Security in the Caspian Sea region has emerged with suprising force in policy debates in Washington, and claims are made sometimes that it has parallels with previous struggles for hegemony in this area. I do not intend to add a new contribution to the debate revolving around the region, Rather, I want to make some modest clarifications, particularly on the issue of why the United States is extremly ill-positioned to deal with regional security problems in the Caspian.
First, the 19th century “Great Game” was between two imperial powers, Russia and Britain. Today, Russia is up against many players in the Caspian. The many participants in proximity to the Caspian include Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and China. Western Europe and the United States are not yet players although their big oil companies are dragging them into the game. Finally, inside the region several newly independent states are players, three are in the Caucasus and five are in Central Asia.
Second, the old Great Game was one of competing imperialism’s. Today, imperialism is found only on the Russia’s side, and in that country it is seriously weakened and could either disappear entirely or revive. The outcome in this respect is yet to be decided.
Third, the character of the regimes within the contested areas is quite different from the 19th century. These former Soviet republics have high literacy rates, know something about industrialization and urbanization, and have active intelligentsia’s. The intelligentsia’s are attempting to articulate identities that are religious, cultural, and ethnic. They do so sometimes with state support and sometimes against local rulers. At most, these developments were only rudimentary one hundred years ago.
Fourth, pay off in the “Great Game” was territorial gains, and the costs normally exceeded potential gains. Today, the payoffs are several, including national independence, profits from oil and gas production, an Islamic cultural revival, and many lesser ones. In sum, if there is utility in historical analogy, it surely is in the dramatic differences, not the similarities.
If we are concerned with the security of this region, we must properly identify and distinguish between threats and vulnerabilities, not confusing the latter for the former. Much talk about threats to the region has clearly been off the mark precisely because is has confused conditions or dispositions with causes. Let me elaborate this problem in principle.
Suppose that I throw a rock through a window and the window breaks. Then suppose an observer says, “the glass broke because it was brittle.” The implication seems to be that brittleness broke the glass, but consider it for a moment. Did brittleness break the glass? Not at all. It was brittle before I threw the rock, and it did not break earlier. Obviously the rock broke the glass. Brittleness is a disposition or condition, not the cause. In military security language, “threats” are potential causes, and “vulnerability” is the proper label for a disposition that threats may exploit.
Diversity in ethnicity is viewed as a threat when it is really a disposition that can become a vulnerability. The so-called danger of radical Islam in Central Asia also is more properly labeled a disposition than a threat, giving it the status of a cause.
With these distinctions in mind, let me suggest two major security threats and two vulnerabilities in Caspian Sea region. If we understood them fully and could deal with them, we would be well advanced towards a solution to the region’s security challenges.
First, Russia remains a threat. Yet it has proven far less effective in asserting its grip on Central Asia and the Caucasus than many observers, including myself, would have believed. The reasons are twofold. First, Russian reformers, especially economic reformers, recognized that hanging on to these regions would seriously impede a transition to a market economy in Russia. The neo-imperialists in the Ministry of Defense and some of the old economic central planning bureaucrats and managers of state owned enterprises want to reclaim control of both Central Asia and the Caucasus. Until the summer and fall of 1993, the liberal reformers seemed to be winning, and then the tide seemed to shift as Russia pushed its way into the Tajik civil war and into Georgia and Azerbaijan. Still, the liberal reformers occasionally succeed in blocking the neo-imperialists. For example, they simply do not provide funds to the army even when it has been appropriated, and the cost of keeping troops on the Afghan border, in Dushanbe, and Georgia and Armenia is not small.
The second reason is that the Russian regime has proven far weaker than most observers expected. It proved capable of making trouble inside states in both regions, but it has not been able to reassert control. Partested or against it. Even the plight of Russian minorities in both regions stirs little sympathy, and Moscow’s policies toward Russian’s returning to the Russian Federation range from cool to downright hostile.
Still, I would not yet write off Russian imperialism because of Russia’s proximity to the region. Russia is big and nearby. Europe, the United States, and China are big but far away. Over a long period of time, the West may lose interest; Russia is so close that it probably will not. Nor will China in Central Asia.
Next let me describe a major vulnerability in the region: the weak state syndrome. To understand what constitutes a weak state, of course, requires knowing what constitutes a strong state. I am using the term as it has been developed in American comparative political literature, such as Samuel Huntington’s book, Political Order in Changing Societies, in Joel Migdal, Strong Societies and Weak States, Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change, and others, including my own book, On Internal War. As Huntington puts it, the degree of government is more important than the kind of government when we are concerned with stability and state strength, and as several scholars have demonstrated empirically, the single best indicator of the strength of a state is it capacity to collect income taxes, i.e. direct taxes, because that requires effective local government, police, courts, communications, etc. Huntington also emphasizes that dictatorships, or praetorian regimes, are not strong regimes. And Migdal explains why: they leave many autonomous social enclaves not integrated into the state. Dictators repress them and try to contain them, but they do not control them within their state and social institutions.
Applying these concepts to the states of the Caspian Sea littoral, all of them are weak, in fact very weak, similar to many of the Third World states, former colonies, newly independent since WW II. Most are still weak and likely to remain weak for a long time. The “weak state” syndrome in fact seems to be the international norm. Yet from a policy viewpoint, Western observers tend to see it as temporary and abnormal, a situation that must rectify itself in time.
Weak states do not actually “cause” disorder, violence, and war. Rather they are vulnerable to the actors that cause such things. We find two types of weak states in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The first is the struggling democracy, or those states that tried to follow the democracy path in the last years of perestroika and immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. In all of these cases but Kyrgyzstan, the Russians took advantage of the open political processes there to create chaos, applying a divide and rule strategy to retain Moscow’s influence. Kyrgyzstan has been an exception, probably because Kazakstan and Uzbekistan did not want a civil war there and nipped the KGB’s mischief in the bud in the Fergana disorders in 1990.
The second type of weak state includes the dictatorships Kazakstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. In these cases, local communist party leaders changed their labels, became nationalists, kept control, and therefore, were able to keep the Russians from stirring up conflicts which they could then pretend to manage as so-called “peacekeeping” endeavors, the pattern in Tajikistan, Georgia, and for a time in Azerbaijan. Aliyev has moved Azerbaijan toward this type, just as Akayev has done in Kyrgyzstan. It allows them to keep the Russians out, but it brings other problems.
The dictatorships may survive for quite sometime. The Uzbek, Turkmen, and to lesser degrees, Kazakstan and Azerbaijani power structures look very much like the regimes in Syria and Iraq, with Baathist parties and institutions which were copies from the Leninist model. The latter two could easily fall into disorder. Kazakstan’s large Russian ethnic minority region makes it particularly vulnerable. Aliyev’s Azerbaijan has many refugees, the lingering Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and weak residual institutions from Soviet times, problems far more severe than those facing dictators like Karimov and Niyazov.
Next, as the third factor, is Islam a threat to the region or a vulnerability? Much was made in the first couple of years after the collapse of the Soviet Unionabout the probable ascendancy of radical Islamic influences in both Central Asia and Azebaijan. A lasting judgment on this problem is impossible, but thus far, Islamic radicals have not done well in the region, not even in Tajikistan. Iran has behaved with considerable circumspect, not pushing radical Islam in the region. Saudi Arabia, however, is spending large sums covertly throughout the region to revive Muslim clergy and mosques. What their politics will be is not yet clear.
As a tentative judgment, I suggest that Islam is a cultural disposition, not a threat, but possibly a vulnerability. The seven decades of secularization in Central Asia and Azerbaijan will retard but probably not permanently preclude the revival of Islam. Whether its politics will be radical is likely to be determined by how the dictators treat it. If they treat it as a threat and repress it brutally, it will turn radical. Thus we may want to call Islam a vulnerability, but we should not see it as a threat to the region.
A fourth factor falls into the threat category because of the deleterious effects it will almost inexorably have on several regimes. As some of these states succeed in exporting significant amounts of oil or gas, large revenues will pour in. Anyone familiar with the history of Peru knows what a state’s dependency on commodity exports for revenues does to strength of the regime. It keeps it weak. The regime has no incentive to compromise with social, economic, and political interests that resist its power. This is true because rulers do not have to tax individuals and business at the local level. Oil exports are particularly dangerous in this respect. Nigeria’s history over the past two decades and recent developments in Venezuela are cases in point. The Shah’s fall in Iran was in no small part abetted by dependency on oil revenues for state income. The fragility of all the Persian Gulf oil producing regimes is conspicuous, and the oil price boom in the 1970s weakened Saudi Arabia’s internal tax system noticeably, imposing serious problems when the price bust came in the 1980s.
In the Caspian Sea littoral states, pouring wealth into the hands of weak governments could destroy them, or at least prevent them from making significant progress in state-building. This threat is far more serious for these regimes than Russian imperialism. Yet it is the most difficult and the threat least likely to be addressed by effective Western strategies.
Strategies for Providing Regional Security Against this assessment of the threats and vulnerabilities, let me turn to strategies for achieving regional security. First, dealing with the Russian threat has to be part of our overall strategy toward Moscow, not separate and limited to the Caspian Sea region. Contributing effectively to Russian economic reforms is likely to dampen neo-imperial aspirations, but effective contributions may no longer be big IMF loans and other direct monetary transfers to the Russian state. They are beginning to have a negative impact, allowing the postponement of economic reforms. The former finance minister, Boris Fedorov, argued in Washington in 1996 that an $11 billion IMF loan made no economic sense whatsoever. It could only be justified as buying Yeltsin’s re-election. Second, although it is perhaps too obvious to repeat, I will do so. Building alternate pipelines to the ones from the region through Russia is absolutely essential if the worst kind of Russian influence is to avoided. Multiple routes will encourage competition and a desirable kind of Russian influence cooperative, private sector, business participation.
Third, if the United States is to play a more than a trivial role in the Caspian region, it has to breakout of the constraints it has placed on itself with its double containment policy toward Iran and Iraq. It may not be easy, and many American political leaders may oppose it. We should be clear, however, that the price will be to exclude the United States from playing a much bigger role. And it will also be to facilitate the reassertion of Russian neo-imperialism at the very time we have a chance to transform the Russian role into a positive one. Dealing with these three issues are the first order of business for any major US contribution to security in the Caspian region.