The European Union – Central Asia Cooperation within the Framework of the Omnidirectional Hedging Strategy

Abstract

The Central Asian region has been recently receiving increasing attention, especially due to the war launched by Russia in Ukraine, the growing influence of China both in the region and in the world, and the EU’s desire to find new trade routes with Asia, which would bypass Russia. In this case, the Central Asian states, when developing their foreign policy, claim that they use a multivector foreign policy strategy, but the understanding and explanation of the latter outside the region is somewhat limited. Therefore, this article attempts to show that the multivectorism declared by these countries essentially corresponds to the omnidirectional hedging foreign policy strategy, and the relations between the Central Asian states and the European Union can be one of the examples of the implementation of this strategy, since they are developed based on the key dimensions of the omnidirectional hedging strategy – diplomatic, economic, and security.