Abstract
Luca Anceschi needs little introduction as a well-published scholar of Central Asian affairs. His latest work, Analyzing Kazakhstan’s Foreign Policy: Regime Neo-Eurasianism in the Nazarbayev Era, is a welcome addition to the existing scholarship, focusing on the foreign policies of Central Asian states, such as Turkmenistan (Anceschi, 2008), Uzbekistan (Fazendeiro, 2017) and Kyrgyzstan (Toktomushev, 2018). Leveraging the conventional characterisation of Kazakhstan as a Eurasian ‘bridge’ between Europe and Asia, the book deftly unpacks the conceptualisation, evolution and operationalisation of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy—which Anceschi terms regime neo-Eurasianism—during the tenure of the country’s first post-Soviet President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev who, having stepped down in 2019, is currently the Chairman ‘for life’ of the country’s Security Council. Its central argument is that the Eurasian emphasis is a misnomer since regime neo-Eurasianism was primarily about enhancing Nazarbayev’s legitimacy, leadership and legacy.
The book unfolds over five chapters. Chapter 1 covers the pre-Eurasianist period from 1991 to 1993 when Nazarbayev championed integration with the post-Soviet Commonwealth of Independent States as a way to address the economic and ethnic challenges facing a newly independent Kazakhstan. Chapter 2 unpacks the origins of regime neo-Eurasianism, the milestone event of which was Nazarbayev’s 1994 speech at Moscow State University. It draws comparisons between this concept and alternative Russian and Kazakh formulations of the concept, and highlights that the domestic institutionalisation of the concept was aligned with Nazarbayev’s power consolidation. Chapter 3 considers the interplay between regime neo-Eurasianism and intra-Central Asian integration to suggest that Nazarbayev’s priority on the former largely put paid to the success of initiatives like the Central Asia Union and the Central Asian Economic Union in the 1990s. In this regard, Central Asian regionalism was out of lockstep with Nazarbayev’s ambition to be seen as a champion of wider Eurasian integration, as underlined by his chairmanship of Europe’s top security body, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, in 2010. Chapter 4 explores the workings of two different institutional pillars of Eurasianism—the Eurasian Union and the Eurasian Economic Community—in the wider post-Soviet space between 1994 and 2013. These reflected distinct visions of integration (for instance, in terms of number of members and scope of integration) as well as attempts to manage the vital Kazakh-Russian relationship. Chapter 5 focuses on the most recent incarnation of Eurasianism—the Eurasian Economic Union—which ironically coincides with a period of declining Kazakh interest and agency in integration from 2014 onwards.
This study offers two major conclusions. The first is that assessments of the Nazarbayev regime’s legitimacy at the domestic and international levels not just shaped but largely determined the conception and oscillation of Kazakhstan’s neo-Eurasian foreign policy. The latter was, in the author’s opinion, a malleable policy construct that was widened or narrowed to accommodate Nazarbayev’s shifting interests at a particular juncture. The book’s emphasis on domestic sources of foreign policy and the extent to which smaller states can exert agency in international relations is to be commended; it contrasts with more conventional explanations that locate the primary sources of foreign policy in systemic and exogenous factors. Nevertheless, Anceschi does acknowledge that Russia’s more assertive foreign policy, after the return to power of President Vladimir Putin in 2012, reduced and constrained the amount of policy space available to Nazarbayev to (re)design and (re)formulate Kazakhstan’s foreign policy approach. In this regard, it is surprising that Russia’s disarray under former President Boris Yeltsin does not warrant much discussion since this probably emboldened Nazarbayev. It is also curious that China’s role in Kazakhstan’s regime neo-Eurasianism is cited only in passing—indeed, the term ‘China’ does not appear in the index at all—despite the fact that the author has characterised Sino-Kazakh relations as a ‘divisive’ issue among Kazakh elites elsewhere (Anceschi, 2020). After all, during the twilight of Nazarbayev’s tenure, Kazakhstan took a more active, albeit carefully calibrated, position with regard to China’s mass detention of Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
The second, and perhaps more surprising conclusion, is the assertion that Kazakhstan’s neo-Eurasianism under Nazarbayev had little to do with the country’s ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy, which advocates diversified cooperation with a broad range of countries and actors. Multi-vectorism is an officially sanctioned approach in Kazakhstan, and much scholarly ink has been spilt on examining its implementation and transferability. According to Anceschi, the foreign component of the regime’s neo-Eurasianism was aimed squarely at managing the vagaries of Russia-Kazakh collaboration since the latter greatly impacted the country’s sovereignty and hence Nazarbayev’s domestic legitimacy. In short, multi-vectorism was merely a ‘postscript’ to neo-Eurasianism. However, it is not immediately clear why multi-vectorism is so easily dismissed, especially as the pursuit of, say, Sino-Kazakh relations or Kazakh–Uzbek relations can help to hedge against Russia-Kazakh relations within the framework of neo-Eurasianism.
In view of the book’s emphasis on neo-Eurasianism as a tool for regime legitimacy at home, a minor quibble with the study is the absence of any discussion about the extent to which legitimacy is important in sustaining authoritarian regimes. After all, the significance of elite unity or disunity, elections and other forms of norm institutionalisation, and objects of political legitimacy (the nation, state, regime, ruler, policies) in facilitating authoritarian resilience appear particularly relevant for Nazarbayev’s regime. In any case, the intended audience of the book—students and scholars of politics and international relations—and their assumed familiarity with the academic literature on this subject probably explain its omission.
Such issues notwithstanding, Analyzing Kazakhstan’s Foreign Policy provides a masterful account of the driving themes and issues with Kazakhstan’s foreign policy since its independence. Thanks to Anceschi’s incisive analysis of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy approach to date, the onus now lies on other scholars of Central Asia to reflect on the following issues going forward: to what extent will regime neo-Eurasianism continue under the current President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, given that this approach was closely associated with the person of Nazarbayev? Will Central Asian regionalism be given a boost with the change of leaders in the two key states of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan amidst the rise of a younger generation less beholden to Russia? Stay tuned.