Analysing Kazakhstan's Foreign Policy

Regime neo-Eurasianism in the Nazarbaev era

Luca Anceschi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032400280
• eBook ISBN: 9781317379935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book investigates the roles that ideas and constructs associated with Eurasia have played in the making of Kazakhstan's foreign policy during the Nazarbaev era.

This book delves into the specific Eurasia-centric narratives through which the regime, headed by Nursultan Nazarbaev, imagined the role of post-Soviet Kazakhstan in the wider Eurasian geopolitical space. Based on substantive fieldwork and sustained engagement with primary sources, the book unveils the power implications of Kazakhstani neo-Eurasianism, arguing that the strengthening of the regime's domestic power ranked highly in the list of objectives pursued by Kazakhstani foreign policy between the collapse of the Soviet Union and Nazarbaev's apparent withdrawal from the Kazakhstani political scene (19 March 2019). This book, ultimately, is a study of inter-state integration, which makes use of a rigorous methodological approach to assess different incarnations of post-Soviet multilateralism, from the Commonwealth of Independent States to the more recent, and highly controversial, Eurasian Economic Union.

This book offers a ground-breaking analysis of Kazakhstani foreign policy in the Nazarbaev era. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Central Asian Politics, International Relations and Security Studies.

1 Kazakhstani foreign policy in the pre-Eurasianist era

(December 1991 to November 1993)

A fundamental urgency underpinned Kazakhstani policy in the early post-Soviet era, when a generally unprepared leadership had to identify viable solutions to the challenges posed by an unwanted, and somewhat unexpected, independence. Numerous pressures intervened to inform the assessments that Nursultan A. Nazarbaev and his close associates made of the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the one hand, the Kazakhstani regime had to put a positive spin on the achievement of independence, which was presented to internal audiences as the ultimate stage in the evolution of Kazakh nationhood. Autonomy from the former centre of the USSR raised on the other hand many political and economic questions that, to be properly dealt with, had to be tackled at foreign policy level. As a consequence, a very substantial segment of Kazakhstan’s early foreign policy was played out vis-à-vis the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), while relationships with more distant partners—and the West in particular—were assigned a relatively marginal role within the Kazakhstani external outlook.¹

Alleviating the stress that the transition from the USSR to the CIS put on Kazakhstani statehood became the key foreign policy end pursued by the government in Alma-Ata² between 1991 and 1993. The promotion of reintegration in the former Soviet space represented Nazarbaev’s answer to the numerous challenges set by the implosion of the Soviet Union. As Martha Brill Olcott (2010a, 36) has argued, CIS integration profoundly redefined Kazakhstan’s early foreign policy insofar as it offered readily available (yet rather unimaginative) solutions to the ‘security dilemma’ that a combination of economic pressures and ethnic grievances was then imposing on the Kazakhstani state.

A regime-driven discourse of integratsiya (integration) emerged in this sense as a defining aspect of Kazakhstani foreign policy-making in 1991–1993, when a binary rationale underpinned Nazarbaev’s ‘persistent unionism’ (Hale 2009, 2). Interestingly, this discourse was not articulated through a neo-Eurasianist prism. Kazakhstan’s pre-Eurasianist foreign policy acquired a multi-directional orientation, as the adoption of an external outlook promoting CIS integration assisted the Nazarbaev regime in pursuing two interrelated objectives. Principally, Kazakhstan’s strategy of unconditional support for the CIS was designed to address the economic consequences of the Soviet disintegration. At the same time, it constituted a critical component in the leadership’s response to the numerous ethnic challenges faced by post-Soviet Kazakhstan, where the titular nationality (that is, the Kazakhs) represented a minority of the total population.³

What is most striking about early Kazakhstani foreign policy is that, in essence, it responded to the same interests and pursued the same objectives of the external policies implemented by the regime in the post-1993 years. Yet it did so without the support of a comprehensive neo-Eurasianist rhetoric. Providing an explanatory framework for the non-Eurasianist discourse of integratsiya formulated in the early post-Soviet era represents the core purpose of this chapter, which will outline the key dynamics that defined the Kazakhstani external outlook in the years preceding the introduction of the evraziiskaya strategiya (Eurasian strategy).

Chronologically, this chapter is focused on key foreign policy developments that occurred between the formal disintegration of the Soviet Union (December 1991) and the definitive failure of monetary unionism in the post-Soviet space (November 1993). The analysis presented here will thus link the evolution of the Kazakhstani foreign policy discourse to the progressive crystallisation of Kazakhstan’s politico-economic sovereignty, establishing a direct connection between the external and the domestic dimensions of Kazakhstani policy-making.

In 1991–1993, the regime’s foreign policy adopted a particularly narrow outlook. Kazakhstan’s international activity was almost exclusively developed vis-à-vis the CIS and, to a very significant extent, represented the restricted function of the foreign economic interests of the Nazarbaev regime. In this sense, economic unionism rapidly evolved into the most telling facet of early Kazakhstani foreign policy. This consideration essentially sets the chapter’s analytical focus. After an initial investigation of the domestic vectors of pre-1994 foreign policy-making, attention will turn to the Kazakhstani foreign economic outlook in general, and the regime’s prominent role in support of post-Soviet monetary integration in particular.

The domestic dimension of early Kazakhstani foreign policy-making

The early implementation of the discourse of integratsiya was primarily concerned with driving Kazakhstan’s foreign economic agenda and, simultaneously, played an indirect (yet not insignificant) role vis-à-vis nation-building. Critical to the achievement of these ends were two interrelated relationships, which the regime independently established with Kazakhstan’s russkii (ethnically Russian) population and, more importantly, the Russian Federation itself.

The relationship with Kazakhstan’s sizeable Russian minority shaped the greater part of the regime’s strategies for managing the state’s multinational essence. In the early post-Soviet era, the government attempted to handle Kazakhstan’s precarious ethnic balance while engaging in the complex process of state-building. At the same time, it began to foster its own nation-building paradigm, which had at its very core the glorification of the statehood acquired in 1991 by the Kazakh nation.⁴ The fundamental incongruence of these two processes, as remarked by Martha Brill Olcott (1997, 315), saw N.A Nazarbaev highlighting the multinational nature of the Kazakhstani state and, simultaneously, recognising Kazakhstan as the homeland of the Kazakhs. Interestingly, an analogous version of this apparently paradoxical discourse became a critical element in foreign policy rhetoric (Kasenov 1995a, 265):

Although Kazakhstan is a multinational state, it was the Kazakhs who gave the state its name because it was created along primordial Kazakh ethnic lines. Nevertheless, Kazakhstan formulates and carries out a foreign policy that expresses the interests of the state as a whole rather than of any particular ethnic group, including Kazakhs.

The integration of ethnopolitics and foreign policy-making brought the relationship with the Russian Federation to the epicentre of Kazakhstan’s international activity. The preservation of meaningful ties with the former centre of the USSR helped the regime to defuse the perception of Kazakhstan as an ‘orientalising’ state, an image that was then gathering popularity among Russian Kazakhstanis (Peyrouse 2008, 111–3). At a time when Kazakhstan’s territorial integrity was reportedly put at risk by the secessionist aspirations of the Russian segment of the population,⁵ foreign policy set out to promote a positive image of the regime among ethnic Russians, pursuing in this sense a legitimising agenda (Cummings 2003, 149–51). Focus on post-Soviet reintegration intended to reassure the Russian minority of the congruence between the external outlook of the Kazakhstani state and the regime’s approach to ethnic politics. Power, in other words, was not a peripheral concern in Nazarbaev’s early discourse of integratsiya.

The turbulent ethnic politics of the early post-Soviet era played an ancillary role in shaping the fundamental orientation of Kazakhstani multilateralism, which, in 1991–1993, revolved around the preservation of a functioning economic relationship with the Russian Federation. The importance assigned by the leadership to economic ties between Almaty and Moscow resonated positively across Kazakhstan’s ethnic divide, and economic integration with the CIS served as a critical tool to strike a delicate balance: compensating the economic grievances of the ethnic Russian population, while also satisfying the aspirations of Kazakhs.

Overplaying the ethnopolitical rationale of the Russo-Kazakhstani relationship would nevertheless limit our understanding of the ultimately economic orientation of Kazakhstan’s politics of integratsiya in 1991–1993. Ties between Almaty and Moscow became critical to attaining the key end of early Kazakhstani foreign policy, namely the return to some sort of post-Soviet confederation primarily concerned with economic integration. The sense of dependency (Hale 2009, 10–12) pervading Russo-Kazakhstani relations addressed the regime’s anxiety about embarking upon a difficult economic transition without retaining any link with Russia. This particular dependency ultimately came to embody the most threatening of the many legacies that the implosion of the USSR bequeathed to independent Kazakhstan.

Although the economy of the Kazakh Sovetskaya Sotsialisticheskaya Respublika (Soviet Socialist Republic—SSR) ranked among the most diversified of the Soviet Union (Pomfret 1995, 76–7), it was ultimately designed to operate in an integrated perspective, serving the interest of the Soviet centre rather than ‘the needs of the republic as a unit’ (Brill Olcott 2010a, 129). Three main factors contributed to making the economy of Soviet Kazakhstan highly dependent on the RSFSR, namely the structure in which production patterns were developed,⁶ the infrastructural framework supporting the production activity and, finally, the commercial outlook of the Kazakh SSR, which, at the end of the Soviet era, conducted its trade activity⁷ almost exclusively at intra-republican level. The principle of centralised pluralism,⁸ however, was not the only determinant for the economic symbiosis linking Almaty with Moscow; internal developments within Soviet Kazakhstan also contributed to consolidate this dependency. Specifically, economic decision-making emerged as a critical factor in this regard, as Nazarbaev, between 1989 and 1991, opted to retain fully centralised control of the economy, failing to replicate in the Kazakh SSR the timid liberalising policies introduced in other Soviet republics (Pomfret 1995, 50–60; Abazov 1997, 434).

The collapse of the USSR opened an era of severe instability for the post-Soviet economies. Regime rhetoric recognised in full the challenging nature of the economic transition upon which Kazakhstan had embarked in late 1991. President Nazarbaev (2001a, 54), in a later speech, remarked that the Kazakhstani economy, between 1990 and 1994, was on the brink of collapse (u kraya propasti), and acknowledged on many other occasions the economic chaos into which Kazakhstan had descended after the sudden disintegration of the Soviet Union (Nazarbaev 2006, 13). Nazarbaev’s assessment was essentially based on the instability that characterised the Kazakhstani macroeconomic performance in the early post-Soviet era: the International Monetary Fund reported that Kazakhstan’s real gross domestic product (GDP) experienced a cumulative decline of 31 per cent between 1992 and 1995, while the annual inflation rate reported a peak of approximately 3,000 per cent in mid-1994 (IMF 1998, 4). Negative trends also affected Kazakhstan’s industrial production, which, in 1991–1994, decreased by 47.7 per cent. A sectoral analysis of the Kazakhstani output in the years in question indicates that, while the energy sector somehow managed to contain the speed of its decline, a number of other industries collapsed, with striking declining rates affecting the production performance of the chemical industry (–77.4 per cent), the construction material industry (–73.6 per cent) and light industry (–55.8 per cent).⁹

The regime identified the preservation of a single economic space within the CIS area as the most suitable remedy for the impending crisis. In 1991–1993, however, a fundamental incongruence permeated the official discourse on economic foreign policy. On the one hand, regime rhetoric maintained a generally ambivalent position vis-à-vis the viability of integration in the CIS: the 1992 Strategiya stanovleniiya i razvitiya Kazakhstana kak suverennogo gosudarstva¹⁰—a blueprint document for the politico-economic development of post-Soviet Kazakhstan¹¹—conceptualised Kazakhstan as a rather independent actor in the international economic arena. In proto-Eurasianist fashion, the strategy linked the international potential of the newly independent Kazakhstani state to its unique geopolitical position.¹² Yet, at an operational level, economic foreign policy came to be developed around a truly (re‑)integrationist approach, which was implicitly captured by Nazarbaev (2010a, 23) during his maiden speech before the UN General Assembly:

The fragile constitution of our Commonwealth […] still does not take into full account the long lasting tradition of cooperation of the people and the nations of Eurasia. As a consequence, the economic and democratic transitions in the CIS have been accompanied by economic, political and social instability, which aggravated existing conflicts and favoured the eruption of new ones.

The underlying rationale for early Kazakhstani re-integratsiya policies is outlined in Nazarbaev’s proposition, which identified the lack of integration in the Eurasian space as the key factor behind the degeneration of the CIS politico-economic landscape. Two further inferences can be made while analysing Nazarbaev’s statement. To begin with, the Kazakhstani foreign policy discourse of the early post-Soviet era advanced a restrictive interpretation of the Eurasian political constituent. In 1991–1993, the boundaries of Eurasia, in the views of the Kazakhstani foreign policy-making community, did not extend beyond the CIS borders. In this context, ‘Eurasian cooperation’ quickly became a synonym for ‘post-Soviet integration’.

Second, Nazarbaev’s statement appeared to openly contradict the more ‘sovereignty-focus’ provisions included in the 1992 Strategiya. This contradiction, on closer inspection, epitomises the ‘dialectical’ interaction between ‘sustainable inter-state cooperation […] and enhanced national sovereignty’, highlighted by Gregory Gleason (2001a, 1078) as a critical element in the foreign policy rhetoric advanced in Central Asia during the early and mid-1990s. Gleason’s observation captures in full the fundamental tension pervading the discourse of integratsiya in 1991–1993: on the one hand, the Kazakhstani leadership was boasting about the achievement of national sovereignty while pursuing, on the other, economic integration at supranational level. This tension originated in the peculiar conceptualisation of sovereignty articulated by the regime in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse, when Kazakhstani sovereignty was often introduced as the synthesis of Western and post-Soviet forms of statehood. Specifically, the official rhetoric of the time adopt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Kazakhstani foreign policy in the pre-Eurasianist era: (December 1991 to November 1993)
• 2. From ideya to initsiativa?: Neo-Eurasianist Rhetoric in post-Soviet Kazakhstan
• 3. Regime neo-Eurasianism and the failure of Central Asian regionalism
• 4. Civilised divorce, marriage of convenience: Revisiting two decades of post-Soviet re-integratsiya (1994–2010)
• 5. Eurasia without Eurasianism: Kazakhstan and the Eurasian Economic Union
• Conclusion: Foreign policy, power and identity in the Nazarbaev era
• Bibliography
• Index