Uzbekistan looks to its own good
By Robert M Cutler
MONTREAL - Efforts by various parts of the former Soviet empire to create some
form of closer economic grouping have undergone yet another fit of juggling
that leaves little prospect of any fundamental advance on previous attempts.
A little less than two months ago, Uzbekistan withdrew from the Eurasian
Economic Community (EurAsEC). Then, one week ago, EurAsEC's Inter-governmental
Council ratified the agreement of its remaining five members to establish a
customs union, even though so far only Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have
declared a willingness to join it - with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for
the
moment standing to one side - and its entry into force is set only for 2011.
The two events are indirectly related, although the ratification is not a
tit-for-tat reply to Uzbekistan's decision to quit the group.
Numerous attempts have been made over the past 15 years to establish economic
cooperation organizations in Central Asia and among members of the 12-member
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
(One, Georgia has indicated its intention to quit the largely symbolic
grouping.) Among the most interesting is the idea of Kazakhstan's President
Nursultan Nazarbaev for a "Eurasian Union", in 1994. The project failed to come
to fruition due to Uzbekistan's hesitation in subscribing to it.
Some subsequent economic cooperation organizations were limited to Central
Asian countries only. The Central Asian Union (CAU) was launched in 1994 and
never really had an organizational existence, being limited to presidential
summit meetings involving Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and a few
expert committees. The CAU was expanded to include Tajikistan and renamed the
Central Asian Economic Community (CAEC) before being informally dissolved in
2001. The non-convertibility of the Uzbek currency (som) was one factor that
prevented these attempts at cooperation from being effective.
Amid the ashes of the CAU and the CAEC, the Central Asia Cooperation
Organization (CACO) was announced in 2002, comprising Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - but not including the other Central Asian republic,
Turkmenistan. Russia became a member in 2004.
In October 2005, its members decided to merge the organization with EurAsEC,
which had been founded in 2000 and whose treaty had been ratified by the five
member states in the spring of 2001. As if to add even more confusion to this
mix and while continuing his country's participation in EurAsEC, Kazakhstan's
Nazarbaev in April 2007 launched another Central Asian cooperation initiative,
also named the Central Asian Union. Uzbekistan has again declined to
participate.
EurAsEC is the inheritor of the long-dormant Customs Union of the Commonwealth
of Independent States (CIS). The CIS Customs Union, created in March 1996,
counted as members only Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Kyrgyzstan, which
together became known as the Group of Four. The Group of Four achieved a
certain stability of cooperative existence in the 1990s, although problems of
implementing agreements were never really overcome.
EurAsEC, on ratification in 2001 consisting of the Group of Four plus
Tajikistan, aims to establish the basis for a common market among its members,
including a customs union, a common external policy, common tariffs and prices,
and not excluding eventually a common currency.
Uzbekistan's membership of EurAsEC has been brief, formally joining the group
only in 2006, not long after the Western powers, including the European Union,
instituted sanctions against the country for the violent response of the
government to civil unrest in the city of Andijon. Hundreds of residents were
killed by police there in 2005 in events surrounding a trial of leaders of an
organization accused by the government of being Islamist.
More recently, the European Union has sought to improve its relations with
Uzbekistan, as has the US. Since Russia has complicated the transport of
materiel across its territory in support of Western military forces in
Afghanistan, the US and other NATO members have sought routes avoiding Russia,
for example across the Caspian Sea. Uzbekistan does not have a coastline with
the Caspian, but can serve as an important transit point to northern
Afghanistan.
Uzbekistan's geographical situation has become key for this Afghanistan
question in view of the statement earlier this year by Turkmenistan's president
Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov, at a meeting where he signed an agreement with the
Chinese to build a gas pipeline to western China, that "Chinese interests will
not be threatened" from his country's territory: meaning that a US military
presence on the ground is unlikely (see
Gas pipeline gigantism, Asia Times Online, July 17, 2008, ).
Uzbekistan's exit from EurAsEC is part and parcel of a rapprochement with the
West, as the government's international policy has over the past decade and a
half swung back and forth between Russia and the West several times.
Even so, it is doubtful that Uzbekistan's move is a quid pro quo for Western
support. Uzbekistan's moves are properly seen to be in pursuit of its own
autonomous interests within the Central Asia theater, where historical and
cultural traditions enforce a competition with northern neighbor Kazakhstan for
primacy in the region, even while a "triangulation" with Russia, the EU, and
the US is sporadically in evidence.
The significant number of initiatives to promote interstate economic
cooperation in Eurasia have always had problems in their implementation and in
the resolution of contradictions between these agreements and other
arrangements that the states individually have entered into with third parties.
Moreover, while the EU, seen by many as a template for closer union of once
disparate economies, was first created as the European Coal and Steel Community
around a fundamental sector of industrial production, no such material base
appears provides the "glue" for EurAsEC cooperation, not even energy - although
the formation of an common energy market figures among the organization's
general goals.
It is not clear what the EurAsEC Customs Union offers to Russia and Belarus
that is not already accessible under the plans, dating from the 1990s, for a
Union State of Russia and Belarus. At the same time, Kazakhstan has for some
time been discontented with restraints upon its own development imposed by
Russia. One example is the Kremlin's consistent refusal to redeem its
contractual promise to expand the volume of the oil pipeline from northwestern
Kazakhstan across southern Russia to Novorossiisk on the Black Sea.
With Uzbekistan's exit from the EurAsEC system of cooperation, the latter is
reduced once more to the Group of Four plus Tajikistan. And when one looks at
the size of the different national economies concerned, after the withdrawal of
Uzbekistan, EurAsEC appears essentially as a multilateral framework built upon
the coordination of economic activity between the state structures of Russia
and Kazakhstan.
Indeed, according to a Kremlin source cited in Russian media and reported by
the Azerbaijani Trends News Agency, other EurAsEC members were excluded due to
their low level of economic development.
For all these reasons, it is difficult to see why the present initiative should
be any more successful than in the past, even though the quality of the
technical and legal work behind it may formally be quite high. Uzbekistan's
turn towards the West is best seen in the context of its own attempts to define
a higher international profile, notably using the conflict in Afghanistan as
the instrument towards this end.
Robert M Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org) is senior research
fellow, Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton
University, Canada.
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(One, Georgia has indicated its intention to quit the largely symbolic
grouping.) Among the most interesting is the idea of Kazakhstan's President
Nursultan Nazarbaev for a "Eurasian Union", in 1994. The project failed to come
to fruition due to Uzbekistan's hesitation in subscribing to it.
