experience underscores the importance of regionalism as the building block of a new global order.
We often talk about a “multipolar world” in terms of big powers such as China, the US, EU, and Russia.
But on the ground, what we see is regional multipolarity: different regions organising their own cooperative systems, which then interface with others.
Instead of every country for itself in a chaotic free-for-all, groups of countries band together in regional formats that can then negotiate with other regional or great-power blocs. Central Asia is engaging the EU as a group, engaging China as a group, and so on.
In short, with all these, Eurasia offers a path forward where multipolarity does not descend into chaos, but instead is managed through networks of regional cooperation and project-based coalitions. It is a vision of order that is negotiated and improvised, not imposed from the top.
