Foreign Policy and Aging Central Asian Autocrats
2012; George Washington University; Volume: 20; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-4603
Autores Tópico(s)Central Asia Education and Culture
ResumoIn 2011, the foreign policies of Central Asian states stopped making sense. Central Asia's strongest autocratic rulers-Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbaev and Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov-have become obsessed with winning praise from, and partnerships with, Western democracies. At the same time, Central Asia's lone democratic leader-Kyrgyzstan President Almazbek Atambaev-has displayed little desire to deepen relations with other democracies and, instead, has told the world's most powerful democracy-the United States-that it must vacate its base in Kyrgyzstan by 2014. What explains this paradox? Why are the Kazakhs and Uzbeks seeking audiences in London and Washington while newly democratic Kyrgyzstan is evicting the U.S. military?The answer to this question, I suggest, lies in the changing realities of Central Asian autocratic rule. On the surface, not much has changed in Central Asia in recent years. The same autocrats who have ruled Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan since the Soviet collapse remain in power in Astana and Tashkent. And in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan's own peculiar status quo of uprisings and leadership changes would appear to indicate that there too it is business as usual. Profound change has, though, arrived in Central Asia. Nazarbaev and Karimov are now in their early seventies, an infelicitous age for Soviet leaders. As for Kyrgyzstan, for the first time in post-Soviet Central Asian history we have seen the peaceful alternation of power to a democratically-elected president. Together these changes have yielded a new Central Asian reality where it is not the region's lone democracy, but rather Central Asia's gerontocracies, that most desire western approval and support.In this article, first, I detail the diverging foreign policy orientations of Central Asian states. Next, I develop a hypothesis for this divergence. More specifically, I suggest that growing domestic insecurity among Central Asia's aging autocracies drives Nazarbaev and Karimov to seek approval and support abroad because they can no longer ensure approval and support at home. Conversely, Kyrgyzstan's president, because he is democratically elected, has no need to pander for partners among the international community. I conclude by exploring the implications of these diverging foreign policy orientations. There is no small degree of irony: in Central Asia, Washington's goals of democracy and strategic defense appear, at least in the short run, to be at odds with one another. Central Asia is critical to supplying the U.S. military in Afghanistan and it is the region's autocracies, not its democracy that appear most willing to aid this U.S. supply mission.Timid Autocrats and a Defiant DemocratNazarbaev EnnobledNazarbaev, perhaps more than any other Central Asian leader, craves the respect of his peers abroad. In October 2011, reports emerged in the British media that he had secured a year's worth of advisory services from former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who, Nazarbaev hoped, could secure a Nobel Peace Prize nomination to commemorate the 20-year anniversary of Kazakhstan's renunciation of nuclear weapons.Although Nazarbaev's Peace Prize gambit might appear far-fetched, it is worth noting that the Kazakh leader has pursued similarly implausible schemes in the recent past and with considerable success. In December 2007, for example, the Bush administration yielded, after months of hesitation, to Kazakhstan's bid to become the first post-Soviet country to hold the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In 2010, Kazakhstan served out its chairmanship of this prestigious international organization. By early 2011, though, some of the sheen of the Kazakh chairmanship had disappeared. In April 2011, Nazarbaev called early presidential elections-elections he handily won. Revealingly, the OSCE concluded of the vote: While the election was technically well-administered, the absence of opposition candidates and of a vibrant political discourse resulted in a non-competitive environment. …
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