Politics of Regionalism in Central Asia:

Multilateralism, Institutions, and Local

Perception 1st Edition Jeongwon
Bouqrdais Park
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JeongWon BOURDAIS PARK, Aigul ADIBAYEVA and Danial SAARI

Politics of Regionalism in Central Asia

Multilateralism, Institutions, and Local Perception
JeongWon BOURDAIS PARK
Ningbo, China

Aigul ADIBAYEVA
Almaty, Kazakhstan

Danial SAARI
Almaty, Kazakhstan

ISBN 978-981-99-4078-3 e-ISBN 978-981-99-4079-0

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4079-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive

license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023

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For our families
Preface
This book is about how states that happen to be in geographical
proximity can cooperate more effectively by building a coherent
supranationalism. We, the authors, shared the experience of the
political turmoil in Almaty and have been alarmed by the hostilities in
the ex-Soviet zone since the beginning of the 2020s. Therefore, we
spent quite some time discussing how the Central Asian region could
become a more secure, stable, and viable place to live. We agreed that
articulating region-specific problems and consolidating a more
coherent Central Asia-led regionalization process should be one of the
most prominent agendas that all countries in the region would need to
put forward. However, the common understanding among insiders and
outsiders alike has been that there is a lack of intra-regional initiatives.
There have been significant attempts by the governments of Central
Asia to nurture solid regionality, but these have often been frustrated
by internal and external constraints.
As a politically and economically dynamic region with material and
strategic values, Central Asia continues to undertake a process of
regionalization influenced by external powers’ various patterns of
engagement in the region, notably through increasing seemingly softer
tool such as multilateral institutions. This process is becoming
increasingly difficult for the Central Asian countries to resist, as they
are unable to opt out of it. Therefore, it is highly likely that
regionalization will continue no matter how the region reacts to it.
Considering its enormous potential, Central Asia is a testing bed in
world politics for how powerful countries’ rivalries shape the politics,
economies, and societies of the region. In response to rapid externally-
guided regionalization, further efforts to create a robust regional core
may co-evolve—with accompanying tensions—with multilevel
cleavages at the regional and country levels. We hope that our project
will offer helpful insights for readers who are interested in the politics
of Central Asia.
JeongWon BOURDAIS PARK
Ningbo, China
May 2023
Acknowledgments
Many people have provided a great deal of support to help us to finalize
this book. First of all, we would like to acknowledge that this project
could not have been competed without the direct and indirect
institutional support both from the University of Nottingham Ningbo
China (UNNC) and KIMEP University, Almaty, Kazakhstan. We value
enormously our colleagues and students, who have been our main
sources of intellectual stimulation and inspiration.
Lingzhan Zhou and Zihao Yu, research assistants from the UNNC,
were extremely helpful in performing searches for statistical data,
compiling information, and producing tables, figures, and graphs over
the course of many hours. Special thanks are due to Palgrave Macmillan
for accepting our manuscript and the editorial team for their patient
assistance. We also appreciate all of the interviewees who were willing
to help us with this project. We would like to thank to Villate Brown
McKitrick for providing professional support with English editing and
preparing the final manuscript for submission. However, any flaws that
are found in this book remain the authors’ own responsibility.
This project was partially financed by the School of International
Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC).
Contents
1 Introduction:​Regionalism for Central Asian Studies
2 De-Sovietization, State-Building, and Re-Regionalization
3 Competing External Multilateralisms​and Central Asian
Regionalism
4 Interactive Evolution and Implementation of Regionalism
5 Conclusion:​Externally Guided Regionalization
Index
List of Figures
Fig.​2.​1 Changing trade volume between Central Asia and Russia

Fig.​2.​2 GDP Growth rate of the Soviet Central Asian republics and
countries (1986–2021)

Fig.​2.​3 The number of concluded FTAs by country in Central Asia

Fig.​3.​1 Trade volume between China and Central Asia (1995–2020)

Fig.​3.​2 Trade volume between the US and Central Asia (1995–2020)

Fig.​3.​3 Volume of trade between EU countries and Central Asia (1995–

2020)

Fig.​4.​1 Russia and China-led regional organizations including or

focusing on Central Asian Affairs

Fig.​4.​2 Bilateral Foreign Assistance from the US to Central Asia (2018–

2022)

Note: All tables and figures in the text were adapted and reformulated,
based on the indicated sources, by the authors and our research
assistants, Lingzhan Zhou and Zihao Yu.
List of Tables
Table 1.​1 Global ranking of trade openness

Table 1.​2 Accession to the WTO

Table 1.​3 Perspectives on regionalism in Central Asia

Table 1.​4 Ranking of electoral democracy in Central Asian countries

Table 1.​5 Ranking of freedom of expression in Central Asian countries

Table 1.​6 Shared interests and risks in Central Asia

Table 2.​1 Inflation (change in consumer price index) 1991–1999

(percent)

Table 2.​2 Intra-regional trade volume (in goods) between CA countries

in 2020 (mln.​USD)

Table 3.​1 External actors’ multilateralism policy toward CA

Table 3.​2 Reduction of the US financial aid to Central Asia

Table 4.​1 Types of multilateral institutions in Central Asia

Table 4.​2 Multilateral institutionalize​d cooperation administered by
external actors

Table 4.​3 Other inter-regional cooperative initiatives and programs

Table 4.​4 Initiatives of the Central Asian states to strengthen

multilateral and regional cooperation

Table 4.​5 Total trade turnover between China and Central Asian
countries by 2021

Table 4.​6 Intra-regional migration in Central Asia (2020)

Table 4.​7 Environmental performance ranking of Central Asian

countries (2022)

Table 4.​8 Parliamentary elections results in Central Asian countries

2019–2021

Table 4.​9 Presidents of the Central Asian states

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
J. BOURDAIS PARK et al., Politics of Regionalism in Central Asia
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4079-0_1

1. Introduction: Regionalism for Central Asian

Studies
JeongWon BOURDAIS PARK1 , Aigul ADIBAYEVA2 and Danial SAARI2
(1) Ningbo, China
(2) Almaty, Kazakhstan

JeongWon BOURDAIS PARK (Corresponding author)

Email: jeongwon.bourdais-park@nottingham.edu.cn

Aigul ADIBAYEVA
Email: aigula@kimep.kz

Danial SAARI
Email: d.saari@almau.edu.kz

Keywords Central Asia – Kazakhstan – Kyrgyzstan – Tajikistan – Turkmenistan – Uzbekistan

– Regionalism – Regional cooperation

Central Asia (CA hereafter) is a hybrid region characterized by historical and political
complexity. Its heartland comprises vast forests and steppes, geographically bridging East and
West and featuring multilayered ethnic, religious, and cultural components. The
modernization processes of CA countries have advanced in parallel with foreign invasions,
domination, colonization, and decolonization. The region is currently undergoing another
phase of modernization since independence, yet it still suffers from low levels of
democratization, natural resource curse, uneven development, as well as growing external
influence from major powers including Russia. Uncertainties in relation to the war between
Russia and Ukraine that began in 2022 suggest a gloomy future in many aspects, with CA
countries being caught up in a renewed Cold or Hot War-like international structure
(Imamova 2022).
Despite the region’s strategic importance and the implications of its complicated political
and social dynamics, there is a dearth of updated in-depth case studies on CA that consider it
as a clustered political entity. This book explores the dynamics of regionalism in contemporary
CA amid the changing historical configurations and rising new players in the region. The
romanticization of Western values among CA people has been reinforced by the flow of foreign
aid and investments into the region that have gradually been replaced by renewed great power
rivalries and the cultural hegemony of local autarchic neo-patrimonialism (Erdmann and
Engel 2006; Izquierdo-Brichs and Serra-Massansalvador 2021; McGlinchey 2011; Shkel 2019).
Public discourse reflecting the dynamic changes in the region has evoked heated debates on
the concerns, fears, and expectations rising from the changing geopolitical situation, opening a
space for repositioning CA in world politics.
 In this respect, the main focus of this book is the region per se as a spatially, culturally, and
politically demarcated space. “Regions do have geographical, cultural, institutional, and
economic underpinnings that persist over time, but they are not static and unchanging, or
determined only by geography” (Bickerton and Gagnon 2020, p. 268). The conventional
approach suggests three elements of regionality (regional features), namely the regional
boundary as an organic unity, institutionalization, and identity.
The Western view of CA comprises the territories from the Caspian Sea, the Altai
Mountains, and the Hindu Kush to the Pamir Mountains. After the collapse of the Soviet Union,
the geographical notion of greater CA embraced Afghanistan, northeastern Iran, northern and
central Pakistan, northern India, western China, Mongolia, and the former Soviet republics, in
accordance with ethnic and linguistic paradigms. The geographical and cognitive evolution of
CA as a region was historically far more organic and expansive before Soviet policy delineated
the political demarcations in the vast territories of west CA in the 1920s. It is now commonly
understood as the area of the five post-Soviet independent states. “The interaction of the
steppe-dwellers with neighboring agrarian states has shaped much of our knowledge of
Central Asia” (Golden 2011, p. 4). Our analysis of the region and regionalism takes the
approaches of Political Science and International Relations. That is, for our purposes, the
region that is commonly called Central Asia in the contemporary world politics refers to the
Soviet cultural-territorial-administrative concept and includes five post-Soviet republics:
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan.
Apart from the right to native culture and languages granted by the early Soviet decree on
the right of native peoples to self-determination in the 1920s, a number of border and
territorial units were considered part of the USSR. CA was considered by Russia to be its
‘steppe frontier’ (land inhabited by nomadic tribes in the east) as opposed to its ‘forest
frontier’ (Siberia and the Russian Far East; Buzan and Wæver 2003, p. 399). During the Stalin
era, the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs separately acquired Soviet Socialist Republic status in 1936, while
the Tajik Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic was part of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic
under the USSR between 1924 and 1929 but later divided into two separate Republics in
1936. In the Soviet period, external powers did not affect the formation of Soviet nationalities
in the CA region, which was called ‘middle Asia’ by the Soviet authorities. The involvement of
external powers re-emerged only after 1991, when cultural, historical, and political
boundaries were redrawn. Undoubtedly, Soviet leaders had the strongest influence on the
processes of nation-building and territorial formation of the national republics in CA until
1991.
Therefore, the contemporary national and political tensions in the region originate from
the time when the Soviet government laid the foundation of territorial-administrative division
for CA Union republics with the presence of eight enclaves, namely Sokh, Vorukh, Karaigach,
Sarvak, Barak, Dzhangail, Chon-Gara and Shakhimardan, and an autonomous enclave,
Karakalpakstan. The ethnic enclaves formed in the territories of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and
Kyrgyzstan were seen as the results of ineffective demarcation policies of the USSR that
neglected the ethnically diverse contingent of the population and resulted in many people
being alienated from their historical homelands after 1991 (Valieva 2021). The dissolution of
the USSR resulted in a great deal of hardship for the newly independent states, “which
suddenly found themselves confronted with an urgent need to readjust their Soviet-style
governance models to the new realities” (Valieva 2021, p. 24) as sovereign states in the
international community and the international market. They joined the United Nations (UN)
naturally upon their gaining the status of independent states. However, even after three
decades of independence and interaction with the outside world, their levels of trade
openness remain low (Table 1.1). Nevertheless, they are expected to fully accede to the World
Trade Organization (WTO 2020a, b; see Table 1.2) if they have not already done so.
Table 1.1 Global ranking of trade openness

Trade openness
Country Trade openness, 2018 Global rank Available data
Kyrgyzstan 98.88 57 1990–2021
Uzbekistan 71.53 100 1997–2021
Kazakhstan 63.53 116 1992–2020
Tajikistan 55.85 133 1993–2020
Turkmenistan 35.16 162 1991–2018

Source The Global Economy (2022)

Table 1.2 Accession to the WTO

Accession to the WTO

Kazakhstan 30 November 2015
Kyrgyzstan 20 December 1998
Tajikistan 2 March 2013
Turkmenistan (Observer Governments) Official application made on 24 November 2021
Uzbekistan (Observer Governments) Application made on 8 December 1994

Source WTO (2020a; 2020b; 2023)

Ever since they gained independence, these republics have struggled to build their own
nations and states while consolidating state sovereignty and security both domestically and
internationally. Today, the region suffers from an array of domestic and regional struggles,
including rising rivalries between great powers due to changing interests in the region, the
COVID-19 pandemic, the occupation of Afghanistan by the Taliban, serious clashes over border
disputes between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in April 2021, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in
2022, and unprecedented large-scale citizen protests in Kazakhstan in January 2022 and
subsequent military intervention by the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO). These issues are in addition to other social and welfare problems including widening
income disparity, land degradation, environmental pollution, and public health issues.
Amid these crises and instability due to historical and economic relations with major great
powers and intensifying external power rivalries due to the economic and strategic value of
the region, investigating CA as a regional cluster, an epicenter of geopolitics linking Europe and
Asia, is meaningful for a number of reasons. First of all, due to their geographical and historical
connections, CA countries have common concerns that can be more effectively resolved by
responding collectively. In the development field, synergies can be generated if regional
cooperation is well-designed, and region-focused research offers analysis of both negative and
positive synergies to help clarify under what conditions positive synergy may be generated in
terms of the paradigm of neoliberal institutionalist accounts on the logic of countries’
pursuing absolute gains (Keohane and Nye 1977; Lukner 2014).
Secondly, a regional approach helps in the study of the condition of stable co-existence
through building multilateral security measures and trust. Regional security studies, a type of
middle-level analysis in the field of international relations, effectively contribute to the
stability of the region in question as well as neighboring regions and global security as a
building block. Region-focused analysis fills the gap created by state-centered analysis of
foreign affairs or the macro-level structural system approach to international affairs. Countries
in the developing world show a tendency to bypass their own regional neighbors and often
prefer to play a role in global affairs. The absence or creation of region-wide collective
bargaining power in relation to external powers reflects the asymmetrical power balance
between the regional actors and the external powers, notably China and Russia in the case of
CA (see Laruelle et al. 2010). Analysis of regional hegemons, whether internal or external, also
adds insights that make the study of actor-system interaction more accurate. Investigating the
process of regionalization has comparative advantages to look into the phenomenon of
functional spillover beyond the region in resolving prominent and interconnected issues,
effectively bridging state- and global-level concerns.
Thirdly, understanding regionality, that is, the region-specific features and degree of
interaction among CA countries, is an important part of evaluating the possibility of
constructing sharable interests and identity. The investigation of the process of regional
cooperation provides meaningful case studies and potential to contribute to IR theories at
various intra-regional and inter-regional levels with global implications.
Against this backdrop, we raise the following research questions: How and by what forces
and motivations has regionalism evolved into the current form in the CA region? What are the
main features of CA regionalism? And then, what are the significance and implications of the
evolving regionalism for the stability and development of the countries in the region? Answering
the ‘how’ question with a systematically designed analysis allows us to address part of ‘why’
questions in order to understand essential regional affairs. The concept of integration
including cooperation, “verbally defined as forming parts into a whole or creating
interdependence, can be broken down into economic integration … social integration … and
political integration” (Nye 1968, p. 858). CA regionalism entails both material (i.e.,
geographical and institutional) and ideational (i.e., values, culture, and vision) dimensions. In
this book, we go beyond comparative studies of the individual countries to focus on the
regional sphere, although comparative analyses of the individual countries are included to the
extent necessary in discussing regionalism.
In order to address the main research questions adequately, each chapter deals with two
sets of interconnected questions about exogenous and indigenous factors, shifting the
emphasis to the latter in the penultimate chapter. Firstly, if CA’s inter-state regionalism is
important to the major powers which have been engaged in CA affairs, namely the European
Union (EU hereafter), the United States (US), Russia, and China, how have they molded CA
regionalism through their own agenda of using multilateralism tools in inter-regional (or
bilateral or inter-regional hybrid forms) cooperation? Our investigation also addresses related
questions such as: In what activities have the major powers been engaged in the CA region,
and for what interests? How have these activities been changing, and by what forces? What are
the shared and conflicting interests among the players in the region? To address these inter-
connected questions, this book investigates the influential countries’ interactions with CA and
how they adjust their conflicting interests.
Depending on the perspectives on world affairs and political or scholarly intentions,
labeling a country as a great power status may vary. For the purposes of this book, the great
powers that influence CA are the four major external states or supranational actors mentioned
above that are perceived as greatly influential powers among the CA community in
comprehensive political, economic, historical, and cultural aspects. A great power must have at
least two of three aspects of power, namely military power, economic leverage, and socio-
cultural influence. Therefore, the great or major powers in this research refer to the most
influential extra-regional actors that have been constantly influencing the shaping and
reshaping of the CA region’s security and development (Laruelle et al. 2019, p. 2). The US and
the EU are the two most influential aid donors at least during the first decade of CA’s
independence. Moreover, the EU is the second-largest trading partner of CA, actively
supporting the economic diversification and development of a market economy of CA states,
promoting trade and sustainable interaction between the countries of the region. China and
Russia are the most influential neighboring countries; they are geographically adjacent and
have historical and ethnic ties with the CA countries. China is today the largest trading partner
of the CA states. In addition, all five Central Asian countries have established close relations
with Russia and are cooperating with it in various fields.
Secondly, the main research questions inquire about whether and how the CA states have
collectively reacted to and managed the major powers’ influential and changing engagements
in CA at the intraregional level. In other words, what is CA’s reaction to and the consequences
of the fluctuation of interest of the major powers in the region? Our case study intends to
contribute to finding regularities in the wider context of the process of regionalization in the
field of regional studies in IR. We do not ask why there is no EU-like or ASEAN-like regional
integration in CA; instead, our research highlights what is already there, asking what CA
regionalism is, how and why it has been formed in such a fashion and by what forces. Different
from a rational choice approach which entails more efforts at generalization, our case study
methodology focuses on a specific region. At the same time, through this project, we endeavor
to resolve the tension between idiographic and nomothetic methodologies that has stemmed
from the rise of pluralism and the multidimensionality of contemporary regionalism (See De
Lombaerde et al. 2010, p. 732).
In 2022, there were a series of disturbances in the ex-Soviet territory as mentioned briefly,
including the Kazakhstani president’s decision to invite Russian-led CSTO troops to quell
citizen protests in Almaty in January 2022, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and the harsh
impacts of sanctions against Russia on the CA economy (Najibullah 2022). This turmoil once
again illustrates the volatile and intertwined economic and security dynamics of the region. In
this regard, calculating the benefits and risks of regional interaction among CA countries based
on immediate reciprocity, (if following the strictly rationalist approach to interstate
cooperation) is far more complicated than it appears to be due to, inter alia, shifting national
interests, complexity of issue-linkage, and each country’s bilateral and multilateral ties with
external players.
Although the level of integration is rather low in the absence of intra-regional binding
horizontal regulatory regimes, there have been growing region-wide collective actions toward
further positive interactions, especially during critical periods like the global pandemic. Other
examples of region-wide actions come from the environmental field: for the first time in the
26-year history of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the countries of CA acted as a single region representing a
consolidated position on climate change (Marteau 2021).
Patterns of regional cooperation and integration can vary from region to region. CA has its
own historical and cultural context, and CA regionalism forms neither the ASEAN type of loose
but intra-regionally institutionalized cooperation which is often cited by local intellectuals as a
kind of model of regionalism in Asia (Ba 2014, p. 669), nor the EU-type of fully-fledged tight
integration. It is meaningful to elucidate whether and what CA countries have built through
cooperation and how the leaders and people in the region view the multilateral
regionalization process and the collective vision for the future in positioning the region in the
international community.
 In addressing these questions, the neoliberal institutionalist view alone does not
sufficiently embrace a comprehensive picture of CA given that hardcore security issues still
haunt the region and tensions can be augmented among extra-regional powers. Nor does the
classical realism perspective accurately capture regional affairs since there have been clear
indications of the cooperative benefit-sharing process over the past three decades, namely,
beyond objective shared interests to proactive creation of cooperative agendas and programs
for protecting common goods. In the process, some level of spill-over across sectors has
occurred beyond just balancing powers among actors or benefit-seeking among states.
As seen from the CA countries’ ambiguous response to the changing external powers’
engagement dynamics in the region up until today, region-level politics has been structured in
terms of loose intra-regionality, internally and externally passively balancing rather than
proactively band-wagoning, while at the same time each country makes its own foreign policy
choices. Amid the major powers’ incoherent but deeper engagement in the region, hybrid
forms of region-wide multilateralism have developed rapidly and CA state elites have been
shrewdly well-connected with the global capitalist market (see, for example, Cooley and
Heathershaw 2017). In theory, the possible paths could be as follows: band-wagoning in the
neo-classical realist sense, being structured by post-colonialism from the Marxist perspective,
or seeing regionalism as the rise of regional hegemonism.
A single IR perspective alone cannot accurately portray the CA region and regionalism and
can only partially depict the relations between external powers and the region. The fact that
CA regionalism has developed no regional hegemon makes the process closer to the notion of
“new regionalism” as opposed to a “hegemonic regionalism model” (Hettne 2003, p. 362).
Although CA regionalism per se has not yet been fully developed, the region has been at the
epicenter of a rapidly growing multidimensional, multilateral institutional regionalism.
Therefore, one may consider the inclusive forms of institutionalization of CA regionalism as
part of the phenomenon of a new and global model of regionalisms. However, what was
regarded as new regionalism in the late 1990s was in fact the classical form of norm-based
tighter regionalism, which has often been criticized as an anti-pluralistic pre-theory advocated
by intergovernmentalism, before international regionalism studies was integrated with the
notion of domestic or small-scale regionalism within nations. “Regional hegemonism is the
‘malign’ form of neo-mercantilism. The New Regionalism is the ‘benign’ form. The great task in
creating a post-hegemonic future is to promote ‘benign’ rather than ‘malign’ neo-
mercantilism” (Hettne 2003, p. 367).
One external condition that has supported neo-classical regionalism in this context is the
fact that CA regionalization developed in parallel with the countries’ prompt acceptance of
economic globalization upon their independence (Aslund 2007). The regionalism in CA
developed in response to a wide range of changing external and internal conditions such as
rapid economic globalization, consolidating new nationalism, and building a sovereign nation.
Regionalism offers another option for a new multilateralism in the rapidly globalizing world,
in particular from the relatively weaker countries’ position, as a reaction to or in cooperation
with extra regional powers.
In terms of a vison for regionalism, the debate over regionalism is broadly divided into two
views: the regionalist view that stresses the importance of regional-level cooperation and the
skeptical view of regional cooperation that is pessimistic about either the level of analysis (i.e.,
the region as a major actor in international affairs) or the cooperative approach itself. The
discussion on regionalism in CA has not been fully invigorated, and scholars who have touched
upon the topic endorse more skeptical views with a few exceptions (Rakhimov 2010, p. 101).
Nevertheless, over the past three decades, the CA countries have built a regional structure that
consolidates both state sovereignty and intra-regionalization.
 In addition, Hettne’s (2003) three contrasting models of regionalism provides some
insights, namely, trading blocs or ‘megamarkets’ resulting from the possible breaking up of the
free trade regime; the geo-political division of the world into sometimes competing,
sometimes aligned military-political power blocs; and the process of regionalisation from
below resulting largely from internal transformations within emerging regions. Hettne paid
particular attention to the third model, describing it as “transnational formations which
express a regional identity rather similar to nationalism” and calling it the “new” regionalism
(p. 360). In his view, while the old model exhibits such features as a creation “from above by
the superpower”, “under a bipolar Cold War context”, and “with specific objectives”, the new
regionalism is shaped in a more multipolar setting through a “spontaneous” process from
within the region with state actors as the main initiators, and for more flexible,
comprehensive, and multidimensional directions (p. 362).
As time goes by, it seems that the concept of new regionalism has been employed in the
opposite direction in combination with neo-functionalism, from a thick to a minimalist
definition. In some contexts, such as economic integration, new regionalism refers to an open
and inclusive model, a looser form of cooperation as opposed to a conventional proactive
closed form of integration. In this regard, what is often regarded as process-focused new
regionalism that is mostly based on economic functions and activities in cooperation refers
instead to neo-classical regionalism. Clarification can be achieved by asking ‘how new is new?’
and ‘new to which countries or to which regions?’
At the beginning of the rise of regionalism as a theory, ‘new’ meant a stage closer to what
we categorize as ‘thick regionalism’. This is similar to the term ‘trust-based qualitative
multilateralism’ as opposed to the neoliberal rationalist-institutionalist account of cooperation
Rathbun (2011, p. 244) used to describe the US’s institutionalism. Whereas thin regionalism
was regarded as rather an earlier stage of regionalism in the stage of the full spectrum of
regionalization, what is regarded as new today is in fact the thin model, which is similar with
the classical form of early regionalism. Therefore, the question of ‘how new’ is regarded as
‘new’ tends to be undefinable as both ontology and epistemology may dynamically move in
different directions in regionalism studies considering the quantity, functionality,
legitimization, and spatial expansion of the newly created institutionalized regionalism. The
previously dichotomized understanding between a Western model (e.g., the EU) versus an
Eastern model (e.g., ASEAN) might be less useful than before. The looser form of integration as
opposed to the neo-functionalist integrationist approach including political dimensions (Haas
1958, p. 16) can be understood as neo-classical regionalism. This may explain the
multidimensional and fast-globalizing features with self-legitimation while creating and
consolidating alternative norms to existing global governance found in emerging regionalisms
(Zaum 2017, p. 1114). A great deal of research has been emerging discussing the so-called
new regionalism embodied in new international and regional organizations, insinuating that
their new norm-making function contributes to the plurality of global governance (Ba 2014,
pp. 670–671). Some are more critical on the open and loose definitions of regionalism as it
embraces and legitimizes conflicts with the existing democratic values, rules, and norms by
labeling it under globalization of regionalism (De Lombaerde et al. 2010, p. 734). Regionalism
may mean a region-wide political program accompanying various forms of collective actions
through which regional agendas, goals and visions are discussed and implemented in view of
building a structured cooperative governance.
The gaps in the previous studies on how regionalism in CA is formed manifest the
following points. Some researchers weigh the role of external powers, consequently depicting
the countries and the region as passive victims of rivalries, while others provide insightful
anthropological and historical research on the individual countries and the region. The dearth
of in-depth research on regionalism itself remains; instead, the focus is on the great powers.
This lack of focus overlooks the historical transition toward a different kind of regionalization
in CA. Building upon the previous academic endeavors, this book explores ways to position
and reposition the region in the wider academic account and provides policy implications for
its future stability and prosperity.

Regionality and Regionalization: Affinity Between External and

Intra-Regional Multilateralism(s)
Not only the presence of different external powers but rivalries among them are important
elements in understanding the region and regionalism (Starr 2009, p. 43), although external
actors’ influences will explain CA regionalism only partially. US strategies in the CA region
have not been as coherent as CA countries initially believed, and the strategies changed
dramatically after the 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001 and again in 2008 when the world
experienced a major financial crisis. The series of crises resulted in changes of leadership in
the US, partial withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and a revised foreign policy doctrine
from Russia.
During the first stage of independence, the newly emerged CA states received a great deal
of aid and investment from the West in order to support their smooth transition, and they
were steadily integrated into the world economic community emulating the capitalist
marketized development model. During the second stage of interaction between the West and
the CA region since 2001, CA experienced fundamental geopolitical changes in the
international arena, specifically, the demise of mutual reconsiderations of diplomatic and
developmental strategies and the prioritization of state security. Scholars of CA politics tend to
believe that this abrupt alteration of foreign policy from the West, particularly the US,
generated a vacuum in CA and the countries in the region that were unprepared to face new
political, economic, and social challenges. With the vacuum of Western influence in all CA
countries, political regimes with their own ethnic and historical particularities have evolved.
The governments in CA no longer make efforts to absorb Western political traditions but
instead reflect them through their own paradigms which include much stronger inclinations
toward autocratic characteristics and oriental paternalism. The latter has played a part in
leading to the establishment of rather stable political elite groups in CA throughout the first
decade of the new millennium, which triggered different objectives and implementations, in
some cases attempting political autarchies.
One of the puzzling questions about CA regionalism is why there have been few efforts to
create and maintain intra-regional institutionalized cooperation amid the heated competition
over supranational structure by external powers. Common answers among local intellectuals
include, but are not limited to, the region’s relatively short history of being independent; lack
of physical infrastructure to interact due to lack of communication and transportation
infrastructure; diversity in terms of values and culture including languages; varying stages of
economic development and industrial capacity; competition over natural resources; lack of
mutual trust; and fear of the regional spread of terrorism, extremism, and organized crime.
However, none of these issues can only be understood as constraints. The listed risks are the
very reasons why internally motivated multilateralism can emerge. Diverse economic
structures can complement each other rather than permanently conflict. Cultural diversity and
lack of mutual trust can also explain why a region cooperates.
In the process of regionalization through cooperation, regions often encounter a range of
conflicting situations including hegemonic competition, power struggles, harsh negotiations,
disputes, and escalation of tensions. According to the neo-structural realist IR perspective, in
light of the inevitable power disparity among regional actors and the nature of the state, at
least one country in the region will invariably aspire to become a regional hegemon. According
to Frazier and Stewart-Ingersoll (2010), the conditions for the rise of a regional hegemon
usually depend on the orientation and disposition of the candidate regional power(s). The
conditions include whether the regional power pursues multilateralism or unilateralism;
whether the power seeks for revision or a status quo; and whether the impetus for which
regional powers play their roles is proactive or reactive (Ibid. p. 743).
Although this framework focuses only on one particular aspect of regionalism, that is, the
rise of hegemonic power, it is informative when applied to the situation in CA. Although there
has not been an explicit hegemonic power internally, external powers have shown strong
interest in interacting with the region to various degrees. Therefore, depending on the powers,
a wide spectrum of all three aspects co-exists, reflecting conflicting interests and different
visions for regional development. For example, Russia has expressed a revisionist ambition
toward the CA region when the other three great powers’ influence rises more explicitly,
whereas the other parties would prefer political stability with market-friendly policies to
maintain their trade relationships. In this regard, knowing the external powers’ strategic
positions on the CA region is crucial to understanding the features, functions, and directions of
CA regionalism.
One of the purposes of this introductory chapter is to present an analytical framework to
explain the correlations (co-evolution) of the great power rivalries in CA with the region’s
individual and collective reactions to such a fast-changing dynamism. These reactions can be
categorized as active accommodation, selective cooperation at various levels, resistance, or
hesitation in view of maximizing the region’s or individual states’ interests. Meanwhile, the
great powers’ presence in any region can be depicted in the following categories:
Physical conflicts and harsh and chaotic competition with high tension.
Keeping the region as a buffer zone considering the status quo as the best arrangement.
Hierarchical hegemon’s domination for security and economic benefits.
Rivalry (historic, strategic, latent, or emergent) with occasional tensions.
Equal competition through soft power tools such as bilateral aid, technical assistance,
investment, and institution-building.
Division of labor in tackling CA regional affairs with implicit consensus among the great
powers.
Non-hierarchical confluence toward transparent multilateral governances for co-prosperity.
There seems to be an implicit division of labor among the major powers when dealing with
CA regional affairs through peaceful interest-sharing while continuously expanding their
interests. From the CA point of view, the absence of an internal non-democratic regional
hegemon contributes to regional stability so far. An internal regional hegemon usually leans on
one of the four external powers and securitizes the region with shareable agendas, which may
evoke and legitimize the temptation for influential parties to divide and rule. The feature of
rivalry among the external powers in the region has been a mixture of historical, strategic,
latent, and emerging rivalries with potential conflicts.
At the operational level, the notion of regionalism entails territorial, economic, political,
social, and cultural aspects of connectivity among various actors, which create distinctive
physical and ideational boundaries vis-à -vis other regions. It may refer to region-wide shared
ideas and interactive actions based on their historical, material, and political conditions. The
region’s collective values, similar attitudes, and sharable goals and visions are embedded with
and expressed in interactions and actions in view of achieving some level of regional integrity
through various forms of region-wide agenda-setting, rule-making, and implementation—
what we would call quality development—similarly with qualitative multilateralism (Rathbun
2011, p. 244). In this process of forming a solid regionalism, regional security is the
fundamental means and condition for peaceful cooperation for prosperity.
However, in practice, regionalism is not understood within the region in question as a
unified form under a single perspective. Broadly speaking, our hypothetical typology on
regionalism is summarized in Table 1.3. This hypothetical matrix is developed based on our
interviews with local intellectuals, researchers, and postgraduate students (see Annex 1: List
of interview questions).

Table 1.3 Perspectives on regionalism in Central Asia

Internal core/relatively static features Changes subject to external powers

Optimistic Central Asian shared regional features
proponents reinforce (or should reinforce) regionalism.
Regional identity strengthens regional
cooperation and shapes region-wide agendas
for peace and prosperity in Central Asia.
Further degree of integration is necessary
and possible
Skeptical The region lacks regionality, which is the
outlook most important element of regionalization.
Consequently, regionalism itself led by
external powers will not function as a
sustainable and desirable process of
regionalization. Without regional shared
culture and identity, it is hard to form any
regional solidarity, which is essential for
regional integration
No matter whether there is regionality or not,
external powers created the region and led the
regionalization thereafter, which contributes to
regional peace and prosperity. The influence of
external powers is positive, and competition
among them is beneficial for the region
Due to great powers’ rivalries, regionalism is
dysfunctional in spite of rapid institutionalization
and ever-growing multilateralism. Under this
circumstance, intra-regional cooperation and
integration can hardly be advanced and
consolidated. Moreover, Central Asia needs to be
cautious about the rising great power rivalries as
they affect the region negatively rather than
positively

There are subsequent related questions to address, such as whether regionalism in CA has
been declining although it is perceived to be necessary or whether it has been reinforced. One
clear barometer to assess the degree of regionalization is the institutional development of
regional cooperation. Very few regional organizations in CA are exclusively intra-regional
initiatives, but a growing number of inter-regional multilateral organizations have evolved
under the influence of major external powers, notably Russia and China, along with a looser
form of connections with so-called middle power countries including Turkey, Japan, India, and
South Korea. Chapter 4 details this institutionalization, focusing on its cooperative
mechanisms, fora, platforms, regulatory regimes, and so on. Although these functional forms of
integration are not the only aspects of regionalization, institutionalization certainly plays a
role in reinforcing region-wide cooperation and cultural interaction and contributes to
enhancing expectations about states’ behavior.
Within the institutional approach, another indirect but useful question arises about how to
best understand a state’s eligibility for membership in a political community that is regional in
scope and supranational in scale. It is useful to address how membership in such a community
is created beyond nationhood and statehood, which generates a tangible supranational sphere
in the region. It is a puzzling question in the sense that there is no centralized or established
system in regional politics. This situation is similar to international politics but very different
from domestic politics, with clear territorial demarcation where political principles can be
tested and selected by a clear range of population. Hence, what to study in order to understand
regionalism is one of the difficulties in analyzing regional-level affairs. Regional politics is
highly intangible unless voluntarily constructed, and the border of a region “is not a
geographic fact that has sociological consequences, but a sociological fact that takes
geographic form” (Hemmer and Katzenstein 2002, p. 587). Scholars who are inclined toward
institutional liberalism agree that regions are not merely formed by physical and geographical
affinity but reinforced by social and cultural construction (Acharya 2011; Ruggie 1992, p. 235;
Thomas 2017, p. 2).
Acharya (2011) and Kupchan (2010) define regions as groups of states that share a
communal or cultural identity. Cultural and political spaces construct identities, creating
certain characteristics, meaning, and coherence to their regional self (Thomas 2017, p. 2).
Further, the research objectives can vary depending on the purpose of the study and the
disciplinary approach. Thomas takes the following as important core aspects to look into:
membership norms of a regional community; region-wide internal deliberations;
supranational bureaucracies; and documentation of regional deliberation such as
interviews with former participants, memoirs, public declarations and press reports. On the
other hand, Hameiri (2013) stresses the importance of regional regulatory regimes as the core
of functional regionalism. However, as mentioned earlier, the greatest difficulty in conducting
region-level research on CA, - not being skeptical about regionalism in CA per se -, is the lack of
a tangible process of regionalization that is exclusive to CA states due to their relatively short
history of independence, non-cooperative and rigidly top-down centralized political culture,
political sensitivities, and outward-looking expansion (as opposed to intra-regional) of
institutionalization.
Bearing in mind the methodological challenges, we focus as much as possible on regional
organizations and institutions, region-wide cooperation (whether ad hoc or institutionalized),
region-level regulatory regimes, and regional reaction to common interests. When region-wide
action is too intangible or inconsequential in some areas of regional politics, we investigate
significant bilateral or trilateral interactions. Individual state-level analysis is also provided to
the extent that it is relevant and necessary. Therefore, the main priority of our analysis is the
region-wide supranational-level affairs, but we also include trilateral and individual-level
research.

Multilateral Institutionalism in the Authoritarian Context

Paradoxically, the de-colonization of CA meant re-entering the Soviet frame of ‘Central Asia’. In
the process of de-Sovietization, de-regionalization along with globalization and re-
regionalization occurred concurrently. CA is still in the process of building and molding its
identity through self-identification and vis-à -vis other regions and the global community. CA is
often perceived as Russia’s back yard or as a zone that is accidentally independent but
preserving, without any resistance, their Soviet heritage (e.g., Ubiria 2016). Previous studies
focus on CA countries’ Soviet legacy rather than the new dynamics of the region, which in turn
hampers further theorization (see, for example, Fehlings 2022). Academic social science
research on CA focuses either on anthropological and archeological approaches to the traits of
the nations or macro-level geopolitical analysis of CA’s foreign relations rather than on intra-
regionality. This book project intends to contribute to filling this gap.
One of the important questions in this context is whether and how far authoritarianism,
which is deeply embedded in the political culture of CA nations, may play a cementing role of
stimulating a new phase of regionalization. Although the notion of thin or thick depends on
where one positions their understanding of regionalism in the wide spectrum of a myriad of
interactions, if one endorses thin regionalism, regionality may not be the core variable. By
contrast, a thick regionalism approach considers regionality as the important core of a
successful full-fledged form of regionalism. In the latter case, discussion about CA
authoritarianism is relevant (see Erdmann and Engel 2006; McGlinchey 2011, p. 39).
Specifically, the extension of authoritarianism to intra-regional and inter-regional levels forms
a selective affinity beyond superficial strategic partnership in multilateralism form. For
example, China’s multilateralism shows duality (Auerbach and Castronovo 2013), emphasizing
equality among states in the international arena but hierarchical influence toward like-minded
weaker authoritarian governments. This is in contrast to the expansion of institutionalized
multilateralism among liberal democracies (Kastner and Rector 2018; Scott 2013).
Multilateralism between states is itself rooted in a liberal cooperative and interdependency
approach that respects the counterpart’s sovereignty in theory on an equal basis. The process
of multilateralism is normally also democratic, non-hierarchical, and cooperative in decision
making for foreign affairs. As the neoliberal view recognizes, designing and maintaining
supranational institutions are daunting tasks given the three major common and fundamental
difficulties: bargaining, defection, and autonomy (Sterling-Folker 2013).
In relation to the shared culture in post-Soviet areas, Oleh Fisun (2003) differentiates
between forms of neopatrimonialism: bureaucratic (Belarus), oligarchic (Ukraine and
Georgia), and sultanistic (Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). The main elements of
neopatrimonialism include “personalised power, monopolisation of resources at the regime’s
centre, the predominance of informal institutions and controlled access to political power”
(Hoffmann 2010, p. 90). McGlinchey (2011, p. 39) explains that the roles of ethnic, regional,
and clan identities are latently embedded in political culture, especially in CA. Drawing from
his analysis of variables such as political reform, economic resources, and the presence of local
Islamic influence, McGlinchey provides an informative typology distinguishing three different
types of authoritarian political system in three of the CA countries: repressive
authoritarianism (Uzbekistan), chaotic authoritarianism (Kyrgyzstan), and stable
authoritarianism (Kazakhstan). Although such characteristics of individual countries’
authoritarianism may change over time, the common denominator—a strong affinity between
traditional cultural identity and political system—will likely remain unchanged in the
foreseeable future. The current degree of openness in the scale of the electoral aspect of
democracy in terms of voting rights and freedom of expression are reflected in the world
rankings presented in Tables 1.4 and 1.5. By presenting rankings on some aspects of the states
under this research, we do not intend to insist they are rigidly and objectively factual, but they
entail some degree of useful information with policy implications (for in-depth academic
research on rating and ranking the states, see Cooley and Snyder ed. 2015).

Table 1.4 Ranking of electoral democracy in Central Asian countries

Electoral democracy
Country Rank (out of 179) Electoral democracy—Vote democracy central estimate (2021)
Kyrgyzstan 106 0.421
Kazakhstan 140 0.257
Uzbekistan 149 0.216
Tajikistan 157 0.184
Turkmenistan 165 0.15

Source Our World in Data (2021)

Note The V-Dem index captures to what extent the election was processed under
comprehensive voting rights in free and fair elections with guaranteed freedom of expression.
Scores range from 0 (least democratic) to 1 (most democratic)

Table 1.5 Ranking of freedom of expression in Central Asian countries

Electoral democracy—freedom of expression

Country Rank (out of 179) Freedom of expression—Central estimate (2021)
Kyrgyzstan 110 0.637
Kazakhstan 144 0.408
Uzbekistan 152 0.314
Tajikistan 158 0.235
Turkmenistan 177 0.071

Source Our World in Data (2021)

Authoritarianism rooted in blood-based tribalism and extended nepotism in CA politics is
also worth discussing. This is because those traditional features do not remain mere tradition
but are deeply ingrained in the political system (autarchy), economic relations (over-
concentration and unequal distribution of wealth), and government-society relations
(alienation). Loyalty, trust, patronage, and clientelism dominate the political process and
policy decision making in CA. Clapham (1985, p. 49) called neopatrimonialism “the most
salient type [of rule] in the Third World”. The concept has been well developed in the literature
on sub-Saharan Africa, but very similar concepts with different names have emerged in the
research on other regions, such as Latin America (e.g., caudilismo, Sandbrook et al. 2007, p. 46)
and Southeast Asia (e.g., bossism, Sidel 2008). However, due to its hybridity, as Erdmann and
Engel (2006, p. 17) rightly pointed out, the modern application of patrimonialism involves
tackling the “relationship between patrimonial domination on the one hand and legal-rational
bureaucratic domination on the other.”
How, then, is CA neopatrimonialism linked with regionalization? There are two ways of
understanding the interaction. One is cultural diffusion in the political process of
regionalization, that is, being linked through the procedural mechanism of functionality. The
other has more to do with membership, that is, being linked through the selection of like-
minded countries to band together with. These two aspects are closely interconnected in that
they feature both inclusion due to like-minded political systems and exclusion by forces that
resist authoritarian culture. Recognition of the members’ political culture and system can be
an important factor for sustainable long-term relations. The prefix ‘neo’ hints at the fact that
networks today are no longer necessarily formed along family, kinship, or traditional lines
alone. They may also be formed on a non-blood basis. ‘Neo’ connotes extending beyond the
traditional blood/kin-based expansion of rule and even beyond national boundaries. This
combination of old and new network relations is exactly what we find in countries
like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, in the networks of clans and families on the one hand and of
oligarchs and business networks on the other.
Simultaneously, the exclusion mechanism functions in the process of selection, excluding
actors both domestically, such as non-state actors and those outside the governing clans, and
regionally/internationally, including uncomfortable external powers, potentially the West. In
rentier states (Mousseau 2019, p. 175), the phenomenon of neopatrimonialism refers
particularly to the allocation of rents through non-transparent networks. In most cases, the
services or resources that are offered by a patron to a client are public resources or services
(Erdmann and Engel 2006). The ruler’s demands for loyalty are less oriented toward a
common good than to the maintenance of personal power.
 Financing CA development has been diversified, notably with the rapid rise of China. Such
diversification of the source of development funds and investment naturally results in re-
establishing development agendas on their own among CA states. The countries in CA no
longer need to try to fit Western values when unconditional aid or investment can be secured
from non-Western donors and investors. Due to its growing strategic interest in the region,
China has made an effort to soften its overall image through promoting soft power tools
(Jakimó w 2019; Jiménez-Tovar and Lavička 2019). Nevertheless, the multipolarity China and
Russia have been promoting as opposed to US-led unipolarity may generate new risks for
weaker countries or the cluster of weaker regions. This is because such diversification of
polarity still focuses on the interests of a few polarized states. Ideally, such risks need to be
addressed among CA countries in order to interactively shape the regionalization direction for
their own individual and regional interests.
Unconditional multilateral institutions are based only on consolidated bilateralisms
without necessarily sharing interests and/or developmental vision. With the flow of Chinese
material resources, individual CA countries have interests that are common to all members
while not necessarily sharing the interests collectively. Russia no longer provides immediate
material benefits to CA as a region, and the countries and people in CA tend to believe that
Russian influence has also relatively waned due to its undemocratic colonial vision. Thus,
Russia has limited ability to create any shared vision embracing the former Soviet Republics.
Consequently, regional integration of CA states is not necessarily aligned with Russia’s
interests. Reflecting this regional dynamic, Europe also re-categorized CA countries by
employing either individualized bilateral relations or re-grouping the region under a wider
Asian policy or a global strategy recognizing the great political and economic diversity within
the region.
A series of security issues in the region made the governments of the region cooperate
both internally and externally. Conflicting interests are often observable between the regional
elites and ordinary citizens. The political elites in the CA region were threatened by the Tulip
Revolution in Kyrgyzstan as well as political unrest in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, and Andijan,
Uzbekistan. In those events, the US was considered to be an instigator of political turmoil.
Interestingly, CA “elites seem to see the ‘West’ (zapad in Russian) as one entity. It includes
Europe and the United States and is regarded as one way of life, not only with a uniform set of
principles and political philosophy, but also with one set of contemporary geopolitical
interests” (Peyrouse 2014, p. 6). The ruling elite in the CA region “prefer to blame potential
instabilities on Islamism or political dissidence” instigated by the EU’s belief in a nexus
between democratisation and long-term security (Peyrouse 2014, p. 6). Meanwhile, Russia
was regarded as a partner, as it did not engage in those high-risk security cases (Matveeva
2013) although this attitude has been changing. A skeptical view holds that whatever methods
and efforts the US and the EU undertook at this stage turned out to be incapable of supporting
full-scale democratization in CA. The EU’s democratization policy is often criticized as it sets
the goal based on their knowledge on the Central Eastern Europe as part of Regimes in
Transition which does not fit in any of the CA countries (Hoffmann 2010, pp. 88–89). New
security arrangements were established around CA states, based on both Western strategic
visions of the region and internal security initiatives in the form of a collective security system.
The importance of the CA region as a gateway to the Middle Eastern conflict zone was vividly
reflected in the US’s foreign policy doctrine adopted by the Bush administration in 2001.
NATO’s expansion to the East was echoed by the intensification of US anti-terrorist operations
under the umbrella program of the Partnership for Peace. Consequently, the 2000s were
marked by some level of military cooperation, including the establishment of the Karshi-
Khanabad airfield (Uzbekistan) and the Manas military base (Kyrgyzstan), followed by active
co-trainings of NATO and local troops.
The strategy of military cooperation mutually benefited the participants in terms of the
potential and actual security challenges, both internally and externally. The area of security
cooperation included permanent security monitoring over the emergence of internal unrest
such as that which occurred in Fergana, Uzbekistan, or Osh, Kyrgyzstan, which could have
challenged Kazakhstan’s stability considering its geographical proximity. Worsening relations
between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan may also negatively affect regional stability although
tensions have been attenuated since 2016 under Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s leadership. With the
Russian military troop withdrawal from the Tajik-Afghan border, the US replaced Russian
security guarantees for drug-trafficking and anti-terrorist protection, thus bringing
advantageous gains to Tajikistan. Tajikistan also provided air space for US military flights to
reach Afghanistan at the apex of bilateral security cooperation.

Analytical Framework to Understand Institutionalized Regional

Multilateralism
Regionality of a governance goes along with “a manifest diversity: beyond the evident diversity
in the geographical focus, … a special kind of spatial entity-supranational or transnational
ones” (Debarbieux 2012, p. 119). In this context, “regionality refers to different orders of
reality (ontology), and regions have a heterogenous status in the production of knowledge
(epistemology)” (Debarbieux 2012, p. 119). Scholars of regionalism who stress the core
identity of a region naturally maintain that the existence of institutions and organizations is
not enough. Certain degrees of inter-subjectivity, trust, and legitimacy are required to keep the
institutionalized region functioning as a distinctive boundary as a region. Beyond offering a
functional and technical network, regionalism as a process requires purposeful grouping of
the spatial entities that share geographical proximity and connectivity. Where to end that
boundary depends on intentions and purposes of the internal and external actors. CA is
formed based on the notion of post-Soviet territory with distinguishable religion and ethnic
culture. In this regard, how we build this research for regional interactions in CA entails the
following three dimensions: shared concerns over co-prosperity, at the minimum preventing
regional insecurity and disturbance; shared will to resolve region-wide issues that are usually
not resolved without a certain level of regional cooperation; actual institutionalization (e.g.,
fora, meetings, treaties, organizations, regimes, governance); and geographical connectivity
within which the entities may be affected by any risks without cooperation or the benefits
could be multiplied with cooperation. These pre-conditions contribute to the establishment of
regionality and regionalization. Therefore, the features and process of regionalization can be
articulated based on the following four factors: the positionality and relational power of the
member composition in the wider context in International Relations; motivations and
purposes built on the degree of generating shared interests, not just common interests (Table
1.6); functional mechanisms such as capacity of designing organizations, sustainable fundings,
quality of impartial experts in the secretariats; and a normative vision determining future
directions.

Table 1.6 Shared interests and risks in Central Asia

Shared interests Competing areas with risks

Security Regional stability and Cleavage between pro-Russian, pro-Chinese, pro-Western, pro-
prevention of the spread Islamists etc.; fear of citizens’ anti-government uprisings;
increasing demands for reform; rising or continuous Russian and
 Shared interests Competing areas with risks
of terrorism in the Chinse hegemonism and military presence; militarisation of the
region Caspian Sea
Economy Economic development Competition over resources; trade imbalance; rising tensions
through trade, between government-protected large enterprises and the private
investment, and foreign sector; corruption and lack of transparency in economic order;
aid concentration of wealth in a small group of political and
economic leaders; overreliance on or lack of natural resources;
diminishing Official Development Aid; lack of public sector
investment
Identity/Culture Preservation of CA Rising fears of Russian and Chinese influence; Western powers’
cultural heritage; relative withdrawal; consolidation of nepotism and autarchic
prevention of religious culture in politics; lack of democratic values; political cynicism
extremism; coherent
regional identity
Regarding the first factor for analysis, positionality of power-status in historical relations
among actors, weaker countries have different concerns from more powerful states as a great
power’s involvement may result in manipulation and exploitation rather than cooperation.
Neorealist and Marxist rationalist calculations of inter-governmental cooperation provide
insights on this aspect but do not explain how to incorporate and generate further utilitarian
benefits through inclusion of weaker parties.
The second factor to consider in understanding regionalism is whether the aspiration and
motivation for altering the regional status quo is voluntary, based on inner motivation within
the region (e.g., EU), involuntary integration (e.g., USSR), or involuntary division (e.g., divided
nations such as Germany before unification or the two Koreas). The degree of participation
and the way of legitimizing cooperation vary depending upon the various motivations for
inter-governmental interactions. In such a process, the issues are selected by participating
actors and discourse can be internally constructed. Internally-motivated regionalism is highly
likely to continue, although membership may change from time to time. Within the
aforementioned two types of involuntary regionalism, the former naturally aspires to remain
dis-integrated, whereas the latter may aspire to be re-integrated.
The third element is functionality in the process of proceeding with economic, social, or
political cooperative activities. While these three are the main aspects of cooperation among
actors, cultural interaction is the underlying element that may foster the process, either
positively or negatively. The rationalist choice institutionalism approach focuses more on
quantifiable variables to explain the success or failure of institutions such as durability, the
number of partner states, issue-linkage, and micro-level incentives (Lista and Rojas 2018, pp.
312–313). Durability is a consequence of the motivations and purposes and functionality
rather than the essential condition of the success or failure. Functionality may focus only on a
superficial evaluation of the success of institutionalism. The phenomenon of issue-linkage can
be observed in most international organizations, which also produces institutional-level
drawbacks such as duplication in activities and misuse of issues as a bargaining leverage
against other members. Calculation of micro-level incentives may be essential only for ad hoc,
single-issue focused institutions and may overlook the institutional history and longer-term
interactions of actors.
The fourth point regards integration with clear norms and vision led by internal leadership.
If the accumulated history of collective activities has built up norms and vision led by a
regional power or a leader, the process can be expedited and mobilize various levels of actors.
In this case, institutionalization can be harnessed continuously and supranationalism can
be materialized. Depending on the scale of the vision between cooperation and integration,
supranationality and confederation may be entangled with unavoidable overlaps (Nye 1968, p.
866). In turn, the process itself justifies the legitimacy of the supranational domain with the
creation of shared benefits from cooperation as opposed to choosing not to cooperate.
Our analytical framework consisting of these four inter-connected elements is integrated
to the empirical analysis in the following chapters.
A region generates geographical conditionality and political positionality in world politics.
However, the conditions and positions that may seem to be passively confined to geopolitical
constraints are not static and continuously interact with non-material elements, primarily
regional identity (regionality) and institutions which are continuously evolving through the
process of identification and institutionalization. This book project pays particular attention to
the mutual interaction between external multilateral forces and intra-regionality as a reaction
to those multilateral forces. A new regional culture that is based on a CA type of
authoritarianism prevails, together with factors such as the West’s gradual retreat and
simultaneous new political and developmental dynamism that fill the vacuum.
We address not only the commonly explained barriers but the outcomes of cooperation as
the region’s dynamic changes have been under-researched in previous studies of
regionalization. In particular, we examine the institutions of regionality, motivations of
regionalized actions, and the form of regional regulatory frameworks. While doing so, we shed
light upon how and to what extent shared circumstantial interests (externally imposed) are
transformed into indigenous regionality based on proactively ‘shared’ interests at a
supranational level beyond individual countries’ common interests, meaning a collective and
synergetic rather than a mathematical aggregation of individual countries’ interests.
Intra-regionality and regionalization will be explored through watershed regional affairs
and region-wide reactions. In the authoritarian and state-centered political milieu in the
region, the supranational sphere can be limited and/or controlled, so inter-governmental
authority rather than supranational governance prevails (for a comparative conceptualization,
see, for example, Kreuder-Sonnen 2016, pp. 330–332). In order to examine the degree and
features of supranationality in CA, formal and informal institutions and organizations are
included as main actors. In CA, state actors are still at the center of the creation of
supranational domains, therefore our analyses paid balanced attention to both state and
interstate organs concerning CA regional affairs.
In order to grasp the societal-level perception of regional affairs and vision, we conducted
16 formal in-depth semi-structured interviews face-to-face, online, and via email, mostly
between 2020 and 2022. In parallel, we collected responses from 293 local people across the
region through a simplified survey questionnaire (Annexes 2, 3). Semi-structured interviews
allow for an optimum combination between the deductive approach based on hypotheses in
an evaluation matrix and the inductive approach with data emerging bottom up rather than
envisaged by hypotheses. The interviews were primarily with broadly categorized experts and
intellectuals mostly from civil society in the region.
Civil society (grazhdanskoye obshchestvo, in Russian) in CA is different from interest
groups and tends to refer to any groups, agencies, institutions, and organizations that are not
subject to the central and local governments’ direct control. Some experts recognizes civil
society in CA more broadly to include those groups “cofinanced by the state and serve as an
extension of government structures” (Axyonova and Bossuyt 2016, p. 2). Accordingly, civil
society organizations (CSO) include civil and professional associations and organizations,
academic and research institutes, community-based self-help groups, and labor unions. Due to
the political circumstances, the common understanding of civil society in the region is at times
stereotyped as Western-educated anti-government activism, politically neutral but critical-
minded intellectuals, or frustrated political opportunity seekers who have the ability to
mobilize a particular segment of population. Market actors are also included, but government-
protected or state-owned enterprises are excluded.
CSO itself is not the main focus of our analysis on institutionalized regionalism for the
following reasons. Our main focus in this book is on the inter-state relations in the process of
regionalization through forming regional organizations. Although there is an increasing
number of CSOs in CA, they are still weak, underorganized, and short-lived. Some well-
functioning CSOs are mostly EU-led or local branches of international non-governmental
organizations (INGOs), thus already embedded in our list and analysis of inter-state
cooperation. More importantly, in fulfilling our purpose of investigating regionalism, the
alliances and networking of national CSOs are insignificant at present, which itself provides an
implication for the features of CA regionalism.
Indirect interviews with high-level officials are cited from news media sources due to
limited access to them. Our interviews are supplementary data. Rather than providing a
systematic summative or directed content analysis using pre-defined theories or keywords, we
employed the conventional coding methods during data analysis, based on which, directly
relevant contents were selected and contextualized. In addition, factual data were collected
from relevant international governmental and non-governmental organizations, official
bureaus of statistics, and local and international newspapers. Most importantly, our first-hand
experience of being engaged for many years in the academic community and civil society in
Almaty, Kazakhstan, with frequent travels to other parts of the CA region allowed us to
combine naturally ethnographic observation and insights through a number of seminars and
informal discussions with local people about dynamic regional affairs and changing local
perceptions.
Regionalism in the CA context entails external multilateralisms (conflicting and common
interests) mostly concerning but not limited to security and trade matters, the development of
intra-regional dynamics from de-regionalization for national identity-building toward building
functional regionalization, and moving toward re-regionalization. These aspects generate
regional agendas with sharable interests based on neopatrimonialism, a common political
culture in the region, which has a close affinity with like-minded authoritarian members’
multilateralism in the region and comfort with renewed Russian power, while reaping benefits
from China’s economic investment and Russia’s security guardianship. These conditions have
resulted in the current form of CA regionality and regionalism (for discussions on the features
of multilateralism and building cultural affinities with CA, refer to Erdmann and Engel 2006;
Jakimó w 2019; Jiménez-Tovar and Lavička 2019; Kastner and Rector 2018; McGlinchey 2011;
Scott 2013; Ubiria 2016). However, regionalism is mutually reinforcing and continuously co-
evolving once it reaches the stage of forming functional collectivity.

Structure of the Book

The rest of this book proceeds following the broad external and internal forces that contribute
to CA regionalization and regionalism. Chapter 2 discusses the origins of externally guided
regionalism, born out of the common history of the region. It explains the features of guided
regionalism, focusing on Russia’s continuous influence in the region to maintain Soviet
dominance. During the era of de-Sovietization, individual countries pursued benefits based on
inherited common interests through a certain degree of regionalization, rather than
proactively creating these interests. These can therefore be regarded as shared though
exogenous interests.
 Chapter 3 discusses the dynamic interactions between great power rivalries and CA states’
engagement in multilateralism. These interactions molded the features of the externally
guided regionalism that reflects the differentiated forms of multilateralism introduced,
suggested, and imposed by the major influencing extra-regional powers. The various forms of
externally imposed regionalism offer options to the individual states as to which way to
develop or resist institutionalized regionalization processes, considering political autonomy,
security guarantees, economic benefits, and regime stability.
In Chapter 4, the features of externally guided regionalism are discussed in more detail,
stressing CA states’ selective acceptance and adoption of external multilateralism in line with
major states’ multi-vector or non-involvement foreign policy strategies. The chapter highlights
the alignments between foreign policy, domestic politics, and political culture for state
survival, preserving sovereignty, domestic reforms for stability, and further development.
Through mapping the multilateral institutions, regional regulatory regimes, and organizations,
the chapter depicts how CA regionalism is reshaped by CA states’ shift in priorities from long-
term development to regime stability in the autarchical turn of their political systems.
Chapter 5 summarizes the main findings. Considering the fast development of inter-
governmental institutionalization and global governance, engaging in regional multilateral
processes is inevitable as there is little practical way to escape the forces of economic
globalization. As Hettne (2003, p. 362) noted, “[t]he process of regionalisation implies a
change from relative heterogeneity to increased homogeneity with regard to different
dimensions, the most important being culture, security, economic policies and political
regime”. Therefore, harnessing intra-regional reactions to such forces (i.e., Westernized
multilateralism, Sinicized multilateralism, Russified multilateralism) while balancing
centralized/guided and decentralized diversified participation in the process may benefit all
actors across the nations and the region, further contributing to forming global good
governance.

Concluding Remarks
This chapter provided a conceptualization of key terms and an analytical framework that
explains CA regionalism and regionalization as an outcome of structuration between actors
and conditions of the regional institutional structure. CA’s internally led multilateralism is still
in the transitory period, exhibiting resistance to generating a supranational regional space
even as all actors have been voluntarily or reluctantly engaged in the regionalization process
to various degrees.
In parallel with the nation-building process, regionalism has also evolved ever since the
countries in the region achieved independence. Given the strategic and economic interests of
the great powers in the region, it is hard to imagine that CA regionalism can create its own
intra-regional space without involving these great powers (Muzalevsky 2015). The primary
purpose of this book is to investigate the regional space beyond the individual countries.
Therefore, each chapter prioritizes intra-regional affairs for analysis, with discussion on
bilateral or mini-lateral external relations within and outside CA (involving CA) when
necessary.
CA regionalism was formed accidentally by external powers at the beginning of the
region’s independence. However, ever since the achieved independence, CA countries have
been involved in various cooperative multilateralisms through institutionalization. This
engagement in multilateral processes does not merely serve the great powers’ interests; the
countries also selectively pursue their own interests. All five of the still-young states in CA are
struggling to build their nations while dealing with regional geopolitical dynamics and global
forces. Depending on the future directions of reform policies in each country, regrouping may
happen with other parts of the world. Some level of de-regionalization or regional regrouping
may occur simultaneously based on the directions of national identity, changing state agendas,
foreign policy strategy, and state survival.

Annex 1: List of Questions for the Semi-Structured Interviews

Note: Not all of the questions below were used in all interviews; we selected relevant
questions from the list below depending on the interviewees’ nationality and expertise. Most
of the formal interviews continued with additional questions and informal discussion.
Interviews were conducted in either Russian or English. We anonymized not only the names of
the interviewees but also their affiliations and professions as some of the contents might be
interpreted as politically sensitive to some parties. In the text, we only indicate interviewees’
broad professional group along with the interview date and method.
1. Do you think Central Asian countries have some level of shared interests? Could you
provide examples?

2. Do you feel any kind of solidarity among Central Asian citizens? Please explain under
what circumstances this is the case.

3. In your opinion, how developed are the relations between the countries within the
Central Asian region? Does the region need external players such as the US, the EU, China,
and Russia?

4. Do you think there would be some benefits (or more disadvantages than benefits) if
Central Asian countries cooperate more towards integration? State your view in terms of
security, economic ties, and social cooperation.

5. Could you provide any examples (events, programs, projects, policy, civil activities) that
have contributed to nurturing Central Asian regionalism?

6. As an expert with extensive experience in the field, how would you assess the degree of
presence of Western powers in the Central Asian region? In which areas of activity do
you think this presence has been traceable since the early 2000s?

7. How would you assess the degree of China’s presence in the Central Asian region? Do you
think this presence has increased over the past 20 years? If so, in what areas and do you
find that the presence of the China in the region is a positive trend?

8. How would you assess the degree of Russia’s presence in the Central Asian region? How,
in your opinion, has its presence in the region been changing since 2000? In your view,
does the region need Russia?

9. If you are skeptical about tighter cooperation among Central Asian countries, which
region should your country of origin cooperate more or integrate with (e.g., India, Russia,
Mongolia, Turkiye, etc.)? Explain why.

10. Do you have any policy suggestions for the future direction of Central Asia’s region-wide
cooperation?
Annex 2: Data on Interviews and Survey Cited in the Text
№ Country of Profession Other identification Interview Method
origin date
1 China (Lived Professor University professor and researcher Received e-mail
in Almaty for in the field of Public Policy and response
two years) International Relations on April 6,
2021
2 Italy (Living in Professor Director and professor of Political December face-to-
Almaty) Science and History focusing on 12, 2021 face
Russia and Central Asia
3 US (Lived in Commentator/Associate Retired professor in International Received e-mail
Almaty for Faculty Relations and Regional Studies response
seven years) on March
16, 2021
4 Russia Senior research fellow University Research Institute Received e-mail
focusing on Spatial Analysis in response
International Relations on
February 9,
2021
5 Uzbekistan Writer Founder of Eurasian civil association Received e-mail
and response
network/Commentator/Journalist on March 3,
2021
6 Uzbekistan Assistant Professor College of Humanities and Social November face-to-
(Living in Sciences 5, 2021 face
UAE)
7 Tajikistan Researcher/PhD candidate Director of an international research Received e-mail
(Living in institute on Central Asian Studies response
Sweden) on March
30, 2021
8 Turkmenistan Associate fellow Research institute focusing on Received e-mail
security and development of Central response
Asia on May 20,
2021
9 Kyrgyzstan Policy field practitioner Director of a policy research center Received e-mail
focusing on Asia response
on January
20, 2021
10 Kazakhstan Government official Member of the public council December face-to-
27, 2020 face
11 Kazakhstan Researcher Expert in the field of international July 25, e-mail
business and education 2020
12 Kazakhstan Financial sector Full-time employee in the financial May 9 2022 face-to-
employee/Postgraduate sector in Almaty/Part-time face
student postgraduate student of Public
Policy
№ Country of Profession Other identification Interview Method
origin date
13 Turkmenistan Administrator/Postgraduate Full-time employee in the public May 10, face-to-
student sector/Part-time post-graduate 2022 face
student of International Relations
14 Mongolia Postgraduate student Full-time postgraduate student of IR May 10, face-to-
(Living in and Regional Studies 2022 face
Almaty)
15 China (living Translator/Postgraduate Postgraduate student of IR and May 18, face-to-
in Almaty) student Regional Studies 2022 face
16 Tajikistan Civil society worker Researcher and administrator in a May 20, face-to-
regional environmental organization 2022 face
in Central Asia

List of SurveyMonkey Questions:

A total of 293 respondents completed the survey below via SurveyMonkey, and 16 experts
were selected for in-depth interviews.
Q.1 Your gender.
Q.2 Your age.
Q.3 Your occupation.
Q.4 Do you think that the presence of Western powers in the Central Asian region has
diminished since the early 2000s?
Q.5 Do you think that the change of the West’s presence in Central Asia negatively affects the
development of the region?
Q.6 Do you think that China’s presence in the Central Asian region has increased since the
early 2000s?
Q.7 Do you think that the presence of China in Central Asia has had a positive effect on the
development of the region?
Q.8 Do you think that Russia’s presence in the Central Asian region has diminished since the
early 2000s?
Q.9 Do you think that the change of Russia’s presence in Central Asia has had a negative
impact on the development of the region?
Q.10 Do you think the relations between the countries within the Central Asian region are
sufficiently developed?

Annex 3: Central Asian Research Survey

Questions Male Female 25– 41– 64 Business and Education, Public Yes No
(%) (%) 40 63 years entrepreneurship science service (%) (%)
(%) (%) and (%) and (%)
over culture
(%) (%)
Q.1 Your gender 37.46 62.54
Q.2 Your age 43.60 50.17 6.23
Q.3 Your 17.48 64.69 17.83
occupation
 Questions Male Female 25– 41– 64 Business and Education, Public Yes No
(%) (%) 40 63 years entrepreneurship science service (%) (%)
(%) (%) and (%) and (%)
over culture
(%) (%)
Q.4 Do you think 51.89 48.11
the presence
of Western
powers in
the Central
Asian region
has
diminished
since early
2000s?
Q.5 Do you think 55.59 44.41
the change
of West’s
presence in
Central Asia
negatively
affects the
development
of the
region?
Q.6 Do you think 95.19 4.81
China’s
presence in
the Central
Asian region
has
increased
since the
early 2000s?
Q.7 Do you think 30.00 70.00
the presence
of China in
Central Asia
has a
positive
effect on the
development
of the
region?
Q.8 Do you think 31.85 68.15
Russia’s
presence in
the Central
Asian region
has
diminished
since the
early 2000s?
 Questions Male Female 25– 41– 64 Business and Education, Public Yes No
(%) (%) 40 63 years entrepreneurship science service (%) (%)
(%) (%) and (%) and (%)
over culture
(%) (%)
Q.9 Do you think 45.70 54.30
the change
of Russia’s
presence in
Central Asia
has a
negative
impact on
the
development
of the
region?
Q.10 Do you think 17.18 82.82
the relations
between the
countries
within the
Central
Asian region
are
sufficiently
developed?

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
J. BOURDAIS PARK et al., Politics of Regionalism in Central Asia
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-4079-0_2

2. De-Sovietization, State-Building, and Re-

Regionalization
JeongWon BOURDAIS PARK1 , Aigul ADIBAYEVA2 and Danial SAARI2
(1) Ningbo, China
(2) Almaty, Kazakhstan

JeongWon BOURDAIS PARK (Corresponding author)

Email: jeongwon.bourdais-park@nottingham.edu.cn

Aigul ADIBAYEVA
Email: aigula@kimep.kz

Danial SAARI
Email: d.saari@almau.edu.kz

Keywords De-Sovietization – Central Asia – Regionalism – Guided regionalism –

Multilateralism

Introduction
The disintegration of the USSR was a controversial and protracted process for all its
integral entities. The political liberalization, new ideological platforms, and economic
marketization attempted in the early 1990s failed to have an immediate effect on the
former states of the Soviet republic. The newly established independent Central Asian
states were no exception. Efforts to establish new domestic and foreign political and
economic paths were for decades merely an echo of the Soviet legacy. In these new
realms, independent Central Asia (CA hereafter) faced an extended phase of moving
from Soviet-imposed collectivism to regional coexistence under various atypical hybrid
regimes of traditional and modern state characteristics. Even influential external players
such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) could not prevent the
growth of institutionalized paternalism in the region. The economic transition of CA
countries was also strongly influenced by the Soviet past as the region attempted to
implement a series of economic practices in the 1990s, notably privatization, the
introduction of national currency, and nationalized budget planning.
Unfortunately, these changes were accompanied by limited access to natural and
industrial resources due to poor infrastructure in the region, and Kyrgyzstan and
Tajikistan, in particular, suffered greatly from resource scarcities. Under this
circumstance, CA republics’ re-regionalization as post-Soviet countries took a lower
priority in the agenda of the state-building process, and the region as a whole naturally
faced more obstacles than incentives to implement coordinated intra-regional
cooperation processes during the de-Sovietization era, at least at the beginning of
independence.
During the Soviet era, Sovietization in ideological terms rather than assimilation or
Russification was commonly employed. Moreover, elements of Russian nationalism were
enmeshed with Soviet patriotism. The Soviet system included de-Russification,
preferential advancement of underdeveloped peoples based on indigenization policy of
1923 (Liber 1991), and economic and administrative decentralization, although
Russification rather than Sovietization was the norm at the cultural level. Therefore,
paradoxical as it may sound, de-Sovietization accompanied ethnicization or re-
ethnicization as the de-ethnicized Soviet titular nationalities began to assert themselves
as distinctive ethnic groups and/or sovereign nationalities (Collins 2002, pp. 143–
144; Bourdais Park 2005, pp. 76–78).
Against this backdrop, this chapter discusses the transition of newly independent CA
states from the Soviet Union archetype. De-Sovietization contributed to CA’s
regionalization but at the same time re-regionalized the area under Russian influence.
Through a discussion of the newly independent state actors as well as newly built inter-
governmental institutions, this chapter explores the close linkage between the old Soviet
standards and modernized visions of the political, socio-economic, and cultural
transformations of the CA region. In addition, the chapter provides an analysis of the
discourse concerning the era of de-Sovietization as a challenging period for the nations
and governments of the region as they formed the modern CA states’ diverse regimes,
economies, and societies.

Brief Historical Background

The USSR was the first proletarian state, characterized by a strict unity of ideological,
national, cultural, and socio-economic identity through a mono-centred system.
Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin launched and forcibly constructed national identity
foundations for all Soviet Union entities. Based on the early 1920s Soviet decree on the
right of native peoples to self-determination, a number of border/territorial units were
created in the USSR that kept the right to maintain their native culture and language. By
the time of Stalin’s administration (1936), the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs had acquired Soviet
Socialist Republic status. At the same time, the breakup of the Tajik and Uzbek Republics
was also happening. Thus, the early leaders of the USSR strongly influenced the
processes of nation-building and territorial formation of the national republics in
CA (Cummings 2013, pp. 38–47).
By the time Brezhnev took the leadership in October 1964, the positive signs of
social and economic development were gradually fading due to the steady decay of the
Soviet planned economy and disillusion caused by ideological degradation. The Kremlin
had been capable of successfully controlling all spheres of life in the union of republics,
but the Soviet's Afghan invasion in the late 1970s drove the country to a total
deadlock both internally and externally. Stagnation under Brezhnev facilitated anti-
Soviet sentiments internally, while complicated external relations between the West and
the USSR were marked by the deployment of Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Ideological
friction had intensified by the time of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika, which aimed to
reform the country’s governance and was supposed to create the grounds for civic
society under the Glasnost agenda. Unlike the previously negative attitudes from the
West towards Soviet leaders, the international community welcomed Gorbachev’s
reform drives.
Starting from the Perestroika period, ideas of self-determination began to awaken in
the republics, which further strengthened the Soviet republics’ collective national
awareness. Moves to reject Soviet identity provoked the emergence of groups and forces
with clear separatist-oriented goals among the ethnic and national units. The Jeltoqsan
or ‘December’ uprising of 1986 in Kazakhstan, the Fergana massacre of 1989 in
Uzbekistan, the Osh riots of 1989 in Kyrgyzstan, and an Islamic revival in Tajikistan
signalled the commencement of national movements. In addition, the first wave of
migration of the Russian-speaking population flowing out of the CA republics began to
rapidly reshape the composition of the local population.
Further distance from the Soviet platform fostered a new understanding of the socio-
economic realities in the republics of the CA region in the late 1980s. The new political
elites saw opportunities for further transformation of the Soviet ideological paradigm.
Repeated crises and the impossibility of continuing with Soviet-style policies brought an
attempt at a coup d’état on August 19, 1991, pushing the USSR to its destruction. One
after another, Soviet republics declared their independence after Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus had signed the Belovezha Accords to affirm their sovereignty. The Kazakh Soviet
Socialist Republic was the last among the participants to endorse the document. Unlike
some other post-Soviet republics, the first President of the Kazakh SSR, Nursultan
Nazarbayev, hesitated to exit the union, expressing doubts about future economic and
political progress after the breakup.

From Soviet Republics to Post-Soviet Independent States

External powers did not affect the formation of the region during the Soviet period, but
a number of modern Greater CA concepts based on cultural historical views appeared
after 1991. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CA states urgently needed prompt
elaboration of the appropriate political, social, and economic courses to take for their
own development. These countries aimed to adopt new values and institutions as
quickly as possible in order to build modern and independent political and economic
systems that could best accommodate political modernization and full-scale economic
and social transitions. These included electoral democracy, civic political culture, a
legislative basis, and marketization.
The process of political transformation was not homogeneous throughout CA.
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan took a rather autocratic approach towards state-building
from the very beginning. Kyrgyzstan intended to adopt a Western democratization
model and, notwithstanding frequent political turmoil, experienced active political
participation and the development of civil society that helped it achieve a positive
political reputation in the international community. Strong authoritarian presidential
features imitating the Ata-Turk approach in Turkmenistan contrasted with the active
civic society built in Kyrgyzstan while distinguishing it from the softer guided
democracy in Kazakhstan (Junisbai 2010, pp. 240–255). Tajikistan faced a prolonged
period of civil war at the beginning of its independence that slowed down its post-Soviet
transformation at all levels.
In general, the CA countries achieved only a very limited degree of democratic
advancement due to their persistent inclinations to paternalist political formats, though
to a lesser degree in Kyrgyzstan. Nevertheless, the new political phenomena featured
distinguishable legislative structures that were very different from those of the former
Soviet Union which had been shaped by Kremlin elites and in which national republics
were incapable of autonomous decision-making. These reforms coincided with the
dramatic transformation of the shifting world order from a bi-bipolar to a unipolar
system with the dominant supremacy of the US (Cameron 2005, pp. 166–167). The US
promulgated active foreign policy towards the society of the former Soviet Union.
Democratization, marketization, and investment spread throughout the CA region,
affecting both its economic and foreign political values, at least in the first decade after
the disintegration of the USSR (Catley 1999, pp. 168–174).
Sovietologists evaluate the Soviet period and its influences on the CA region in
various ways (Kushkumbaev 2017, p. 7). Some (Barnes 2020; Laruelle 2013; Zhussipbek
2017) depart from harsh negativism in their evaluation of ‘Sovietism’ in its former
republics, positioning them as victims of the authoritarian Soviet system. From the
beginning, the sovereign states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan were less
negative toward their Soviet past and therefore less hostile toward the Russian
Federation thereafter. Meanwhile, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan rather hastily tried to
distance themselves from Russia and were far less enthusiastic about re-evaluating
Russia separately from the USSR. However, citizens in all five countries have been
divided and highly fragmented over political and foreign policy issues depending on
their own experiences, memories, and perception relating to their Soviet pasts and the
Russian Federation. They either held loyal attitudes or used revisionist approaches
towards the Soviet past (Kassymbekova 2017, pp. 1–6).
Concerning the Soviet legacy, the three interview texts below reflect general view on
the CA's relations with Russia. One of our interviews mentioned: “Russia remains a
strong regional player. Although Russia took a back seat for quite some time, in terms of
geographical proximity, the prevalent use of Russian language in CA, shared information
and media space, and economic ties kept the CA region within Russia’s orbit under
Soviet legacy” (Interviewee No. 8). Another interviewee offered an outsider’s view,
responding as follows to the local people's concerns on the question of continuous
Russian influence in the region:

Russia has recovered enough from the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet
Union to become a significant actor on the world stage, and no doubt feels, with
justification, that CA is vital to its security needs. Given the region’s proximity to
Russia, and the danger that the Muslim majority populations of the CA states may
be susceptible to radicalization, its security concerns make sense. But more than
that, Russia obviously feels that history, i.e., the long period of integration during
the period of the USSR, and Russian domination long before that time, and
cultural Russification during the entire Soviet era, provided Russia a special
status and privileges in regard to the present and future political and cultural
 development in the region. Therefore, the question as to whether the region
needs Russia is irrelevant. It will have a significant degree of Russian involvement
in its political and economic sphere whether it feels it needs Russia or not.
(Interviewee, No. 3)
Similarly, taking an external observer's view, another interviewee noted, “Now, this is
a bit more trembling point in the sense that actually CA countries were part of the USSR
and they are the part of the Post-Soviet system, but it is also true, that actually they [CA
countries] are trying to break such kind of labelling and they want to become CA rather
than Post-Soviet” [Interview No. 2]. Other interviewees exhibited similar views
regarding the Soviet legacy, although their tones and nuances differed. In general, our
interviews with local and foreign experts explained the dilemma that CA region has
faced, increasingly hoping for further de-Sovietisation while admitting the remaining tie.

Emergence and Challenges of Central Asian Regionalism

One of the Russia’s primary agendas has been maintaining a wide range of integrity of
the former Soviet space. Attempts to lead regional integration through
institutionalization by Russia-led regional organizations such as the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and the
Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) gradually shifted to the more dominant regional
hegemonism. Not only explicitly militarized coercive influence but also so-called soft
power tools, very similar to what democratic countries have implemented in their
foreign policy, have been implemented in parallel (Paizova et al. 2021, pp. 74–75). An
interviewee expressed the view that the decline of Western power in CA is linked with
Russia's increasing so called soft power influence with anti-Western propaganda in
content:

Western powers in Central Asia, I mean organizations and politicians, have

noticeably decreased here since the 2000s. Significantly, especially in comparison
with the 1990s. I think the following factors played here: the Russian
Federation’s turning its interests towards the former republics of the USSR, and
an attempt to regain influence. This affected the active promotion of propaganda
and the concept of nostalgia for the USSR. It occurred in parallel with active anti-
Western propaganda and rhetoric. (Interviewee No. 9)

The CIS consists of the CIS 9 (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan,
known collectively as the CA4, and Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, and Russia)
and Turkmenistan as an Associate Member based on its charter adopted in 1993. It was
formed as an umbrella organization to deal with a range of political, military, and border
security affairs as well as to coordinate trade, finance, and lawmaking. While the Baltic
states and Georgia illegalized the Soviet Union’s historical territorial occupation upon its
disintegration, CA states as well as Ukraine until 2018 and Belarus participated in the
CIS process based on the Belovezh Accords and the Alma-Ata Protocol. Under the
umbrella regional organizational framework, the CIS also built two nested
organizations: the CSTO for military and security functions and the Eurasian Economic
Union for free trade agreements. The CSTO, designed as the military arm of the CIS,
consists of Armenia, Russia, and the CA4. The EEU was modeled after the European
Union and includes Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia. It also
established two sub-institutions: the Eurasian Economic Commission based in Moscow
and the Court of the Eurasian Economic Union based in Minsk.
Another important regional organization is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), formally established in 2001 with the membership of Iran, India, China, Pakistan,
Russia and the CA countries excluding Turkmenistan. The SCO has observer countries
such as Afghanistan, Belarus, and Mongolia, and ‘dialogue partners’ including Armenia,
Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Turkiye, Egypt, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. Since
2022, the SCO’s agenda has included the development digital economic architecture. The
SCO has been recognized by the United Nations (UN) through participating as an
observer in the UN General Assembly since 2005, and the SCO Secretariat has
established partnerships with various organs of the UN, such as the UN Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Tourism Organization
(UNWTO), and the International Organization for Migration (UNIOM). The SCO
expanded its cooperative network with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the
UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP) and the UN
Office on Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT).1 This is one of the SCO's critical steps toward
self-legitimization as a significant actor in the international community. To be
recognized, legitimacy needs to be claimed vis-à -vis different audiences by IOs and their
members (Zaum 2017, p. 1116). However, the SCO is still be understood as largely
political than actually achieving military cooperation, while providing an effective venue
for the member states to engage in balancing different external powers in the region
(Lohschelder 2017, 101). As chapter four of this volume discusses more in detail about
regional organizations, this chapter provides only an overview of the emergence of
institutionalized regional cooperation during the early period of de-Sovietization.
Given the power asymmetry in Russo-CA and Sino-CA relations, collective security
paradoxically increases the deep-seated anxiety and insecurity of individual countries in
the region, as can be seen in the violent relationship between Russia and its former-
Soviet neighbors. The flip side of this includes the rise of skepticism among local
intellectuals who predict that the Russo-Ukraine war in 2022 may further legitimize the
consolidation of autocratic CA leaders’ totalitarian regimes. This is particularly the case
for Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, which are already moving toward more oppressive
totalitarian dictatorships similar to that of Taliban-led Afghanistan. Russian media
reacted critically to Kazakhstani President Tokayev’s public speech on domestic reform
drives on 6 March 2022, interpreting the attempt at democratic transition as an anti-
Russian move. On 21 August 2022, Moscow announced extended military drills among
CSTO members while making sure that gas lines to Europe will not pass via CA as a
means to detouring the Ukrainian territory lest the Russian strategy of restricting export
to Europe should be watered down by CA’s providing alternative source to Europe. At
the same time, the China-led SCO extended its membership to include Iran in 2023.
In turn, this Russo-CA tie will put already unpopular leaders in the predicament of
feeling pressure for internal reform to address the domestic public’s concerns,—as in
the case of Kazakhstan—, and being externally pressured by Russia, which will
continuously limit CA governments’ autonomy. By the same token, the influence of
Another random document with
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 Thus the good seed sown in Western Europe during the
preceding century brought forth its fruit. England could not long
remain a stranger to the march of events. But, slow as usual and
averse from hasty experiments, she pondered while others
performed. Besides, she had been spared the volcanic eruption of
the Continent which, while destroying much that was venerable and
valuable, had cleared the ground for the reception of new things.
There is every reason to believe that the ordinary Englishman’s
view of the Jews during the first half of the nineteenth century
differed in no respect from the view entertained by the ordinary
American of the same period, as described by Oliver Wendell
139
Holmes. The ordinary Englishman, like his transatlantic cousin,
grew up inheriting the traditional Protestant idea that the Jews were
a race lying under a curse for their obstinacy in refusing the Gospel.
The great historical Church of Christendom was presented to him as
Bunyan depicted it. In the nurseries of old-fashioned English
Orthodoxy there was one religion in the world—one religion and a
multitude of detestable, literally damnable impositions, believed in by
countless millions, who were doomed to perdition for so believing.
The Jews were the believers in one of these false religions. It had
been true once, but now was a pernicious and abominable lie. The
principal use of the Jews seemed to be to lend money and to fulfil
the predictions of the old prophets of their race. No doubt, the
individual sons of Abraham whom the ordinary Englishman found in
the ill-flavoured streets of East London were apt to be unpleasing
specimens of the race and to confirm the prevailing view of it.
The first unambiguous indication of a changing attitude towards
the Jew appears in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Scott in that work
gives utterance to the feeling of toleration which had gradually been
growing up in the country. It was in 1819, during the severest season
of the novelist’s illness, that Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, his friend, “sitting
by his bedside, and trying to amuse him as well as he could,” spoke
about the Jews, as he had known them years before in Germany,
“still locked up at night in their own quarter by great gates,” and
suggested that a group of Jews would be an interesting figure in a
 140
novel. The suggestion did not fall on stony ground. Scott’s eye
seized on the artistic possibilities of the subject, and the result was
the group of Jews which we have in Ivanhoe. Although the author in
introducing the characters seems to have been innocent of any
deliberate aim at propagandism, his treatment of them is a sufficient
proof of his own sympathy, and no doubt served the purpose of
kindling sympathy in many thousands of readers.
Not that the work attempts any revolutionary subversion of
preconceived ideas. The difference between Isaac of York and
Nathan the Wise is the same as the difference between Scott and
Lessing and their respective countries. The British writer does not try
to persuade us that the person whom we abhorred a few generations
before as an incarnation of all that is diabolical, and whom we still
regard with considerable suspicion, is really an angel. Whether it be
that there was no need for a revolt against the Elizabethan tradition,
or Scott was not equal to the task, his portrait of the Jew does not
depart too abruptly from the convention sanctioned by his great
predecessors. His Isaac is not a Barabas or Shylock transformed,
but only reformed. Though in many respects an improvement on
both, Scott’s Jew possesses all the typical attributes of his
progenitors: wealth, avarice, cowardice, rapacity, cunning, affection
for his kith and kin, hatred for the Gentile. But, whereas in both
Barabas and Shylock we find love for the ducats taking precedence
of love for the daughter, in Isaac the terms are reversed. It is with
exquisite reluctance that he parts with his shekels in order to save
his life. Ransom is an extreme measure, resorted to only on an
emergency such as forces the master of a ship to cast his
merchandise into the sea. But on hearing that his captor, Front-de-
Bœuf, has given his daughter to be a handmaiden to Sir Brian de
Bois-Guilbert, Isaac throws himself at the knight’s feet, imploring him
to take all he possesses and deliver up the maiden. Whereupon the
Norman, surprised, exclaims: “I thought your race had loved nothing
save their money-bags.”
“Think not so vilely of us,” answers the Jew. “Jews though we be,
the hunted fox, the tortured wildcat, loves its young—the despised
and persecuted race of Abraham love their children.”
 On being told that his daughter’s doom is irrevocable, Isaac
changes his attitude. Outraged affection makes a hero of the Jew,
and for his child’s sake he dares to face tortures, to escape from
which he had just promised to part even with one thousand silver
pounds:
“Do thy worst,” he cries out. “My daughter is my flesh and blood,
dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty
threatens.”
While emphasising the good qualities of the Jew, the author
takes care to excuse the bad ones. Isaac is despoiled and spurned
as much as Barabas or Shylock. But there is an all-important
difference in Scott’s manner of presenting these facts. He describes
Isaac as a victim rather than as a villain, as an object of compassion
rather than of ridicule. “Dog of a Jew,” “unbelieving Jew,”
“unbelieving dog” are the usual modes of address employed by the
mediaeval Christian towards the Jew; just as they are the usual
modes of address employed by the modern Turk towards the
Christian rayah. The Jews are “a nation of stiff-necked unbelievers,”
the Christian “scorns to hold intercourse with a Jew,” his propinquity,
nay his mere presence, is considered as bringing pollution—
sentiments which far exceed in bitterness those entertained by the
Turk towards the Christian. Under such circumstances Isaac makes
his appearance: a grey-haired and grey-bearded Hebrew “with
features keen and regular, an aquiline nose and piercing black eyes,”
wearing “a high, square, yellow cap of a peculiar fashion, assigned
to his nation to distinguish them from the Christians.” Thus attired,
“he is introduced with little ceremony, and, advancing with fear and
hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility,” he takes his seat at
the lower end of the table, “where, however, no one offers to make
room for him.” “The attendants of the Abbot crossed themselves,
with looks of pious horror,” fearing the contamination from “this son
of a rejected people,” “an outcast in the present society, like his
people among the nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting
place.”
Isaac has scarcely taken his seat, when he is addressed, with
brutal frankness, as a creature whose vocation it is “to gnaw the
bowels of our nobles with usury, and to gull women and boys with
gauds and toys.” So treated, the Jew realises that “there is but one
road to the favour of a Christian”—money. Hence his avarice.
Furthermore, the impression of a craven and cruel miser, that might
perhaps be derived from the above presentation, is softened by the
author, who hastens to declare that any mean and unamiable traits
that there may be in the Jew’s character are due “to the prejudices of
the credulous vulgar and the persecutions by the greedy and
rapacious nobility.”
Scott endeavours to engage the reader’s sympathy for his Jew
by dwelling at great length on these causes of moral degradation:
“except perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the
earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such an
unremitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this
period.” “The obstinacy and avarice of the Jews being thus in a
measure placed in opposition to the fanaticism and tyranny of those
under whom they lived, seemed to increase in proportion to the
persecution with which they were visited.” “On these terms they
lived; and their character, influenced accordingly, was watchful,
suspicious, and timid—yet obstinate, uncomplying, and skilful in
evading the dangers to which they were exposed.” Thus we are led
to the conclusion that the Jew’s vices have grown, thanks to his
treatment, his virtues in spite of it. For Isaac is not altogether
impervious to gratitude and pity. He handsomely rewards the
Christian who saves his life, and he himself saves a Christian’s life
by receiving him into his house and allowing his daughter to doctor
him.
But, just as he is to the father, Scott is more than just to the
141
daughter. While Isaac is at the best a reformed Barabas or
Shylock, Rebecca is the jewel of the story. The author exhausts his
conventional colours in painting her beauty, and his vocabulary in
singing the praises of her character. “Her form was exquisitely
symmetrical,” “the brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her
eyebrows, her well-formed, aquiline nose, her teeth as white as
pearls, and the profusion of her sable tresses,” made up a figure
which “might have compared with the proudest beauties of England.”
She is indeed “the very Bride of the Canticles,” as Prince John
remarks; “the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley,” as the
Prior’s warmer imagination suggests. Immeasurably superior to
Abigail in beauty and to Jessica in virtue, she equals Portia in
wisdom—a perfect heroine of romance. Withal there is in Rebecca a
power of quiet self-sacrifice that raises her almost to the level of a
saint. Altogether as noble an example of womanhood as there is to
be found in a literature rich in noble women. To sum up, in contrast
to Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s creations, there is a great deal of
the tragic, and little, if anything, of the comic in Scott’s Jew.
It would, however, be an error to suppose that Scott was the
spokesman of a unanimous public. His Ivanhoe appeared in 1819.
Four years later we find the writer who with Scott shared the
applause of the age, giving an entirely different character to the Jew.
The Age of Bronze, written in 1823, carries on the Merchant of
Venice tradition. To Byron the Jew is simply a symbol of relentless
and unprincipled rapacity. Referring to the Royal Exchange, “the
New Symplegades—the crushing stocks,”

“Where Midas might again his wish behold

In real paper or imagined gold,
Where Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake,
And the world trembles to bid brokers break,”

the poet moralises at the expense of the Jew, to whom he traces our
own greed and recklessness in speculation:

“But let us not to own the truth refuse,

Was ever Christian land so rich in Jews?
Those parted with their teeth to good King John,
And now, Ye Kings! they kindly draw your own.”

Alas! times have changed since the day of “good King John.” Now
the Jews, far from being the victims of the royal forceps,
 “All states, all things, all sovereigns they control,
And waft a loan ‘from Indus to the pole.’
And philanthropic Israel deigns to drain
Her mild per-centage from exhausted Spain.
Not without Abraham’s seed can Russia march;
’Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror’s arch.”

Nor is this all. Sad as the state of things must be, since Spain the
persecutrix has been degraded into a suppliant, the worst of the
calamity lies in the circumstance that these new tyrants of poor
Spain and poor Russia are a people apart; a people without a
country; a people of parasites:

“Two Jews, a chosen people, can command

In every realm their Scripture-promised land.
What is the happiness of earth to them?
A congress forms their ‘New Jerusalem.’
On Shylock’s shore behold them stand afresh,
To cut from nations’ hearts their ‘pound of flesh.’”

But our modern Jeremiah’s indignation is not altogether

disinterested. He confesses elsewhere, with a candour worthy of his
prophetic character,

“In my younger days they lent me cash that way,

142
Which I found very troublesome to pay.”

And not only Byron but piety also was still inimical to the Jew.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose philosophy, in its second childhood,
sought comfort in the cradle of theology—a not uncommon
development—gives vent to some exceedingly quaint sentiments on
the subject. On April 13, 1830, he declares that the Jews who hold
that the mission of Israel is to be “a light among the nations” are
utterly mistaken. The doctrine of the unity of God “has been
preserved, and gloriously preached by Christianity alone.” No nation,
ancient or modern, has ever learnt this great truth from the Jews.
“But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still
learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the
light of the glow-worm, which gives no heat, and illumines nothing
143
but itself.” Here we find Coleridge, in the nineteenth century,
reviving the complaint of Jewish aloofness—of the provincial and
non-missionary character of Judaism—which was one of the causes
of the Roman hatred towards the race in the first. Nor is this the only
case of revival presented by Coleridge’s attitude.
Luther, three hundred years earlier had said, “I am persuaded if
the Jews heard our preaching, and how we handle the Old
144
Testament, many of them might be won.” Coleridge now says: “If
Rhenferd’s Essays were translated—if the Jews were made
acquainted with the real argument—I believe there would be a
145
Christian synagogue in a year’s time.” He is, however, somewhat
in advance of Luther, inasmuch as he does not insist upon the Jews’
abandoning circumcision and “their distinctive customs and national
type,” but advocates their admission into the Christian fold “as of the
seed of Abraham.” He is also in advance of Luther in forgiving the
Jews their claim to be considered a superior order; for he finds that
this claim was also maintained by the earlier Christians of Jewish
blood, as is attested both by St. Peter’s conduct and by St. Paul’s
protests. He also refers to the practice of the Abyssinians—another
people claiming descent from Abraham and preserving the Mosaic
Law—and asks: “Why do we expect the Jews to abandon their
national customs and distinctions?” Coleridge would be satisfied with
their rejection of the covenant of works and with their acceptance of
“the promised fulfilment in Christ.” But what really distinguishes
Coleridge’s missionary zeal from that of the great Reformer is his
demand that the Jews should be addressed “kindly.” It is hard to
imagine Coleridge in his old age taking a Jew on to London Bridge,
146
tying a stone round his neck and hurling him into the river.
 However, though three centuries of humanism had not been
altogether wasted, the philosopher is in theory as hostile to the poor
Jew as Luther himself: “The Jews of the lower orders,” he tells us,
“are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty
in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and
exclusive occupation.” Nor was this prejudiced view of the race
softened in Coleridge by his profound admiration for its literature,
any more than it was in Luther. The latter was an enthusiastic
admirer of the Psalms—the book that has played a larger part in
men’s lives than any other—and so was Coleridge: “Mr. Coleridge,
like so many of the elder divines of the Christian Church, had an
affectionate reverence for the moral and evangelical portion of the
Book of Psalms. He told me that, after having studied every page of
the Bible with the deepest attention, he had found no other part of
Scripture come home so closely to his inmost yearnings and
147
necessities.” But Coleridge’s affection for ancient Hebrew
literature deepened, if anything, his contempt for the modern Jew.
He called Isaiah “his ideal of the Hebrew prophet,” and used this
ideal as a means of emphasising his scorn for the actual: “The two
images farthest removed from each other which can be
comprehended under one term are, I think, Isaiah—‘Hear, O
heavens, and give ear, O earth!’—and Levi of Holywell Street—‘Old
clothes!’—both of them Jews, you’ll observe. Immane quantum
148
discrepant!” The philosopher does not deign to reflect on the
possible causes of this lamentable discrepancy.
Again, Coleridge, like Luther, delighted in clandestine
conversion. He was on friendly terms with several learned Jews,
and, finding them men of a metaphysical turn of mind, he liked, as
was his wont, to preach to them “earnestly and also hopelessly” on
Kant’s text regarding the “object” and “subject,” and other things
weighty, though incomprehensible. At one time he was engaged in
undermining the faith of four different victims of his zeal and
friendship, or may be of his sense of humour: a Jew, a
Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a New Jerusalemite. “He
said he had made most way with the disciple of Swedenborg, who
might be considered as convert, that he had perplexed the Jew, and
had put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that upon the
New Jerusalemite he had made no more impression than if he had
149
been arguing with the man in the moon.”
Even the genial Elia was not above entertaining and elaborating
the hoary platitude that Jews and Gentiles can never mix. Although
he declares that he has, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews, he
admits that he would not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse
with any of them. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on the one
side—of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate, on the other,
between our and their fathers, he thinks, must and ought to affect the
blood of the children. He cannot believe that a few fine words, such
as “candour,” “liberality,” “the light of the nineteenth century,” can
close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. In brief, he frankly
confesses that he does not relish the approximation of Jew and
Christian which was becoming fashionable, affirming that “the spirit
150
of the Synagogue is essentially separative.”
Yet, in defiance of Byronic wrath, of Elian humour, and of
Coleridgean theology, the demand for justice daily gained ground. In
1830 Mr. Robert Grant, member of Parliament for Inverness,
sounded the trumpet-call to battle by proposing that Jews should be
admitted to the House of Commons. The Bill was carried on the first
reading by 18 votes, but was lost on the second by 63. The initial
success of the proposal was evidence of the progress of public
opinion; its final rejection showed that there was room for further
progress. Indeed, the victory of light over darkness was not to be
won without a severe conflict: the prejudices of eighteen centuries
had to be assaulted and taken one after the other, ere triumph could
be secured. How strong these fortifications were can easily be seen
by a glance at the catalogue of any great public library under the
proper heading. There the modern Englishman’s wondering eye
finds a formidable array of pamphlets extending over many years,
and covering the whole field of racial and theological intolerance. But
the opposite phalanx, though as yet inferior in numbers, shows a
brave front too. In January, 1831, Macaulay fulminated from the
pages of the Edinburgh Review in support of the good cause:
 “The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a
separate people, living locally in this island, but living morally and
politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over
all the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or Portuguese Jew as
his countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want
of patriotic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise political
functions.”
This premosaic platitude, and other coeval arguments, Macaulay
sets himself to demolish; and, whatever may be thought of the
intrinsic value of his weapons, the principle for which he battled no
longer stands in need of vindication.
The warfare continued with vigour on both sides. The Jews,
encouraged by Mr. Grant’s partial success, went on petitioning the
House of Commons for political equality, and their petitions found a
constant champion in Lord John Russell, who year after year brought
in a Bill on the subject. But the forces of the enemy held out gallantly.
That a Jew should represent a Christian constituency, and, who
knows? even control the destinies of the British Empire, was still a
proposition that shocked a great many good souls; while others
ridiculed it as preposterous. A. W. Kinglake voices the latter class of
opponents in his Eothen. A Greek in the Levant had expressed to
the author his wonder that a man of Rothschild’s position should be
denied political recognition. The English traveller scowls at the idea,
and quotes it simply as an illustration of the Greek’s monstrous
materialism. “Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been
the Prime Minister of England! I gravely tried to throw some light
upon the mysterious causes that had kept the worthy Israelite out of
the Cabinet.” Had Kinglake been endowed with the gift of foreseeing
coming, as he was with the gift of describing current events, he
would probably never have written the eloquent page on which the
above passage occurs. But in his own day there was nothing absurd
in his attitude. Till 1828 no more than twelve Jewish brokers were
permitted to carry on business in the City of London, and vacancies
were filled at an enormous cost. Even baptized Jews were excluded
from the freedom of the City, and therefore no Jew could keep a
shop, or exercise any retail trade, till 1832.
 The struggle for the enfranchisement of the Jews was only one
operation in a campaign wherein the whole English world was
concerned, and on the result of which depended far larger issues
than the fate of the small community of English Jews. It was a
campaign between the powers of the past and the powers of the
future. Among those engaged in this struggle was a man in whom
the two ages met. He had inherited the traditions of old England, and
he was destined to promote the development of the new. His life
witnessed the death of one world and the birth of another. His career
is an epitome of English history in the nineteenth century.
In 1833 Gladstone, then aged twenty-four years, voted for Irish
Coercion, opposed the admission of Dissenters to the Universities,
and the admission of Jews to Parliament. He was consistent. Irish
Reform, Repeal of the Test Acts, and Relief of the Jews, were three
verses of one song, the burden of which was “Let each to-morrow
find us farther than to-day.” In 1847 Gladstone, then aged thirty-eight
years, “astonished his father as well as a great host of his political
supporters by voting in favour of the removal of Jewish
151
disabilities.” His desertion, as was natural, aroused a vast amount
of indignation in the camp. For had he not, only eight short years
earlier, been described as “the rising hope of the stern and
unbending Tories”? But the indignation, natural though it might be,
was unjustifiable. Gladstone was again consistent. Several important
things had happened since his first vote. Both Dissenters and
Roman Catholics had been rehabilitated. In other words, the Tory
party had surrendered their first line of defence—Anglicanism, and
abandoned their second—Protestantism: was there any reason,
except blind bigotry, for their dogged defence of the third? Gladstone
could see none. The admission of the Jews was henceforth not only
dictated by justice, but demanded by sheer logic. Furthermore, the
Jews in 1833 had been permitted to practise at the bar; in 1835 the
shrievalty had been conceded to them; in 1845 the offices of
alderman and of Lord Mayor had been thrown open to them; in 1846
an Act of Parliament had established the right of Jewish charities to
hold land, and Jewish schools and synagogues were placed on the
same footing as those of Dissenters. The same year witnessed the
repeal of Queen Anne’s statute, which encouraged conversion; of
the exception of the Jews from the Irish Naturalisation Act of 1783;
and of the obsolete statute De Judaismo, which prescribed a special
dress for Jews. After the bestowal of civil privileges, the withdrawal
of political rights was absurd. Gladstone could not conceive why
people should be loth to grant to the Jews nominal, after having
admitted them to practical equality. But though prejudice had died
out, its ghost still haunted the English mind. Men clung to the
shadow, as men will, when the substance is gone. Those orators of
the press and the pulpit whose vocation it is to voice the views of
yesterday still strove to give articulate utterance and a body to a
defunct cause. Sophisms, in default of reasons, were year after year
dealt out for popular consumption, and the position was sufficiently
irrational to find many defenders. But the result henceforth was a
foregone conclusion. Even stupidity is not impregnable. Prejudice,
resting as it did upon unreality, could not long hold out against the
batteries of commonsense.
Yet ghosts die hard. Baron Lionel de Rothschild, though returned
five times for the City of London, was not allowed to vote. Another
Jew, Alderman Salomons, elected for Greenwich in 1851, ventured
to take his seat, to speak, and to vote in the House, though in
repeating the oath he omitted the words “on the true faith of a
Christian.” The experiment cost him a fine of £500 and expulsion
from Parliament. Meanwhile, the Bill for the admission of the Jews
continued to be annually introduced, to be regularly passed by the
Commons, and as regularly rejected by the Lords. The comedy did
not come to an end till 1858, when an Act was passed allowing Jews
to omit from the oath the concluding words to which they
conscientiously objected. Immediately after Baron de Rothschild took
his seat in the House of Commons, and another “red letter day” was
added to the Jewish Calendar.
The Factories Act of 1870 permits Jews to labour on Sundays in
certain cases, provided they keep their own Sabbath; and the
Universities Tests Act, passed in the following year, just after a Jew
had become Senior Wrangler at Cambridge, enables them to
graduate at the English seats of learning without any violation to their
religious principles. At the present day the House of Commons
contains a dozen Jewish members, and there is scarcely any office
or dignity for which an English Jew may not compete on equal terms
with an English Christian. The one remnant of ancient servitude is to
be found in the Anglo-Jewish prayer for the King, in which the
Almighty is quaintly besought to put compassion into his Majesty’s
heart and into the hearts of his counsellors and nobles, “that they
may deal kindly with us and with all Israel.”
Tolerance has not failed to produce once more the results which
history has taught us to expect. As in Alexandria under the
Ptolemies, in Spain under the Saracen Caliphs and the earlier
Christian princes, and in Italy under the Popes of the Renaissance,
the Jews cast off their aloofness and participated in the intellectual
life of the Gentiles, so now they hastened to join in the work of
civilisation. When the fetters were struck off from the limbs of Israel,
more than the body of the people was set free. The demolition of the
walls of the ghettos was symbolical of the demolition of those other
walls of prejudice which had for centuries kept the Jewish colonies
as so many patches of ancient Asia, incongruously inlaid into the
mosaic of modern Europe. The middle of the eighteenth century,
which marks the spring-time of Jewish liberty, also marks the spring-
time of Jewish liberalism. It is the Renaissance of Hebrew history; a
new birth of the Hebrew soul. The Jew assumed a new form of pride:
pride in the real greatness of his past. He became once more
conscious of the nobler elements of his creed and his literature. And
with this self-consciousness there also came a consciousness of
something outside and beyond self. Moses Mendelssohn did for the
Jews of Europe what the Humanists had done for the Christians. By
introducing it to the language, literature, and life of the Gentiles
around it he opened for his people a new intellectual world, broader
and fairer than the one in which it had been imprisoned by the
persecutions of the Dark Ages; and that, too, at a moment when the
shadows of death seemed to have irrevocably closed round the body
and the mind of Israel. This deliverance, wondrous and unexpected
though it was, produced no thrill of religious emotion, it called forth
no outpourings of pious thankfulness and praise, such as had
greeted the return from the Babylonian captivity and, again, the
Restoration of the Law by the Maccabees in the days of old. The joy
of the nation manifested itself in a different manner, profane maybe
and distasteful to those who look upon nationality as an end in itself
and who set the interests of sect above the interests of man; but
thoroughly sane.
Orthodoxy, of course, continued to hug the dead bones of the
past, to denounce the study of Gentile literature and science as a
sin, and to repeat the words in which men of long ago expressed
their feelings in a language no longer spoken. This was inevitable.
Equally inevitable was another phenomenon: a religious revival
springing up simultaneously with the intellectual awakening. The
Jewish race includes many types. As in antiquity we find Hellenism
and Messianism flourishing side by side, as the preceding century
had witnessed the synchronous appearance of a Spinoza and a
Sabbataï Zebi, so now, while Moses Mendelssohn was writing
Platonic dialogues in Berlin, another representative Jew, Israel
Baalshem, was mystifying himself and his brethren with pious
152
hysteria in Moldavia. But the more advanced classes declared
themselves definitely for sober culture. The concentration which was
forced upon Judaism as a means of self-defence, more especially
after the expulsion from Spain and the subsequent oppression
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was now to a great
extent abandoned, and then ensued a period of dissent
proportionate to the previous compulsory conformity. There was a
vast difference of opinion as to the length to which reform should go.
But one result of the movement as a whole was a more or less
thorough purification of Judaism of the stains of slavery. The solemn
puerilities of the Talmud and the ponderous frivolities of Rabbinic
tradition, grotesque ritualism, and all the inartistic ineptitudes in belief
and practice, with which ages of barbarism had encrusted Judaism,
were relegated to the lumber-room of antiquarian curiosities, and all
that was fresh and truly alive in the Jewish race sought new vehicles
for the expression of new thoughts: modern emotions were
translated into modern modes of utterance and action. The
Messianic dream came to be regarded as a vision of the night,
destined to vanish in the light of freedom, and its place was taken by
an ideal of a spiritual and racial brotherhood of the Jews, based on
their common origin and history, but compatible with patriotic
attachment to the various countries of their adoption.
Nothing is more characteristic of the general healthiness of the
emancipation of the Jewish mind than the new type of renegade Jew
which it brought into being. In the Middle Ages the Jew who
renounced the faith of his fathers often considered it his sacred duty
to justify his apostasy by persecuting his former brethren. The
conditions which produced that vulgar type of renegade having
vanished, there began to appear apostates of another kind—men
who, though unwilling to devote to a sect what was meant for
mankind, or, perhaps, unable to sacrifice their own individuality to an
obsolete allegiance, yet never ceased to cherish those whom they
deserted. In them the connection of sentiment outlasted the links of
religion, and these men by their defection did more for their people
than others had done by their loyalty. Heinrich Heine, born in 1799,
was baptized at the age of twenty-five, prompted partly by the desire
to gain that fulness of freedom which in those days was still denied
to the non-Christian in Germany, but also by a far deeper motive: “I
had not been particularly fond of Moses formerly,” he said in after
life, “perhaps because the Hellenic spirit was predominant in me,
and I could not forgive the legislator of the Jews his hatred towards
all art.” The case of Benjamin Disraeli in this country was an
analogous, though not quite a similar one. Among later examples
may be mentioned the great Russo-Jewish composer Rubenstein
who, though baptized in infancy, never sought to conceal his Jewish
birth, but always spoke of it with pride—and that in a country where it
still is better for one to be born a dog than a Jew. Many of these ex-
Jews have attempted, and in part succeeded, in creating among the
Gentiles a feeling of respect towards the Jewish people as a nation
of aristocrats. And, indeed, in one sense the claim is not wholly
baseless.
Since the abolition of religious obstacles the Jews have taken an
even more prominent part in the development of the European mind
under all its aspects. Israel wasted no time in turning to excellent
account the bitterly earned lessons of experience. The persecution
of ages had weeded the race of weaklings. None survived but the
fittest. These, strong with the strength of long suffering, confident
with the confidence which springs from the consciousness of trials
nobly endured and triumphs won against incredible odds, versatile
by virtue of their struggle for existence amid so many and so varied
forms of civilisation, and stimulated by the modern enthusiasm for
progress, were predestined to success. The Western Jews, after a
training of eighteen hundred years in the best of schools—the school
of adversity—came forth fully equipped with endowments, moral and
intellectual, which enabled them, as soon as the chance offered, to
conquer a foremost place among the foremost peoples of the world.
Science and art, literature, statesmanship, philosophy, law, medicine,
and music, all owe to the Jewish intellect a debt impossible to
exaggerate. In Germany there is hardly a university not boasting a
professor Hebrew in origin, if not always in religion. Economic
thought and economic practice owe their most daring achievements
to Jewish speculation. Socialism—this latest effort of political
philosophy to reconcile the conflicting interests of society and its
constituent members—is largely the product of the Jewish genius. It
153
would be hard to enumerate individuals, for their name is legion.
But a few will suffice: Lasalle and Karl Marx in economics, Lasker in
politics, Heine and Auerbach in literature, Mendelssohn, Rubenstein
and Joachim in music, Jacoby in mathematics, Traube in medicine;
in psychology Lazarus and Steinthal, in classical scholarship and
comparative philology Benfey and Barnays are some Jewish workers
who have made themselves illustrious. Not only the purse but the
press of Europe is to a great extent in Jewish hands. The people
who control the sinews of war have contributed more than their
share to the arts and sciences which support and embellish peace.
And all this in the course of one brief half-century, and in the face of
the most adverse influences of legislation, of religious feeling and of
social repugnance. History can show no parallel to so glorious a
revolution. Mythology supplies a picture which aptly symbolises it.
Hesiod was not a prophet, yet no prophecy has ever received a
more accurate fulfilment than the poetic conception couched in the
following lines received in the Hebrew Palingenesia:
“Chaos begat Erebos and black Night;
But from Night issued Air and Day.”
 CHAPTER XXI

IN RUSSIA

The one great power in Europe which has refused to follow the new
spirit is Russia. In the middle of the sixteenth century Czar Ivan IV.,
surnamed the Terrible, voiced the feelings of his nation towards the
Jews in his negotiations with Sigismund Augustus, King of Poland.
The latter monarch had inserted in the treaty of peace a clause
providing that the Jews of Lithuania should be permitted to continue
trading freely with the Russian Empire. Ivan answered: “We do not
want these men who have brought us poison for our bodies and
souls; they have sold deadly herbs among us, and blasphemed our
Lord and Saviour.” This speech affords a melancholy insight into the
intellectual condition of the people over whom Ivan held his terrible
sway. Nor can one wonder. Printing had been popular for upwards of
a century in the rest of Europe before a press found its way into the
Muscovite Empire, where it aroused among the natives no less
astonishment and fear than the first sight of a musket did among the
inhabitants of Zululand, and was promptly consigned to the flames
by the priests, as a Satanic invention. Things did not improve during
the succeeding ages. Till the end of the seventeenth century Russia
remained almost as total a stranger to the development of the
Western world and to its nations as Tibet is at the present day.
Venice or Amsterdam loomed immeasurably larger in contemporary
imagination than the vast dominions of the White Czar. British
traders at rare intervals brought from the port of Archangel, along
with their cargoes of furs, strange tales of the snow-clad plains and
sunless forests of those remote regions, and of their savage
inhabitants: of their peculiar customs, their poverty, squalor, and
superstition. And these accounts, corroborated by the even rarer
testimony of diplomatic envoys, who in their books of travel spoke of
princes wallowing in filthy magnificence, of starving peasants, and of
ravening wolves and bears, excited in the Western mind that kind of
wonder, mingled with incredulity, which usually attends the narratives
of travellers in unknown lands.
This home of primordial barbarism was suddenly thrust upon the
attention of the civilised world by the genius of one man. Peter the
Great, a coarse and cruel, but highly gifted barbarian, conceived the
colossal plan of bridging over the gulf that separated his empire from
Western Europe, and of reaching at a single stride the point of
culture towards which others had crept slowly and painfully in the
course of many centuries. It was the conception of a great engineer,
and it required great workmen for its execution. It is, therefore, no
matter for surprise if the work, when the mind and the will of the
original designer were removed, made indifferent progress, if it
remained stationary at times, if it was partially destroyed at others. It
must also be borne in mind that Peter’s dream of a European Russia
was far from being shared by the Russian people. The old Russian
party, which interpreted the feelings of the nation, had no sympathy
with the Emperor’s ambition for a new Russia modelled on a
Western pattern. They wanted to remain Asiatic. And this party found
a leader in Peter’s own son Alexis, who paid for his disloyalty with
his life. The idea for which Alexis and his friends suffered death is
still alive. Opposition to Occidental reform and attachment to Oriental
modes of thought and conduct continue to exercise a powerful
influence in Russian politics. Europe and Asia still fight for
supremacy in the heterogeneous mass which constitutes this hybrid
Empire, and there are those who believe that, although Russia
poses as European in manner, in soul she is an Asiatic power; and
that the time will come when the slender ties which bind her to the
West will be snapped by the greater force of her Eastern affinities.
Whether this view is correct or not the future will show. Our business
is with the past.
The history of the Russian Empire from the seventeenth till the
twentieth century is largely a history of individual emperors, and its
spasmodic character of alternate progress and retrogression is
vividly illustrated by the attitude of those emperors towards their
Jewish subjects. Peter the Great welcomed them, his daughter
Elizabeth expelled them, Catherine II. re-admitted them, Alexander I.
favoured them. No democratic visionary was ever animated by a
loftier enthusiasm for the happiness of mankind than this noble
autocrat. By the Ukase of 1804 all Jews engaged in farming,
manufactures, and handicrafts, or those who had been educated in
Russian schools, were relieved from the exceptional laws against
their race; while special privileges were granted to those who could
show proficiency in the Russian, German, or Polish language. Other
decrees, issued in 1809, ensured to the Jews full freedom of trade.
These concessions, while testifying to the Emperor’s tolerant
wisdom, show the severity of the conditions under which the race
laboured normally. On the partition of Poland the Russian Empire
had received an enormous addition to its Jewish population, and the
Czars, with few exceptions, continued towards it the inhuman policy
already adopted under Casimir the Great’s successors. The Jews
were pent in ghettos, and every care was taken to check their growth
and to hamper their activity. Among other forms of oppression, the
emperors of Russia initiated towards their Jewish subjects a system
analogous to the one formerly enforced by the Sultans of Turkey on
the Christian rayahs: the infamous system of “child-tribute.” Boys of
tender age were torn from their parents and reared in their master’s
faith for the defence of their master’s dominions. Alexander I.
determined to lift this heavy yoke, and, as has been seen, he took
some initial steps towards that end. But, unfortunately, the closing
years of the high-minded idealist’s life witnessed a return to
despotism, and consequently a series of conspiracies, which in their
turn retarded the progress of freedom and hardened the hearts of its
foes.
1825 Alexander’s stern son, Nicholas I., was a
nineteenth century Phalaris. His reign was inaugurated
with an insurrectionary movement, whose failure accelerated the
triumph of the Asiatic ideals in Russian policy. Nicholas, imbued with
a strong antipathy to all that was Occidental, and convinced that the
greatness of Russia abroad depended on tyranny at home, set
himself the task of undoing the little his predecessors had done in