The Resurgence of Central Asian Connectivity

It is early September 2017 at the Dostyk border post, where southern Kyrgyzstan meets Uzbekistan’s Andijan region. Located only a few kilometers outside of Osh, Dostyk became instrumental in separating communities that were once united: until the summer, people could only cross it by producing a so-called telegramma – an official proof of invitation received from across the border. A lively ceremony is held to mark the reopening of Dostyk or, more precisely, the termination of this strict invitation-only policy. Local leaders from either side of the border and Kyrgyzstan’s deputy prime minister noted the progress made by bilateral relations in the preceding year, highlighting the benefits that a working border post may bring to the economies of the neighboring regions and, most importantly, the daily lives of local communities.

Fast-forward seven weeks and move a few hundred kilometers north to the border between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. There you will be met by long queues of lorries and a multitude of people trying to enter Kazakhstan. Despite common membership in the Eurasian Economic Union — an organization that is purportedly establishing a customs union across post-Soviet Eurasia  — the Kyrgyz Republic and Kazakhstan are entangled in a customs dispute in which the latter unilaterally imposed stricter checks on incoming people and goods from Kyrgyzstan. In a two-week timeframe across late October 2017, the number of individuals and vehicles crossing the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border at Ak-Zhol and Ak-Tilek decreased by 240 percent. Trade with, or through, Kazakhstan is a key component of Kyrgyzstan’s commercial activity; Radio Azattyk confirmed that newly introduced controls inevitably led to an increase in contraband practices at major border posts, including Korday [Zhambyl oblast’, Kazakhstan]. Meanwhile, the government in Bishkek continues to protest Kazakhstan’s actions to both the WTO and the EEU, and Kyrgyz media is awash with pictures of fruits and vegetables rotting at different border posts.

Remarkably, both the deteriorating situation at the Kazakh-Kyrgyz border and the Uzbek-Kyrgyz rapprochement sealed by more relaxed controls at Dostyk and elsewhere are the direct ramifications of high and lows in personal relations between the leaders of the states in question. Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Uzbekistan’s leader since the death of Islam Karimov in August 2016, embarked on a charm offensive to re-establish good relations with neighboring Kyrgyzstan. This policy culminated in an official visit to Kyrgyzstan — the first by an Uzbek president since 2000 — in which Mirziyoyev signed a border agreement with his Kyrgyz counterpart, Almazbek Atambayev. Reportedly, the rationale of the Kazakh-Kyrgyz dispute is also very personal: despite official rhetoric, the hardening of Kazakhstan’s customs policy was designed in retaliation to a series of offensive remarks made by Atambayev to comment on Nursultan Nazarbayev’s decision to meet with one of the candidates running in Kyrgyzstan’s 2017 presidential election. Central Asia’s foreign policymaking remains in this sense an extremely personalized environment, in which the leaders’ impulses are critical drivers behind the alternation of highlights and lowlights in inter-state relations.

There is nevertheless more than the leaders’ personalities to recent tightening and relaxations in Central Asia’s customs policies. Globally, the movement of people and goods across international borders is perceived as a bitterly divisive issue. In Central Asia, the mechanisms determining who and what transits across regional borders have been equally politicized, and remained essentially subjugated to the authoritarian agendas that crystallized regionally since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, the political imperatives of the emerging regimes dominated the strategies through which new international boundaries were demarcated. More recently, the logic of authoritarian control sealed the majority of these borders, which thus became symbols of isolation and instruments of insulation from external actors, influences, and pressures.

Despite the advance of globalization, and notwithstanding China’s recent push for regional connectivity, Central Asia retreated into one of the most dis-integrated and disconnected regions in the world: the five regional states showed very little interest in establishing mutually sustainable commercial relations and, perhaps most disconcertingly, failed to engage multilaterally in any meaningful way. The consolidation of authoritarianism prevented the progress of Central Asian integration and set apparently insurmountable obstacles to the dual enhancement of connectivity and integration in the region. Looking at the current border kerfuffle between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the process of regional dis-integration appears to be irreversible. Recent improvements in Uzbek-Kyrgyz relations, on the other hand, paint a much rosier picture of the prospects for inter-state cooperation in Central Asia.

If anything, the very uncertain scenario crystallizing in late 2017 tells us that Central Asia’s connectivity may actually be at a crossroads, at a time in which an inevitable process of generational change is shaking up the authoritarian leaderships of the five regional states. This complex nexus sits at the core of this article, which will describe how the regional norm of non-democratic governance influenced Central Asia’s understandings of connectivity, while shaping the local states’ attitude to regional integration.

The Death of Central Asian Connectivity

In October 2005, the incorporation of the Organization of Central Asian Cooperation (known by its Russian acronym TsAS) into the Evraziiskoe Ekonomicheskoe Soobshchestvo (Eurasian Economic Community, or EvrAzEs) decreed the ultimate failure of Central Asian regionalism. TsAS represented the last multilateral organization featuring a membership exclusively limited to the five Central Asian republics: with its disappearance Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan lost the only forum available to discuss their affairs without the interference of non-regional actors. Perhaps most significantly, the Central Asian states elected not to replace TsAS with an analogous organization, a decision that ushered in an unprecedented era of dis-integration.

This dramatic lack of regional cooperation enhanced Central Asia’s international isolation, which is nevertheless a phenomenon generally exaggerated in mainstream media and commentaries. Such relative isolation, however, appears to be also influenced by the many authoritarian choices made by the individual Central Asian states.

Even after TsAS had become obsolete, a number of regional actors, and Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in particular, devised with some consistency policy strategies pursuing proactive international agendas. Kazakhstani Eurasianism is essentially a policy umbrella for a series of more or less functional multilateral initiatives aimed at internationally legitimizing President Nazarbayev and, indirectly, the regime he has been leading since independence. For Kyrgyzstan, beyond its pragmatic attempt to address some of the country’s many infrastructural problems, participation in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) addressed the need to overcome the many limitations that small stateness and the neighborhood’s increasing connectedness are imposing on the Kyrgyz Republic.

The authoritarian leaderships of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, on the other hand, progressively receded into a cocoon of self-imposed isolation. Saparmurat Niyazov and, after 2006, Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov interpreted the official state policy of neutrality as a vehicle to close off the country from external influences. Turkmenistan withdrew from any kind of multilateral engagement (including, in 2005, the moribund CIS) and closed off its borders to foreign visitors and investors, pursuing an essentially autarkic politico-economic agenda that has recently begun to display some visible cracks.

Under Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan renounced contributing in any significant way to regional cooperation, concealing an increasingly isolationist outlook behind empty narratives that drew parallels between post-Soviet regionalism and the establishment of a new, mythical Turkestan. Rhetoric notwithstanding, the Karimov regime relinquished the central role that geography and size assigned to Uzbekistan, and began to act as one of Central Asia’s key disintegrators. Nothing captures this isolationist trend more poignantly than Tashkent’s unilateral withdrawal from Central Asia’s unified electricity grid, which, since 2009, exerted an extremely detrimental influence on the energy security, and indirectly the living standards, of ordinary Uzbek citizens. Equally destabilizing were Karimov’s difficult relations with his Tajik and Kyrgyz counterparts: Uzbekistan’s progressive disentanglement from its closest neighbors led to the interruption of basic transportation links, the arbitrary closure of borders, and the introduction of convoluted visa systems, bringing to the fore a series of measures that came to complicate enormously the daily lives of communities living in Uzbekistan’s border areas and, more widely, Central Asia’s transnational connections.

For much of the post-Soviet era, Central Asia’s regional relations were dictated by this irreconcilable combination of relatively outward-looking states and increasingly closed-off partners. This elusive equilibrium led to the effective implosion of the region’s political and economic ties: the demise of TsAS terminated the long chain of ineffective regional organizations that, since 1992, had linked together the five republics, while commercial relations and intra-Central Asia investment flows collapsed under the pressure exerted by the diverging economic choices made by the national regimes.

The latter point is illustrated with greater precision by a rapid glance at the ultimately insignificant economic relationship connecting Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Despite their 1994 pledge to establish a common economic area — which was meant to also include Kyrgyzstan — the post-Soviet leaderships of Central Asia’s two key states embarked upon essentially irreconcilable economic policies: as an inward-looking Uzbekistan became a marginal destination for overseas direct investment originating in Kazakhstan, the parties’ commercial relations remained largely undeveloped throughout the Karimov era. In the same years, failure to launch an Uzbek-Kazakhstani economic partnership wielded a major influence on wider dynamics of regional cooperation. It is virtually impossible to image any meaningful form of regionalism in Central Asia as long as these two core partners continue to ignore each other on an economic level.

Paradoxically, recent strategies of infrastructure development exerted a very negative impact on Central Asia’s connectivity. A look at the trajectories that came to define the region’s infrastructure system from independence until the death of Islam Karimov revealed that, ultimately, the Central Asian states had prioritized the construction of transport, energy, and trade links with non-regional partners, establishing as a consequence an essentially centrifugal infrastructure network. Such decision-making entrenched the peculiar conformation that this network had invariably inherited from the Soviet Union, when Central Asia’s transport, transit, and commercial links were aimed at enhancing the region’s connectivity with the Union’s center rather than promoting a sustainable network of local infrastructure. A few examples may be of help here. The only pipelines built by post-Soviet Turkmenistan, for instance, meant to increase natural gas trade with the Islamic Republic of Iran first and, in 2009, the People’s Republic of China. Kazakhstan’s successful construction of a domestic pipeline system, moreover, facilitated the eventual commercialization of energy ties with China, in a move that recently saw the government in Astana expressing some interest in sending significant gas volumes over the border.

The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative made a further, and ultimately more peculiar, contribution to the dis-integration of Central Asia. As it developed during a protracted period of economic crisis, the transport links constructed within the BRI framework progressively reduced the region to a mere conduit for the transit of goods destined to other markets. The Western China-Western Europe Expressway offers a fitting example here. The construction of the Kazakhstani section of the highway (approximately 2,800 km long) is taking place at a time when the Kazakhstani economy is struggling to come to terms with the harsh reality posed by low hydrocarbon prices. The end of the economic dream fostered by the Nazarbayev regime hit Kazakhstan’s middle class most severely; their capacity to enjoy the increasing supply of goods associated with the new expressway is now questionable. Construction work is also bringing very little employment, as the highway is mainly built by Chinese labor residing in Kazakhstan for the medium term. The ultimate benefits for BRI development in Kazakhstan are likely going to be reaped by the political and economic elites associated with the president and Kazakhstan’s first family. It is by looking at the offshore Silk Roads described by Alexander Cooley and John Heathershaw that we may recognize some of the numerous non-transparent ends pursued through infrastructure development in Kazakhstan and beyond.

Central Asia is therefore shaped as an essentially disconnected and dis-integrated region, with very little politico-economic cooperation going on between the states and, in turn, the local populations, as grassroots connectivity has been systematically frustrated by the many factors we examined above. This is not to say that, as a region, Central Asia does not exist: common cultural, historical, linguistic, and societal links are evident to whoever travels the region while being regularly highlighted in the Central Asian academic discourse on regionalism. It is the particular form of politics crystallized during the post-Soviet era that is attempting to un-weave this very regional fabric. With little or no change in regional political dynamics, in other words, there is limited hope for the re-emergence of an interconnected Central Asia.

A series of recent developments, however, suggest that regional connectivity may be slowly returning to a minimally functional level. In one way or the other, these developments relate to a single landmark event, namely the accession to power of a new leader in Tashkent.

The Post-Karimov Resurgence of Connectivity From Within

On March 22, 2017, the high-speed Tulpar-Targo train left Almaty-2 station and embarked upon its maiden journey, which ended 16 hours later when the convoy slowly rolled into Tashkent’s central station. A few weeks earlier, the Uzbek government had announced that, from April 2017, Ozbekiston Havo Yollari was expected to resume direct flights to Dushanbe, the capital of neighboring Tajikistan. While the new train line is offering an additional option to travel between Almaty and Tashkent – arguably Central Asia’s two major cities – the re-establishment of a regular air link between Tashkent and Dushanbe brought to a very welcome end the 25-year interruption in direct flight connections between the two capitals.

As these new links become entrenched realities in Central Asia’s changing transport map, there is a general sense that a trend of connectivity from within – namely one that is not sponsored by external actors, be they foreign states or international companies – is finally re-emerging across the region.

Undoubtedly, the accession to power of Shavkat Mirziyoyev has to be seen as the crucial vector facilitating the comeback of intra-Central Asia connectivity, if only because the policies implemented so far by the new Uzbek president reversed some of the most severely isolationist strategies of the late Karimov years. International commentators, perhaps too hurriedly, associated this more active foreign policy to the blossoming of an Uzbek spring, suggesting that a wider process of political liberalization may be somehow enmeshed in Mirziyoyev’s external policies.

To my mind, the kind of connectivity by default promoted by the Uzbek regime in 2017 is integral to a wider charm offensive through which Mirziyoyev and his associates intend to bring a sustainable inflow of foreign investment back into Uzbekistan. While political openings are likely to remain very limited, Mirziyoyev’s economic strategies seem to be tailored around the acquisition of a more globalizing outlook, similar by design to that pursued by neighboring Kazakhstan. In this sense, the new Uzbek regime appears to be diluting its more extreme policies, with a view to reach an internationally acceptable degree of authoritarianism that may in turn be conducive to economic development.

A specific example may identify with greater precision the meaning of this latter proposition. Rather than being inspired by a genuine commitment to human rights, the invitations recently extended to Human Rights Watch and the BBC to reopen their offices in Tashkent sought to propagate the idea that Uzbek politics is slowly returning to the international norm and that, as a consequence, Uzbekistan is now open for business. Economic growth was the prize eyed by the new leadership in Tashkent in this context, as these very invitations were quickly followed by the announcement of a $125 million loan agreed by the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development – the first issued to Uzbekistan since 2010.

From whatever standpoint we assess the current Uzbek policy course, Mirziyoyev’s accession to power has been beneficial to Central Asia’s regional cooperation. Two recent developments, in particular, confirmed that regional connectivity has returned to represent a meaningful process rather than an aspirational end routinely mentioned at the numerous bilateral summits periodically held across Central Asia.

On November 8, 2017, Uzbekenergo announced the conclusion of the infrastructural work required to re-integrate the Uzbek electricity grid with Tajikistan’s, in a move that may facilitate the eventual return to an integrated electricity network across the region. Central Asia watchers welcomed this news with unprecedented optimism, remarking that, if pursued – Tajikistan is yet to confirm its intention to be part of the plan – grid re-integration may actually become a landmark event in Central Asia’s regional politics. The decision to deepen electricity cooperation with Tajikistan is the latest in a series of steps through which the Uzbek regime is seeking to enhance energy connectivity across the Central Asia. In addition to another major electricity deal concluded with Turkmenistan (August 2017), Uzbekistan also finalized an oil purchase agreement with Kazakhstan with a view to enhance the capacity of the $2.2 billion refinery to be constructed in Jizzakh region – one of Mirziyoyev’s flagship projects. Region-wide electricity cooperation is a critical step toward the enhancement of the populations’ energy security, which has become very precarious against the backdrop of the idiosyncratic energy strategies pursued by the Central Asian regimes throughout the post-Soviet years. 

In a perhaps less publicized – yet not necessarily less significant – announcement, the governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan disclosed their intention to establish a series of joint zones of economic and industrial development in their bordering regions. This plan forms part of a wider collaborative framework whereby the parties are intending to increase their trade turnover by 150 percent, reaching a total commerce of approximately $5 billion by the end of the decade. A strengthening bilateral partnership between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as we have seen above, has the potential to become the locomotive for the progressive economic integration of Central Asia as a whole.

How different are these initiatives from other connectivity projects that are currently implemented in Central Asia? A relatively limited scope, which reveals an incrementalist outlook, confers these two specific initiatives a modicum of feasibility exceeding that held by analogous projects developing across the region. Take the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project, for instance. Designed to connect the gas fields in eastern Turkmenistan with India, after a tortuous route crossing both Afghanistan and Pakistan, this natural gas pipeline became a symbol of infrastructural virtuality, as its elevated costs, scarce profitability, and insecure transit options are obstructing the current progress and future completion of the construction works, reportedly started in late 2015. As a colossal project, TAPI pursues a utopian form of regional connectivity, one that is not consistent with the current economic environment – predicated upon low commodity prices – and is moreover detached from the authoritarian reality of the regional partners, in this case Turkmenistan, which is unlikely to open up the consortium membership to Western energy companies or investors. The achievement of grid re-integration between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, on the other hand, is based on already existing infrastructure and requires the injection of amounts of capital that are realistic vis-à-vis Central Asia’s current economic circumstances. 

Their essentially bilateral outlook represents a second important marker for the initiatives described above. Until its eventual death in 2005, Central Asia’s post-Soviet regionalism came to be defined by an excruciatingly long series of multilateral initiatives, pursuing chaotic connectivity agendas through vaguely defined policy steps. Mirziyoyev’s regional strategy, to the contrary, seems to be pivoting on relatively low-profile connectivity activities, which the Uzbek leader uses to engage his Central Asian counterparts bilaterally. The prospected creation of unified economic zones between southern Kazakhstan and the Tashkent oblast, for instance, aims at marrying economic localism with state-level cooperation, dovetailing a wider logic of economic cooperation with the strengthening of cross-boundaries transport linkages, as confirmed by the launch of a new Shymkent-Tashkent bus line announced in March 2017. In this context, transport, energy, trade connectivity is interpreted – correctly, to my mind – as a means to develop Central Asian regionalism, in a move that may dramatically alter the region’s modus operandi, which has so far seen the strengthening of inter-state connectivity as an objective elusively pursued by top-down multilateral cooperation.

Connectivity Now, Integration When?

The power transfer in Tashkent brought with it, perhaps unexpectedly, a timid return of regional connectivity across Central Asia. The early Mirziyoyev era saw Uzbekistan re-engaging with its regional partners through a series of targeted initiatives, which are facilitating the movement of people and goods across regional borders, while attempting to transform Central Asia into a more integrated energy market. Ordinary Central Asians have to be seen as key beneficiaries of these policies, which are removing some of the artificial barriers that the local leaders erected against inter-state cooperation. The taxing burden imposed on the Kyrgyz population by the current border dispute between Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan is a timely reminder that leaders’ whims continue to obstruct people-to-people links across the region.

The transformative potential of the connectivity policies associated with the rise of Mirziyoyev is significant, perhaps even more than the one inscribed within BRI, which has so far brought limited economic benefit to the region. While absolutely consistent with the regional norm of authoritarian policymaking, Uzbekistan’s attempts to reconnect with its immediate neighborhood injected new life into the idea of a more integrated, cohesive Central Asia. It is refreshing to note the very different approach of the new Uzbek leader, who shunned the grandiloquence of his predecessor and of his regional counterparts to introduce apparently minor policy changes that are nevertheless making the difference at local level.

If we consider Uzbekistan’s economic recovery as the key aim behind Mirziyoyev’s charm offensive, then we have to query these policies’ sustainability beyond short-term GDP growth or immediate improvements in the Uzbek trade turnover. While a more connected Central Asia certainly represents a positive environment to promote Uzbekistan’s economic growth, the opposite may not hold true.

It is difficult to predict whether an economically viable Uzbek state will stimulate a meaningful form of state integration in Central Asia, addressing longstanding problems, including the shared use of water resources, the harmonization of policies and regulations, and the establishment of a single, unified market across the region. Despite recent progresses, in this sense, there is a very long way to go to fully remove the numerous hurdles that 25 years of idiosyncratic policymaking set against inter-state cooperation in Central Asia.