Eurasia Concordia — a model for the 21st century
A voluntary treaty. Three balanced zones of prosperity. 90 percent fewer weapons — and trillions for education, health and climate. This is not a dream. It is a blueprint.
An open discussion model — research-oriented, non-partisan, put forward for debate.
01 — The Problem
The world spends more on armaments today than at any time in history — and has become less secure, not more. Every franc, euro, dollar and ruble that flows into deterrence is missing where the real threats of our time lie: climate change, pandemics, educational poverty.
$2.7 trillion
More than 2.7 trillion dollars flow into military budgets every year — more than the entire annual gross domestic product of France. The trend: rising, in almost every region of the world at once.
~12,000
Around 12,000 nuclear warheads still exist — enough to end civilisation several times over. A single false alarm, a single transmission error can suffice. This architecture is not protection; it is a permanent risk.
1914 · 1945 · 2022
Three times Europe has experienced how alliance logic, armament spirals and unresolved security questions ended in catastrophe. Three times the lesson was the same: security against one another does not work. Only security with one another endures.
02 — The Vision
A multilateral treaty through which nation states voluntarily join together into three large, balanced and largely demilitarised zones of prosperity — protected by natural geography and economic self-sufficiency instead of weapons. National identities, languages and cultures remain fully preserved and legally guaranteed.
Zone I
From Lisbon to the Yenisei
A democratic union which European Russia and Ukraine also join — as partners, voluntarily and as equals. The principle of “United in Diversity” is given constitutional rank: every language, every culture — Russian and Ukrainian expressly included — enjoys legally enforceable protection.
Foundation: democracy, rule of law, cultural diversity
Zone II
China, Eastern Siberia, parts of Central Asia
A zone of shared economic development in which infrastructure, energy and resources are developed cooperatively rather than competitively. Economic self-sufficiency strips expansion of all logic — prosperity is created within, not conquered without.
Foundation: shared development, infrastructure, stability
Zone III
India and the Indian Ocean
The alliance guarantees the peaceful order of maritime trade in the Indian Ocean — open sea lanes for all, controlled by no one against anyone. Trade is transformed from a geopolitical lever into a common good.
Foundation: open sea lanes, trade, maritime cooperation
The United States remains engaged as a strong, cooperative partner in its hemisphere — economically closely interwoven, relieved of its security burden. In a world without Eurasian confrontation, NATO loses its adversary and with it its purpose: it is not defeated, it becomes unnecessary. That is the most dignified farewell a defence alliance can take.
03 — The Foundation
Every lasting peace in history rested on three foundations: equal partnership, shared prosperity and stable geography. The Eurasian Future Treaty builds on all three at once.
I
No one loses. Everyone joins.
The European-Siberian Federation comes into being not through victory or subjugation, but through accession — as voluntarily as Portugal or Poland once joined the European Union. Russia and Ukraine enter as equal founding partners, not as losers of a conflict.
The European principle of “United in Diversity” is elevated to constitutional rank: the Russian language, Ukrainian cultural heritage, every regional identity from Lisbon to the Yenisei enjoys the same legally enforceable protection. What for centuries was the fault line between East and West becomes the largest zone of peace in human history — not because anyone gives in, but because everyone gains.
II
2.4 trillion dollars. Every year.
The world today spends more than 2.7 trillion US dollars per year on armaments — more than ever before in history. Disarmament by 90 percent frees up around 2.4 trillion dollars. Year after year.
That is enough to close the world's education funding gaps, to guarantee basic healthcare for every human being and to fully finance the global energy transition — all at the same time. Peace is not a renunciation of security. It is the greatest investment open to humanity: security through prosperity instead of prosperity sacrificed to insecurity.
III
When geography protects, no one needs weapons to protect.
Wars arise where borders are contested, resources scarce and distances short. The Concordia model inverts this logic: three economically self-sufficient zones, separated by the most powerful natural lines on the planet — the Yenisei, the Himalayan massif, the expanse of the oceans.
A zone that possesses everything it needs, whose neighbours live behind a thousand kilometres of taiga or eight thousand metres of rock, simply has no rational reason left for offensive weapons. Wars of aggression are not banned — they are rendered pointless. And that is the most stable peace of all: one that no one wants to break, because no one could profit from breaking it.
04 — The Transition
Disarmament never fails for lack of will, but for lack of verification. That is why, at every step, trust precedes reduction — following the proven principle of “trust, but verify” that already made the INF and START treaties successful.
Phase 1 · Years 1–5
Full mutual disclosure of all arsenals. A joint satellite and sensor verification system under the supervision of a reformed international disarmament agency. A freeze on all modernisation programmes, withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from third countries. In this phase not a single weapon is given up — only made visible.
Phase 2 · Years 5–15
Synchronised disarmament in annual 10-percent steps — always simultaneous and mutually inspected; no actor is ever more than one annual step ahead. Conventional offensive systems (long-range missiles, strategic bombers, carrier groups) are dismantled first, as they embody the capacity to attack; defensive systems last. In parallel: step-by-step economic integration within the three zones.
Phase 3 · Years 15–30
Each zone retains a purely defensive and civil-protection capacity of 10 percent of the initial level. The last nuclear weapons are dismantled under verified international supervision and the fissile material converted to civilian electricity — following the example of the “Megatons to Megawatts” programme, which between 1993 and 2013 already turned 20,000 Russian warheads into American electricity.
Each step is coupled to the previous one: whoever drops out stops the process but gains no advantage, since everyone else remains at the same level. In addition, every zone has an orderly right of withdrawal with a multi-year notice period — no one is trapped. It is precisely this voluntariness that makes the system stable: members stay because they want to, not because they have to.
05 — The Proof
Move the slider and see what every percentage point of global disarmament would free up each year — distributed according to the Concordia key: 40 % climate action, 30 % health, 30 % education.
90 %
Freed up annually: …
Climate action (40 %)
…
≈ the estimated annual additional cost of the global energy transition
Health (30 %)
…
≈ basic healthcare for every human being worldwide
Education (30 %)
…
≈ a multiple of the global education funding gap
Basis: roughly 2.7 trillion US dollars of global military spending per year (order of magnitude as per SIPRI). Illustrative model calculation — not an economic forecast.
06 — Sceptic Protection
A peace model that shies away from critical questions deserves no trust. Here are the hardest ones — and our answers.
Because they already do — and have for seventy years, whenever the gain exceeds the price. No country was forced to join the EU, ASEAN or the African Union; they did so because pooled sovereignty creates more real capacity to act than isolated sovereignty. A state that is formally “fully sovereign” today, yet spends 5 percent of its economic output on defence and lives under permanent nuclear threat, is in fact less free than a federation member without those burdens.
Moreover, the Concordia model demands less than the word “federation” suggests: taxation, education, culture, law and administration remain national. Only external security and disarmament verification are transferred — precisely those areas in which going it alone is demonstrably most expensive and most dangerous. And crucially: accession is reversible. Every zone has an orderly right of withdrawal with a multi-year notice period. It is precisely this voluntariness that makes the system stable: members stay because they want to, not because they have to.
Through threefold, legally enforceable protection — and through the lesson of seventy years of European experience that integration does not erase cultures but makes them more visible. Ireland is more Irish today, Catalonia more Catalan and Poland more Polish than before EU accession, because cultural identity no longer has to be defended militarily and can instead be lived as civilisation.
Concretely, the Future Treaty provides: first, a cultural constitution of constitutional rank guaranteeing every official language — Russian and Ukrainian expressly included — in education, administration, media and the judiciary, enforceable before any federation court. Second, the principle of subsidiarity in absolute form: cultural, language, education and religious policy lie exclusively with the nations and regions; the federal level has no competence here whatsoever and cannot acquire it by majority vote. Third, a cultural council with veto power, in which every founding nation — regardless of its size — sits as an equal. A federation that derives its peace legitimacy from voluntariness simply cannot afford cultural dominance: it would destroy the very foundation on which it stands.
Disarmament never fails for lack of will, but for lack of verification. The Concordia plan therefore relies on three phases in which trust precedes every reduction — see the roadmap: Phase 1 makes all arsenals visible without a single weapon being given up. Phase 2 reduces synchronously in annual 10-percent steps, mutually inspected, offensive systems first. Phase 3 leads to the 10-percent plateau of purely defensive and civil-protection capacity; the fissile material of the last nuclear weapons is converted to civilian electricity.
Each step is coupled to the previous one: whoever drops out stops the process but gains no advantage, since everyone else remains at the same level. Disarmament thus becomes the only rational path.
They are needed — more urgently than ever. The very competencies that organise deterrence today are exactly those that civilian transformation requires: logistics for disaster relief, engineering for the energy transition, cyber defence for critical infrastructure, discipline and leadership for building new institutions. The peace dividend finances a multi-year conversion programme for this: guaranteed retraining, continued pay during the transition, and priority in staffing the new civilian verification, protection and infrastructure corps. History shows that this works: after 1990, millions of soldiers and defence workers were transferred into civilian professions — chaotically where it happened unplanned, successfully where programmes were in place. Concordia plans for it from day one.
07 — Transparency
A model that wants to convince must name its strongest counter-arguments itself. These objections deserve to be taken seriously — we document them here in full and answer where we can, honestly also where we (yet) cannot.
Correct. The EU analogy does not fully hold where armies rather than tariffs are concerned: no state has ever voluntarily federalised its core defence. The model responds with reversibility and transition periods spanning decades — but it remains true that this would be historically uncharted territory. Whoever advocates the model must be able to live with that uncertainty.
The weightiest objection. From a Russian perspective, assigning Eastern Siberia to the East Asian zone would be perceived as territorial partition — regardless of how voluntary and economically advantageous it is conceived to be. Demarcation lines that cut through states have historically created new conflicts rather than ended old ones. The model stands or falls on whether such a reordering could ever be experienced as a gain rather than a loss — and to that there is no reliable answer today.
This too is correct. After the experiences since 2014 and 2022, the mutual trust that any voluntary integration presupposes will not exist for the foreseeable future. The model therefore explicitly understands itself as a generational project with a time horizon of decades — and as food for thought for the time after a just peace, not as a proposal that could be implemented over the heads of those affected.
The danger is real: large spaces can swallow small voices. The model tries to counter this with veto rights, subsidiarity and exit options — but critics rightly object that formal guarantees are often worth little amid power asymmetries. Whether Central Asia, the Baltic states or the littoral states of the Indian Ocean would experience such an order as protection or as paternalism can only be shown by their own free decision.
Our standard: whoever finds these objections stronger than our answers should be able to say so here. Write to us — we will add the best counter-arguments to this list.
08 — Get Involved
Concordia is an open discussion model. It lives from people reading it, picking it apart, improving it — and passing it on. Three ways to get involved:
Send us your criticism, your improvements, your counter-models. We publish the strongest contributions.
Use our texts and graphics freely in schools, universities and discussion groups — education is the first step of every disarmament.
The project is open source. Improve content, translations or code directly in the repository.