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Author : D. Litskay
First Secretary, Department for Asian and Pacific Cooperation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russ-
ian Federation
THE ISSUE of admitting new members has re-
cently become one of the key priorities on the
agenda of the Shanghai Cooperation Organiza-
tion (SCO).
A meeting of the SCO Heads of State Council
held in September 2014 in Dushanbe has become
a watershed event. At the meeting, Russia took up
the baton of chairmanship in SCO in 2014-2015.
The summit's major result was the adoption of a
revised version of a model Memorandum of Commitments to Obtain the Status of a SCO
Member State and the Procedure for Granting the Status of a SCO Member State.
Adoption of the above documents has crowned a long and complicated pro cess of form-
ing a legal basis for expanding the Organization's membership, thus offering new oppor-
tunities for a consolidated political decision by the member states which will allow starting
negotiations with candidate members.
Despite the fact that all member states acknowledge the importance of accepting new
members for the purposes of SCO's further development, there still remain substantive
differences in their approaches to this process and in their assessments of the first "wave"
of candidates. Now therefore, the Organization is confronted with a challenging task of
balancing out, on a sustainable basis, two strategies, namely, concentrating the Organiza-
tion's efforts on strengthening internal consolidation and raising the efficiency of existing
institutions, and actively working on the admission of new members.
Obviously, India, Iran, and Pakistan will not be endlessly standing in line to get access to
SCO, and will, in conditions of a sharp geopolitical competition prevailing in the world
today, turn over to other, more "receptive" regional structures, which would hardly corre-
spond to the SCO member states' interests.
At the same time, if it throws its doors open to New Delhi and Islamabad, and possibly
to Tehran in the foreseeable future, the SCO would automatically turn into a political struc-
ture able to radically change the Eurasian alignment of forces.
An enlarged SCO, which would comprise all Afghanistan's neighbors having an impact on
all major Afghan forces, might come up as an efficient mediator of peaceful settlement in
Afghanistan and a source of sizeable economic and humanitarian aid.
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Shanghai Cooperation Organization Looking Toward Enlargement