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

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

Thanks, interesting. (No, really!) I can never remember offhand which -stan is which other than Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.

Am I being too imaginative in reading between the lines of the question and noting that the US seems to have for decades and decades valued stability far more than (say) democracy or civil content? Which is great for US corporate interests in the short to medium term but seems to tend to act against US interests in the longer term as it forces the US again and again to support dictators against their populations?
I haven't read books on this stuff, just newspapers down the years, so I'm willing to be corrected :-)

[winterbadger]

Tajikstan is easy (for me) because it's the one that sits atop the NE corner of Afghanistan, which is where all the Tajiks are from in Afghanistan (like the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, one of the few decent-sounding guys among the warlords).

Uzbekistan is the one to the west of that, as it has the Tajik cities gerrymandered into it).

Which leaves Kyrgyzstan as the other country that shares part of the Fergana Valley (which also runs through Tajik and Uzbek territory--because the Soviets figured that the best way to keep subject nationalities at each other's throats was to split the most fertile land in the region between them!)

The US has indeed devoted much of its foreign policy over the centuries to promoting stability, as do pretty much all nations. It does this in part by trying to help nations find peaceful, democratic ways to solve their internal disputes and negotiated, diplomatic means to settle disputes with their neighbors. It has supplied food aid and technological aid and infrastructure aid both because it seemed like a generous thing to do and because it was likely to promote stability.

Of course, the US has also acted in many cases in ways that promoted its own interests over peace and justice. As all nations do. I think our problem has been that we always trumpet our belief in freedom and democracy, even when what we're doing works directly against the freedom and democracy of people in other countries. From what I've read about ancient Greece, Athens was the same--famous for its democracy at home, but abroad an expansionist, hegemonic power quite willing to destroy cities, enslave people, and kill thousands in order to maintain and extend its power. I wonder if they got dinged the same way the US does. I think we'd get less flak if we were open and honest about our self-interest, like the French.

I'm not saying I think the criticism is unfair at all; I think everyone should be called to account for the difference between the ideals they proclaim and what they do.

Speaking of the French, one of the things I found interesting about the series on John Adams (which I think was well produced enough to be trustable in its historical details) was the confrontation between the ambassador from the Revolutionary government, Edmond Genet, and President Washington. When Washington seemed reluctant to commit the US to war with Britain in support of France, Genet threatened to "go over Washington's head to the people of the United States". A Girondin, he was later recalled for arrest when the government in France was taken over by the Jacobins, and the US granted him asylum.

Speaking of stability, I've been listening to Robin Wright's latest book on the Middle East, where the theme of stability comes up again and again, the number of countries where autocracies manage to frighten or persuade the people that dictatorial stability is preferable to democratic anarchy. You would think that this would sound a bit thin and self-serving, but really, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon have got to be three strong arguments in some peoples' minds in favour of stability over democracy!

[cmlc.livejournal.com]

So that's why the borders between those countries are so weird! What an awful thing to do to them :-(

I once met a Russian (well, ethnically) helicopter pilot from Kyrgyzstan, on a flight from Delhi to Kathmandu. Nice guy, but we had very little language in common - his most sophisticated English word was "tomato" and I couldn't think of any Russian at all except "borscht" so we couldn't really chat much about Kyrgyzstan, never mind.

I suppose you have a point about not raising expectations you have no intention of living up to. But there should be some moral direction in foreign policy, surely, it shouldn't all be colonialist grabbing of natural resources and sod the other guys. And here I must say the US to its eternal credit must be praised for the Marshall Plan - they could just have left Europe to rot after WWII but thankfully they didn't. Presumably someone recognised that this would just lead rapidly to WWIII as the Versailles settlement led to WWII.

I'm not sure you can really say that Palestine and Lebanon are unstable because of their system of government - being next door to a warlike apartheid state which deliberately destabilises its neighbours has to have something to do with it, surely :-)
And Iraq of course was deliberately brutalised by an appalling monster of a dictator, it'll be lifetimes before its population is capable of living in a peaceful democratic way, I'd have thought, because of all the debased sub-human murderers created/encouraged by Saddam - didn't he have a deliberate policy of forcing everyone who worked for him to commit mass murder so they wouldn't have a motive for overthrowing him and normalising the country with the international community? (Vague pre-war memory.) Urgh, *shudder*, enough of that subject!

[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).