Power and Change in Central Asia

Sally Cummings

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415255851
• eBook ISBN: 9781134520831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This volume offers the first systematic comparison of political change, leadership style and stability in Central Asia. The contributors, all leading international specialists on the region, offer focused case-studies of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, comparing how the regimes have further consolidated their power and resisted change.

1 Introduction

Power and change in Central Asia

Sally N. Cummings

Many predicted that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be followed by the democratization of the successor states.¹ This notion has turned out to be at best premature, at worst misguided. Nowhere is this more so than in Central Asia, where the first decade of independence has been marked by strong authoritarian presidentialism. These contributions examine how the presidents of the Central Asian republics came into office and how they have managed to stay in office in the face of enormous transitional challenges. This book is thus an exploration of comparative presidentialism in the post-Soviet Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

As is frequently asserted, these five states had not desired independence.² Writes Gregory Gleason: ‘The greatest irony of independence in Central Asia [was that it came] as had Soviet-style colonialism several decades before – it was imposed by Moscow’.³ In Central Asia, communist elites resisted Gorbachev’s democratization and liberalization reforms and independence came by default only when the Soviet centre collapsed in 1991. The absence of an anticolonial struggle in these states – with the notable exception of Tajikistan’s – denied these leaders historical legitimacy.

Authoritarian presidentialism has emerged in all five states with important geopolitical and economic differences. Kazakhstan is the largest, spanning an area eleven times the size of the United Kingdom but with a population of under 15 million; its geopolitical destiny is primarily shaped by the two neighbouring great powers, China and Russia. By contrast, its main regional competitor, Uzbekistan, has the highest population density in the region, and borders on the unstable states of Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Tajikistan has recently partially emerged from a civil war that has been ongoing between 1992 and 1997; like Kyrgyzstan it is mountainous and inaccessible. Turkmenistan is similarly isolated; in fact, it was the most isolated of all Soviet republics in the Soviet period. Its border with Iran is an important geopolitical influence. While Turkmenistan and Tajikistan have emerged the poorest of the post-Soviet economies, those of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan benefited considerably from Soviet rule. As Caspian littoral states, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan stand to profit substantially from oil revenues if transport can be found. Like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan has gas as well as a substantial cotton crop. Both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have hydroelectric power and mineral resources.

The presidents of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – Nursultan Nazarbaev, Islam Karimov and Saparmurat Niyazov, respectively – are all former first secretaries of their republics’ Communist Parties. Each one made himself president, like Gorbachev, prior to the fall of the Soviet Union and has managed to hold on to power ever since. By contrast, President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan, a physicist and dissident, had by the close of the 1980s severed his links with the republican party leadership, and thus assumed the office of the presidency without a consolidated political elite behind him. Similarly, Tajikistan’s Imomali Rahmonov did not have a ready constituency and, unlike Akaev, did not embody reform credentials. All five presidents of the region have become known for running tight ships; they wield the most authoritarian rule, along with Belarus, in the post-Soviet space.

The following outlines the aims and rationale of the book, its structure and its principal findings. This piece thus serves as both an introduction and conclusion to the book.

Aims and rationale of the book

This book is written in the same spirit of two recent works on post-Soviet leadership and with the same basic assumption: leadership matters. In Patterns in Post-Soviet Leadership, Timothy J. Colton and Robert C. Tucker explore, inter alia, various post-Soviet presidents’ individual characters and values; leadership roles and institutions; the state and cultural framework within which leaders operate; and leadership effectiveness.⁴ In Ray Taras’ edited volume Postcommunist Presidents his contributors ‘consider how the “character and values” of incumbents of the executive branch of government have affected the political system’.⁵ They both suggest a linkage between presidential power and authoritarianism.

No single definition of political leadership currently exists. Jean Blondel calls ‘specifically national political leadership . . . the power exercised by one or a few individuals to direct members of the nation towards action’.⁶ Other definitions of political leadership encompass personality, environment, behaviour and roles, and institutional structures. Indeed, the entire political (and social) system, to the extent that it affects political life, is part of the instrument that a leader has at his or her disposal. As Blondel explains, the way in which the relationships are organised between leaders and their immediate entourage is an important element in how leadership works. This is why leadership is often viewed in terms of a ‘regime’ – an institutional style characterising polities under a given ruler.

The present volume offers a comparison of post-Soviet Central Asian presidentialism. Like Colton and Tucker, we aim to look at the exercise of presidential power in terms of leadership roles, institutions, environment and effectiveness, and like Taras’ work but to a lesser degree, it explores down- stream analysis, that is, the effects of institutional choice on regime type. More specifically, this volume aims to look at how these five presidencies have built their power and managed to keep it for, in most cases, a decade, along with more general reasons for the emergence of authoritarian presidentialism in this region. By asking these questions about one geographic area with similar historical legacies, we can attempt a controlled comparison.

Is it possible to speak of one type of presidential leadership in Central Asia, or are there different types? To answer this we need to both classify and explain. Where do these regimes fit in terms of nondemocratic states, and what are the principal reasons for this type of presidentialism having emerged? Observers of Central Asia often remark on the uniformity among these states; this book sets out to both confirm and challenge these claims. The contributions here do not deny these similarities, and part of this book’s remit is to show how those common characteristics have been important. Indeed, as is demonstrated, there is a stronger case today than there was at the beginning of the 1990s for arguing that the Central Asian states are marked by a considerable degree of uniformity. In its ten-year history, post-independence political development in Central Asia has shown a relatively limited number of trajectories, processes and political systems. Nevertheless, this book is also very much about the differences in leadership displayed by the presidents in the region, and how the first decade of independence has demonstrated varying levels of willingness and ability to experiment and innovate, and of pressures to liberalize.

In its focus on presidential rule, the volume explores the role of agency in regime creation, maintenance and change. In Robert Fishman’s words, a ‘regime may be thought of as the formal and informal organisation of the centre of political power, and of its relations with the broader society. A regime determines who has access to political power, and how those who are in power deal with those who are not’.⁷ Regimes are typically less permanent than states but more permanent than governments. In reaction to the momentous global transformations scholars have shown a renewed interest in regime change. As emphasized by Herbert Kitschelt, the main theoretical division within this field is drawn between those who seek more ‘structural’ and ‘configurational’ explanations, on the one side, and those who focus on the process of change itself – the sequence of events and the strategic moves of the actors.⁸

Structure-oriented scholars usually contend that actors are constrained by their environment and face a limited number of choices. By contrast, processoriented scholars attribute considerable autonomy to leaders and hence greater opportunities to experiment and innovate. This book emphasizes process, even if individual contributors illustrate how leadership choices and strategies, in the spirit of Blondel’s definition, need to be assessed in the context of their environments.

Essentially, then, the aim of this book is to reach a sense of where power is in the Central Asian state. Power is a crucial category for political theory, yet it is a very elusive one. Is power derived from agency or structure? Should it be seen as conforming to social reality or as a capacity to act? As Steven Lukes has usefully formulated, a state might have power over but not power to.⁹ The first, represented by the pluralist and elitist traditions, emphasizes the dimension of ‘power over’ and the existence of power struggles linked to conflict of interest. The second, advanced by Talcott Parsons and Hannah Arendt, among others, stresses the collective ability, the ‘power to’, and underscores consensus. Still others argue that power should be considered an autonomous force that shapes and reshapes structures and processes.

What does it mean to exercise power in the specific context of Central Asia? Writing on post-colonial Africa, Chris Allen remarked that ‘to have power was to have the means to reproduce it; to lose power, however, was to risk never having the means to regain it’.¹⁰ The same could be said of the leaders in Central Asia. Once in office, Central Asian presidents have sought to consolidate their power and build their authority and all have viewed their office as a zero-sum game, as a winner-take-all position. Locating and unpacking power will help to classify, or typologize, the five regimes. Unpacking the source and nature of power in each state will help us explain both the similarities and differences in regime type among the five states. In addition to establishing categories and exploring causes, the book finally assesses the likely trajectories of these regimes.

Methodology and structure

This book operates on two levels. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a broad perspective for the discussion by drawing historical comparisons of post-empire politics and regime types. The remainder of the book, Chapters 4–8, is firmly grounded in empirical evidence, in which each President and his rule are analyzed in turn. There is one chapter examining each of the five presidents. All these empirical essays draw on indigenous sources and provide details about presidential regimes in their respective states.

In Chapter 2, Dominic Lieven compares the impact of empire and its aftermath in Central Asia with other regions of the world where empires have ruled. Lieven shows how the newly independent states of Central Asia have survived without the periodic crises of sovereignty that have plagued post-imperial states elsewhere, such as Africa. This more robust sovereignty stems partly from the fact that Russian and Soviet rule in Central Asia, while relatively brief in its history, did entail the transformation into a region of modern, urban, secular and industrial societies. Lieven concludes that it ‘is on the whole a fair generalization that these Soviet colonial-era notables have done less damage since 1991 than the nationalist forces which came to power, above all, in the Caucasus region.’

Indeed the single most astonishing fact about the collapse of the Soviet Union, as stressed by Lieven, is that it was not accompanied by wider regional conflict. Of course Tajikistan did have a civil war.¹¹ But overall the collapse was comparatively remarkably peaceful. Lieven does not rule out the possibility of a violent nationalist upsurge at a later stage, however. He outlines some variables: the fate of Russia and its former periphery cannot easily be divorced; Russia will have an even greater impact on those states where national unity is fragile and regional and clan loyalties are strong; and the impact of huge export earnings on political stability can be particularly destructive.

In Chapter 3, John Ishiyama assesses the authoritarian regimes now emerging in post-Soviet Central Asia and speculates on the consequences of current regime formation processes for future moves toward democratization. Through an analysis of the evolution of the presidencies of Central Asia, he sheds light on the process of institution building prior to political transition. This chapter is divided into three sections: Ishiyama first places the five Central Asian states into the literature on personalist regimes, particularly neopatrimonial authoritarian states; then he demonstrates how different types of neopatrimonial regimes are likely to lead to different types of transition; finally, he places Central Asia in this framework of neopatrimonialism.

In the first of the five country studies, Sally Cummings argues that by concentrating on power consolidation, Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, has neglected to build authority. The 1995 referendum and early 1999 elections, for example, can be seen in this light; the former served to consolidate power, the latter to build authority (even if these elections were eventually not free or fair). Part of the process of authority building is to target the right constituency. For the moment, that constituency is the elite rather than society. Furthermore, Nazarbaev has been increasingly unable to unite the political and economic elite with the central and regional political elite. The upshot is a hybrid, transitional regime of part-authoritarianism.

In Chapter 5, Eugene Huskey argues that Askar Akaev has remained in power in Kyrgyzstan through a mix of deferential political culture and ‘an economy of authoritarianism’. This is no mean feat: not only was Akaev the only post-Soviet leader to have survived a reformist agenda which brought with it profound and painful political and economic change, he did so from coming outside pre-existing Soviet institutions. As also highlighted elsewhere by Adrian Karatnycky, the other anti-Communist reformers of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Tajikistan did not survive, falling either in coups (Azerbaijan and Georgia), forced resignations (Armenia) or civil war (Tajikistan).¹² Furthermore, Akaev took office at a moment of ethnic crisis, and continues to lead in the context of an ethnically divided society. Huskey argues that the deferential political culture gave the president the space to enact radical economic reforms directed from above without a popular backlash.

Huskey emphasizes also the importance of agency, and how Akaev has been instrumental in marketing his poor, isolated country aggressively to the world as a place to do business. Although Akaev has clearly been the most progressive of the Central Asian presidents, in the second half of the 1990s he employed a minimalist authoritarianism in response to a number of factors: pressures from neighbouring states; social strains brought on by economic chaos and ethnic tensions; and challenges to his own authority and honour. Huskey claims that Akaev’s more authoritarian style does not represent a turnaround from his progressive intentions as yet; nevertheless, ‘[s]hould economic performance continue to worsen, or economic resentment along ethnic lines deepen, Akaev will be tempted to apply even larger doses of authoritarianism. Such is the logic of states detached from the societies over which they rule.’

In Chapter 6, Muriel Atkin characterizes Imomali Rahmonov’s rule as one of ‘ineffective authoritarianism’. Presidential rule in post-Soviet Tajikistan is unlike that in any other Central Asian state; Rahmonov enjoys neither authority nor power. Like Akaev, Rahmonov hails from outside the structures of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), but he was chosen not for his standing but for his very insignificance. Rahmonov rules a war-torn society from within a coalition – a divided elite. Writes Atkin: ‘At times, contemporary Tajikistani politics appears to be the war of all against all’. Far from being master of the land, Rahmonov depends heavily on Russian backing to remain in power.

In Chapter 7, Sally Cummings and Michael Ochs show the presidency of Turkmenistan to be an inglorious semi-sultanism. The term sultanism is primarily illustrative because it conveys the personalism, excesses and arbitrariness that have characterized presidential rule in the first ten years of Turkmenistan’s independence. But the regime differs enough from traditional sultanistic regimes for the comparison to shed much light on the processes of regime genesis and maintenance. The differences stem primarily from the particular imprint Saparmurat Niyazov has made on his political system. Of the Central Asian presidents, he has had the most enduring and far-reaching effect on state, regime and population. The chapter demonstrates how a peculiar confluence of factors has enabled personality to play this important role in Turkmenistan.

Finally, in Chapter 8, Roger Kangas discusses Islam Karimov’s rule in Uzbekistan in terms of ‘benign authoritarianism’. Karimov has built his authority and consolidated his power, and as a consequence he enjoys great popularity. He has gained authority through a mix of charismatic, traditional and legal–rational forms: he has portrayed himself as a strong leader; he has called on traditional leaders, particularly Amir Timur, and clan networks, to bolster his legitimacy; he has appealed to a complex mix of Islamic, secular and national identities; and he has ‘legally’ confirmed his rule by using elections and referenda.

These legal forms, however, have been fraudulent – Karimov has used façade democracy. He has been helped here, Kangas writes, by a subservient political culture inherited from the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras. But, to turn around George Breslauer’s phrase as Huskey does, consolidating power is not the same as building authority. Power consolidation requires the development of effective institutions of rule and the forming of a loyal and competent leadership team. Kangas demonstrates that Uzbekistan’s institutions are consolidated, but not necessarily effective. Karimov has achieved this situation through the wide use of his formal and appointive powers, which have ensured a loyal and centralized elite...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Empire’s aftermath
• 3 Neopatrimonialism and the prospects for democratization in the Central Asian republics
• 4 Kazakhstan
• 5 An economy of authoritarianism?
• 6 Tajikistan
• 7 Turkmenistan
• 8 Uzbekistan