SEOUL, September 02 (AJP) - A development bank that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has not yet agreed to create already has a country volunteering to house it.
Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Heads of State in Bishkek on Sept. 1 that Kazakhstan would take the lender and its headquarters if the bloc's members reached agreement on building it. He backed the proposal, which China has pushed, and said the money should go first to infrastructure, technology and industrial projects.
"And if the member states reach consensus, Kazakhstan could host this institution, its headquarters," the Kazakh president said.
The bank does not exist yet. Tokayev attached his offer to a condition the bloc has not met, and the leaders left Bishkek without a founding document for the institution. The SCO groups 10 member states, including China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and four Central Asian countries, and has run for a quarter century without a development lender of its own.
Tokayev built the offer on trade numbers. He said commerce among SCO countries was approaching $1 trillion, then argued that the bloc's economic connections still fall well short of what its members could manage together.
Kazakhstan wants what he called a broad SCO trade and investment space with minimal barriers, digital procedures and developed transport and logistics links. To get there, he proposed a workaround for the bloc's habit of moving at the pace of its slowest member.
"We propose introducing a mechanism of pilot industrial consortia, which will allow states to carry out projects as they become ready for them, without waiting for all participants to join," he said. "Successful undertakings can be scaled up across the whole Organization."
He also proposed launching SCO cross-border trade zones on the basis of existing border cooperation centers, describing them as a testing ground for simplified goods exchange, digital customs procedures and modern settlement mechanisms.
Transport came next, and here Kazakhstan has the most direct stake. The country sits on the overland routes between China and Europe, and Tokayev listed the Belt and Road Initiative, the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route and the North-South corridor as networks the SCO should knit together.
He asked members to build a single digital transit platform that would follow cargo from departure point to final recipient, and to adopt a Transport Connectivity Strategy of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization through 2035.
On technology, Tokayev argued that artificial intelligence is moving too fast for member states to simply adapt to it. He said SCO countries should shift from trading experience to building technology together, and proposed a network of AI centers under SCO auspices drawing on member states' universities, research institutions and technology companies.
Kazakhstan already signed on to a parallel Chinese project in this area. On July 16 in Shanghai, it became one of 29 founding members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, an intergovernmental body headquartered in the Chinese city and created on Beijing's initiative to set common approaches to AI governance.
Security occupied the first section of his speech. Tokayev proposed an SCO ministerial conference on strategic stability and confidence-building measures in Eurasia, with an agenda covering the reduction of military risks, restraint of a new arms race, and the prevention of dangerous incidents.
He warned that the effects of armed conflict are no longer contained where the fighting happens. "Of particular concern is the fact that the consequences of armed conflicts are already spreading beyond the immediate combat zones, affecting international markets, commercial shipping and the stability of energy and transport links," he said.
Kazakhstan backed the aims of two bodies the bloc is standing up, the SCO Universal Center for Countering Security Challenges and Threats and the SCO Anti-Drug Center, saying their work would lift coordination among member states' agencies to a different level.
Tokayev also asked that the question of reforming the SCO be handed to member states' foreign ministries.
The session continued in the SCO Plus format, where Tokayev turned to the wider international system and made an unusual argument for a leader in that room. He defended the United Nations. "A good deal of criticism is directed at the U.N.," he said. "Even if this criticism is partly justified, it does not cancel out the main point, that there is no alternative to this Organization."
He said the U.N. Charter should remain the universal foundation of international law, praised Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for defending it, and said the reform Guterres began would succeed only if member states supplied the political will.
Tokayev then made a case for countries in Kazakhstan's own weight class. Responsible middle powers, he said, can broker between competing centers of power and should have their positions reflected in global governance mechanisms. He pointed to Kazakhstan's decision in July to join the Convention on the Establishment of the International Organization for Mediation, another Chinese initiative, as evidence of that approach.
He proposed fixing the SCO's core principles in a special U.N. General Assembly resolution timed to the International Day of Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace.
Water took up the longest passage of the second speech. Tokayev said dozens of U.N. structures handle water issues without any single intergovernmental organization holding a comprehensive mandate, and repeated Kazakhstan's call for an International Water Organization under U.N. auspices, with an SCO water analysis center as its regional counterpart.
On technology governance, he cited a project already approved. The Asia-Pacific Digital Solutions Center for Sustainable Development, established in Almaty on Kazakhstan's initiative under the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, should help spread working digital solutions to developing countries, he said.
He used the SCO Plus floor to report on changes at home, telling the leaders that Kazakhstan's new constitution took effect July 1 and that a new unicameral legislature, the Kurultai, has begun work.
Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Tajik President Emomali Rahmon and Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev also addressed the session.
The leaders closed the meeting by signing the Bishkek Declaration marking the organization's 25th anniversary, along with decisions approving the regulations of the SCO Universal Center for Countering Security Challenges and Threats and the executive committee of the SCO Anti-Drug Center. No document establishing the development bank was among them.
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