CENTRAL ASIA IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD: URRENT TRENDS AND PROSPECTS

Abstract

In the threshold of the 21st century, the strategic importance of the new sovereign states of Central Asia, endowed with huge oil, gas, uranium, gold and other mineral reserves, sharply increased.

The newly formed states sought to become independent from Russia and to develop political and economic contacts with other countries on a parity basis. In a short period, they established diplomatic relations with most countries of the world, became members of the United Nations and other international organizations, signed hundreds of interstate treaties and agreements, and entered into highly complex trade and economic relations with over 140 countries.

However, throughout the entire independence period interstate relations in Central Asia have remained very complicated and have developed inconsistently under the simultaneous influence of two opposite trends: integration and disintegration.

The interregional and intersectoral contradictions of what used to be a single national economic complex, earlier compensated from the Union budget, were automatically transformed into interstate contradictions. At some undemarcated and internationally unrecognized sections of the Uzbek-Kyrgyz, Uzbek-Tajik and Uzbek-Kazakh borders, disputes and conflicts flared up and are still simmering today. Ultimately, close neighbors were pulled apart by different models of economic and political reform, competition for foreign investment and leadership in the region, the incompatible regional and international ambitions of their leaders, and their sometimes-different positions with respect to the CIS and Russia.

The contradictions were generated by the very geopolitical peculiarities of Central Asia: abundant natural resources in a closed transport space with limited outlets to world markets and a relatively undeveloped network of communications, especially external communications (numerous alternative oil and gas pipelines are still at the project stage); the new states’ striving for economic independence and their strong economic and transport ties with Russia; the “artificial” nature of interstate borders; significant human resources (over 60 million people) and labor shortages, which have become particularly severe as a result of the migration of Russian-speaking people; vast water resources in mountain areas and severe water shortages; overpopulation and insufficient living space in the Fergana Valley (up to 500 persons per sq km) coupled with vast unpopulated desert areas.

These contradictions have been sharpened by serious miscalculations in economic policy, growing social discontent, mass unemployment, impoverishment of society, endless disputes between countries over water and land use, an intensifying struggle for redistribution of property, and stepped-up activities of terrorist organizations and drug dealers