CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review

Chief Editors: Marianne Kamp (Laramie, Wyo., USA), Virginia Martin (Huntsville, Ala., USA)
Section Editors:
Perspectives: Robert M. Cutler (Ottawa/Montreal, Canada), Edward Walker (Berkeley, Calif., USA)
Research Reports and Briefs: Ed Schatz (Carbondale, Ill., USA), Jamilya Ukudeeva (Aptos, Calif., USA)
Reviews and Abstracts: Shoshana Keller (Clinton, N.Y., USA), Resul Yalcin (London, England)
Conferences and Lecture Series: Peter Finke (Halle/Salle, Germany), Payam Foroughi (Salt Lake City, Utah, USA)
Educational Resources and Developments: Philippe Forét (Zurich, Switzerland), Daniel C. Waugh (Seattle, Wash., USA)
Copy Editor: Michael Davis (Kirksville, Mo., USA)
English Language Style Editor: Helen Faller (Ann Arbor, Mich., USA)
Production Editor: Sada Aksartova (Washington, D.C., USA)
Web Editor: Paola Raffetta (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Indexer: Charles Kolb (Washington, D.C., USA)
Editorial and Production Consultant: John Schoeberlein (Cambridge, Mass., USA)

[Contents]

Perspectives

The Complexity of Central Eurasia

Robert M. Cutler, Research Fellow, Institute of European and Russian Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ont., Canada, rmcalum.mit.edu, http://www.robertcutler.org

Up until now, "Perspectives" has presented in each issue of CESR a single essay regarding Central Eurasia within the global sociology of knowledge, offering a particular view conditioned by the evolution and construction of disciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge. In the current issue of CESR, "Perspectives" presents instead a series of shorter essays. Several of them were submitted as commentaries on longer published essays, and readers are encouraged to continue this practice. Such comments will receive consideration for publication in "Perspectives," and it is hoped that this practice will give rise to further exchange and debate.

All of the "perspectives" offered in the present issues of CESR address questions about how to situate Central Eurasia in time and space, and how that situation changes through time and over space. This essay introduces the four that follow, and establishes a context that seeks to integrate them conceptually, by outlining a perhaps unorthodox but systematic international relations approach to current study of the region.

In their essays below, Doulatbek Khidirbekughli and Alexander Lehrman both emphasize historical and cultural continuities that justify considering the region as a unity. Khidirbekughli's "Mysterious Eurasia," offering remarks on John Schoeberlein's (2002)[*] presidential essay in CESR, emphasizes the longue durée while consistently underlining the region's historical nature as an intermediary among cultures and peoples, and indeed empires. He tends to regard Central Asia as the most "central" part of Central Eurasia, geographically limited to the five contemporary Central Asia states with those contiguous cross-border regions sharing a culture or a language. Alexander Lehrman's "The Distinctive Factors of Central Eurasia," commenting on Gregory Gleason's (2003) presidential essay in CESR, argues that the living legacy of the Russian language is today a substratum providing a broader Central Eurasia with unity in spite of contemporary changes, which have not effaced the recent Slavophone inheritance or its significance.

The essays by Amineh and by Pomfret focus on the region's future rather than the past. Such a vantage point yields a different conceptual perspective; and that perspective differs today from what it would have been a decade and a half ago. Since the end of the Cold War, global international relations are more clearly a "complex system," a self-organizing network rather than a top-down hierarchy (Bar-Yam 1997). Superpowers (or at least one), great powers, and regional powers still exist, but middle-level phenomena have become important drivers in a world that now self-organizes from bottom up.

Before the USSR disintegrated in the early 1990s, the late Turkish President Turgut Özal's strategic vision provided a bridge between the concepts of "Southwest Asia" and Central Asia. The concept of "Southwest Asia" emerged as a focus in US strategic thought after the 1979 Iranian revolution. To Southwest Asia there is being added the so-called "Northern Tier," not just in strategic thinking but as a result of events on the ground. This process creates a new and larger geopolitical entity that extends from Turkey in a crescent east-northeast through Kazakhstan (Barylski 1994; Bininachvili 1993). The Caucasus, which historically has been part of an extended Middle East, is regaining its role as a crossroads among continents. Central Asia is recognizing its cultural links with Southwest Asia while it puzzles out its relations with Russia.

One way to see Central Eurasia is to employ seven scales of analysis, even if one focuses on only a few of them at a time. The first and finest scale of analysis is the national scale - i.e., state level - of analysis where each of the Central Asian countries may be taken separately. (This scale of analysis subsumes a yet finer scale, that which analyzes subnational differentiations such as the contrast between northern and southern Kazakhstan.) Second, there is the regional scale of Central Asia itself, which takes the five former Soviet republics as a whole and also considers their transnational cultural and demographic interrelationships. Third, the "macro-region" of Greater Central Asia includes "political" Central Asia (i.e., the five former Soviet republics) plus their cultural and economic connections with such neighboring regions as western China, southern Russia (including southern Siberia), northern Afghanistan, and northeastern Iran.

Fourth is the "meta-regional" scale of Central Eurasia, a still broader construct. Although "Central Eurasia" is sometimes used as a shorthand designation of the former Soviet territory, it is perhaps more apposite to adopt the definition from the CESS website, that it "include[s] Turkic, Mongolian, Iranian, Caucasian, Tibetan and other peoples[, and] extends from the Black Sea region, the Crimea, and the Caucasus in the west, through the Middle Volga region, Central Asia and Afghanistan, and on to Siberia, Mongolia and Tibet in the east." The collapse of the Soviet Union did not assure the consolidation this crescent-shaped "meta-region" containing the Caucasus and Central Asia as an acknowledged new region in geopolitics or energy geo-economics. Expert opinion is that this required three things: international financial and industrial interest in the impressive natural resources in the region, the political will of the only remaining superpower, and the free and rapid exchange of information possible only through the Internet and other electronic telecommunications. These three conditions have all taken hold in a decade.

In a broader historical and cultural sense, Central Eurasia (like Greater Central Asia) includes portions of Russia and China. However, the latter are fully integrated at a fifth, "mega-regional" scale of analysis, including not only Russia and China but also the whole of South and Southwest Asia, from India and Pakistan through Iraq and Turkey, to which we may refer simply as Eurasia. A sixth scale of analysis is Greater Eurasia, from Spain to Sakhalin and Spitzbergen to Singapore, including the European Union and its family of institutions (Cutler 2003). Finally, the seventh scale of analysis is the global scale, which adds the United States, American transnational corporations with a global reach, and worldwide international organizations having especially an economic, industrial or financial vocation.

It is not necessary to treat all these scales of analysis together, although it is useful to employ the first and the seventh together so as to anchor any discussion. These "scales" of analysis differ, both in conception and in application, from what are traditionally considered to be "levels" of analysis in international relations. This difference means that they are not stacked upon each other in a mechanistic manner, even though it is convenient to discuss them sequentially for expository purposes. The levels are not strictly hierarchical, meaning that they also are not "nested." Rather, as in any "complex system" - i.e., a system where the behavior of the whole is not predictable from analysis of its components and where properties of the system emerge from one scale into another - these scales of analysis overlap; and what one sees depends upon where one stands.

The foregoing sketch illustrates one way to make connections among different levels of analysis in a manner more nuanced than traditional geopolitical analysis. In "Towards Rethinking Geopolitics," Mehdi Parvizi Amineh introduces a new approach to the topic, called "critical geopolitics," which challenges the "orthodox geopolitics" usually associated with realist and neorealist theories of international relations. In particular, he highlights the role of non-state actors, such as international financial institutions (IFIs), in both the conceptual and the material construction of the region. Richard Pomfret's essay on "The Specific and the General in Economic Policy Analysis and Advice" concludes with some more extended reflections on IFIs in particular. His remarks may be read as a commentary on Morgan Y. Liu's (2003) "Detours from Utopia on the Silk Road: Ethical Dilemmas of Neo-liberal Triumphalism" previously published in this space, addressing specific results of liberal economic intervention in Central Eurasia.

Readers are encouraged to submit to "Perspectives" shorter essays and commentaries such as those published here, as well as longer sociology-of-knowledge reviews.

[*] References can be found at the end of the Perspectives section - Eds.

[Contents]

Mysterious Eurasia: Thoughts in Response to Dr. Schoeberlein

Doulatbek Khidirbekughli, Professor of Political Science and International Relations, Kazakh University of International Relations and World Languages, Almaty, Kazakhstan, doulatbek3hotmail.com, doulatfreenet.kz, http://www.freenet.kz/~alumni/doulatbek

Ten thousand years ago, ancestors of the Turkic tribes inhabited Central Eurasia. These Turkic Eurasian tribes migrated in all directions. During this great migration of peoples, they influenced the cultures of the European peoples, including Western Christianity, as well as the cultures of the Mongol and Chinese civilizations in the East, where the Paleo-Asian and Proto-Mongolian peoples emerged from the mixture of alien (proto-Turkish) and autochthonous (local Mongol). Some of these subsequently crossed the Bering Strait, forming the stock from which some Native American peoples descended. In Western Eurasia contact between Turkic and Germanic peoples came with the fall of the Roman Empire as the Huns settled in Europe.

Dr. Schoeberlein (2002) was correct to state that "in North America, the entire northern tier of Central Eurasia has been claimed by a society whose name and orientation feature 'Slavic Studies' for the simple reason that this territory has been under Russian domination. Scholars who are interested precisely in that Russian domination may find a home in Slavic studies, but others in both Slavic studies and Central Eurasian studies find the connections too tenuous to be meaningful." Only specialists in North America, Europe, and Islamic countries really have knowledge of this region, which in the popular mind is still identified as part of Russia.

Scholars from Islamic countries consider Central Eurasia as a part of Muslim history and culture. Islam dominated in Central Eurasia from the ninth through the 19th centuries. Central Eurasia thereafter fell under Russian domination and European culture. Central Eurasian languages are based either on Turkic or on Persian roots, with more recent Russian overlays, adaptations, and vocabulary transfers. Divided between Islamic and post-Soviet studies, the study of Central Eurasia should be considered as a separate and independent field.

"Eurasianism" was a traditional Russian construction that included the precepts of Russian colonial policy and great power nationalism. Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia used such an ideology as a basis for empire, combining Western colonialism with Asian despotism inherited from traditions going back to Chinggis Khan.

The Soviet Russian conception of "Middle Asia" (Sredniaia Aziia) included only the former Soviet republics between the Tian Shan-Pamir Mountains and the Caspian Sea, but "Central Asia" (Tsentral'naia Aziia) meant "Inner Asia," namely the territory of Mongolian Republic and contiguous Inner Mongolia, including the Gobi Desert. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, geographers in the post-Soviet space adopted the Western nomenclature and speak of "Central Asia" instead of "Middle Asia". Mongolia thus became construed as a part of East Asia; but Mongolia and Inner Mongolia are populated by non-Han peoples. Meanwhile, scholars of China, Japan and Korea study Mongolia, Tibet, and (at least part of) Turkistan under the rubric of "(East) Asian Studies."

As the empire of Chinggis Khan was divided after his death, his grandchildren and descendants became rulers of countries and peoples speaking diverse languages. To the sedentary peoples he invaded, Chinggis Khan was a despot but the Kazakh Khanate inherited nomadic traditions and structures. Its way of life included certain democratic elements, such as resistance to abuse of power in peacetime, coupled with the acceptance in wartime of "tyranny," much like Cincinnatus of Ancient Roman history. While the khan was not a crown prince, only the descendants of Chinggis Khan might be kings. The Qurultay selected the potential candidate for election. Over time, the chief of the tribe became only a nominal representative of the tribe or the clans or communes within it. His functions were under the control of the council of aqsaqals (elders). This democratic aspect of Asian nomadism in fact distinguishes it from the more widely disseminated concept of Asian state despotism, characterized by China, India, the countries of Indochina and the Islamic world.

The term "Central Eurasia" could be thought superficial and stereotypical. Dr. Schoeberlein remarked that the definition of Central Eurasia is anything but dogmatic. Eurasia is populated by Tungusic and Turkic peoples of Siberia, by Uralic peoples of the Volga Basin, by Caucasian Muslim and Caucasian Christian peoples, by Muslim peoples of Eastern Europe and of Central Asia. It includes Slavic peoples living in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia as well as the indigenous population. But Central Eurasia is fundamentally Central Asia, with other regions and subregions adjoined. The territory of Central Asia is an historical space of interaction of nomadic and settled peoples, in contact with both Islam and Christianity, and likewise with both Asian and European cultures. It seems to me that the territory of the former Soviet Union, with extension into western China and the greater Middle East, is a "full" Eurasia.

In general, we must understand that Eurasia is a composite of two basic cultures and layers. Central Eurasia occupies a central place in the system of interactions between Western and Eastern civilizations. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks imposed upon CESS an "urgent responsibility to communicate its knowledge to the world," to communicate to Western mass publics and leaders how Central Eurasia differs from Russia, East Asia, and the Islamic World. This is a principal obligation of CESS in the world today: to promote the study, in their full depth and breadth, of the historical, political, socio-economic, ethno-psychological, and cultural aspects of this great region. We must combine knowledge of the past and present to ascertain the future of the region.

[Contents]

The Distinctive Factors of Central Eurasia: A Response to Professor Gleason

Alexander Lehrman, Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Delaware, Newark, Del., USA, lehrmanudel.edu

Central Eurasia possesses a unique combination of linguistic and cultural factors that make it a distinct area. The geographic, historical, and socioeconomic circumstances of these factors are quite well known and do not need to be reiterated here. The importance of linguistic factors, however, is typically overlooked and deserves to be pointed out.

The determining role of shared language and culture, particularly literature, has been systematically underestimated in contemporary theory which has privileged secondary (economic, social, and political) factors. Yet shared language, and the shared culture based on the transmitted texts in that language, clearly play the generative role in forming the population's expectations and attitudes that ultimately determine the speakers' choices, with important consequences, both short- and long-term.

The most obvious examples include the recent "Anglophone" go-it-alone military alliance in Iraq - a continuation of the virtually unchanged close cooperation among the English-speaking populations of the globe for over a century. There is also the continuing struggle of the French-speaking world, led by France, to assert its independence from the "Anglophone" world in every domain. And there is the relatively cohesive "Arab world" which has defined itself unabashedly along the linguocultural lines, with the Quran as the main transmitted value-imparting text, in reaction against the successful incursions of the "Francophone" and "Anglophone" entities. These recent examples, and more could be listed, clearly demonstrate that the forces of attraction and repulsion work along the linguocultural lines.

Central Eurasia is no exception. If we wish to find the distinctive features of Central Eurasia and attempt to discover the "power" lines along which this area's development is likely to proceed, we need to understand its linguocultural situation and the tendencies inherent in that situation. Contrary to Professor Gleason's assertion (2003: 3) that "no single language is spoken everywhere in the [Central Eurasian] region", there is indeed such a language. The existence of such a language also stands contrary to the ideological aspirations of certain currently ascendant groups in the area. Those aspirations, reflecting a strong reaction against a dominant factor, are probative of this factor's enduring power.

This factor, this language is Russian. The populations of Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, constituent parts of Russia for several hundred years, are of course primarily Russian-speaking and thoroughly bilingual. The peoples of most of the independent states in the area - Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan - are to a considerable extent conversant with Russian. Some of the artists, performers, and writers native to those parts achieved wide fame in the larger Russian-speaking urban areas of the former Soviet Union, thanks precisely to their work in and through the medium of Russian (e.g., Rasul Gamzatov, Fazil Iskander, Chingiz Aitmatov, Mukhtar Auezov). These countries' professional elites have a perfect command of Russian, their higher education having been conducted almost entirely in that language. The same applies to a predominant number of professionals in Mongolia, though not to the population at large. Even in Afghanistan, to an extent much larger than currently admitted, there is a significant number of Russian-educated professionals. The areas not affected by the dominance of Russian during the Soviet period include, of course, Iran and, to a lesser extent, Xinjiang, although the latter deserves special study in view of Chinese Turkistan's complicated contacts with the largely Russian-speaking Kazakhstan. Russian has deeply affected many of the languages of the area: their writing systems remain Cyrillic-based, with the exception of Azeri that switched recently to Latin and of course Armenian and Georgian which have long preserved their epichoric alphabets. All of the languages, particularly the Turkic ones, have borrowed their technical and sociocultural vocabularies from Russian, often complete with the Russian norms of pronunciation.

The authority of Russian, whose character has been changed by the bankruptcy of the Marxist-Leninist ideology and its transmitted texts, continues to be enhanced by a steady flow of prestigious scientific and technological texts. Classical Russian texts also have enduring importance, and are often markedly respectful of the values of the autochthonous peoples (particularly certain works by Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy). The Russian-language works by Central Eurasian writers deeply rooted in the classical Russian tradition also remain highly valued.

When Russian became a linguocultural determinant in the area, three other determinants had already been at work. Most of the people living in Central Eurasia are Turkic-speaking: Tatars, Bashkorts, Azeris, Turkmens, Kyrgyz, Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and Uzbeks all share a common Turkic language heritage. This of course includes not just the fundamental lexicon and grammar but also texts, idioms, proverbs, and even portions of oral epics, such as the Alpamish, which derive from a linguistically transmitted common Turkic heritage.

Iranic linguocultural heritage is the second important determinant. This stratum is directly represented by the languages and cultures of Iran (Persian),Tajikistan (Tajik), and Afghanistan (Dari), to all of whom the highly prestigious Classical Persian literature and its language belong. These, however, have exerted a great influence on the Turkic-language civilizations of the region. Only Mongolia has remained outside of the Iranic sphere of influence. It has also remained unaffected by the third important determinant: Arabic.

The influence of Arabic, the language and the texts of the Islamic civilization, is well-known and can hardly be overestimated. The loanwords from Arabic in the Iranic and Turkic languages of the region constitute from 50 to 60 percent of their vocabularies. Arabic contributed greatly to all areas of culture now inseparable from the basically Iranic and Turkic societies, beginning with the writing systems and calendars of the area. It was only in the 20th century that the Arabic writing system and calendar were replaced with the Russian-derived ones for the Turkic and Iranic languages of Central Asia.

I hope that these remarks have made it quite clear that there is a unique combination of determinants characterizing Central Eurasia precisely and objectively and in a fashion that is truly meaningful. Geographic, political, and economic factors are the venue, the ways, and the means, but the linguocultural factors are the content - the explanatory narrative and the "mission statement" - of the people sharing them.

[Contents]

Towards Rethinking Geopolitics

Mehdi Parvizi Amineh, Amsterdam School for Social Science Research and International Institute for Asian Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, aminehpscw.uva.nl

The term "geopolitics" has various meanings, for example: it may be taken as synonymous to political geography or politics in its spatial dimension. For the realist school of international relations it means rivalry among great-power states. It can mean the geographic dimension of the foreign policy of a single state. In strategic terms it may signify the struggle for control of a certain geographic area. Also, the term "geopolitics" is sometimes used as a synonym for international politics stressing political and military behavior in a specific context.

The main ideas of traditional or "orthodox" geopolitics are related to the realist and neo-realist schools of international relations, based upon the Westphalian conception of the international system. According to this view, the nation state is paramount and international relations are best understand through a balance-of-power approach among stages struggling for influence and dominance in world politics. This geopolitical discourse emerged in the 19th century (Kjellen 1897; Ratzel 1897; Mahan 1890) and developed in the first half of the 20th (Mackinder 1904, 1919; Haushofer 1932; Spykman 1942). However, both the end of the Cold War and globalization (internationalization of trade, transnationalization of production and finance, and the internationalization of functions of the state) have forced social scientists to rethink the meaning of geopolitics.

A new approach to geopolitics, called critical geopolitics, has been trying to create a synthesis between the traditional understanding of geopolitics ("orthodox geopolitics") and the "geo-economics" of the world political economy. Critical geopolitics developed in the 1970s when some researchers began to reject a narrow concern with "national security" as the defining feature of geopolitics and sought a wider context of social and human development, encompassing such concerns as poverty, violence, and environmental degradation. Based on neo-Marxist political economy and "world-system" theory, scholars started to incorporate not only the geographic but also the economic dimensions of global politics into the conceptualization of geopolitics (especially Taylor 1993). Under the influence of critical theory and post-structuralist theory, the concept of "critical geopolitics" has been introduced into geopolitical discourse (Agnew and Corbridge 1995).

"Critical geopolitics" does not constitute the world as a fixed hierarchy of states, cores and peripheries, spheres of influence, flashpoints, buffer zones and strategic relations. Rejecting state-centric reasoning, it favors a more nuanced vision of world politics as a system dominated not only by political states but also by economic and technological developments that are capable of threatening the well-being of the citizens of those states. The critical geopolitics approach holds that geographic arrangements are social constructions that may change over time with changing human economic demography. It holds that the relevant actors for analysis of the political-geographic world include not only states but also international and nongovernmental institutions, as well as transnational movements and transgovernmental interest groups. Critical geopolitics also disagrees with the assumption of objectivity self-imputed by world-system theories as well as by orthodox geopolitics. Rather, the critical-geopolitics school holds that any geopolitical approach to world politics carries conceptual and methodological assumptions that cannot help but animate and influence analysis. Writers on critical geopolitics therefore call for a methodological and conceptual re-evaluation of political geography.

With the end of the Cold War, Central Eurasia has become an important geo-strategic and geo-economic region in world politics. Many countries in the region are politically weak and economically dependent on Russia. The internal sovereignty of many governments is contested by grave economic, financial, social and political challenges. The critical-geopolitics school asserts that there are causal relationships between socio-economic underdevelopment on the one hand and, on the other hand, ethnic conflict, political unrest, and (for instance) Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

Central Asia and the South Caucasus are located north of the great mountain chain that divides the Eurasian landmass as a pastoral corridor of flat and easily traversed steppe lands. In the past, the region functioned as the historical crossroads between Europe and Asia. The history of Central Eurasia has been conditioned to a large extent by the westward movements of Central Eurasian peoples at least a far back into the past as 4000 BCE. For centuries external forces have made contact with and sometimes ruled over this region from different parts of the world. The main external forces in the early Islamic phase of Central Eurasian history from the eighth and ninth century onwards were the Abbasid Empire (750-1258) and the Mongol Empire (1141-1469). However, after 1400 the horse-mounted archer was increasingly outgunned by artillery, the musket and powder. Mobile societies of herdsmen were unable to support manufacturing required to cope with invaders. Invaded by Russians from the north, by Chinese from the east, by the Ottoman and Persian Empires from the west, the region was conquered by outsiders. Tsarist Russia colonized the region, which was subsequently taken into the realm of Soviet industrialization.

Features characterizing the Central Asia and Caucasus regions, if not the whole of Central Eurasia, thus include: the historic confrontation between nomadic horsemen and settled agriculturalists; the lands where Turkic, Iranian, Caucasian, Mongolian, Tungusic and Tibetan peoples have proliferated; the Inner Asian territories of Islam, Buddhism and Shamanism; and the emergence of the newly independent states from the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The strategic importance of the Central Asia/South Caucasus region to the West is bound to increase substantially in the coming decades, not least due to the region's vast energy resources. Also it is a natural trade and transit link between Europe and Asia. Critical geopolitics holds normatively that all these actors would benefit from converting the region from a zone for geopolitical competition and confrontation to a zone of cooperation. Even under the assumptions of "orthodox geopolitics," the region's political stability and socio-economic development in this region would be crucial for global peace and security.

Critical geopolitics considers that the main actors in the contemporary international relations of Central Eurasia comprise several levels. The "inner circle" includes Russia, Iran, and Turkey. The "outer circle" includes (a) the more distant states China, India, Pakistan and also Afghanistan; and (b) the peripheral states Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. There are also actors external to the broader region, mainly the United States, European Union, Japan and East Asian states. Non-state actors such as ethno-religious movements, international organizations, transnational energy companies, and international crime syndicates are also significant to international relations.

[Contents]

The Specific and the General in Economic Policy Analysis and Advice

Richard Pomfret, Associate Dean and Professor, School of Economics, University of Adelaide, Australia, richard.pomfretadelaide.edu.au

In all social sciences there is a tension between seeking generalizations and acknowledging specific conditions. In the Eurasian context, this has been highlighted by the urgent need for well-founded policy advice after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dichotomy is often sharpest between economists on the one hand, especially those related to the international financial institutions (or IFI, meaning the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), and, on the other hand, regional specialists. The area studies specialists criticize the economists' models and econometric analysis as based on general assumptions inappropriate to specific countries, while the economists are dismayed by ad hoc treatment of social structure, historical specificity or personal characteristics of the leadership.

One reason why this dichotomy has been especially pronounced with respect to Central Eurasia was the low status of studies of this area in the high-income countries before 1992. While centers of excellence existed, their salience was far less than that of centers of Latin American studies in the United States or of African studies in Europe, or of (East) Asian studies in most OECD countries. After 1991 a large group of new independent countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as Mongolia, urgently sought advice on introducing and managing a market economy. For this they turned to individuals and to institutions with high technical reputations, the IFIs. The latter assumed this role despite their lack of expertise in the region, and their limited experience with formerly centrally planned economies. At the same time, area specialists, unused to being involved in active policy debates, largely remained in their ivory towers.

What was the outcome? Important elements of the early policy advice were clearly right. For example, many Soviet-trained economic policymakers blamed inflation on monopolies, but consistent emphasis and explanation by foreign economists helped to convince policymakers of the links between money creation and inflation, and between financial deficits and money creation. The hyperinflation of the early 1990s was only tamed after governments accepted this argument and gave priority to monetary stabilization.

In other areas, however, economists' advice based on general models was too simplistic. Large-scale privatization was not just a matter of creating property rights so that resource allocation could be efficient, as economists argued from the Coase Theorem. The way in which privatization occurred mattered, both directly in its impact on managerial quality and on equity and indirectly through feedback effects on the political system. Economists underestimated the potential for state capture, and that this might take diverse forms in different countries.

The one-size-fits-all recommendations of the IFIs have had mixed results. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia were relatively willing pupils, but the economic outcomes differed markedly. Kyrgyzstan liberalized its economy quickly but with disappointing outcomes due to poor infrastructure, inappropriate institutions, and lack of resources. Kazakhstan was slower to liberalize but, despite a counterproductive alienation of state assets, had greater long-term success, which might be explained by higher initial income levels and human capital or by abundant resources. Mongolia, also resource-poor, has been more successful than Kyrgyzstan, apparently due to its more democratic and open political system than those in Central Asia.

The poor pupils of the IFIs have also had diverse outcomes. Uzbekistan's economic performance, in terms of GDP the best of all former Soviet republics, does not fit into the IFIs' model. Ascribing this success simply to "gradualism," as critics of the IFIs' "shock therapy" approach are wont to do, is not helpful. Turkmenistan has also been a gradualist, but with a significantly different policy setting and economic outcome. Uzbekistan may have poor prospects because of failure to reform more thoroughly, but its economic performance during the 1990s cannot lightly be dismissed, and predictions of future prospects would be more convincing if we had a good explanation of past performance. For me, this has something to do with inherited administrative strength derived from Tashkent's central role in Soviet Central Asia, but there may be other explanations which deeper country-specific analysis might uncover.

How we assess the policy performance during the first post-Soviet decade depends in part on our evaluation of the general outcome. Critics of the IFIs' role emphasize the traumatic fall in living standards, deindustrialization and rising external debt. Things could, however, have been worse. Governance, including economic management, has been sufficiently good to avoid widespread bloodshed, except in Tajikistan. The whole of the former Soviet Union has had a terrible time economically and, given their starting points at the bottom of the heap, it is surprising that the Central Asian countries have done better than the average.

In the second post-independence decade, things are more complex. How to end hyperinflation, the principles of monetary and fiscal policy, or of price reform are all more straightforward and universal than managing an established market economy. Now, needs will change from broad-based policy advice to deeper analysis of the consequences of policy decisions or of other events or phenomena.

From the economists' side, the time should be ripe for fruitful interdisciplinary cooperation. One of the most exciting branches of economics in recent years has been the study of differences in economic growth rates, in which there has been a fruitful blending of theory and empirics. The consensus has moved beyond proximate explanations of growth to "deeper" explanations of why some countries, and not others, adopt policies conducive to economic growth, and why good policies work well in some settings but are ineffective elsewhere. While there is debate over the role of deterministic factors such as geography and resource abundance, there is a strong consensus that institutions matter. Institutions are, however, broadly defined and remain essentially a black box which economists need help in understanding.

In conclusion let me stress that this is not intended as a partisan approach to the Methodenstreit between area specialists and economists. Economists filled a policy void in the 1990s and much of that early advice was good, even if far from perfect. Area specialists may have had better understanding of Central Asia, but they failed to meet the challenge in the 1990s because much of their criticism of the economists' universal models was of little practical help to policymakers facing novel problems for which their training had not prepared them. In the second decade of transition, more sophisticated analysis of Eurasian economies is required and that will need the combined skills of good economists and knowledgeable regional specialists.

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2003 "Detours from utopia on the Silk Road: ethical dilemmas of neoliberal triumphalism," Central Eurasian Studies Review, 2 (2) 2-10.

Mackinder, Halford J.

1904 "The geographical pivot of history," Geographical Journal, 13: 421-437.

1919 Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction. New York: Holt.

Mahan, Alfred Thayer

1890 The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660-1783. Boston: Little, Brown.

Ratzel, Friedrich

1897 Politische Geographie. München: Oldenbourg.

Schoeberlein, John

2002 "Setting the stakes of a new society," Central Eurasian Studies Review, 1 (1) 4-9.

Spykman, Nicholas

1942 America's Strategy in World Politics. The United States and the Balance of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.

Taylor, Peter

1993 Political Geography of the Twentieth Century: A Global Analysis. London: Belhaven.

[Contents]

Research Reports and Briefs

State Decline in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

Lawrence P. Markowitz, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., USA, lmarkowpolisci.wisc.edu

This study investigates why Tajikistan's state collapsed in 1992 into civil war while state power in Uzbekistan declined into a mixture of coercion and material inducement consistent with predatory rule.[1] To explain the patterns in these two cases, my research has come to focus upon the conditions under which local economic elites ("strongmen"), patronage politics, and regionalism in national institutions contribute to and detract from the use of coercion in state building.

Based on preliminary data analysis, I find that specific combinations of local strongmen and regional patrons promoted very different forms of regionalism in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan during the Soviet period. The distinctive shapes of regionalism persisted into the 1990s, influencing the strategies and effectiveness of law enforcement agencies in each case. In 1992, dissension over one region's hegemony in Tajikistan split its national institutions from within, leading to the capture of the central coercive apparatus, the state's failure to police mass demonstrations, and eventually to state collapse. Uzbekistan's decentralized regionalism, however, left the center consolidated and its coercive apparatus intact. This prevented the type of rapid breakdown that occurred in Tajikistan, but the central leadership's growing reliance on coercion as a means of political control has encouraged predatory behavior in its law enforcement organs. State capture in Tajikistan and emerging predatory rule in Uzbekistan are diverging outcomes that can be best explained by each country's configuration of strongmen, patronage, and regionalism.

By the end of the Soviet period, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan resembled many "weak" states in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, whose efforts to complement their juridical sovereignty with empirical sovereignty are complicated by diffused systems of authority at the interstices of state and society (Migdal 1988; Jackson and Rosberg 1982). Yet, state weakness in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan was characterized by two features of the Soviet system: (1) concentrations of wealth under local agricultural, industrial, or resource extraction operations, constituting the heads of these operations as "strongmen" within their localities; and (2) devolution of political authority to provincial governors (Obkom [oblastnoi komitet; provincial committee] First Secretaries), giving them opportunities to construct regional patronage relations. Local strongmen and regional patronage relations influenced the organization of state power in all Soviet republics (albeit in different ways), but these variables are of particular interest here because they distinguish Tajikistan and Uzbekistan from each other better than variables identified in general theories of state breakdown.[2]

In conducting my research, I used a comparative case study approach which placed Tajikistan and Uzbekistan within a "most similar" research design - one that seeks to explain different outcomes among cases that are otherwise similar. I organized my field research so that I could spend the first phase (September 2002 in Uzbekistan and October-December 2002 in Tajikistan) collecting data on strongmen, patronage relations, and regionalism. I designed my data collection on these variables around specific indicators[3] and used national, regional, and district newspapers, various issues of the economic handbook Narodnoe khoziaistvo, and ministry publications. My research yielded biographies of central elites and regional governors, several databases of tenures of central elites, district governors and collective farm chairs, and local budget figures in each country from 1960-2001 (though gaps in the data remain to be filled). In addition, I collected several elite biographical works and conducted brief interviews with local elites, journalists, and on selected collective farms.

Preliminary analysis of these data confirms most assessments of Tajikistan: that a type of regionalism emerged which effectively split the center from within (Dudoignon and Jahangiri 1994; Roy 2000). Specifically, my analysis suggests that concentrations of strongmen of collective farms and regional patronage relations in the Leninabad province promoted its hegemony in key ministries of the republic's political economy, while local strongmen active in the Mountain-Badakhshan Autonomous Province's growing underground economy sustained its control within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Data also show that these same variables were more evenly spread across regions in Uzbekistan, leaving Uzbekistan's central leadership undivided but ringed by powerful regional political machines. I believe that this difference accounts for the mobility of Uzbekistan's coercive apparatus in policing demonstrations in the early 1990s and for Tajikistan's immobility. Since much of this became clear to me while I was in the field, I was unable to interview elites who worked in the central offices of each country's law enforcement agencies at that time. I plan to interview these former officials during a follow-up field trip.

During the second phase of my research in Uzbekistan (January-August 2003), I investigated the effects that local strongmen, patronage, and regionalism have on the country today. I decided to focus on the Prosecutor General and its regional and district offices. Since the mid-1990s the Prosecutor General's office has been given permission to use its wide-ranging formal powers to spearhead state-building in the country. Its mandate has included reducing the power of regional and district governors. I designed my ethnographic research so that it focused on the successes and failures of this effort among regional and district prosecutors. Over several months I conducted approximately 50 semi-structured interviews of high-level staff in district prosecutors' and district governors' offices and another 50 interviews of journalists, external observers, and lawyers in regional law offices. I conducted these interviews mainly in Uzbek (several were in Russian) in a random selection of districts in Tashkent City and in the provinces of Samarqand and Ferghana (lawyers were interviewed in other regional centers as well). Within each locality, informants were selected based on their professional position only, not according to ethnicity, sex, or social class.

Preliminary findings from these interviews suggest that the use of the Prosecutor General's office to undermine regional elites in Uzbekistan has had mixed results. There have been some successes, but prosecutors are underpaid, overworked, and often in debt from (formal and informal) law school expenditures. In addition, many view their primary role not as an anti-corruption mechanism but as a support for local resource extraction. As such, many of the local offices of the Prosecutor General have become incorporated within regional patronage relations and, paradoxically, enhance them. At the same time, where prosecutors remain relatively autonomous from regional governors and local strongmen, patterns of predatory behavior upon local economic actors have emerged, posing a new challenge to Uzbekistan's political and economic development. However, variation within Uzbekistan is significant and I hope to specify patterns in other localities through interviews in several regional centers upon my return to the field.

References

Beissinger, Mark, and Crawford Young, eds.

2002 Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.

Deng, Francis M.

1995 War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Dudoignon, Stéphane A., and Guissou Jahangiri, eds.

1994 Le Tadjikistan existe-t-il? Destins politiques d'une "nation imparfaite" [Does Tajikistan exist? The political destinies of an 'imperfect nation']. Cahiers d'Etudes sur la méditerranée orientale et le monde turco-iranien, Vol. 18.

Ellis, Stephen

1999 The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War. New York: New York University Press.

Jackson, Robert H., and Carl Rosberg

1982 "Why Africa's weak states persist: the empirical and juridical in statehood," World Politics, 35 (1) 1-24.

King, Charles

2001 "The benefits of ethnic war: understanding Eurasia's unrecognized states," World Politics 53 (4) 524-552.

Lewis, Ioan M.

1994 Blood and Bone: The Call of Kinship in Somali Society. Lawrenceville, N.J.: Red Sea Press.

Migdal, Joel S.

1988 Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Reno, William

1995 Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Roy, Olivier

2000 The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations. New York: New York University Press.

Rubin, Barnett R.

1995 The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Notes

[1] State breakdown or decline is a general term describing the diminishing effectiveness of a state's institutions to function. State collapse refers to the complete failure of state institutions and concurrent social disintegration (often internal conflict). Predatory rule denotes a personalistic regime ruling through coercion and rewards to collaborators. For more, see Beissinger and Young (2002) and Lewis (1996).

[2] Three common theories would emphasize that Tajikistan and Uzbekistan differ in: (a) how identities were formed and mobilized (Lewis 1994; Deng 1995); (b) the incentives among state rulers whose informal pacts of accommodation with local strongmen may or may not force them to purposely dismantle state institutions (Reno 1995; Ellis 1999; King 2001); and (c) levels of economic dependence on a foreign patron (Rubin 1995). While possible to apply to Tajikistan's collapse, none of these explanations adequately accounts for why Uzbekistan did not also collapse.

[3] A "strongman" exists when his or her (and there were female strongmen) tenure outlasted that of his/her immediate superior (the Raikom [raionnyi komitet; regional committee] First Secretary). The shape of regional patronage relations is indicated by the lateral movements of Raikom First Secretaries within a province and by the origins of provincial governors. Types of regionalism are defined by the distribution of key positions in national institutions among regionally based elites.

[Contents]

Towards a Connection between Religion and Nationality in Central Asia

Sébastien Peyrouse, Post-doctoral Fellow, French Institute for Central Asian Studies (Institut Français d'Etudes sur l'Asie Centrale, IFEAC), Tashkent, Uzbekistan, sebpeyrouseyahoo.com

This report presents findings of a research project conducted for a Ph.D. on Christian movements and believers in Central Asia from 1945 through the present. It is a result of a two-year stay (1998-2000) in the five republics of Central Asia with the support of IFEAC, where I currently pursue research on politics and religion in Central Asia after independence. This research is based on library work (in Paris, Nanterre, Strasbourg, Oxford, Moscow, and throughout Central Asia, especially in Tashkent, Dushanbe, Ashgabat, Bishkek, Almaty and Öskemen [Ust'-Kamenogorsk]), plus surveys and interviews. I also extensively used Russian-language Soviet and post-Soviet newspapers, such as Kazakhstanskaia pravda, Kommunist Tadzhikistana, Pravda vostoka, Sovetskaia Kirgiziia, and periodicals covering religious issues, such as Bratskii vestnik, Zhurnal moskovskoi patriarkhii, Svet pravoslaviia v Kazakhstane, Vedi, Zhizn' very, and Slovo zhizni. A number of important documents came from church libraries or were given to me by priests, pastors, and believers. I interviewed state officials in charge of religious affairs, representatives and believers of all Christian denominations present in the area, from the Orthodox Church to the Catholic Church, and the numerous Protestant denominations.

In Central Asia Christianity was not only persecuted by the atheist regime, but it was also a minority religion in a Muslim area. After independence the national character of a minority faith appeared more obviously within the framework of the Muslim majority and of the new nation-state building. This did not prevent numerous movements from successful missionary work. Many missions, especially Protestant ones, are now active among the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks. What is the link between nationality and religion, and how did the Russian Orthodox Church appropriate the concept of nationality after 1991? Are Orthodoxy and Islam trying to bipolarize the religious spectrum in Central Asia in the name of the link between nationality and religion?

The Soviet pattern - that is, a faith fighting for its own existence in an atheist regime - has given way in the post-Soviet period to a Central Asian specificity: Christianity as a minority faith which appears as a symbol of European identity in a Muslim land. European emigration significantly increased from the times of perestroika and independence, considerably diminishing the number of Christians, and arousing the Christian clergy's anxiety. Minorities have expressed their fear evoked by the indigenization of power, and ethnic nationalism has become a key element in the religious revival. This "ethnic-religious" combination constitutes one of the responses to the Central Asian situation. From the titular group's point of view Islam may be viewed as a just return of religion which used to be persecuted by a foreign regime, and which would be essential in the context of nation-building.

The Titular Nationality-Islam Connection

The rapid rise of foreign Christian missions and the conversions of members of the titular nationality (e.g., Uzbeks in Uzbekistan) have caused some hostile reactions from the Muslim clergy who consider themselves "at home" in Central Asia. If Muslims claim to respect Christianity, pressures have grown against the religious movements whose proselytism amidst Muslims is too obvious. This hostility is expressed in countries such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, but also the other republics less influenced by Islam such as Kyrgyzstan, where Christian missionary activity is especially potent: petitions against the activities of these movements were signed in Kyrgyz mosques. In Uzbekistan, the Muslim clergy's pressures have born fruit: the political authorities have reviewed legislation on religion.

The Russian-Orthodox Connection

The Muslim refusal of Protestant or even Catholic proselytism is supported by the Orthodox Church, which tries to justify its position towards Islam and its predominance over the other Christian movements. It asserts an intrinsic tie connecting every Russian to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The terms "Russian" and "Orthodoxy" would then be strictly bound together. The Orthodox Church tries to crystallize to its advantage the Russian population's status of political and cultural minority. The prayer house enables people to meet "compatriots," while the liturgy uses multiple specific cultural aspects.

The link between nationality and religion in Kazakhstan is emphasized by the notion of canonical territory, which according to Orthodoxy concerns all of post-Soviet space. In the name of a supposed precedence over all other churches today present in this area, Orthodoxy claims the right of preeminence, not only over the religious affairs of Russians, but over those of all citizens. In this perspective, a Christian living in any area colonized by Russia would have to be Orthodox. There would be only two exceptions: first, people of non-Slavic origin whose history and culture are bound to another religion (e.g., Uzbeks, Tajiks, Georgians), and second, people whose nationality is culturally bound to a church situated beyond the former USSR borders (e.g., Catholic Poles, Protestant Germans).

The simple presence of some Russian soldiers, Cossack garrisons or Old Believers since the beginning of the 18th century, in particular in the northern Kazakh Steppe, would be enough to support the idea that Central Asia belongs to the Russian world and is intrinsically bound to Orthodoxy. The two Orthodox journals published in Kazakhstan, Vedi and Svet pravoslaviia v Kazakhstane, highlight pre-Soviet Russian history while erasing the Soviet period, which has lost its legitimacy. In this perspective the Russian presence in Kazakhstan is a legacy from the Russian empire and not from Soviet rule.

The Russian Orthodox Church also highlights its link to the Russian nation, while preserving a moderate and accommodating discourse on the new states' political reality, where challenging political frontiers or expressing any kind of irredentism is strictly banned. The Church has to distance itself from the most nationalistic and Cossack movements and has refused to be associated with any kind of unofficial political action. The archbishop of Astana and Almaty has made several statements in interviews and articles weakening the link between religion and nation. The Church especially focuses on the notion of civic patriotism based on territory of residence. Nevertheless, the Orthodox Church cannot solve the contradiction stemming from its claim of a "canonical" territory that implies the existence of a specific link through which Kazakhstan would be, on a religious plane, dependent on Moscow.

Islam and Orthodoxy: Between Cohabitation and Alliance

In the name of national stability, which would be threatened by proselytism and so-called "foreign denominations," Orthodoxy tries to polarize the religious spectrum around the Orthodoxy-Islam duo in order to minimize the influence of Protestantism and so-called non-traditional denominations. Orthodoxy and Islam each refuse to engage in proselytism among nationalities traditionally belonging to the other religion. "In Central Asia and in Russia, there is a natural distribution of the sphere of influence between the two main religions, Orthodoxy and Islam, and no one will destroy this harmony" (Botasheva and Lebedev 1996). The Orthodox hierarchy emphasizes its mutual understanding with Islam and asserts that "Islam is closer to Orthodoxy than other Christian confessions" (Peyrouse 2003: 288). Some embarrassing elements of Orthodox history in Central Asia are then forgotten, as for example the existence of a "Kyrgyz" (i.e., Kazakh) anti-Muslim "mission" in the Kazakh steppes in 1881. The Church also participates in several symbolic events in Kazakhstan, such as commemorations of Abay Qŭnanbaev or Shoqan Uälikhanov [Valikhanov].

If Orthodoxy advocates Russians' rights in Central Asia, it also strives to preserve its good favor with local regimes. When the Russian nationality refers to Orthodox history, this notion of Orthodoxy is not, according to the Archbishop of Astana and Almaty, transnational but on the contrary comes within the scope of the territorial entity in which a Christian lives. Orthodoxy in Central Asia claims to be "autochthonous" (e.g., Svet pravoslaviia v Kazakhstane 1999). Despite its subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate, it refuses to get involved in the Russian Federation and rejects all supra-state political thought so as not to appear a foreign element in Central Asia.

The effort to bipolarize the religious spectrum in Central Asia has met with uneven success, but it is at times strongly supported by local governments. President Niyazov of Turkmenistan has divided the religious spectrum into two distinct wholes which cannot interfere with each other in terms of flux of believers and conversions. Thus, a Turkmen believer is supposed to be Muslim and a European believer - Orthodox. The other republics, especially Uzbekistan, are also evolving in this direction despite the persistence of an official policy of a more diversified religious spectrum.

Unlike certain other Muslim countries, there is no discrimination against Christianity on the whole in post-Soviet Central Asia, as Orthodoxy and other denominations, such as Catholics or Lutherans, are fully recognized. Although discrimination exists against some specific denominations that are viewed as foreign movements (such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostals and even Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists), in practice, no Orthodox in Central Asia complains about flagrant inequality, which would give Christians a lower status. The religious differences are dominated by national identification. Central Asia in this sense remains closer to the rest of former Soviet space than to the Near and Middle East. There is no desire to eliminate Christian practices, whether Orthodox or non-Orthodox, but rather a more subtle discrimination against national (European) minorities through the violation of certain religious rights.[1]

The religion-nationality connection is, of course, not unique to Central Asia and Orthodoxy. Nevertheless, it reveals various questions people raise while facing numerous changes in their society. At the same time it also shows a certain continuity in post-Soviet Central Asia, as this paradigm existed prior to independence. For Russians in Tsarist and Soviet Central Asia, Orthodoxy was a way to mark their identity in a Muslim environment. This link is being reinforced by the new social, economic, and national context, and by the new opportunity for individuals to practice their religious beliefs with fewer restrictions.

This work on Christianity is part of an ongoing research project at IFEAC on the mutual instrumentalization of politics and religion in post-Soviet Central Asia. One of its goals is to study how political discourse uses religious (Muslim, Christian, etc.) phenomena in the framework of nation-state building, and how political powers are attempting to display an image of religious pluralism and freedom. Our present research also examines how religion is viewed by the national minorities, especially in their politico-cultural claims. This question not only concerns minorities of Muslim origin, such as Caucasians or Central Asians living outside their eponymous state, but also the European-Slavic minorities. Since 2003 we have concentrated our work on the Russian minority living in Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan. One of the objectives is to study how Russians are attempting to use the Orthodox Church in defense of their rights in this republic and how the Church replies in the framework authorized by the political power.

References

Botasheva, I., and V. Lebedev

1996 "'Krestonostsy' kontsa XX veka," Kazakhstanskaia pravda, April 2, 1996.

Peyrouse, Sébastien

2003 Des chrétiens entre athéisme et islam: regards sur la question religieuse en Asie centrale soviétique et post-soviétique. Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose.

Svet pravoslaviia v Kazakhstane

1999 No. 9-10 (66-67) 10-11.

Note

[1] The Orthodox and Muslim hierarchies take remarkably similar positions in each of the Central Asian republics: all condemn Protestant proselytism. In the area of religious legislation, however, missionary Christian movements are much less restricted in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan than in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

[Contents]

The Role of the Pilgrimage in Relations between Uzbekistan and the Uzbek Community of Saudi Arabia

Bayram Balcı, Researcher, the Turkey and Caucasus Program, French Institute for Anatolian Studies (Institut Français d'Etudes Anatoliennes, IFEA), Beyoğlu-Istanbul, Turkey, balciazeurotel.com

This report presents the results of my study of a Central Asian community - Uzbeks in today's terminology - who settled in Saudi Arabia in several successive waves starting from the early 1940s, and who are identified by Saudis as Turkistani or Bukhari, according to the regions of their origin. Given Uzbekistan's independence, Saudi Uzbeks today define themselves as Turkistani or Uzbek, depending on the situation.

The study was conducted during two two-week pilgrimages (umra) with Central Asian pilgrims and Saudi Uzbeks at the time of Ramadan in December 2000 and November 2001 in Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina. I also conducted several field visits among the Uzbek community in Turkey and in Uzbekistan, where I followed Saudi Uzbeks visiting their relatives. The findings of this study are based on regular contacts with 15 families who invited me to their homes, on interviews with more than 80 individuals during each pilgrimage, and on family archives, i.e., pictures, letters and videos. The research was supported by the Centre Français de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain (CERMOC, located in Beirut and Amman) and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

In this report I argue that the pilgrimage plays an important role in preserving Uzbek identity on the ground. The Uzbek community (with Uyghurs, another Turkic community exiled in Saudi Arabia, not studied here) is one of only two national groups that have succeeded in achieving relative integration in Saudi Arabia without being completely assimilated. This is notable, since the kingdom makes it difficult for immigrants to preserve their identities.

Before Russian colonization in the 19th century, Central Asians had multiple identities - familial, tribal, regional, and religious. When needed, one would refer to one or all of his/her identities. According to scholars and old refugees in Mecca and Medina, in the early 1930s when Soviet control over the region of Central Asia grew stronger and more violent, the term "Uzbek," that already existed at the time had no real meaning for the exiles. Synonymous with "confederation of tribes," it was of secondary importance for the people who preferred to be identified as "Kokandi," "Namangani," "Marghilani," "Farghani," etc. The outsiders called them Turkistani or, more frequently, Bukhari, referring to the last local independent Emirate and then Socialist Republic of Bukhara (Shalinsky 1994).

Reasons for Exile: New Political and Economic Order

The existing literature on Central Asian migrations (e.g., Shalinsky 1994; Komatsu, Obiya and Schoeberlein, eds. 2000) and my interviews with elders in Saudi Arabia highlight two main reasons for the Turkistani to leave their homeland. Soviet control over the region, with its new coercive economic structure (collectivization and its rejection by landowners) and social-political order (abolition of religious courts and "Russification" of the educational system) pushed people to exile.

Two directions were chosen - East to Kashgar and South to Afghanistan. Some, after a relatively short stay (a couple of months or years), proceeded farther to Turkey and Saudi Arabia. This route was especially attractive partly because of the holy status of the destination, and also because the young Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was among the few Islamic countries to welcome refugees. For pragmatic reasons the Saudi government viewed the migrants as an opportunity to support the population and development efforts of the kingdom. It was also important for the first Islamic state to prove solidarity with the Muslim population persecuted by a communist and atheist regime. With leadership ambitions over the Muslim world, King Abdel Aziz (1876-1953) was not only in charge of the holy cities but also desired to be considered as the protector of all Muslims. This explains the warm welcome and reception of the Turkistani exiles, even as foreign communities enjoyed no separate existence as national groups in Saudi Arabia.

Evolution of Uzbek Identity in Saudi Arabia

The Turkistanis used different identity strategies to ease their migration. The differences in tribal identities were smoothed away in favor of muhajir and Bukhari. On the thorny path of exodus the community considered itself as muhajir - refugees fleeing persecution, in the Islamic sense of the word, comparing oneself to the first muhajir, the Prophet Muhammad in his hijra (exile) from Mecca to Medina. The use of the word muhajir probably commanded sympathy among the Saudis; so did the second identification as Bukhari, which bears not only a geographical significance, but most importantly a religious meaning. By calling themselves Bukhari they demonstrated to the Saudi authorities and population their close relationship with Isma'il al Bukhari, the great Islamic thinker from Bukhara, who was respected in Saudi Arabia.

Like other foreign communities Uzbeks were deprived of the right to create cultural associations and to teach children their native language. Contacts with Turkistan (soon subdivided into five Soviet republics) were made impossible during the Cold War. The community was linguistically Arabized in less than two or three decades. However, contacts with the Uzbeks of Turkey and with Turkish workers or pilgrims in Saudi Arabia facilitated (at least for the community leaders) the survival of Turkic vernaculars that mixed Anatolian and Uzbek languages. In Soviet times the impossibility of visiting the homeland pushed the community leaders closer to Turkey, where exiles established an important Uzbek community.

In 1991 the independence of Uzbekistan brought new hope to the Uzbeks of Saudi Arabia, who were threatened with dilution into the Arab culture. Renewed relationships through the pilgrimage undoubtedly influenced the Saudi Uzbeks' identity.

In the Soviet literature the hajj, synonymous with obscurantism, was totally forbidden except for 10 to 15 handpicked loyal officials. Even though forbidden, the institution of the ribat turned hajj into a cohesion tool within the diaspora. Ribats, created by Turkistani sponsors to facilitate the hajj of their poor countrymen, had existed even before the Uzbek immigration to Saudi Arabia. They functioned as rest houses for fellow townsmen. Namangan, Kokand Marghilan, and even Kashgar and Khotan had their own ribats. Until 1991 these foundations played a crucial role in maintaining the solidarity among the members of the Central Asian community at large. In the absence of legal, cultural, or ethnic associations the ribats also functioned as meeting centers for old leaders (aqsaqal) of the community with the Turkistani-Uzbek pilgrims exiled in Turkey. Now ribats have a chance to evolve into business centers to coordinate cooperation, to develop networks and forums for the exchange of views, and eventually, to redefine the common identity.

Much was expected from the pilgrimage, as Saudi Uzbeks (especially the young ones) do not travel much to Uzbekistan. Pilgrimage had become a source of interest in Uzbekistan long before the end of the Soviet regime (Hayitov, Sobirov and Legai 1992). In 1992 Islam Karimov adopted a more open policy towards Islam after he performed the hajj and received an excellent welcome from the Saudis (thanks to the Uzbek community leaders who had presented him as a descendant of Isma'il al Bukhari). Above all, Uzbekistan's independence marked the reopening of the route to Mecca. From 1992 to 1996 the relationship between the two countries was good and 3,000-4,000 Uzbek pilgrims visited Saudi Arabia annually for the hajj or umra. After 1996, due to the rise of Wahhabism in the Ferghana Valley with alleged involvement of some Saudi Uzbek leaders, Tashkent decided to tighten its control over religious activity in the country and restrict the entering of Saudi Uzbeks into their homeland. The growing scope of pilgrimage and mutual influence contributed to the transformation of the Saudi Uzbeks' identity.

Independent Uzbekistan and Uzbeks have revived pride among the Turkistani group. While some intellectuals eschew the term "Uzbek" as a pure invention of the Russian colonizers to break the Turkic unity in Central Asia and beyond, today when asked about their identity most Saudi Uzbeks tend to add the term "Uzbek" after "Muslim" and "Turkistani" to indicate their belonging to the broader Turkic family. However, for the Saudi population and authorities nothing has changed as Saudi Uzbeks are still perceived as Turkistani or Bukhari. Furthermore and surprisingly, they do not differentiate Saudi Uzbeks from the other two Turkic communities exiled in Saudi Arabia - the Uyghurs of Eastern Turkistan (Xinjiang) who arrived after the communist takeover in China in 1949, and the Afghan Uzbek refugees who arrived after Afghanistan's invasion by the Soviet Army in 1979. Although all these Turkic groups are called Turkistani in Saudi Arabia, they present significant differences in terms of identity and solidarity. This is a subject which requires further study.

References

Hayitov, Sh. A., N. S. Sobirov and A. S. Legai

1992 Xorijdagi O'zbeklar [Uzbeks in Foreign Countries]. Toshkent: Fan Nashriyoti.

Komatsu, Hisao, Obiya Chika and John Schoeberlein, eds.

2000 Migration in Central Asia: Its History and Current Problems. JCAS Symposium Series 9, Osaka: Japan Center for Area Studies.

Shalinsky, Audrey

1994 Long Years of Exile: Central Asian Refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan. London: London University Press.

[Contents]

Reviews and Abstracts

Reviews

Mark Slobin, Afghanistan Untouched. Traditional Crossroads CD 4319, 2003. 2 CDs, 40 pp., notes, photos, ASIN B0000A4GAH, $14.00.

Reviewed by: Rachel Harris, Ph.D., Lecturer in Music, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK, rhsoas.ac.uk

"Before its lands were crushed, its people scattered, and its music silenced by chaos and decree, Afghanistan overflowed with musical treasure" (CD back cover).

On the eve of the US-led overthrow of Taliban rule, that regime's suppression of music became a powerful symbol in Western portrayals of Afghanistan (Baily 2001). Footage of unspooled cassette tape hanging from Afghan trees came to symbolize the cultural wasteland. In the aftermath of the Afghan war, with the introduction of a more liberal regime at least in Kabul, Western groups have been active in seeking to aid a musical renaissance. Crate-loads of classical Western instruments have arrived at the Kabul conservatory, where no one can be found who knows how to play them; a passing German rock band persuaded two burqa-clad women to pose for photographs playing an electric guitar and drum set. Ethnomusicologists have been more interested in the possibilities for revival of the myriad Afghan traditions. This new release joins a number of re-issues of books (Sakata 2002) and CDs (Ustad Mohammad Omar 2002), and complements Mark Slobin's new website (http://www.wesleyan.edu/its/acs/modules/ slobin/html/) which makes available a great deal of original material from his earlier book on music in Northern Afghanistan (Slobin 1976).

The sound quality on these CDs, mastered largely from the original 1968 Uher 4000/L mono recordings, is remarkably fresh and immediate. The tracks on the first CD were recorded among the Central Asian peoples of northern Afghanistan, descendants of Uzbeks who crossed the Amu Darya in 1500 and Tajiks, Kazakhs, and Turkmen who fled the USSR in the 1920s. These are Central Asian folk traditions, a world away from the "classical" Indian-derived tradition of the Afghan rubab. There are some fabulous recordings of the felak songs of tragic love which are also common in southern Tajikistan, (CD1, tracks 2 and 5, with beautiful translations of the lyrics), and there is a rare recording of professional Uzbek women wedding singers (CD1, track 12) which is very reminiscent of the Bukharan style. The second CD contains some real treasures from the eastern city of Herat with its Iranian influences: a charming children's song (CD2, track 9), and some stunning Herati dutar playing (CD2, track 10). This CD also includes some extraordinary rarities from the small Kazakh and Turkmen communities in Afghanistan.

The accompanying liner notes are lucid and packed with information. The recordings serve as an admirable illustration of Slobin's earlier theories of shared and discrete music cultures, but these notes differ from his earlier writing in their attention to the personal. They include many sensitively drawn portraits of the featured musicians, complemented by some beautiful black and white photographs. It is the throw-away remarks which are most revealing of the culture of the time: the inclusion of Hindi film tunes in the local repertoire; references to the expensive local delicacy of Polish candy; the musicians' habit of "vamping indeterminately" to keep the dance going. The freshness of the material at this remove in time is a tribute to the great dedication and care with which the original fieldwork was undertaken. This is a welcome and moving addition to the excellent Traditional Crossroads series.

References

Baily, John

2001 "Can You Stop the Birds Singing?" The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan. Copenhagen: Freemuse. http://www.freemuse.org/03libra/pdf/ Afghanistansats.pdf

Ustad Mohammad Omar: Virtuoso from Afghanistan

2002 Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings.

Sakata, Hiromi Lorraine

2002 [1983] Music in the Mind: The Concepts of Music and Musician in Afghanistan. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Slobin, Mark

1976 Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

[Contents]

Eric W. Sievers, The Post-Soviet Decline of Central Asia: Sustainable Development and Comprehensive Capital. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. 264 pp., illustrations. ISBN 0700716602, $75.00.

Reviewed by: Daniel Stevens, Doctoral Candidate, Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK, stevenspobox.com

That the 1990s was a decade of decline for Central Asia is a conclusion that resonates with the experience of many, and yet largely for reasons of politics is one that few have admitted in official reports and scholarly writings. In this idiosyncratic and yet important work, Eric Sievers bravely attempts to develop a "robust" explanation for this decline, using the idea of "comprehensive capital." The author begins to unpack this concept in the introduction, arguing that sustainable development involves more than just preserving physical capital, but depends upon a virtuous cycle of increasing stocks of physical capital along with less tangible phenomena of health, education, institutions and trust. The author draws on a number of theories that have attached the label "capital" to such issues, and takes these disparate theories and attempts to relate them to each other under the heading "comprehensive capital," focusing on the way that deficits in one can negatively affect the others. This is then illustrated in the first half of the book, as the author charts the squandering of capital stocks built up in the Soviet era in the areas of natural capital (Chapter 1), human capital (Chapter 2), organizational capital (Chapter 3), and social capital (Chapter 4). The chapters are full of well-judged commentary and tantalizing detail, and reflect the author's depth of experience in the region and an equally impressive breadth of understanding of theoretical approaches. His case for the decline of human capital is particularly compelling, and the section on social capital showcases an ability to draw from a range of material - a quantitative study of mahallas (neighborhoods) in Uzbekistan accompanied by excellent insights into how everyday phenomena such as queues and taxi rides can illuminate wider social processes.

The second half of the book takes international environmental law as the "lens through which to frame a workable investigation into how Central Asia's comprehensive capital relates to aspirations for sustainable development" (p. 27). There follows a somewhat involved investigation into how the Central Asian states have encountered and responded to the increasing number of environmental treaties, institutions and NGOs that make up the "international environmental regime." His conclusion is that "both donors and Central Asian governments can pretty much say whatever they want and do whatever they want in Central Asia without much concern ... for their veracity, legality, or [the] consequences of their actions" (p. 144).

Considerable blame for this is attributed to the actions of donors, and Sievers concludes his critical review of "internationalizing" the Central Asian environment by asking whether things would have been much worse if the international community had not become involved (Chapter 6). Given the amount of resources invested in seeking to lead the new Central Asian states down the right path, it is damning that Sievers ends on an equivocal note. The World Bank and United Nations Development Program (UNDP) come off particularly badly, being likened to Soviet institutions in their command style of management, their lack of democracy, their violations of their own rules, and in particular the UNDP's effective arrogation of the role of ministries of the environment in many of the republics.

The final chapter sums up the decline and makes explicit a theme implied in many of the chapters, namely that Central Asia took a wrong turn in the early 1990s by rejecting perestroika dialogues on issues such as the environment and the rule of law in favor of nationalist ideologies and the embrace of the international community, neither of which proved to be sufficient checks on the self-serving behavior of local elites.

While the book is full of firsthand and thorough insight into the decline of Central Asia during the 1990s, the volume sets itself up to be judged at a higher level - as offering a unique and comprehensive explanation for this decline. As such, the question is whether the book is anything more than the sum of its excellent parts. A table on the interrelations of the various types of capital (p. 29) promises much, yet some might question whether it really delivers. Theoretically this work may not be rigorous enough for the macro-theorist who wants to see a few more testable hypotheses and more added to the conceptual backbone of interrelated capital stocks. On the other hand, those favoring an ethnographic approach could be uncomfortable with reducing complex social processes to a game-theory-driven understanding of social capital, or the rather broad concept of organizational capital. Whether the concept of comprehensive capital can provide a framework for further research is unclear, yet I consider that the case made in this volume was very stimulating and worthwhile.

[Contents]

Brian Glyn Williams, The Crimean Tatars: The Diaspora Experience and the Forging of a Nation. Leiden: Brill, 2001. xxvii + 520 pp., maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. ISBN 9004121226, $123.00.

Anna Oldfield Senarslan, Languages and Cultures of Asia Ph.D. Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wis., USA, acowisc.edu

Brian Williams' ambitious history of the Crimean Tatars sweeps from the prehistoric to the present day, offering a comprehensive work that is both rich in detail and broad in scope. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including travelers' accounts, recently de-classified NKVD documents, interviews with surviving deportees, Ottoman histories, Russian periodicals, Crimean Tatar ballads, recent Western scholarship, and personal observations, Williams creates a multi-textured account which combines ethno-genetic, political, social, economic, and cultural histories. While guiding the reader carefully through time in a series of 14 chapters, Williams simultaneously constructs an interpretive/theoretical layer, which he uses to explain and shape the phenomena he describes. Consistently reminding the reader that he is working in a highly contested and politicized arena, Williams challenges Russian, Soviet, Tatar, and Western views alike, offering his own "fundamental reinterpretation" (p. 42) of Crimean Tatar history.

The book is organized chronologically in clearly marked thematic sections. Beginning with ethnic origins, Williams elucidates the genesis of the various subgroups that constitute the Crimean Tatar people, emphasizing their status as indigenous peoples of the Crimean Peninsula. As he leads the reader through the periods of the Crimean Khanate, Russian imperial rule, and diaspora in the Ottoman Empire, Williams presents and discusses previous histories and eyewitness accounts culled from letters, travelogues, periodicals, etc., before constructing his own versions. Williams treats each topic carefully and gives detailed attention to many areas seldom explored in Western sources, such as the social and cultural life of the Crimean Tatars before and during Russian colonial rule. He also provides an excellent and often harrowing section on the fate of those who emigrated to the Dobruca region, and an in depth-investigation of the 1944 deportation and ensuing life of exile in Central Asia. Ending with recent descriptions of new Tatar settlements, the book will leave many readers concerned and eager to find out more about the current state of affairs in the Crimea. Interviews with survivors of the deportation, and important national leaders such as Mustafa Jemilev together with the author's eyewitness accounts greatly enliven the later sections.

In Chapters 5 and 6, which treat the period of Russian colonial rule and the Tatar "migration" to the Ottoman Empire, Williams elaborates on the central argument of his work, which seeks to explain the construction of Crimean Tatar nationality as a process of development from a pre-modern, Islamic identity to a modern, secular-nationalist identity. As support for his argument Williams highlights the two waves of migration to the Ottoman Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Williams contends that after Russian colonization "the Crimean shores, mountains, and steppes had ceased to be considered their homeland in the traditional Islamic sense and had been transformed into the Dar al-Kufr (Abode of the Infidel)" (p. 108). While asserting the reality of the sufferings of non-Russian nationalities under Russian rule, Williams argues that the Crimean Tatars left the Crimea because of factors inherent in their cultural belief system, migrating to the Dar al-Islam (Abode of Islam) to preserve their religious identity. Completing the argument in subsequent chapters, Williams describes the transformation of the Crimean Tatars into a people with a national territorial identity, attributing this change to a combination of factors including the diaspora experience, the influence of Western ideas, the impact of modernist Ismail Gaspirali (Gasprinskii) and his followers, and, ironically, the enthusiasm of early Soviet policies intended to encourage national culture. Tracing the growth of a politicized sense of national consciousness, Williams explains why this people, whom he repeatedly characterizes as having "abandoned" their lands, maintained an intense attachment to the Crimea as an idealized, Edenic homeland while in diaspora, and braved many miseries to return there fifty years after their forced deportation.

Williams crafts his argument well, building it carefully from chapter to chapter. However, it is disappointing that this author, who so effectively deconstructs other versions of history, does not clearly explain the underpinnings of his own constructions. Although he appears occasionally in the narrative as an observer, Williams does not elaborate on his own position as an American scholar, consider what may be his own biases, or explain the development of his theoretical framework. Problematic concepts, such as the assumed opposition of Islam to modernity, or the meanings of "pre-modernity" and "modernity" in this context, are not sufficiently discussed, and could be challenged by readers coming from other disciplines where these terms are strongly contested. Although unstated, Williams' biases seem to show up in the unfortunate characterization of pre-modern Crimean Tatars as "apathetic Muslim peasants" (p. 3), along with the repeated use of the word "simple" to describe the non-literate peasant class. These designations, which belie the well-known complexities of orally transmitted culture, are contradicted by Williams' own descriptions of the activity, creativity, and resourcefulness of the Crimean Tatar villagers. At times, it seems that Williams is so enthusiastic about his theoretical paradigm that he fails to see places where it might be challenged by his own evidence. For example, the destan ballads he uses to illustrate the Tatars' voluntary abandonment of the Crimea, could be interpreted to the contrary, as an indication that they were forced out from a cherished place which they had already constructed as a homeland. An awareness of his own interpretation as one of many possible constructions, and a stronger consideration of possible alternative interpretations, would add depth and maturity to Williams' work.

Any discussion of this book also needs to consider the issues involved in representing living people,

CESR Central Eurasian Studies Review

Contents of this issue

Perspectives

Research Reports and Briefs

Reviews and Abstracts

Conferences and Lecture Series

Educational Resources and Developments

Editors - CESR Vol. 3 No. 1

Perspectives

The Complexity of Central Eurasia

Mysterious Eurasia: Thoughts in Response to Dr. Schoeberlein

The Distinctive Factors of Central Eurasia: A Response to Professor Gleason

Towards Rethinking Geopolitics

The Specific and the General in Economic Policy Analysis and Advice

References

Research Reports and Briefs

State Decline in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan

References

Notes

Towards a Connection between Religion and Nationality in Central Asia

The Titular Nationality-Islam Connection

The Russian-Orthodox Connection

Islam and Orthodoxy: Between Cohabitation and Alliance

References

Note

The Role of the Pilgrimage in Relations between Uzbekistan and the Uzbek Community of Saudi Arabia

Reasons for Exile: New Political and Economic Order

Evolution of Uzbek Identity in Saudi Arabia

References

Reviews and Abstracts

Reviews

References

CESR
Central Eurasian Studies Review