Central Asia

Geopolitics, security and stability

Ajay Patnaik

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138640023
• eBook ISBN: 9781317266396
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Throughout history, Central Asia has formed an important strategic link between the East and the West and been described as the 'great pivot' in the early-twentieth century.

This book looks at the relations between the Central Asian states and major external powers. It shows how these nations have kept the fragile geopolitics of the region free of the so-called 'New Great Game'. The volume evaluates the roles of major powers such as Russia, United States, China, Iran, and Turkey, as well as India and its 'Silk Road Strategy'. It also compares the regional geopolitics of Central Asia with its neighbour Caucasus. The study indicates how, despite limited inter-state cooperation, the region has prevented conflicts and wars, due to which these states have been able to enjoy greater strategic autonomy in their dealings with other countries.

The book will benefit scholars and researchers of international relations, political and strategic studies, area studies, and Central Asian studies apart from the interested general reader.

1
Geopolitics

Concept and reality

More than a century and a quarter after Alfred Thayer Mahan in his work, ‘Influence of Sea Power upon History’ (1890) made it famous, the concept of geopolitics continues to influence strategic thinking and policies of states in the contemporary world. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century was the period of classical geopolitics, whose leading scholar, of course, was Halford John Mackinder. His ‘Heartland Theory’ in a paper titled ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’, presented at the Royal Geographic Society in 1904, was a seminal moment in the evolution of the concept of geopolitics. Though there were other works before, like Mahan’s The Interest of America in Sea Power (1897) and Frederich Ratzel’s works in 1896 and 1897, Mackinder inspired generations of strategic studies all across the globe. After the Soviet collapse, there has been a strong revival of Mackinder’s ideas to justify or analyse competition for influence in the Eurasian ‘Heartland’. The current work is one more attempt to discuss why and how geopolitics operates in the post-Soviet space, especially in Central Asia.

Though the term geopolitics went out of fashion immediately after the Second World War, it never really disappeared. In various forms, including through theories like realism, geopolitics continued to influence policies of major powers. During the peak of the Cold War, Mackinder and his geopolitical ideas made a comeback of sorts in American strategic studies and even policy-making, though thinkers like Frederich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen were discredited, since they came to be associated with the Nazi state’s philosophy of ‘superior culture’.

Kjellen argued that the more vigorous and ‘advanced’ a culture, the more right it had to expand its ‘domain’ or control more territory. This complimented Ratzel’s concept of Lebensraum, or living space. Hitler put these ideas into practice by identifying Germany as the embodiment of that ‘advanced culture’. Another personality who influenced German geopolitical thinking was General Karl Haushofer. He began to disseminate his ideas through the Journal of Geopolitics in the 1920s, around the time when the Nazi party began to rise to power. Haushofer’s idea was to elevate German power without coming into conflict with the United States. Going beyond just expansion of the German border towards Russia, his geographical vision of the world talked of ‘pan-regions’ (large multi-latitude regions that were dominated by a particular ‘core’ power). In Haushofer’s scheme of the world, the United States dominated the Americas and Germany dominated Eurasia and controlled Africa.¹

However, it was not just German geopolitical thinking, but the concept of geopolitics itself that came under intellectual criticism after the Second World War. Classical geopolitics developed in the background of competition between imperial powers for influence in different parts of the world in the nineteenth century. As a result, various geographical areas were given specific attributes to promote the interests of particular powers vis-à-vis others. In the aftermath of a war of such a devastating scale, scholars were not willing to project a theory that promotes domination by powerful states.

Why then did these aggressive and hegemonic ideas continue to be part of the discourse? Was it because of their relevance in the context of Cold War confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union? Did theories like realism find sustenance through the ideas of geopolitics and vice versa? It is clear that despite having disappeared from intellectual discourse after the war and notwithstanding Hans Morgenthau’s criticism of Mackinder, ‘geopolitics’ continued to survive because of its association with realism, which emerged as a powerful trend in international politics. The epistemological bond comes from the common basis of centrality of the ‘state’ and ‘power’ in both theories.² The ontological link comes from the relevance of both theories for the United States and its allies to emerge as the dominant power/hegemon in the Cold War period.

At a time when geopolitics lost its appeal in the academic world, realism was emerging as the dominant theory in the field of international relations in opposition to the Marxist view. The Soviet Union advanced the view that the world was divided into ideological spaces during the Cold War. On one side stood the socialist countries and the newly independent countries that wished to be free from new forms of subjugation by the leading capitalist powers, which controlled all the post-war international institutions. The Soviet Union presented itself as the counter-hegemonic power, which would strengthen socialist orientation among communist-ruled states and an independent self-reliant path of development in the newly liberated countries.

The West used elements of classical geopolitics in its rivalry with the Soviet Union. Nicholas Spykman, a leading strategic American thinker, for example, combined elements of geopolitics with that of realism while promoting US leadership in the world. He accepted the idea of classical geopolitics, that the globe is divided into regions with varying degrees of strategic importance. Spykman mixed this with the realist notion of ‘balance of power’. Spykman’s world comprised of the Old World that included the Eurasian continent (along with Africa and Australia) and the New World of the Americas to be dominated by the United States. The United States, according to Spykman, should ‘construct and maintain a balance of power in the Old World’ in order to prevent it from being united and mounting a challenge to the US supremacy. Spykman identified ‘Rimland’, akin to Mackinder’s notion of ‘inner crescent’, as the key geopolitical arena, which should be of focus especially to contain any rival power.³

Lucian M. Ashworth gives some examples, like the publication of the 1942 American edition of Democratic Ideals and Reality (by Mackinder in 1919), which introduced Mackinder’s ideas to the post-war generation of strategic studies and diplomatic experts in the United States. They have used the ‘heartland’ thesis in one form or another since then. Other examples include works of Colin S. Gray (The Geopolitics of Super Power, 1988) and of Henry Kissinger (Diplomacy, 1994). Even after the Cold War ended, Mackinder’s ideas started to frequently appear in articles since the middle of the 1990s.⁴

Another important work, George Modelski’s cycle of world leadership (Modelski, Long Cycles of World Politics, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987), provides a structure within which the action of states and other geopolitical actors may be interpreted. The leading power in this model has the ability to exercise military force across the globe. While this notion of power leads to an ‘uncritical belief that the militarization of foreign policy is inevitable and beneficial’, Modelski also underlines that the power of the world leader rests in its ability to define a ‘big idea’ and the military or naval capability to make others accept those ideas – ‘The power of the world leader rests in its agenda setting capacity and its ability to enforce it.’⁵

At the end of the Second World War, the United States was able to set a global agenda around themes such as national self-determination and development that established its position as world leader. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), UN and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) were established to enforce and legitimise the new world leader’s agenda. However, as Colin Flint argues, dissent toward the American leadership emerged, and much quicker than in previous global leadership cycles. The Soviet Union provided an immediate ideological and military challenge. The Korean and Vietnam Wars illustrated the limitations of American ideological leadership and military capabilities.⁶

Colin Flint traces how the Cold War soon witnessed the revival of the practice of geopolitics though there were hardly any theoretical works coming out. Increasingly, US geopolitical views took the form of government policy statements that, in the absence of academic endeavours, assumed the status of ‘theories’, and hence gained a certain degree of authority. First was George Kenan’s call for ‘containment’, then National Security document NSC–68, supported by the controversial ‘domino theory’. Kenan, in the tradition of geopolitics, was also eager to classify the world into regions with political meaning, defining a maritime trading world (the West) and a ‘despotic xenophobic East’.⁷

Mackinder, in 1904, had constructed the core of Eurasia as the ‘Pivot Area’, which he renamed as the ‘Heartland’ in 1919. But the region he was referring to was the same, roughly representing the territorial core of the Soviet Union. The defeat of Nazi Germany and control over East Europe by the Soviet Union, which controlled the vast natural resources of Eurasia, was creating a Mackinderian scenario for the West. The containment theory was an offshoot of this fear and designed to prevent Soviet influence over the rest of Europe and other parts of the world.

Since direct invasion of the ‘heartland’ was not a realistic option during the Cold War, the ‘Rimlands’ that Spykman talked of were important spaces for future containment of Soviet Union. The US policy was to strengthen its presence in these areas by creating pro-Western regimes there. That is why, in a departure from Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman considered ‘Rimland’, rather than ‘heartland’, as being the key to control the ‘World Island’.

The policy prescriptions in the United States during the Cold War were thus based on previous Western geopolitical thinking. Mackinder’s Heartland Theory, according to Chris Seiple, was the intellectual underpinning of the American ‘containment policy’ that provided conceptually cohesive clarity during the Cold War. George Kenan, considered to be the father of ‘containment’, wrote in 1951 that it was ‘essential to us, as it was to Britain, that no single continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass’. Ronald Reagan wrote in his 1988 National Security Strategy for the United States,

The first historical dimension of our strategy is relatively simple, clear cut, and immensely sensible. It is the conviction that the United States’ most basic national security interests would be endangered if a hostile group of states were to dominate the Eurasian landmass – that area of the globe often referred to as the world’s heartland. We fought two world wars to prevent this from occurring. And, since 1945, we have sought to prevent the Soviet Union from capitalizing on its strategic advantage to dominate its neighbours in Western Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and thereby fundamentally alter the global balance of power to our disadvantage. The national strategy to achieve this objective has been containment.

As the Cold War progressed, the word ‘containment’ came to describe the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States for global influence. It was Henry Kissinger, according to Seiple, who almost single-handedly helped revive the term in the 1970s by using it as a super-power game of balance of power politics across the world.⁸

Essentially, geopolitics, according to Colin Flint, is the practice of states controlling and competing for territories and resources within them. However, as he points out, the competition for territory is not confined to states only. Since individuals, movements, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), private companies and even terrorists are engaged in competition for control of territories, geopolitics is the ‘multiple practices and multiple representations of a wide variety of territories’.

In geopolitics, the classification of the globe into particular regions reflects the strategic importance of a country or region evaluated in terms of its location, resource potential and strategic role. At the same time, Flint argues, geographical images are constructed to justify the intervention of powerful states. Despotism, barbarism, closed social and political institutions, etc. were terms used earlier to provide a moral justification for imperial/colonial aggression.⁹

In the Cold War geopolitical discourse, the old thinking was always present. According to Levent Hekimoglu,

Sir Halford Mackinder and his 1904 thesis, pretty much ignored in the English-speaking world for four decades, was suddenly rediscovered in the 1940s and acquired great fame by mid-century; not on account of the validity underlying premises and the merits of the argument, but because its conclusions recommending the containment of Russia fitted snugly into the emergent Cold War discourse.¹⁰

American geopolitical theorists like Colin Gray argued till the very last years of the Soviet Union that Mackinder’s ideas ‘provide an intellectual architecture, far superior to rival conceptions, for understanding principal international security issues’.¹¹

Gerald O’ Tuathali is of the view that geopolitics has always been about production of ‘power/knowledge’. While geopolitics of the early twentieth century was associated with imperialist expansion, in the later part of the century, it was ideological competition that defined the context of geopolitics. But in both cases, it was a discourse that justified the global strategy of dominant power/s.¹²

‘Critical geopolitics’ as a theory emerged as a reaction to the continued search for global dominance that major powers engaged in. After the end of the Cold War, the East–West rivalry and confrontation was supposed to end. Instead, geopolitics continues to influence policies and strategic thinking. Politics aside, even economics was not spared. Being prefixed with ‘geo’ to be described as geo-economics, the use of economic instruments like FDI, free-market and energy diplomacy have become an integral part of great power strategy.

At every level – politics, economy and culture – geopolitics is being reproduced. We are witnessing what Tuathali calls ‘operation of discourse and power/knowledge’. He gives the example of Francis Fukuyama, whose articles ‘End of History’ declared the triumph of Western liberalism and that of Edward Luttwark, who envisions a future of geo-e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Geopolitics: concept and reality
• 2 Security concerns of Central Asian states
• 3 Energy geopolitics in the Central Asia–Caspian region
• 4 Russia in Central Asia: the geopolitical balancer
• 5 Central Asian states and regional powers: China, Iran, Turkey and India
• 6 Central Asia: regionalism and regional mechanisms
• 7 Regional stability: challenges and prospects
• 8 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index