HEAD OF EDB: CLINTON’S STATEMENTS ON PREVENTION OF INTEGRATION PROCESSES ARE RECURRENCE OF IMPERIAL THINKING
Tuesday, December 11, 15:48
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statements about Washington’s
intention to prevent the integration processes in the post-Soviet
space are recurrence of imperial thinking, Igor Finogenov, Chairman
of the Board of the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB), told Armenian
journalists in Yerevan on Tuesday.
To recall, during the summit of the OSCE Ministerial Council in Dublin,
just hours before bilateral talks with Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov, Clinton slammed “a move to re-Sovietise the region”,
referring to plans to set up a new trade union between Russia and
some former Soviet nations. “It’s going to be called customs union,
it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that. But let’s make
no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to
figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it”, she said.
Finogenov qualified Clinton’s statement as confrontational. When
the global economy is shocked and a model of interaction is needed
to consolidate stability, such statements seem strange, Finogenov
stressed. He thinks that integration is one of the factors increasing
the welfare of nations.
As regards de-integration processes, including economic ones, they have
sad consequences. “I think the resistance to integration processes at
the political level is a short-sighted policy”, he stressed. Finogenov
hopes that the real policy of the USA will not hinder the integration
process of the CIS countries. More than 50% of total investment in
Armenia’s economy comes from Russia. This is also proved by the money
transfers of labor migrants from Armenia. Over Jan-Sept 2012 these
money transfers totaled $1.3 bln, which has an essential impact on
the consumer demand given the current economic situation in Armenia.