The Heart of Eurasia. This slogan, popularised through a far-reaching campaign funded by the Kazakh government, has defined how mainstream international observers approached the geopolitics of post-Soviet Kazakhstan for almost two decades.
Framing the answer to a captivating question (“Do you know where the magic lives?”), the campaign’s flagship video suspends Kazakhstan in an intermediate space, situated at the crossroads between East and West, tradition and modernity, the vastity intrinsic to Steppe nomadism and Astana’s hyper-urbanised locality. The in-between space described by Kazakhstani propagandists is Eurasia, an opaque entity with poorly delineated contours, but a distinctive core: the territory of today’s Kazakhstan. As an instrument to obliterate Kazakhstan’s post-colonial sense of peripherality, the message of this campaign seems to have reached its targeted audience: the debate on the boundaries of Eurasia goes on, yet there is virtually no doubt that Kazakhstan is, indeed, an Eurasian state.
While other scholars problematise the nation-branding implications of this campaign, I have often wondered about the influences that such an over-played Eurasian identity exerted on Kazakhstan’s perception of its place in the world. Asking a simple question - What does it mean, in foreign policy terms, to be an Eurasian state? - I embarked upon a long research journey that investigated how ideas and constructs associated with Eurasia steered the foreign policy course followed for almost 30 years by Kazakhstan’s first president Nursultan A. Nazarbayev.
