Making Eurasia Stable

S. Frederick Starr

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1996

Article preview: first 500 of 4,361 words total.

Summary:  Central Asia is central to Eurasian security despite its seeming remoteness. Blessed with natural riches, it nevertheless has two wars in progress, ethnic and religious tensions, a limited amount of democracy, and far to go in development. Whether Central Asia consolidates its independence or slides into chaos will help determine whether Russia develops as a normal nation free from regional insecurities and imperial longings. Uzbekistan may be an island of stability and a potential anchor.

S. Frederick Starr, Distinguished Fellow at the Aspen Institute, is the author of 13 books on Russian and Eurasian history, politics, and culture.

UZBEKISTAN AT THE CENTER

Central Asia, scene of the Great Game between England and Russia in the nineteenth century, is once more a key to the security of all Eurasia. Since the fifteenth century the region has mainly been politically organized from without; from the 1870s Russia controlled most of its vast territory. The collapse of the Soviet Union four years ago left five new states and placed the area's fate in question. Whether stability comes, and how, will affect Eurasia as a whole, and particularly Russia in its transition to democracy.

Central Asia--Afghanistan and the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan--is strategic despite its seeming remoteness. It borders China, Russia, Iran, and Pakistan and the four major cultural zones they represent; Islam is a significant force without and within. The region possesses some of the world's largest deposits of oil, natural gas, gold, and uranium. The site of the bloodiest war of the past generation, between Afghan rebels and Soviet troops, the region is now roiled by civil wars in Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Huge stores of conventional weapons in several of the countries pose problems. The area also produces or acts as a conduit for much of the heroin reaching Europe. For these reasons alone Central Asia cannot be ignored.

There are three possibilities for the region. It could come under the hegemony of one or more outside powers, Russia being the most likely candidate. It could lapse into chaos--Tajikistan and Afghanistan already have--threatening the security of adjoining regions. Or it could achieve equilibrium and coherence from within, through the emergence of an anchor state or states.

The growth of one or more strong centers would fill a political vacuum in Central Asia, eliminating what has long been the main rationale for foreign encroachment and so helping protect Russia's fragile democracy from the potentially fatal temptation of expansionism. Most important, a Central Asian stabilizer would quickly become the third leg of a tripod of power in the former Soviet Union, alongside Russia and Ukraine. This could create a healthy balance that would best serve the interests of regional security, Europe, and NATO.

Among the Central Asian nations, only Uzbekistan appears to have the potential to be such a stabilizer. But for Westerners, Uzbekistan is an unfamiliar country in an unfamiliar region, and so far it has been relegated to the periphery of U.S. policy.

WHY NO OTHER STATE WILL SERVE

Seven decades of Soviet rule and central planning deformed the politics and economies of the Central Asian states, each in a different way. Four years after independence the countries of the region are still struggling to find and follow their distinct paths to the overall development that each acknowledges is necessary.

Kazakhstan gained great short-term diplomatic benefit from agreeing to relinquish the nuclear weapons left on its soil after the Soviet breakup. It will be a country to reckon with because of its enormous oil reserves. Adroit leadership by President Nursultan Nazarbayev and ...

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