Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 20 – The resignation
of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the last Soviet-era republic head to leave office if
not it seems to give up power, has major consequences for Kazakhstan and the
world in the longer term because of the generational, geopolitical and cultural
shifts that one can see his exit exacerbate or make possible.
Most commentators, not surprisingly,
have been focusing on the short term, on questions like whether Nazarbayev is
pulling a Deng Xiaoping, whether he is planning to establish a family dynasty
and whether his “replacement” will have any real power – as well as whether
Nazarbayev’s actions will become a model for Putin, Lukashenka or Aliyev.
Those are all important questions,
but the answers to them will only be known with time. The larger consequences
of his departure, however, are knowable, some because Nazarbayev himself has
been responding to them for some time and others because his departure by its
very nature will begin a generational shift in Kazakhstan’s governing elite.
Three seem especially obvious and
important now – and most of them are likely to happen regardless of whether Nazarbayev
acts as Deng, his daughter or someone else succeeds, or whether any other
leader in the post-Soviet space chooses to copy in some way what the Kazakhstan
leader does.
First and most important, with
Nazarbayev’s exit, Kazakhstan will become a Central Asian country. When Nazarbayev came to power, Kazakhs had a
small plurality over ethnic Russians in the republic’s population, the result
of Soviet engineering designed to ensure that it would never be able to act as
a purely Central Asian country lest it lose Russian parts.
Now they outnumber Russians nearly three
to one, an advantage that will only increase. Because Kazakhs are Islamic by
culture if not always by practice, they will now be able to play a role in
Central Asia without worrying about the ethnic Russian fraction of the
population as much.
That in turn will allow the Central Asians
to unite because the Kyrgyz, Tajiks and Turkmens will be able to use Kazakhstan
as a powerful balance against the more numerous Uzbeks, changing the political
arrangements of that region in fundamental ways. At the very least, Moscow’s role will be much
reduced.
Second, Kazakhstan will become less
Russian and more Muslim, not only because of the continuing departure of ethnic
Russians but because Islam will become an ever more important part of the
national identity of the Kazakhs as they become more numerous and more involved
with Central Asia.
The Russian language will be less widely
used, with Chinese and English becoming more often the second language of
Kazakhs; and Islamic customs will spread, challenging the predominately secular
society and politics that Nazarbayev has promoted. Over time that could lead to radical changes in
the direction of an Islamic country.
Indeed, no matter who the new leader of
Kazakhstan is -- and even if it is a member of Nazarbayev’s own family --those
in their 40s and 50s who will be coming to power have grown up in a less
secular and more Muslim society than did Nazarbayev himself. That will matter ever more importantly in the
years to come.
And third, Nazarbayev’s exit from the
scene will mean that the CIS will lose a non-Russian who still thinks in Soviet
terms, something that will weaken the non-Russians as long as they stay in
Russian-established institutions but that will increase the likelihood that Kazakhstan
and others will exit these Muscovite institutions.
Moscow has relied on Nazarbayev to
maintain its concept of a post-Soviet space; but with the Kazakhstan leader’s
withdrawal from such a role, Moscow will find it harder to keep the CIS
together. Just as Kazakhstan’s separateness from Central Asia in the past has
ended, so Kazakhstan’s balancing role in the CIS will disappear – and with it,
likely the CIS itself.
Third, Nazarbayev as a Soviet-era
politician was much more oriented toward Europe and the West than his
successors will be. It is probably the case that he chose as his locum tenens a
diplomat who has worked extensively in the West. But with time, that individual
or his replacement will be caught not between Russia and the West but between
Russia and China.
In that event, China will play a far more
important role in Kazakhstan – and Central Asia as a whole – with Nazarbayev’s
departure – and both the West and Russian smaller ones, the former because it
will cease to be the most interesting opponent of Moscow and the latter because
of its growing economic and geopolitical power.
As a result, it is quite possible that the
biggest winner from Nazarbayev’s departure is precisely China, which now stands
over the coming years to pick up the pieces there and in Central Asia more generally
that Russia has assumed belonged to it and that the West has believed it could
win it could effectively challenge.
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