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Travails of the Caspian Region: Five Perspectives
by Frederick Starr
Fred Starr is Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Summary
The countries of the Caspian region are facing a common set of problems, but opinions about their causes vary from country to country. Some explanations stress deep-rooted patterns of geography and history, while others stress the vagaries of leadership, or their willingness to adopt the required set of reform policies. The influence of the Soviet era still looms large: most of the "bad habits" of the region and the mind-set of the contemporary leaders date back to Soviet times. During the last decades of the Soviet regime, Moscow''s influence over the area began to wane, as investment was cut back and new revolutionary forces were emerging south of the Soviet border. Since 1970 the countries of the Caspian region have been waging a steady struggle for independence. This struggle is still not yet over, and this interferes with the countries'' ability to focus on the challenges of democratization and market reform.
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It is no secret that the new states of the Caspian region are all experiencing severe travails today. Well-wishers at home and abroad are quick to point out their achievements as well, such as the preservation of sovereignty, the establishment of institutions appropriate for independent states, their entry into major international bodies, etc. But these all seem to pale in comparison to their current problems.
Nor is the nature of those difficulties in dispute: internal and interstate tensions arising from conflicting identities, both religious and ethnic; social stress caused by absolute poverty and the polarization of incomes; economies that are torn between new market principles and old practices of centralized planning; states that are at once too weak to fulfill public expectations and at the same time inclined to act in ways that appear capricious or authoritarian; flawed elections; and legal systems that permit corruption while alienating law-abiding citizens and foreign investors.
While there is general agreement on the general nature of the problems facing the new states, there is by no means a consensus over their origins and hence over the best prescription for overcoming them. One school of thought goes so far as to minimize or deny the extent to which the various problems and pathologies manifested in the new states are common to them all. According to this view, which is not uncommon within the region, the profound differences between Georgia and Turkmenistan, Armenia and Kazakhstan, never ceased under Russian and Soviet rule. The collapse of the USSR enabled these differences to come once more into the light. Any effort to generalize about problems across the region is to miss their fundamentally distinctive character in each country. To proponents of this view, the so-called "Caspian region" is really no region at all, except in a geographic sense. Only a perspective that is rooted in distance and ignorance could see it otherwise.
With this exception, all other perspectives on the state of the region begin with the reasonable assumption that common problems are likely to have common origins. From this point on, however, they head in sharply different directions. Surveying a large and variegated body of evidence, one may speak of five main alternative approaches. Viewed in isolation, each seems quite reasonable, and each can be found imbedded in authoritative writings on the region. But while they overlap somewhat, they are ultimately incompatible with one another. Most important, the various operational implications that derive from them are so divergent as to force us to take them seriously. Like it or not, we must carefully weigh each perspective and make choices among them.
The first view traces the origins of current problems in the regional states to their failure to proceed swiftly with privatization and democratization. Whatever their past experience, each of these states is capable of successful development, if only it will deliberately set about the work of reform. Accordingly, each should be rewarded with Western aid in proportion to its commitment to this task. The great advantage of this approach (assuming that it is valid) is that it provides a ready scale by which progress in each country can be measured. Allowing for a certain amount of refinement, such a perspective finds particular support in the Department of State and the agencies it controls.
The problem with this hypothesis is that it does not fit the facts. Kyrgyzstan has, until recently, been relatively more democratic than its neighbors. Its boldness in economic reform is exemplary, making it the first country of the former Soviet Union to gain admission into the World Trade Organization. Yet Kyrgyzstan''s economy is on the verge of collapse and the country is beset by all the pathologies common to the region as a whole. Georgia is also moving determinedly towards reform but with similar results. Uzbekistan, by contrast, has combined very measured progress towards reform with what has been, until recently, a relatively high GDP and a high degree of internal stability.
A second perspective traces the origin of the region''s problems directly to the quality of political leadership in the various countries. Once they all followed Russia in adopting Gaullist constitutions with "special powers" for the presidents, the die was cast. Georgia''s fate parallels the rise and fall of Gamsakhurdia and then the rise of Shevardnadze, just as Azerbaijan''s tracks with the careers of Presidents Abulfez Elchibey and then Heydar Aliyev. Turkmenistan''s problem is said to be Saparmurad Niyazov, while Kyrgyzstan''s openness to reform reflects the presence there of Askar Akaev. Poor leadership in Tajikistan under President Nabiyev led to civil war while Imomali Rakhmonov''s limited understanding of market economics purportedly accounts for that country''s slow progress today. A country''s success or failure may be traced to many causes, but none is more important than leadership. A good leader can motivate people under nearly any system, while no abstract program of reform can save a country from the effects of bad leadership. And unfortunately, no electoral system can guarantee the quality of the leaders it produces.
This appeal of such a hypothesis has been clear since the time of Herodotus. Its shortcomings for our purposes are equally clear. First, since it applies equally to all times and places, it really explains nothing. Second, since leadership is a deus ex machina, it has no more significance operationally than does fate. Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that the differences in leadership among the Caspian states are not a negligible factor in their success.
A third hypothesis denies any significance to the question. It holds that the various problems and successes of the Caspian countries since independence are of short duration and their origins unimportant because the conditions prevailing up to now are transitory. In the long run, the main determinant of success or failure will be the importance to the world economy of each country''s natural resources or its favorable geopolitical position. Either condition will release investment and support from the major powers. Their absence will give rise to neglect. Whatever their short-term fate, this factor will prove decisive in the long run.
If it were not for the fact that this notion has been invoked by some regional leaders and by their business partners in the West, it would not be worth refuting. Who can deny that resources and location will go far towards determining the extent of US interest in a given country? But who, in the face of such eloquent examples as Iran, Iraq, and Angola, will go on to equate Western support with successful development?
A fourth hypothesis warrants more serious consideration, for it addresses the very nature of the societies that are now struggling to find their way as independent states. This view begins with the assertion that 70 years of Soviet rule, while significant, pale in importance compared with each society''s development over a millennium or two. If you want to understand the origins of Azerbaijan''s difficulties over the last eight years look at the fate of this people in the centuries since their brief effervescence under the Saffavids. Turkmenistan''s "go it alone" approach and its prickliness in all foreign dealings have less to do with their Soviet experience than with the opportunistic way marauding Turkomen tribes dealt with reality since the Timurid era. And is not the contentiousness of the Georgian principalities all too familiar to anyone acquainted with what W.E.D. Allen called the "chivalrous fracas" of that country''s medieval history?
The merits of this hypothesis should be obvious to anyone who brings a sense of history to the effort to understand the region''s problems. It provides a useful insight, for example, on the type of authoritarianism that has arisen in Uzbekistan. As a country forged from a half dozen oasis centers, modern Uzbekistan owes its economic well being to the careful allocation and exploitation of water resources. In oasis cultures this function was traditionally organized hierarchically. To be sure, there was a participatory role at the lowest level (corresponding to President Islam Karimov''s revived mahallas). But the basic structures were vertical and residence on the oasis required that one accept this fact.
What a contrast this offers to Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan, where all lines of authority below the presidency seem to be tangled and in constant flux. It is tempting to explain the very different political culture of these peoples - and hence their differing approaches since independence - in terms of habits formed over the course of their long nomadic past. Should we not trace Kazakhstan''s mercurial approach to policy issues directly to the fluid relationships of nomad life, as Bartol''d argued nearly a century ago?
It is impossible to deny the relevance of their deep historical experience to the behavior of the Caspian states today. Doubtless, American policy in the region would be wiser if it were informed by historical understanding, or, lacking that, by a sense that historical understanding might be important.
At the same time, it is important to understand the limits of the historical-cultural hypothesis. For one thing, it tends to be static, imposing continuity even where it does not exist. An awareness of the easy interaction of Armenians and Azeris, or of Georgians and Abkhazians, over a millennium leaves one unprepared to deal with the past decade''s ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, such an approach easily becomes deterministic. It may be true that Azeris'' greatest hope over many centuries was to play a bad hand effectively, but does that condemn them to nothing more than rear-guard actions against the forces that challenge them today? Since people do change, explanations of behavior that stress only the power of history, and policies based on them, can easily become self-fulfilling.
The fifth hypothesis is also historical. But instead of stressing the forces of deep cultural continuity, it traces the origins of many of the Caspian states'' current dilemmas to the more recent Soviet past. Tajiks and Uzbeks had worked out a practical modus vivendi that enabled them to interact fruitfully over more than four centuries until Stalin, in 1924 and 1929, drove a border between them that punished the Tajiks. This border did not cause the Tajik civil war of 1992-97 but it created the distinctive mental state among Tajik leaders that defined the way they pursued that conflict. The extraordinary rise and fall of Georgia within the USSR parallels the career of Joseph Stalin. And Soviet settlement policies, especially Khrushchev''s Virgin Lands project of the 1950s, so profoundly altered Kazakhstan''s demographic and cultural makeup that it became a different republic from what it had been.
Those who express disappointment at the region''s slow progress towards privatization, a market economy, and democracy, and who bemoan the spread of lawlessness and corruption would do well to examine more closely the conditions that prevailed there during Soviet times. The way leaders were chosen, the way decisions were taken, the way pressure and force were used to impose those decisions, the way individual and small groups worked to undermine or bypass official acts, the way official property was appropriated for private use - in these and many other areas Soviet life was a kind of school, the graduates of which still dominate the public life of all the Caspian countries.
However, not all periods of Soviet history are equally relevant to our effort to trace the origins of some of the problems besetting the Caspian states today. For several reasons, the period of 1970-1990 must claim special attention. Obviously, these were the years in which nearly every current leader and official in the Caspian region was formed. However committed they may be to change, they bring to that process only what they had acquired earlier in their lives, in short, the habits and outlook of the last decades of Soviet rule.
The period of 1970-90 shaped the Caspian states'' post-independence reality in several more concrete ways. Beginning in the 1960s, Soviet investment in the domestic economy began to flag. This was particularly noticeable in the Caspian energy sector. Two world wars had shown that the Baku oil fields were vulnerable to attack. Production was declining, just as new reserves were being discovered in West Siberia. A wave of Russian nationalism, epitomized by the "village prose" writers, inspired Moscow to shift the locus of its oil industry away from the Caspian to "authentically Russian" Siberia.
Encouraged by official policy, Russians and other Slavic peoples had been migrating to Central Asia and the Caucasus throughout the period between 1930 and 70. The Virgin Lands movement and reconstruction of Tashkent following the 1966 earthquake marked the crest of this human tide. Thereafter it stopped, and even reversed. The last two decades of Soviet rule were marked by net outflows of settlers from the Caspian region.
With money and people increasingly shifting elsewhere, the Caspian peoples were left to shift for themselves. Moscow contented itself with appointing reliable local satraps to preserve order and insure the flow of raw materials to northern industry. Beyond this, Kremlin leaders were remarkably indifferent to what happened in the region. Georgians could maintain a vibrant private and illegal sector. A regional lord in Uzbekistan could maintain private armies and jails. None of this mattered so long as the region as a whole remained tranquil and the flow of oil, gas, cotton, uranium, gold, aluminum, and fresh fruits and vegetables continued. Such were the conditions as Russia''s presence in the region began to wane.
A further condition of Russian rule in the Caspian region had been Moscow''s tight control over communications with countries across the USSR''s southern border. The 1979 Khomeini revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began to change this. For sixty years revolutionary propaganda had flowed from North to South, but now the flow was reversed and there was little Russia could do to quell it.
The history of independence in the Caucasus and Central Asia traces back not to 1992 but to 1970, when Russia''s withdrawal from the region began. Important dates in that process include the Afghan disaster after 1979, which established the limits of Russian power in the Muslim world; the bloody confrontations in 1989 between the Soviet Army and local civilians in Georgia and Azerbaijan, which demonstrated that Moscow would use force to resist its loss of control in the region; and Russia''s 1993 expulsion of the Caspian countries from the ruble zone, which proved that Moscow would not jeopardize its own self-interest for the sake of its former republics.
If the process of Russia''s withdrawal from the Caspian region and the establishment of new sovereignties there began not in 1992 but 30 years ago, when was it completed? The obvious answer, as can be confirmed by every day''s headlines, is "Not yet." The two Chechen wars and the struggle over Dagestan demonstrate clearly that the process has not yet run its course. True, the new states are a reality in that they have flags, embassies abroad, presidents, and parliaments. They have even shifted their patterns of trade and welcomed investments from America, Europe, and Asia. But the era of anti-colonial revolution in the Caspian region is not yet done, for there has not been any kind of final settlement between the new states and their former ruler that both parties are truly prepared to accept and live with.
Americans should not find this at all surprising. The Fourth of July, 1776, was not the revolution but an incident in a long process of emancipation from Britain that began early in the 1760s and extended down to Yorktown and the ratification of the new Constitution in 1789. During that entire time every discussion of internal policy was dominated by concerns over what London would do. Questions of sovereignty dominated and defined all other issues, whether the subject was taxation, laws, foreign relations, credit, or finances. As late as 1794 Jefferson wrote to Adams "My countrymen are groaning under the insults of Great Britain." Every Caspian leader might still say the same today about Russia.
The argument being advanced here is that a main cause of the manifest problems and shortcomings of the Caspian states today is that the minds of their leaders remain focused not on fostering sustainable economic development, the enhancement of their people''s well-being, or the promulgation of laws to protect trade and investment, but on protecting their nations'' fragile sovereignty. Their every act is accompanied by glances over the shoulder, first towards Moscow and then towards their new would-be protectors, whether NATO, OSCE, the World Bank, IMF, WTO, the United States, or the UN. Bluntly, the highest priorities of regional leaders are not what we think (and tell them) they should be.
This thesis holds that the process of emancipation from Russia is not yet complete in the Caspian region, and that it continues to dominate the attention of leaders in the region, whether or not they admit it publicly. They see themselves less as leaders who are launching a new era than as combatants in a continuing struggle that began in 1970. Fault them for paranoia or lack of vision, but this is reality, as they perceive it.
An important corollary of this thesis is that in spite of the fact that they live in new states and under new governments, most publicly active people in these countries continue to fall back on practices and habits developed during the decades of Russia''s gradual withdrawal from their lives. These practices and habits constitute a kind of encyclopaedia of what western governments and investors consider the region''s pathologies and problems. Caspian business partners frustrate Western colleagues by their stress on reaping short-term gains because they are not yet convinced that a long-term perspective is possible. They have yet to cast their lot decisively with the new order, because they have yet to be convinced that it will be allowed to continue. Viewed in this way, even theft becomes a rational, if socially undesirable, coping mechanism.
This analysis has considered five different explanations for the various travails that beset the new states of the Caucasus and Central Asia. In the end, it finds the most plausible explanation to be the one that traces the main source of the region''s current problems to the last two decades of Soviet rule, and which views that period and the first eight years of independence as a single era that is not yet done. This period is defined in terms of Russia''s steady but still incomplete withdrawal from the region and in terms of the continuing practices and habits that grew up there in the course of this process.
The conclusion to which this analysis leads is that the new states cannot be expected to focus on the priorities we consider important until the issues of sovereignty and security that are their highest priority have been satisfactorily addressed. No amount of preaching about democracy and free markets can change this. Nor does it help to tell Caspian leaders that they are missing the point, for security is a psychological state, not a geopolitical equation.
A final word about Russia is in order. Because this discussion has tried to take a Caspian perspective, it is natural that Russia''s role would be cast in a negative light. But Russia''s attitudes and policies vis-Ã -vis the new Caspian states differ little from those of other imperial powers when confronted with the loss of control over territories they formerly ruled. Britain burned the White House in 1812, Spain launched a war against independent Chile as late as 1866, and both France and Portugal fought fierce wars in vain efforts to retain control over their possessions in Africa. Russia''s pretensions in the South Caucasus and Central Asia should be staunchly resisted but they can be viewed as manifestations of the same type of behavior that other European countries engaged in while making the transition from imperial powers to democratic states.