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,