TAJIKISTAN AND REGIONAL INTEGRATION IN CENTRAL ASIA

Abstract

The idea of an independent integrated Central Asian expanse was born when perestroika in the Soviet Union was on its last legs. There was the strong feeling that the crisis of Soviet statehood gave rise to numerous and multiplying challenges that needed to be opposed by all means. For the first time in their Soviet history the local republics were confronted with a very real need to act on their own to cope with the problems created by the Union center’s loss of ideological, political, and administrative competence.

In the past, the Central Asian republics developed under Moscow’s supervision; the center-initiated perestroika reforms led to a breakdown in economic ties between the region and Moscow. The Central Asian republics found themselves in a quandary; they gradually became convinced that they had reached the point of no return. Under these conditions, the local political elites tried to compensate for the lost economic ties with the center by establishing contacts among themselves. It was tacitly accepted that they would stay within the Soviet Union, while the Union itself would transform (without dropping its Soviet nature) from a unitary into a genuinely federal state (which meant it would acquire the form it should have had from the very beginning). As distinct from the Baltic and some other republics, neither the political community, nor the ruling circles, nor society in the Central Asian republics as a whole wanted any other arrangement prior to August 1991, which brought new political forces to power in Russia. The frantic efforts of the Central Asian republics at the late stage of perestroika to organize regional integration fell through.

The Soviet Union collapsed when the Soviet government was liquidated; the Central Asian republics, one after another, declared themselves independent states. This was done in a hurry under the pressure of fear that the new rulers in Moscow would try to restore pre-Soviet, albeit modernized, order across the still Soviet expanse. After beginning to fill their theoretical independence with real content in 1990 by declaring their national sovereignties within the U.S.S.R., they found this prospect distasteful.

Together with the Soviet Union’s disintegration, the region fell apart into smaller units—the newly independent states—causing even worse hardships for the man in the street than the last period of perestroika. The disappearance of the unified state came as a shock—political, social, economic, humanitarian and, not least of all, psychological. No wonder a fairly large share of the local population still looks at restoring a more or less integrated regional expanse as one of the remedies.

At the turn of the 21st century, the development of new realities in Central Asia received a new impetus. In the wake of 9/11, the United States and its Western allies increased and confirmed their political, financial, economic, military, and information presence in the region in the course of the anti-Taliban military operation. This ended Russia’s nearly 150-year-long monopoly in the region, urged China, Iran, and other countries to step in, and intensified post-Soviet rivalry among the world powers. The flow of drugs that crosses the region amazed no one: the war against the Taliban sent up drug production in Afghanistan. The repeated attempts to involve the region in globalist projects of all sorts and hues are another everyday reality 

 This serves the background for a new dimension of the old idea of an integrated Central Asian expanse. Some forces regard it as a sine qua non for protecting the region against the negative results of the processes unfolding as a direct outcome of the circumstances and events mentioned above. Others, separated from Central Asia by thousands of kilometers, look at integration as a means of protecting their regions and states against the negative developments in the region.