Neoliberalism and Post-Soviet Transition

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Wumaier Yilamu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319692203
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319692210
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica comparata

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem of scale, with essays ranging in subject matter from literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. Its contributors consider a variety of issues provoked by the sudden and pressing shifts in scale brought on by globalization and the era of the Anthropocene, including: the difficulties of defining the concept of scale; the challenges that shifts in scale pose to knowledge formation; the role of scale in mediating individual subjectivity and agency; the barriers to understanding objects existing in scalar realms different from our own; the role of scale in mediating the relationship between humans and the environment; and the nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales.

© The Author(s) 2018

Wumaier YilamuNeoliberalism and Post-Soviet Transitionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69221-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Wumaier Yilamu¹

(1)

Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

End Abstract

This book explores the relation between the ideology of neoliberalism and the post-communism capitalist transitions of two former constituent republics of the erstwhile Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, from a discursive perspective. Neoliberalism has been a dominant ideology of the world since the 1970s (Steger 2009, 7; Jessop 2002, 455). Associated first and foremost with twentieth-century Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek and his most famous American counterpart, Milton Friedman, the theory of neoliberalism proposes a capitalist economic model that is premised on the following four core ideals and presumptions: the advantage of the free market and free trade for economic growth, a restricted role of the state in the economy, the sanctity of private ownership, and the freedom of individuals as rational economic actors (Harvey 2005, 2; Steger 2009, 12) . At the heart of these ideals is neoliberalism’s conceptualization of free market as a universal path to prosperity and freedom for all human societies. Promoted by its proponents in a language that ostensibly supports the democratization of the world, the ideology of neoliberalism has proliferated around the world, facilitating the global spread of free market–based neoliberal capitalism, a process that is further claimed by neoliberals to be an objective and inevitable process that will subsume all nations around the globe (Steger 2009, 60–87).

By the 1980s, the influence of neoliberalism was felt everywhere, including states of the former communist camp in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union, where their centralized command economies were plagued by severe morbidity and structural deficiencies and were failing to deliver the promised material abundance and prosperity. The notions of democracy , freedom, and market efficiency in the ideological rhetoric of neoliberalism resonated with the peoples in these former socialist countries given their experience of decades of repression by communist totalitarian regimes in reigns of terror that sought to maintain absolute monopoly of every aspect of public and private life. When the West heralded its overcoming of the decade-long economic crisis of ‘stagflation’ in the early 1980s, these communist regimes were still coping with their ailing economies and thereby the dwindling legitimacy of their one-party state systems. As a result, ironically, these communist countries started to turn to the market-based economic practices of the West, or more precisely capitalism, which they had once proclaimed they would bury in history, for solutions to their economic problems. Against this backdrop, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the former Soviet Union in 1985 and embarked on his twofold reform efforts, dubbed glasnost (political openness) and perestroika (economic restructuring), in an attempt to breathe new life into the ailing Soviet system. The glasnost was meant to liberalize the political system in the Soviet Union for the ensuing economic reform (White 1994, 7), yet political liberalization spun out of control and undermined the effectiveness of the economic reform.

It was clear that Gorbachev’s economic restructuring was intended to be a market reform, albeit in piecemeal and compromised fashion. The hallmark of this market reform lay in the reestablishment of private ownership of the means of production, denationalization of state enterprises through new forms of ownership that encouraged private involvement, reduced involvement of the state in economic activities, and decentralization of the economic planning system (Rutland 1994, 140–149). Taken together, these initiatives were clear indications of the influence of neoliberal economic thinking.

In retrospect, the processes of neoliberal transformation initiated in the Western economies can be seen as essentially an effort to change how they ran their capitalist states while keeping intact the fundamental capitalist liberal social order on which their political and economic systems were built, albeit with much of the heralded revolutionary rhetoric in the West. However, the Soviet reform program led by Gorbachev was drastically different, and in a sense truly revolutionary, in that it shattered the very foundation of the USSR’s socialist social order—total state ownership of the economy and absolute control of the Communist Party. It did so in order to establish a new social order founded on the antithesis of the Soviet system, capitalism in a free market guise, while attempting at the same time to preserve the Soviet system of socialism. The hope of combining liberal values with egalitarian socialist ideals turned out to be a delusion. The reform’s structural contradictions presaged its final failure, together with other factors contributing to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the socialist economic system. The reasons for this disastrous outcome were complex and multiple, and they are still being debated by historians. Nevertheless it set the stage for what would come next in the successor states of the disintegrated Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the fall of the Soviet Union, the neoliberal ideas introduced in Gorbachev’s reforms had gained currency in the former Soviet domains, and their influence proved to be far-reaching even in the post-Soviet period. Rising as independent states out of the rubble of the Soviet empire, the ex-Soviet states of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan immediately engaged in a long-term process of reforms aimed at national revival and economic resuscitation. Both states’ leaders, President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan and President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, proclaimed at the dawn of independence that their respective state would move from a Soviet past of totalitarianism toward a market economy and democracy (Karimov 1998, 1; Nazarbayev 1994, 4), tellingly reflecting a strong influence of the dominant neoliberal view that combines the terms of free market and democracy on the agenda of post-Soviet reforms. The neoliberal discourse usually describes the successor states of the former Soviet bloc as post-communism states or transition countries, meaning that they are in the process of transition from the past’s Soviet totalitarianism to a bright future of Western-style capitalism characterized by free market and democracy (Buyandelgeriyn 2008, 235–250; Fairclough 2006, 66–68).

Transition: From Socialism to Capitalism

More than two decades of reforms in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan since 1991 have profoundly changed the political-economic systems of these ex-socialist countries. Both countries have successfully established functioning new economic systems radically different from the socialist ones of the bygone Soviet era. By now the system of private ownership has been firmly institutionalized and established in both of these ex-Soviet states. The socialist system of the state monopoly of economy has been totally dismantled. The private sector has already replaced the state as the dominant force in production, exchange, and distribution of wealth in the economies of the both countries. By any measure, from either the liberal standpoint or the Marxist tradition, post-Soviet transformations in both countries have been capitalist in nature, albeit with peculiarities. Such pattern of regime changes is generally consistent across the post-Soviet space.

The theoretical perspective of neoliberalism, in its application to post-Soviet states and the former socialist countries of the Eastern Europe, gave rise to a body of literature called transitology focusing on a dual process of democratization and marketization. This reflects a general assumption of the neoliberals that post-communism transitions of the former socialist countries were destined to have an end point—the establishing of a variation of capitalism characterized by its free market economy and liberal democratic politics. Given the global hegemony of neoliberalism, such neoliberal discourse on transition, to a considerable extent, pervades scholarly thinking of transition in the post-communism context. For example, a survey of accounts of post-Soviet transitions of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, especially those in their early years of independence, would generally reflect the prevalence of such dual-process thinking that gave much attention to analyzing and reasoning the success or failure of the establishment of free market and democracy in both countries.

Neoliberal View of Economic Transition as Marketization and Its Critics

Narratives of the neoliberal discourse of marketization explaining economic transition in a post-communism context usually describe it as a set of processes that has a starting point—a defunct centrally planned socialist economy—and an end point—a supposedly vibrant free market economy (Pomfret 1995, 6). Their basic point is that by adopting a market-oriented neoliberal economic model, the post-communism economies would start to take off and would eventually be transformed into prosperous Western-style market economies, resulting in a “democratically based rise in living standards” (Sachs 1994, 25). Fairclough (2006) observes that the Western architects of the transition envisaged it as part of the global spread of capitalism based on neoliberal principles of liberalization, open markets, and free trade (67). The neoliberal economic discourse echoed the “structural adjustment program”—the Washington Consensus, which was developed in the early 1990s by the neoliberal economist-dominated World Bank and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Understanding Neoliberalism: A Comprehensive Approach to the Concept of Neoliberalism
• 3. Political Liberalization in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan: The Influence of Neoliberalism
• 4. The Influence of Neoliberalism on Economic Liberalization in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan
• 5. Neoliberal Capitalist Transitions in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan: A Cultural Perspective
• 6. Applying a Three-Dimensional Framework to Understanding Neoliberalism: Discourse Analysis of Speeches and Writings of Karimov and Nazarbayev from 1991 to 2015
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter