It has taken time for those sceptical about the recent changes in a number of former Soviet states Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan to find an appropriate voice. An annual gathering of experts on oil and strategy from the Caspian littoral states at the Eurasia Programme in Cambridge, England heard it clearly. In my country we have a saying: Measure it, measure it, ten times, and only then cut.
The speaker was a Russian politician expressing widespread doubts about the orange revolutions of 2003-05, above all the political changes in these three former Soviet republics and the encouragement of similar changes elsewhere (Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan).
In Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, nothing had changed, the Russian politician argued once Leonid Kuchma, Eduard Shevardnadze and Askar Akayev had stolen as much as they wanted, one group of robbers just replaced another.
Also in openDemocracy on the Caspian region, the Caucasus, central Asia, and Russian policy:
Caucasus fractures debate with articles by Neal Ascherson, Nino Nanava, Alexander Rondeli, Sabine Freizer, George Hewitt, Brenda Shaffer, and Thomas de Waal
Sabine Freizer, Midnight in Tashkent (April 2004)
Mary Dejevsky, The west gets Putin wrong (March 2005)
David Coombes, A different kind of revolution in Kyrgyzstan (June 2005)
Ivan Krastev, Russias post-orange empire (October 2005)
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Other conference speakers had different worries: the collapse of Ukraines industrial economy, the destabilising promotion by western states and NGOs of an orange revolution roadshow, and (from a Kazakh who favoured responsible pluralism) the hotheads among the regions opposition forces.
Resource politics
The fate of the wider Caspian region since the collapse of the Soviet Union is as complex as its current political and strategic control is contested. Two factors are especially relevant in understanding its context.
First, as a result of different calculations about how oil and gas reserves are to be found, there is no agreement among the five littoral states about what the status of the Caspian is. Four of the five states Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan now argue that it is a sea, to be governed by international maritime law, and that its seabed resources are to be divided up into national exploration zones. The fifth, Iran (whose representatives were prevented by British visa obstruction from attending the conference) claim that the Caspian is a lake, albeit four times larger than any other in the world, and that revenues from oil and gas in the sea be shared between the five states.
This dispute is complicated by other maritime uncertainties: protection of the environment, sturgeon fishing (the Caspian is the source of the worlds best caviar), naval security against piracy and drugs smuggling, and fishing rights.
Second, the Caspian region lacks political stability. The endemic war in Chechnya carries the persistent threat both of murderous individual actions by the guerrillas (Beslan in September 2004, Nalchik in October 2005) and of a wider spread of violence to the multi-ethnic republics of the north Caucasus, including Dagestan on the Caspian shore.
At the same time, the protracted conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh is no nearer resolution as long as leading forces in Baku or Yerevan continue to block the reasonable settlement worked out by international diplomats and experts.
Armenia, landlocked and resource-poor, has lost half of its population to emigration since 1991, and subsists on remittances by émigrés that fuel consumption but avoid investment. Political power in Yerevan rests in the hands of a nationalist military elite around Robert Kocharian that has no serious interest in a compromise. Azerbaijans outlook is brighter: it is looking forward to an increase in oil and gas revenues, not least with the opening in May 2005 of the pipeline from the Caspian coast to Ceyhan on Turkeys Mediterranean coast.
The authoritarian model
The brittle, increasingly nationalistic character of local regimes compounds these inter-state security concerns. None of the three new post-Soviet states around the Caspian has allowed substantive democratisation. Kazakhstan, the largest and richest, which has seen substantial economic growth in the last ten years based on oil revenues, allows only token opposition in its presidential elections; the government of Nursultan Nazarabayev warns of the dangers which any repetition of the Orange revolutions could bring about. Kazakhs are particularly scathing about the corrupt and divided nature of the new government in Kyrgyzstan.
Azerbaijan has weathered the transition from the rule of former president Heydar Aliev to his son Ilham, but is equally immobile and resistant to democracy even as the November parliamentary elections approach. The Baku regime is pinning much of its hopes on forging closer military ties with the United States in the face of Iran to the south. (It is one of the ironies of politics in this region that Shia Iran supports Orthodox Christian Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, partly because of Shia Azerbaijans alliances with Turkey and the United States).
Turkmenistan, ruled by the authoritarian Turkmenbashi (father of the Turkmen) Saparmurat Niyazov) whose cult of personality in the form of giant statues adorns its cities is the most retrograde of the ex-Soviet republics. Despite this centralising focus, its reliance on energy revenues means that the regime is riven by factional disputes over control of resources.
The country whose policy causes greatest concern to observers at present, however, is the regions largest: Russia. Here the consolidation of an authoritarian security-business nexus around President Vladimir Putin proceeds apace, with evident uncertainties for its internal opposition, for businesses, and for neighbouring states.
Russias recovery
A senior Russian official who knew Putin well and with whom I spoke recently observed: Putin knows how far he wants to go in consolidating the state, but he is surrounded by people who want to go much further.
When discussing, in a mixture of broken Russian and English, a comparison between Tony Blair and Putin as leaders, I remarked nash malchik ne slushaet (our boy does not listen), my interlocutor replied wryly: nas malchik tozhe ne slushaet (our boy does not listen either).
Russias attempt to project its power outwards into the former republics has, however, made some progress. The US advance into the region, in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 and with the partial agreement of Moscow itself has to some degree been halted.
Fred Hallidays global politics column makes sense of national histories, geopolitical currents, and small wars across the world. A selection:
Terrorism and world politics: conditions and prospects (January 2005)
An encounter with Mr X (March 2005)
Irans revolutionary spasm (July 2005)
Political killing in the cold war (August 2005)
Maxime Rodinson: in praise of a marginal man (September 2005)
Uzbekistan is returning to a pro-Russian stance after the mass killing of demonstrators in the town of Andijan on 13 May and the resulting international outcry; it has obliged the Americans to abandon the military base they were using at Karshi-Khanabad.
Meanwhile, the opening of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline is explicitly designed to avoid Russian territory but in itself does not obviate the need for more east-west energy transport channels through Russia. Despite American pressure, Moscow is refusing to participate in the imposition of sanctions on Iran over its nuclear plans; and a more favourable climate towards Russia in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan has allowed the country to regain some of the influence in Afghanistan it had in the 1980s.
The Chinese are coming
The great new event in the region is the economic and strategic advance of China. Its state companies have forged agreements larded with references to the historic silk road to move Caspian oil and gas thousands of kilometres across Asia to Chinese markets. As Chinese migrants settle more and more in central Asian states, China, with its investment funds available and a growing demand for oil, has now become a major economic player.
China is also an active political and strategic element in the region. It has used the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to develop a strategy for central Asia that explicitly excludes the United States and binds it, with Russia and the ex-Soviet republics, into a security network. China has no interest in democratisation or orange revolutions and has (like Russia) supported the president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, after the Andijan massacre. China has also reached agreement with Kazakhstan to prevent Uighur Islamic opposition forces using the border to carry out operations in Chinas northeast province of Xinjiang.
Much coverage of this complex region resorts to the 19th-century image of the great game, celebrated by the writer Rudyard Kipling, in which Russia and Britain manoeuvred for influence in this region. There are great-power rivalries being played out today, but the great game fails to capture what is different today: China is today an active agent, and local regimes (powerless and impoverished Khanates 150 years ago) are independent states with their own calculating, revenue-generating and nationalistic leaderships.
A Kazakh delegate to the Cambridge conference invoked a local saying to warn potential players in the region: do not stir the bees nest! Too late: the bees, on all sides of the Caspian, and in all directions from it, have already been well stirred.
