Central Asian Integrations obstacles: Authoritarian regimes dealing with big powers and internal tensions

Abstract

After the disintegration of Soviet Union, one could expect that five Central Asian actors, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan would integrate. However, these newly independent states decided to follow different ways. Confidently, Central Asian actors shared common history, more importantly, they operated under single system and integration process would be easily achieved because Soviet Union seemed to be base for this. But nation states possessed different features which did not allow integration to happen. Precisely, some of them such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan had stronger “say” because of its natural resources, while, countries like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were weak in all possible spheres. One may assume that these individual characteristics could not provide pure “win-win” situation which in the case of any integration process plays a key role. Furthermore, authoritarian regime differences were another prominent issue that impeded integration. Clearly, new actors had not similarities in their domestic regimes that are believed to be one of the fundamental elements for integration. For example, Kyrgyzstan became close to Western style of governance such as democratization, while, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan decide to be more closed ones. Turkmenistan with its natural resources transformed into isolated state and became neutral. Finally Tajikistan was suffering from civil wars which impeded not only integration but deteriorated the whole situation. Thus, this paper aims to explore obstacles that impeded possible integration of Central Asian actors by looking at historical data and analyzing individual states’ features.