"The focus of this article is two-pronged. First, it highlights China’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ (OBOR) initiative as a Eurasia-centred project that, distinct from the twentieth-century Eurasianism, aims to introduce a new comprehensive integrationist agenda to the Eurasian strategic landscape. Second, it compares the US-led EuroAtlanticism and the emerging Eurasianism, holding that while the former has historically stressed security over development (development is seen as contingent on the establishment of a hard security regime), the latter prioritises development over security (security is viewed as contingent on the establishment of an inclusive economic regime). Thus, this research argues that, if implemented successfully, OBOR could challenge EuroAtlanticism as the long-held normative paradigm of interstate relations by offering a systemic alternative. EURASIANISM IS A CENTURY-OLD IDEA. EMERGING IN THE early 1920s and largely nurtured by the Russian immigrants settled in Europe, the concept, despite its various interpretations along different political and ideological lines, laid claim ‘to represent some unique synthesis of European and Asian principles’ (Bassin 2008, p. 281), defining Russia ‘not as a European and not as an Asian country; … as a third, special continent of Slav–Turkic cohabitation that bears the imprint of the great empires that have ruled over its expanses—from the Mongolian to the Russian’ (Laruelle 2009, p. 94).1 Although the Eurasian doctrine did not assume itself as a unified ideology but rather evolved into a multitude of different forms (Laruelle 2015), early Eurasianism in general argued a particular geographic, linguistical, ethno-cultural, and philosophical identity for Russia distinct from both Europe and Asia (Shlapentokh 1997, pp. 130–31; Senderov 2009, p. 25; Mileski 2015, pp. 177–79). However, despite the fact that early Eurasianist thought envisioned a unique political and philosophical space for Russia, it also ‘developed a positive but general discourse about the Orient’, holding that ‘Russia should be closer to Asia than to Europe’ (Laruelle 2004, p. 116). During the Cold War, under the weight of deep ideological confrontation with the West, the Eurasianist thought took a further Orientalist inclination, emphasising cultural and ideological differences from Europe (Von Hagen 2004, p. 450). Especially with the emergence of NATO and the expansion of US- and Soviet-led camps ‘beyond the original arenas of Europe and Asia’, the militarised This research was sponsored by the International Postdoctoral Exchange Programme of Shandong University..."