my latest essay

[winterbadger]

What has been the impact of independence on the stability of the states of Central Asia? Some states, such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, have changed very little, at least in political terms; they have moved from governments by a political elite paying lip service to Communist ideology while operating largely in an oligarchic manner to a political elite paying lip service to nationalist ideology while operating in an autocratic manner. In both countries, the Communist Party was not so much dissolved as transmuted into a nationalist party supporting the ruler personally (Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan and first Niyazov then Berdimuhammedow in Turkmenistan). Independence had brought little political change to these countries, but they have remained relatively stable. This is most remarkable, perhaps in Kazakhstan, which has the distinction of being the only Central Asian nation where the speakers of the notionally national ethnic language are not a majority, and where potential exists for considerable tension between the ethnic nationals and the substantial Russian minority.

Following much the same path, Uzbekistan under the guidance of Karimov has suffered greater instability as result of the growth of opposition to the party of autocracy. Roy (in Chapter 7) proclaims the regime to be in control and its reign stable, but in the years since the publication of ‘The New Central Asia’, continued and heavy-handed repression by the government has resulted in the growth of a violent resistance, a terrorist bombing campaign, and an incident in 2005 when government forces killed several hundred demonstrators. While Karimov continues to control Uzbekistan, but the country is far from stable, and Western criticism of the use of force has driven Karimov to move closer to Russia and China, engage in threats and hostility toward his Central Asian neighbors, and break nascent ties with the US and some European countries.

Kyrgyzstan looked set to follow a similar pattern to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; but in the eleven years since Roy’s publication, the rise of a serious opposition party and public outrage at government attempts to rig election results have seen the would-be autocrat Askar Akayev driven from power and replaced by an elected government.

Tajikstan has been, as Roy points out in Chapter 7, the greatest exception to the model of peaceful transition from pro-Soviet rule by local elite to nationalist-autocratic rule by a local elite. A bitter civil war raged in Tajikstan from 1992 to 1997, in which regional factions, each with different ties to the former Soviet power structure, fought for control of the country. Uzbekistan (with a considerable Tajik population of its own, including the two great historical Tajik cities of Bukhara and Samarkhand), took particular interest in events next door, and Russia likewise sought to influence the outcome. Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands were killed, and tremendous damage was done to the country.

Economically, independence has seen little change in agricultural organization; as discussed by Roy in Chapter 9, the control by traditional solidarity groups that had (somewhat) been adapted by or (mostly) adopted the language of the Soviet kolkhoz system has changed little with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and Soviet terminology. With Russia always unwilling to engage in large-scale manufacturing or heavy industry, that sector had little to privatize. What has changed dramatically is the economic relationship between Russia and its former republics in Central Asia; Roy describes in Chapter 10 how the formerly close economic relationship between the region and the Russian core has been disrupted by a combination of Russian intransigence and a Central Asian unwillingness to continue the colonialist exchange of raw materials at low prices for finished goods at high ones. Especially in the case of those nations with large oil and/or gas reserves, independence has proven highly beneficial and has lead to considerable economic stability.

Comments

[winterbadger]

Lebanon's instability results in large part from its creation. France, in relinquishing its mandate over part of the former Ottoman Empire, wanted to leave behind a friendly enclave that would protect people it felt a religious and cultural tie to. So they carved Lebanon out of the province that had contained Syria and locked into its constitution that the principal roles in government would be divided on a sectarian bases established on the grounds of the sectarian populations as they were then (nearly a century ago).

That said, and taking your points that all of those countries (Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq) have faced severe external challenges (Lebanon has suffered, politically, much more from Syria than it has from Israel), my meaning was that for the citizen of an Arab state, these are the examples of Arab democracies to compare with Arab autocracies, Yes, under autocracy you may suffer political repression, but you have stability, and stability is not just a dictator's excuse for maintaining power. Would most Iraqis trade today's Iraq for the Iraq of, say, the 1980s, if they had the choice? I think many of them would be more than happy to.

I'm not saying I favour dictatorship. The descriptions of torture and confinement that I've heard in this book visited by Arab Muslim rulers on their subjects who dared to speak out have made me in some cases physically ill, and the Iranian revolutionary government has been little better. But I can see some in the Middle East (and, as I've said in my class, some in Central Asia, especially Uzbekistan and Tajikstan) thinking that dictatorship is bad, but it has its benefits nonetheless.

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

I see what you mean. And yes I'd forgotten how artificial those borders are. Met an Iraqi guy once, he was running a shop in Edinburgh back in the 80s, a few years before Saddam forced such men to return to Iraq on pain of death - anyway, he told us how the countries in that area were "really" one country, with artificial divisions. (Another area blighted by deliberately inappropriate national borders.)

Well done (I think), I don't think I'd want to read such books :-(

[winterbadger]

Olivier Roy is, IMO, needlessly dense in a manner typical of political scientists. But he does make some interesting points about how (a) the Soviets sort of created ethnicities in Central Asia out of differences that in most cases were much smaller than the "nations" they manufactured would suggest and (b) the Soviet system (which was of course not really communist at all, but a bureaucratic autocracy) ended up being implemented in CA by reassigning roles and titles to the pre-existing social structure (with one serious exception--the Soviets wiped out a lot of cultural nomadism and vastly expanded agriculture).