Abstract
The emergence of China, Korea and Japan as major external powers in Central Asia challenges our Eurocentric scholarly biases about the region's natural orientation and introduces new network ties, norms and organizations that will profoundly transform the region.
This excellent collection of papers is the result of a special roundtable, organized by Professor Contessi, to engage with leading English-speaking scholars of East Asia about the region's growing ties with Central Asia. The event, held on December 3, 2014 at Columbia University in New York, was co-sponsored by the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, suggesting that both regional institutes grasped the cross-regional significance of the topic. As the reader will see from the high quality of the papers, Dr. Peyrouse, Professor Dadabayev and Professor Fumagali have bridged the two regions with conceptual clarity, invaluable current data, and great analytical nuance, while Professor Contessi has provided a very helpful overview of the major themes, trends and questions left unanswered by this gathering.
So just what is “Central Asia's role in Asia?” The very simplicity of the question posed in the title of our forum reveals two critical shortcomings that continue to distort the West's understanding of Central Asia's regional and international relations.
The first is a Eurocentric bias in the way we look at the region. Much of this Eurocentric bias stems from the important role that has been assigned to Russia, as former imperial power and current regional hegemon. Moscow's renewed interest in Central Asia, especially under President Vladimir Putin, as part of its regional sphere of “privileged interest,” both legitimizes its self-perception as a great power and affords it status as an important pole in a growingly multipolar world. Its recent efforts to integrate the Central Asian states into new, tighter regional Russian-led architectures like the EEU and CSTO have been given new geopolitical meaning by the Ukrainian crisis and Moscow's efforts to push back against Western influence across Eurasia. Caught between a resurgent Russia, fears of Maidan-like street processes, and a wave of economic crisis and uncertainty unleashed by Western economic sanctions on Russia and the latter's countersanctions, Central Asia's relations with Russia have been magnified, even as its economic interactions with other regions and states have actually accelerated.
At the same time, over the last two decades the region's international political economy and economic development have been viewed, by scholars and international policymakers alike, through the lens of the post-Communist transitions. International organizations and institutions have classified the Central Asian states as “transitioning countries,” benchmarking them to East Europe's liberal market ideal types, while ignoring their obvious geographic and geopolitical dissimilarities. Without the pull of the European Union, it now seems apparent that forces of economic and legal globalization have had a much different impact on Central Asia than post-Communist Eastern Europe.
As our contributors show, the region's growing ties to its East are consistent with the Central Asian states’ multivector foreign policy doctrines and practices but, critically, are also driven by a range of societal actors – multinational companies, diaspora communities, and small entrepreneurs – often acting without coordination or strict guidance from their respective capitals.
At the same time, the rise of China, South Korea and Japan has also complicated and intensified East Asian political dynamics, projecting back onto the region. China's growing role has not only forced an accommodationist stance by Russia, especially as it completes its own “pivot to the east,” but perceptions of Beijing's growing regional economic power and possible accompanying influence are motivating Japanese policymakers to design their own distinct forms of engagement, ODA and multilateral forum.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Professor Contessi and the contributors point to the growing role of a number of new regional organizations that increasingly contain and mediate these Eurasian–East Asian relations. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, now set to expand its membership to include India and Pakistan, is still only fourteen years old, yet it has clearly charted a course as a non-Western alternative for promoting regional integration and interactions. China's establishment of the New Silk Route Fund, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and a resurrected Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) are weaving a fabric of arenas, norms, and agendas through which the Central Asian states will only accelerate their integration into Asia. As Contessi points out, East Asia's incremental engagement with Central Asia has provided a sustainable platform for pragmatic cooperation. By contrast, the West is either being perceived as withdrawing from the region – as in the case of the United States which no longer needs the region to support its dwindling Afghanistan operations – or, as in the case of the European Union, appears disinterested and ineffective in the region, especially in its efforts as a normative actor to engage with a region that is adopting different referents for its social and political life.
As a result, this outstanding collection of essays not only provides us with some of the most in-depth and groundbreaking analysis about China, South Korea and Japan's individual engagements with Central Asia, but it also suggests that these new projects, networks and multilateral institutions will have more staying power than many of their Western counterparts. Most intriguingly, they suggest that just as Central Asia became a site for US–Russia–China interactions in the 2000s, the region is poised to become a new arena where the East Asian and other Asian countries project overseas their own forms of economic influence, strategic priorities and norms. How the Central Asian elites and public react to these new vectors remains an open question, for they will also be challenged to maintain important foreign policy balances and their own subjectivity in this growing thicket of external actors.
However, what is clear is that this fine collection represents the beginning of a fruitful, pressing and critical research agenda, one that will both provide a more accurate reflection of the international environment confronting the Central Asian states, and also give us concrete examples of the types of results that Asia's new forms of engagement and regional orders are producing.