Globalizing Central Asia

Geopolitics and the Challenges of Economic Development

Marlene Laruelle, Sebastien Peyrouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780765635044
• eBook ISBN: 9781317469636
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this global era, Central Asia must be understood in both geo-economic and geopolitical terms. The region's natural resources compel the attention of rivalrous great powers and ambitious internal factions. The local regimes are caught between the need for international collaborations to valorize these riches and the need to maintain control over them in the interest of state sovereignty. Russia and China dominate the horizon, with other global players close behind; meanwhile, neighboring countries are fractious and unstable with real potential for contagion. This pathbreaking introduction to Central Asia in contemporary international economic and political context answers the needs of both academic and professional audiences and is suitable for course adoption.

Part I

“Great Games” and “Small Games”

The Strategies and Outcomes of External Actors

All parts of the world have given rise to meta-discourses fed by historical and geographical references, but some do so more than others. This is the case for Central Asia, where onlookers embed the realities of daily political, social, economic, and cultural existence in a globalizing narrative that is intended to make sense of contemporary developments. This is not only a sign of lack of knowledge about the region, but also of the lack of interpretative guides to the changes taking place there. Thus, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Asia is variously cast as the “South” of the former Soviet Union, the eastern pole of Washington’s “Greater Middle East,” the new “Far West” of China, a “buffer zone” between continental and maritime powers, a “Greater Central Asia” linked to South Asia through Afghanistan, the “Caspian Basin” as a historical place of conflict between Russia and Iran, and as a “Central Eurasia” where Slavic, Turkic, Persian, and Chinese cultures meet. These familiar interpretations invite external actors to project their international identity on the region, each with their own set of normative principles, arguments in favor of rapprochement with Central Asia, and legitimacy strategies to influence the future of the region.

Among these metanarratives, the “Great Game” is probably the most popular.¹ It recalls the geopolitical competition between the Russian and British empires during the second half of the nineteenth century in the area stretching from the Kazakh and Turkmen steppes to the north of India, and from the Caspian Sea to the foothills of the Himalayas. It led to the birth of Afghanistan and the historic separation between Russian Turkestan and British India.² The current idea of the new “Great Game” is marked by the post-Cold War rediscovery of colonial adventures and revives the Orientalist fashions of the nineteenth century, as well as Romanticism’s attraction to a mystical “East.” The previous “Great Game” was not a typical armed conflict, but rather an indirect competition based on cultural and commercial sway, which used methods of disinformation and discrete struggles for influence, as well as the weapon of scientific knowledge. All these are standard strategies of the twenty-first-century post-Cold War world, hence the tendency to consider both situations similar.³

But the “Great Game” formula causes confusion on multiple levels. The contemporary Central Asian states are independent, legitimate international actors and recognized members of major organizations, which the nineteenth century khanates of Bukhara, Khiva, and Kokand were not. They cannot be reduced to simple objects of rivalry between great powers, and they have not been passive recipients of external influence, either under colonial domination in the nineteenth century, Soviet control in the twentieth century, or post-Cold War geopolitical contests in the twenty-first century. They are actors in their own right, with their own subjectivity and projection of identity on the international stage.

Political Map of Central Asia

Most importantly, despite a power differential that is not in their favor, they are able to deploy strategies to force regional actors and global powers to compete with one another, and have the capacity to limit the impact of outsiders. Neither Russia nor China nor the United States can impose their rules of the game on Central Asia in a unilateral manner, and any of them may experience sudden losses of influence. Moscow has limited means by which to exert pressure on Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, and it also has to manage the growing autonomy of Kazakhstan, as well as respond to the bargaining tactics used by Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Beijing has been unable to enforce its own specific set of economic and strategic wishes, and the Central Asian states rejected its proposal to transform the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into a free trade zone. China also found itself at a loss, for example, when confronted with Tashkent’s obstruction of the hydroelectric station projects it is financing in Tajikistan. The United States or the European Union cannot influence the nature of Central Asian regimes, which have managed to maintain political isolation when faced with democratizing pressures, and Washington has experienced several significant strategic setbacks in the region.

The notion of the “Great Game” also presupposes a set of binary oppositions whose relevance has not been demonstrated. While Russia and the United States appeared to dominate the Central Asian scene in the 1990s, now China has positioned itself as a new matrix for the region and potentially as a competitor with Russia. US-China competition in the region is not clearly apparent, but it exists. Yet multiple other powers, such as the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, Iran, India, have also entered the regional arena. Each seeks to project itself as a model for Central Asian development and to frame the legitimacy narratives of the Central Asian states.

Russia’s and China’s influence has been established over the long term, and both have territorial contiguity with several Central Asian countries. They are the only “total” players in the sense that they are able to partly shape politics, strategic orientations, economic development, and social issues in Central Asia. With the Soviet legacy, Russia has a cultural advantage, although China hopes to fill the gap with its economic dynamism. A second set of actors, the United States and the EU are both symbols of democratic values and a Western way of life that is both attractive and repellent. The differences between these two actors, however, are significant. Washington arrived in the region with the legitimacy of the sole superpower, but its distance from the Eurasian continent limits its level of interaction with Central Asian societies. For its part, Brussels is mobilizing its normative and soft power. It is more influential in economic terms than the United States, but less so in strategic terms; it has the potential to influence state-building in the region, but its foreign policy lacks impact. A third set of actors, Iran and Turkey, draw on cultural and linguistic proximity, which provides them with niches of influence but not first-tier status. A fourth group includes the more minor actors—Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, and Israel—and a fifth group of even less influential countries includes former Soviet “brothers” and newly rediscovered neighbors, Ukraine, Belarus, the South Caucasus, and Afghanistan.

Far from being binary, the relationships between Central Asian countries and each of these external actors, or among the external actors themselves, are flexible. Not all of them share the same objectives, strategies, or outcomes, and the “smaller” actors can sometimes impede the “greater” powers. None of these external actors wants to gain a monopoly over the region. It is too fragile domestically and too exposed to an unstable regional environment for outside powers to risk entering into conflict with the others to achieve a unilateral stranglehold over it. This situation is positive, since it limits greatly the risks of conflict between external actors. But it is also negative, since the main influential actors are involved mostly with defense strategies (to confine the risks of “instability” emanating from Central Asia), and no one is ready to pay too dearly for its presence in the region.

The diversity of Central Asia has also been reinforced since independence. The five states now have little in common in terms of economic capacity and development strategy. Each of them is autonomous in its foreign policy decisions, and has a very specific identity and its own views on the geopolitical environment. Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan each view China differently, and the same is true of Russia in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The governments quite legitimately exploit international competition to their own advantage and are learning how to present different faces depending upon the partner with which they are dealing. When negotiating with Moscow and Beijing, they do not conceal the authoritarian nature of their decision making, but when meeting with the Europeans and Americans, they display concern for democratization and good governance. With Muslim countries they play the Islam card, and with Israel and Europe, that of the secular state. From the time of their independence, the states of Central Asia have promoted divergent conceptions of their place on the international stage, and these divergences have widened over time. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian foreign policies share similar objectives—autonomy but recognition—but from it they draw very different strategies and outcomes. Indeed, the diversity of positions is extreme, going from Turkmen isolationism—so complete that it led to the country’s often being placed alongside North Korea and Burma in various global rankings—to the far-reaching openness of Kyrgyzstan—the only country in the world to host a Russian and an American military base on its soil only a few kilometers from one another.

Kazakhstan is the only Central Asian state to have succeeded in implementing a positive multi-vectored policy vis-à-vis its international partners, by building links in multiple directions, rather than opposing the actors against one another. By openly displaying the hierarchy of its relationships—Russia first, China second, followed by the West (with the European Union taking precedence over the United States)⁴—Kazakh foreign policy has managed to build stable and consensual foreign policies. The multi-vectored policy of the other Central Asian states has proven more problematic.⁵ Turkmenistan’s stance of “permanent neutrality” can only be defined as multi-vectored by default, since it is more isolationist than internationalist. Uzbekistan has undergone several major strategic reversals, which makes its multi-vector orientation a sign of geopolitical instability, as it switches between pro-Western and anti-Russian, and anti-Western and pro-Russian stances. Kyrgyzstan, for its part, as well as Tajikistan to a lesser extent, are able to play on the oppositions between the major powers with a fair amount of success, but they do not have any established multi-vectored policy to speak of. They play one power against another, while Kazakhstan plays on all of the powers at the same time.

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Table Part 1.1

Main Economic Partners of Central Asia by Rank, Value of Trade, and Percentage in 2010

Rank	Country	Total trade in million US$	Percent of total Central Asian trade
1	China	28,388.7	26.1
2	EU	28,317.3	26
3	Russia	13,955.4	12.8
4	Turkey	6,204.8	5.7
5	United States	2,919.2	2.6
6	Ukraine	2,895.2	2.6
7	South Korea	2,739.1	2.5
8	Belarus	1,246.4	1.1
9	Japan	1,069.1	0.9
10	UAE	927.5	0.8
11	Iran	834.7	0.7
12	Azerbaijan	624.8	0.5
13	Afghanistan	531.5	0.4
14	India	476.6	0.4
15	Malaysia	208.4	0.19
16	Israel	129.4	0.11
17	Pakistan	34.5	0.03

Source: 2011 European Commission statistics, http://ec.euro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps, Figures, and Tables
• Introduction
• Part I. "Great Games" and "Small Games": The Strategies and Outcomes of External Actors
• Part II. Facing Globalization: Strengths and Weaknesses of Central Asia's Economies
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors