Russia's Relations with Kazakhstan

Rethinking Ex-Soviet Transitions in the Emerging World System

Yelena Nikolayevna Zabortseva

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317361961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent political developments in post-Soviet countries have raised novel issues regarding the stability of the post-Cold War world order. A new direction in policy has been exemplified by the recent bolstering of a number of post-Soviet political and economic institutions - such as CSTO, SCO and the Eurasian Economic Union - in which the role of Kazakhstan is considerable. In addition to its unique geopolitical location, Kazakhstan's importance in regional integration structures and international relations more broadly is reinforced by its rich oil and uranium deposits.

This book centres on an exploration of the changing relations between Russia and Kazakhstan and their impact on post-Soviet interactions with the rest of the world. The role of specific factors in the formation of the post-Soviet regional system will be explored in historical perspective. The multifaceted relations between Kazakhstan and Russia from 1991 to the contemporary period will be analysed in terms of relations in several spheres: political, military and security, Kazakhstan's nuclear withdrawal, ethnicity and national identity, economic, foreign policies, regionalism and international trends and the impact of historic trends.

An important analysis of Kazakhstan, the second largest country in the post-Soviet world, this book is of interest to researchers of International Relations, Post-Soviet Studies and Central Asia Studies.

1 Introduction An era of ‘catastrophe' or a ‘star century’?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315668727-1

I believe that the XXI century would become a star century for Kazakh nation.

(Nazarbayev) ¹

The collapse of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

(Putin 2005)

Introduction

The end of the Cold War did not simplify the system of international relations, but rather complicated it and led to the appearance of new challenges and controversies. ² The competing tendencies towards geopolitical and geoeconomic cooperation versus confrontation between the West, Russia, China, the Islamic world and other actors with interests in post-Soviet Eurasia are among the most challenging issues in contemporary international relations. Different trajectories of development, along with uncertainty about current and future strategic alliances, put stability and security at stake in the post-Soviet region and the world in general. A huge ideological vacuum still exists as the post-Soviet countries remain uncertain about different strategies related to their national and foreign policies. These strategies include several, often contradictory, options: attempts to re-enforce old historical and religious identities as well as efforts to keep Soviet-based ties and efforts directed towards establishing new, stronger relations with neighbouring countries and leading world powers.

There has been a significant shift in the approach to the issue of security over the last decade (Finel 1998). With the end of the Cold War, many people have criticized the traditional, narrow definition of security and focused on issues other than military affairs, such as population growth, environmental degradation, ethnic conflict, crime, drugs and migration. In an increasingly globalized world, these threats undeniably extend beyond the limits of traditional security issues as formulated by states. Most crucially, they are of direct and crucial importance to the post-Soviet states.

The aim of this book is to provide insights into the different trends in bilateral relations between Russia and Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is often characterized as a potential territory for post-Ukrainian confrontation involving Russia, ³ primarily due to the huge Russian diaspora in Kazakhstan and existing tensions over the Republic’s northern territory (Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2012: 81). In addition, this contemporary relation also reflects the involvement of multiple national interests because the oil assets in Kazakhstan directly involve US and Chinese capital, the promulgation and entrenchment of various trade deals, and security issues arising from the proximity of Kazakhstan to Afghanistan.

Only nine years ago, Central Asia was ‘… largely ignored as a scholarly backwater of the defunct communist world system’ (Luong 2002, cited in Pacek 2003: 65), but it has now been characterized as one of the epicentres of contemporary geoeconomic and geopolitical controversies (Feiertag 2009). Several factors stipulate an increasing role for Central Asia in world affairs: the region’s rich energy resources in the Caspian region; its geopolitical location with respect to Russia, China, India and Iran; and the differing interests of the USA, Russia, the EU and the Islamic world in the region (IIAS 2002). As now often recognized, ‘[N]ot only is the region enmeshed in America’s global war on terror, it sits between a newly aggressive Russia and resource-hungry China and alongside one of the volatile areas in the world’ (Cooley 2012). The role of Kazakhstan – the ninth largest country in the world and the second largest country in the post-Soviet world – cannot be overestimated in Central Asian developments. Although the economic and military role of Russia in contemporary global affairs does not require a specific introduction, it is not common knowledge that oil-rich Kazakhstan is also one of the world’s leading uranium producers, which, coupled with its important geopolitical location, intensifies its strategic importance. In addition, questions have been raised about how democratic the development of the country has been, as well as discussions on the progress of its cooperation with leading European and international human rights organizations (Shkolnikov 2011). Kazakhstan–Russian relations are particularly important as a result of the international political and economic controversies involving these countries.

In 2009, Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been in power since the Soviet era, stated that: However, in 2015, Nazarbayev spoke of leaving the Eurasian Economic Union should Eurasian integration ‘threaten independence’, regardless of his own long-held and widely pronounced position in support of Eurasian integration. The contemporary Ukrainian factor has greatly affected relations between Kazakhstan and Russia in terms of economic, social and political interests.

During all of these years, whatever different politicians would say, whatever difficulties were there in our relations, Kazakhstan never and nowhere has betrayed Russia, never expressed any negative attitude towards it. In world politics, and in the CIS, Kazakhstan has always supported Russia as a true ally. Russian and Kazakhstan’s economies are the most integrated ones in the world […]. It is impossible to forget that previously our nations have been living together. I believe that in the future Russia would also be forming its strategy based on the conditions that Kazakhstan would remain its closest neighbour and ally.

(Nazarbayev 2009a, b: 339)

To develop any prognosis on the future of the relations between the major world powers in the region and how they influence the changing system of international relations, it is important to evaluate past results of bilateral relations and to determine the essence of transformations within these relationships. This is especially important as the development of relations between Russia and the largest Central Asian country – Kazakhstan – have had a considerable impact, not only on regional developments, but also on the relations between the other major powers involved, such as the USA, the EU and China. Alexandrov (1999), in his book about Kazakhstan–Russia relations between 1991 and 1997, referred to the bilateral relations between Kazakhstan and Russia as an ‘uneasy alliance’. In this book, I examine how relations between Russia and Kazakhstan have developed following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 to the present day. The experience of Kazakhstan–Russia relations could be considered as a unique case in terms of comparative politics because these two countries have gone through unprecedented changes in terms of their foreign and national public policies.

Contemporary public policy trends in Kazakhstan already echo the concerns of international experts, particularly as they relate to the Republic’s investment climate. Kazakhstan completely privatized its energy sector by selling the majority of shares in formerly state-owned oil and gas enterprises to foreign investors (Luong and Weinthal 2001: 369). Kazakhstan’s strategy is particularly puzzling because the conventional wisdom is that new states should jealously guard their new-found sovereignty. If oil and gas reserves are indeed its only real potential for economic growth, we would expect Kazakhstan to retain full state ownership and to be more wary of the international community’s direct involvement in its energy sector.

More recently, the international literature has featured renewed efforts to expand our understanding of the region’s complex political and economic landscape – for example, see as Cooley (2012) and Bedeski and Swanstrom (2012). There is also an increased contention in common that any true commentary on Central Asia must take into account not only the broad geopolitical/geoeconomic forces affecting the region, but also domestic actors, conditions and institutions (Laruelle and Peyrouse 2013).

The key questions addressed in this book are the following: While investigating how the different spheres of the relationship between Russia and Kazakhstan are interrelated, several more specific issues will be also considered. Among these questions are the following: In this introduction, I initially refer to the importance of contemporary regional developments in Eurasia to global geopolitics and geoeconomics, including the impact of the Ukrainian factor on relations between the two main members of the newly established Eurasian Union: Russia and Kazakhstan. This general outline of the role of the region in international relations is followed by an outline of two issues of more specific consequence to research on Kazakhstan– Russia relations and their potential impact on trends in the international arena. The first of these issues is the inclinations towards regionalism in security and the involvement of several international actors therein. The second issue is associated with the domestic policies of Kazakhstan – specifically those nation-building processes in the Republic that involve relations between the Kazakh population and, notably, the Russian-speaking population. I will then introduce my approach to researching the relations between Russia and Kazakhstan that informed this book, while also establishing the main sources of literature and data used to conduct my analysis.

• the role of historical tendencies of bilateral relations in the development of contemporary trends;
• the importance of oil ⁴ and gas in the geopolitical structure of the region and the impact of natural resources on the Kazakhstan–Russia relationship;
• the possibility of a more considerable presence of Russian foreign direct investments (FDIs) in Kazakhstan’s economy through offshore investments;
• Kazakhstan’s nation-building and its impact on Kazakhstan–Russia bilateral relations; ⁵ and
• the impact of regional integration processes on Kazakhstan–Russia bilateral relations and, in turn, the role these countries play in such processes.

1. How has the Kazakhstan–Russia relationship changed since 1991?
2. What were the specific stages in Kazakhstan–Russia relations?
3. What factors influenced the bilateral relations in general and the different stages of the relationship?

The importance and role of regional developments in international affairs

The Eurasian region has shaped an important strategic agenda within the international landscape in several spheres, most notably in economics (energy), geopolitics and security (Zabortseva 2012: 168–169). In fact, on the eve of political transformations in the CIS, two world-known scholars referred to Eurasia as a potentially dangerous geopolitical and ethnically unstable region (Brzezinski 1998: 265–269; Huntington 1993). Indeed, Eurasia is now enduring a new stage of re-division – echoing the time when Mackinder coined his concept of a pivotal regional Heartland. ⁶ Apart from the huge land area of Eurasia, it contains one-third of the world’s oil production, 40 per cent of the world’s oil reserves and 53 per cent of the world’s natural gas deposits. From 1990 to 2006, 19 of the 57 regional conflicts in the world took place in this region as a result of the division of previously common resources (Matsuzato 2010: 43).

From the perspective of policy-making officials from the USA, for example, the geostrategic dimensions of the Caspian region are not restricted to energy security issues alone; they have larger implications for the grand strategy of the USA in the twenty-first century (Iseri 2009: 26–46). After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, according to the opinion of some scholars, Central Asia became the area where the reconfiguration of international politics and Russia– USA relations was increasingly tethered. ⁷ Jan Kalicki, who served as Ombudsman for Energy and Commercial Cooperation with the New Independent States during the Clinton Administration and acted as Counsellor to the US Department of Commerce, realized that ‘… [t]he Caspian basin holds enormous oil and gas deposits that could play a critical role in the world’s economic future’. In turn, he expressed concern that ‘… getting them out of the ground and onto the market requires overcoming formidable political and geographic problems’ (Kalicki 2001). This emphasis on the Caspian basin is explained by the discovery of oil in the Kashagan field, which is considered to be the largest oil discovery of the last 35 years. ⁸ Moreover, this field is expected to be the largest in the world outside the Middle East, with estimated total reserves as high as 50 bbl/day oil (15–20 recoverable) (United States Energy Information Administration 2005, 2008a; McCutcheon and Osborn 2001).

Different trajectories of development and uncertainty about current and future strategic alliances put stability and security in the post-Soviet world at stake. A yawning ideological gulf persists, as post-Soviet countries remain uncertain about the differing strategies to be employed in the pursuit of national and foreign objectives. This vacuum complicates relations between the post-Soviet countries and the rest of the world. In addition, starting from the year 2000, there has been a general increase in controversies between the USA and Russia, with Central Asia playing a considerable role in these disputes. ⁹ It is widely believed that the Soviet Union was a superpower during the Cold War period of confrontation largely because of its ability to generate enormous military power (Miller and Trenin 2004: 2). Russia’s military policy and power still remains significant in the contemporary world ( Russia’s Military Posture 2009), leading some analysts in the West to become increasingly concerned with Russia’s political and military ‘resurgence’. Prior to the outbreak of renewed hostilities between Russia and Ukraine, the global literature tended to link a number of controversies between Russia and the West to the specific policies of Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush, stating that several of the political/military decisions taken were not always justified by the national priorities of each country. ¹⁰ Other, mostly Russian, critics considered that Putin’s policy was not sufficiently assertive (APN 2008). This criticism was based on the belief that the general logic of the Kremlin was related to the financial/business interests held by the top ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: an era of ‘catastrophe’ or a ‘star century’?
• 2 Rethinking the stages of Russia–Kazakhstan relations (1991–2015)
• 3 Historical background of Russia–Kazakhstan bilateral relations
• 4 Stage 1 (1991–1994): Soviet ‘Eurasia’ divided: strategic military arsenal and the ‘fifth column’?
• 5 Stage 2 (1995–1999): economic interests and state-building
• 6 Stage 3 (2000–2004): increased security concerns and the thaw in bilateral relations
• 7 Stage 4 (2005–2012): intensification of bilateral cooperation
• 8 Stage 5 (2013–2015): Vostok-delo tonkoe [East is a delicate matter] – the impact of Ukraine on Kazakhstan–Russia bilateral relations
• 9 Conclusions
• Appendix: main events in Russia–Kazakhstan relations from 1991 to 2008
• Bibliography
• Index