MONTREAL - China's emergence as an important player in the development and use
of energy resources found in the Caspian Sea basin, alongside longer
established interests emanating from Russia, Europe and the United States, is a
reminder of the ever-changing dynamics of the region, too easily overlooked
during periods of apparent statis, such as during the late Soviet era.
Yet the appearance of this new power in the region also confirms the essential
stability of a core group of relationships about which others wax and wane,
with a periodicity of possible future importance that China's presence can help
us to identify.
Two bilateral energy relations, Kazakhstan-Russia and Turkmenistan-Russia, are
of such import and duration that we can justifiably speak of the
Kazakhstan-Russia-Turkmenistan triangle
as the foundation for the evolution of Central Eurasian energy geo-economics.
That is the case, even though the third leg of that triangle, the relations
between Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, is only beginning to manifest itself
through cooperation over the gas pipeline to China.
Development of hydrocarbon energy resources in Central Asia and the South
Caucasus began independently of each other, although they share the same
chronology. Yet despite the apparent disorder of everyday life in the region
over the past decade and a half, "patterns", if not a "logic", that recur and
recombine in different and ever newer ways are detectable.
In particular, it is possible to detect three phases over the past 16 years in
Caspian/Central Asia energy development and its connection with the South
Caucasus. The first, from 1993 to 1998, we can term the "bubbling up" phase;
the second, from 1999 to 2004, "settling down" phase; and the third, from 2005
to 2010, as the "running deep" period.
The Kazakhstan-Russia-Turkmenistan triangle is the fundamental fact, and here
it is worth noting that network sociologists in the 1990s demonstrated that the
dynamic of triangular, or triadic, relations are qualitatively different from
any aggregation of bilateral, or dyadic, relations. [1]
By circumstance, a different strategic player - a "fourth vertex" - became the
principal motor of developments during each of the three phases identified
above. From 1993 to 1998, this was the United States; from 1999 to 2004, it was
the European Union or at least several of its member-states and their "national
champions" such as BP for the United Kingdom and Eni for Italy; from 2005 to
2010, it has been China. Each of these fourth players has interacted in
different pairs from the initial three, setting up their own triangles of
development.
During the first phase, in addition to the basic Kazakhstan-Russia-Turkmenistan
triangle, the US was the fourth player - creating a Kazakhstan-Russia-US
triangle, immediately in evidence over the question of an export pipeline for
Tengiz crude.
American offshore terminals in the Gulf of Mexico were the first intended
targets of Kazakhstani oil shipments. Also during these years, the US embassy
in Almaty (then Kazakhstan's capital) proved essential to Russia and Kazakhstan
for the restructuring of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, enabling the CPC's
pipeline to be subsequently in fact built.
Western interest in Turkmenistan at this time was exclusively US interest,
concentrated on ameliorating Ukraine's payments situation as an importer from
Turkmenistan and also promoting the first attempt to negotiate a
Turkmenistan-Azerbaijan Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline (TCGP). In the 1990s, US
companies GE Capital, Bechtel and PSG were the driving forces behind this
pipeline. The US-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan triangle remained undeveloped.
From 1999 to 2004, the EU became the fourth vertex associated with the
fundamental Central Asian energy triangle, with EU interest in gas from
Turkmenistan in the early part of the present decade after the American project
had failed. The EU's latest initiative, led by the German company RWE, is for a
Turkmenistan-Azerbaijan gas link descending from that failed project.
The EU-Russia-Kazakhstan triangle was manifested in European and Russian
interest in developing the Kashagan deposit and other North Caspian fields in
Kazakhstan's offshore, though the European interest was from EU member states
and their national champions, rather than from the EU itself.
The EU-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan triangle was manifested also in the failed
Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline project and other designs still on the
drawing-board, with more or less direct successors being the idea to pipe
Kashagan's associated gas to Azerbaijan, and the proposed Kazakhstan-Caspian
Transportation System (KCTS), also for Kashagan if not Tengiz oil.
Finally in the third phase, from 2005 to 2010, China comes into a prominence as
the fourth vertex.
The China-Turkmenistan-Russia triangle is animated by contradiction between
China and Russia over Turkmenistan's natural gas, as in the competition between
Russia's unrealized project for a refurbished Caspian Coastal (Prikaspii)
Pipeline on the one hand and, on the other, the Turkmenistan-China gas pipeline
now under construction.
The China-Kazakhstan-Russia triangle is also animated by a China-Russia
contradiction, in for example the China-Russia competition to buy out the
Canadian firm Petrokazakhstan (previously Hurricane Hydrocarbons).
Petrokazakhstan owned a piece of the pipeline that China needed to put together
its Tengiz-Xinjiang oil pipeline, a westward extension of the pipeline from
eastern Kazakhstan to China agreed to in the late 1990s and which entered into
service after long negotiations over implementation.
Finally, the China-Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan triangle is manifest in the gas
pipeline, negotiated on the basis of a bilateral China-Kazakhstan project, now
being built from Turkmenistan, through Uzbekistan, and then through Kazakhstan
to western China. There, it will join up with the "West-East" Pipeline in China
running to the coast, which Beijing constructed earlier this decade, and for
precisely this reason, at a financial loss.
We can identify, therefore, three periods of "epigenetic" development ( that
is, each period building out or "accreting" from what went before), starting
from the basis of the Russia-Turkmenistan-Kazakhstan triangle, then
successively adding on the US, then the EU, then China, as fourth vertices,
consecutively driving the evolution of the network as a whole.
The terms "bubbling up," "settling down," and "running deep" characterize these
phases. To put flesh on this skeleton, "bubbling up" refers to how, after the
Soviet state disestablished itself, new possibilities for patterns of
international relations began to percolate from events on the ground,
relatively free from the hierarchical constraints that characterized the
bipolar Cold War system.
In the realm of Eurasian energy development, this means that the years
1993-1998 were marked principally by proposals for new exploration for and
development of resources, and pipeline construction. "Settling down", referring
to the 1999-2004 period, identifies the fact that it was during these years
that some of those projects acquired a life of their own and moved toward
physical realization. Others died, or perhaps entered a state of suspended
animation. "Running deep" designates those years (2005-2010) when such projects
that had acquired life began to operate and thrive. Put another way, the three
phases can be considered periods of, successively, emergence, self-produced
development, and coherence.
If we now look ahead, an increasing body of work, involving independently
conducted studies that use distinctively different methods for prediction and
forecast, strongly suggests that international relations as a network will
begin to undergo another radical transformation beginning in about the early
2040s - that is, about 32 years hence, or about twice the overall length of
time considered above. [2]
That then raises the question of whether the period just considered is, then,
itself only the initial, or "bubbling up", phase of the transformation forecast
to start in the early 2040s.
If that is so, then we are now at the start of a "settling down" metaphase of
the present international system, including international energy geo-economics,
that is, in turn, likely to be followed, if the present metaphase lasts more or
less 16 years, by a third, "running-deep" metaphase of similar duration,
bringing us to the early 2040s - and the possible transformational turmoil
equivalent in quality and extent to the end of the Cold War. This change,
clearly, cannot yet be described, as its nature will depend upon the system's
evolution, including energy geo-economics, in the interim.
This is a perspective from which the coming "settling-down metaphase" of
Eurasian energy geo-economics can, and possibly must, be seen, for it offers a
broader, and valuable context for considering issues and decisions of present
importance regarding the vital resources of the region and their use far
further afield - from the Nabucco and South Stream gas pipelines, to White
Stream, to the broader significance of the "Trans-Anatolian" (Sansum-Ceyhan)
oil pipeline, and other others. Stay tuned.
Notes
1. For examples, see: Ronald L. Breiger, Explorations in Structural Analysis:
Dual and Multiple Networks of Social Structure (New York: Garland Press, 1991);
Phillippa E. Pattison, Algebraic Models for Social Networks (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993); Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust,
Social Network Analysis, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
2. See literature review in Robert Denemark, "World System History: From
Traditional International Politics to the Study of Global Relations,"
International Studies Review, Vol. 1, No.2 (1999), pp 167-199.
Dr Robert M Cutler (http://www.robertcutler.org), educated at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan, has
researched and taught at universities in the United States, Canada, France,
Switzerland, and Russia. Now senior research fellow in the Institute of
European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University, Canada, he also
consults privately in a variety of fields.
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