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FACED with an exponentially growing Chinese presence and the continuation of strong Russian influence, the European Union is seeking to find its place in Central Asia. Beyond grand discourses about the partnership between the European Union and the Central Asian states, the mutual relations have until recently remained rather limited: hindered by the absence of a common long-term Strategy, they have faltered on Brussels’ inability to reconcile political and economic objectives and the failure of numerous programmes, leaving the image of a bureaucratic institution which is complex, costly and scarcely effective. However, since 2007, the EU has sought to speak in a more affirmative voice in Central Asia: the deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan, the upheavals in the Middle East, tensions over energy supplies with Russia, China’s rise to power and the scathing critiques of the Central Asian capitals toward Washington, all these elements have prepared the ground for the EU to play its hand in the region, especially as the Central Asian regimes have often called on Europe to make its intentions more clearly known. In addition, the EU has started to exert its economic influence: it is one of the main trading partners of the five states and today intends to work toward transforming the bilateral economic relations of its member states into a global dynamic with a broader impact on Central Asian societies.
The Political and Social Complexity of the Central Asian Region
The political trajectories of the five states have many features in common. They are all going through a deterioration in their political situations where opposition parties are either placed in very difficult situations (this is the case for Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan) or are unable to exist (Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan). The media has also had limits placed on its freedom of expression, to say nothing of the human rights situation. Central Asian heads of state have succeeded in securing power inside their own families. They have personally misappropriated a part of the oil and gas manna and demand high rent from foreign investors desirous of establishing themselves in the country, whatever their field of activity. Since 2001 they have also developed a so-called “enlightened” secular authority by putting forward their role as a bastion to Islamism. Since the events of September 11th 2001 and the “war on terror”, the international circumstances have made it possible for the ruling elites to justify greater authoritarianism in the name of secularism, especially in Uzbekistan. They have encouraged not only the international community but also the population, which is rather fearful of the eventuality of civil war or the coming to power of religious extremists, to turn a blind eye to the regime’s abuses of power.
The region is also caught in the middle of drug trafficking networks. Until the end of the 1990s, Central Asia’s role in global drug trafficking was that of a place of transit. This situation has slowly altered and today the five states are starting to become sites of production, transformation and consumption. The “Afghan cancer” is corrupting the whole of the region: in 2007, production in Afghanistan attained a new record at more than 7,500 tonnes of opium, which after transformation equals some 700 tonnes of heroin. In all of Central Asia, the shadow economy, essentially drug trafficking, reaps more revenue than the official economy. It finances two sorts of milieu: established leaders and clandestine Islamist circles. Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and even more so Tajikistan are in turn becoming “narco-states”: a number of state representatives, at each administrative level, from the directors of kolkhozes to the regional authorities and the highest-ranking state officials (i.e. the presidential families), are directly involved in the drug trade, which has corrupted the entire state functioning, in particular customs officers and the police corps. This trade has also enabled Islamist groups to gather considerable financial means, permitting them to function underground.
This situation is part of a larger context that affects all the states of the region, with the exception of Kazakhstan, namely the pauperization of the urban and rural populations. The Central Asian economies can be classified as rent economies: the region’s development is subject to the ups and downs of world prices of oil, gas, metals and cotton. What has eventuated in Central Asia is no different from the situation in other rent economies: an inability to distribute the manna; a widening of social inequalities and weak administrative structures; an absence of real legal constraints, as well as of institutional mechanisms to ensure that economic decisions are made in the public interest. Kazakhstan is the only state to have any real economic dynamism, which comes from its oil production. In the other states, the arrival of the market economy above all led to the impoverishment of a still mostly rural population. According to United Nations figures, approximately 70 percent of Tajikistan’s population lives below the poverty line on less than a dollar per day. In Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan this figure drops to 50 percent, but numerous zones remain on the verge of economic strangulation. In Tajikistan, entire regions of people suffer malnutrition and even near-famine.(1)
The 2008 global financial crisis has dramatically weakened these already fragile economies and intensified general social discontent: the large numbers of Central Asian migrants (nearly three million Tajiks, Kyrgyz and Uzbeks) that go to work in Russia and Kazakhstan each year, mostly on construction worksites, returned to their countries of origin this year without the expected money. Though the risks of civil war, which were real after the disappearance of the USSR, have faded and though Tajikistan seems to have found some stability, the political and economic achievements of the region remain far from outstanding. With the exception of Kazakhstan, the Central Asian states have been sliding steadily into a global social crisis and the political stability ought not to be regarded as a certainty.
In this context, China, which has yet to bring the unstable province of Xinjiang under control, wishes to leave the strategic management of Central Asia to Moscow and to focus its efforts at the commercial level. Perceived as the number one enemy at the time of independence, China is gradually winning sympathizers among the Central Asian political elites. While some key figures are on record as expressing their unilateral critiques of the Chinese presence, others do not conceal their sympathy, and even admiration, for Beijing’s dynamism. However, the majority of Central Asians tend to advance both pro- and anti-Chinese arguments. A feeling of mistrust about Beijing’s “hidden” objectives prevails: despite its currently positive effects, there is a suspicion that in the long term, China’s presence will cause huge problems for Central Asian nations. The authoritarian shift of the current Central Asian regimes in the 2000s earned them much criticism from the West and led them to strengthen ties with the two neighbouring powers, Russia and China. The United States’ influence in the region has continued to wane during recent years. Under pressure from Moscow, Bishkek came, for example, to demand the closure of the last American base in the region in February 2009. The European Union’s strengthened presence since 2006-2007 has not been enough to provide western countries with a decisive influence compared to that of Moscow and Beijing.
[ End of sample | Please purchase the magazine for full articles ]
1. Central Asia Human Development, United Nations Development Programme, 2005.
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Sébastien Peyrouse holds a Ph.D. at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Cultures in Paris. He was a doctoral and postdoctoral Fellow at the French Institute for Central Asia Studies in Tashkent (1998-2000 and 2002-2005). He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Central Asia and Caucasus Institute. His main areas of expertise are political systems in Central Asia, Islam and religious minorities, and Central Asia’s geopolitical positioning in relation to the EU, China, Russia and South Asia. He is the author and co-author of five books in French, Christians between Atheism and Islam: a Regard on Religion in Soviet and Post-Soviet Central Asia (2003); Turkmenistan. A Destiny at the Crossroads of Empires (2007); with Marlene Laruelle, Russians in Kazakhstan. National Identities and New States in the Post-Soviet Space (2004), and Central Asia, the Drift Towards Authoritarianism (2006); and with Pierre Chuvin and René Letolle, History of Contemporary Central Asia (2008). He is the editor of two volumes in French, Managing Independence and the Soviet Legacy in Central Asia (2004) and Islam and Politics in the former Soviet Union (2005). |
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| Issue 7.2 |
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Priceless Friendship
—Matteo Ricci’s Legacy
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