CENTRAL ASIA’S POWER DILEMMAS
Abstract
It turned out to be much harder to create new power structures in Central Asia than else-where in the post-socialist world: no matter how hard it was for the Central European countries to acquire new political institutions, their advance toward the Western democratic model was much smoother. In the European part of the post-Soviet geopolitical expanse, Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova experienced fewer problems than the Central Asian region (CAR for short), though they too had their share of contradictory and, in many respects, unpredictable attempts at reforming their state machines. In Central Asia, this is due to the poly-civilizational nature of public life that could not but affect the local peoples’ political culture and the political elites’ approaches to the task of the fundamental political reconstruction in their countries.
Those responsible for such reconstruction took the Western democratic values as their starting point, but this civilizational orientation proved relative, not absolute: in most of the local countries these values are not rejected—they are merely imitated. The local peoples find it hard to embrace the values as part of their national political mentality: they are interpreted through the seemingly more European (than the traditional local culture) elements of the Soviet way of life of long standing. The Soviet educational system might have helped, but its impact on “Europeanization” was greatly undermined by the predominance of the rural population, which, for obvious reasons, was less exposed to European culture than the urban dwellers. Since the early 1990s, the intelligentsia more widely exposed to technological and economic achievements in other countries has been affecting Westernization of the local perception of the world to a certain extent.1
The Soviet past created very specific conditions for today’s political developments in the region. A keen observer will conclude that in many respects the Soviet political system was very close to the local traditional culture. I have in mind state paternalism, the authority of elders (the republican and local Communist functionaries of Soviet times) used for political purposes, purely formal elections, the obvious gap be-tween the form and real nature of the power structures, etc. Until the mid-1970s, it was the “Soviet” traits that dominated these elements of political culture, which consistently, but not efficiently enough, squeezed out the traditional approaches to society and the relations inside it, which could be described as nationalistic and contradicting the “friendship of peoples” ideology. During the stagnation of Brezhnev’s era,
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References
It was P. Willis who detected this phenomenon as applied to the Soviet technical intelligentsia back in the 1960s (see: P. Willis, Political Economy of Commu-nism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.,1962, p. 329).
See: N. Amrekulov, “Zhuzes and Kazakhstan’s Social and Political Development,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 3, 2000, p. 105.
See: S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, New York, 1996, p. 71.
See: Ibid., p. 174.
See: Internationale Politik, No. 10, 2001, p. 66.
See: M.B. Olcott, Vtoroy shans Tsentral’noy Azii, Moscow Carnegie Center, Moscow, Washington, 2005 (English edition: Central Asia’s Second Chance, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC,2005), p. 166.
“In Kyrgyzstan, it was democratization that determined the social and economic developments in the country,” said former president Akaev about the causes of the Tulip Revolution in his country. We may agree with this on the whole (Moskovskiy komsomolets, 27 July, 2005).
R.N. Zhanguzhin, Novye nezavisimye gosudarstva Tsentral’noi Azii v sisteme sovremennykh mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniy, Institut mirovoi ekonomiki i mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniy, Kiev, 2005, pp. 321-322.
See: F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, The Free Press, New York, 1992.
See: M.B. Olcott, op. cit., p. 181.
See: E. Bay, “Byvshiy ziat Islama Karimova mozhet possorit SShA i Uzbekistan,” Izvestia, 24 December, 2003.
See: “Padishakh XXI veka,” Korrespondent, No. 49, 2005, p. 61.
Besides the already quoted books by R. Zhanguzhin and M. Olcott, there are definitive works by the same authors:
Olcott, Kazakhstan: neproydenny put, Gendalf Publishers, Moscow, 2003 and R. Zhanguzhin, Kazakhstan postsovetskiy,IMEMO Press, Kiev, 2004 (see also: P. Luong, Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia,Cambridge University Press, 2002, and articles by V. Bushkov, E. Friedman and M. Walton, Ch. Chotaev and others in the Central Asia and the Caucasus journal, Central Eurasian Studies Review, etc.).
See: E. Freedman, M. Walton, “Independent News Web Sites’ Coverage of Religion in Central Asia,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 1 (37), 2006, p. 103.
See: S. Huntington, op. cit., p. 175.
See: Uzbekistan: desiat let po puti formirovania rynochnoi ekonomiki, Uzbekiston Publishers, Tashkent, 2001,pp. 24, 339.
R. Zhanguzhin offers a detailed analysis of the rivaling forces in his Novye nezavisimye gosudarstva Tsentral’noy Azii v sisteme sovremennykh mezhdunarodnykh otnosheniy, quoted above.
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