New Great Game: failure of regional cooperation or failure of understanding? Same Old Ideas? Neo-Sovietism in Central Asia

John Heathershaw Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science [e-mail]

• Understanding Kyrgyz-Russian relations: New Great Game or Same Old Ideas?

Outline

• New Great Game: failure of regional cooperation or failure of understanding?

• Same Old Ideas? Neo-Sovietism in Central Asia

• An Illustration: reacting to Uzbekistan’s Andijon uprising

• Post-revolutionary Kyrgyz-Russian Relations

1. The New Great Game: A Failure of Regionalism or a Failure of Understanding?

• Failure of Regional Cooperation?

• Central Asian ‘orphans’ that must be forced (according to realists) or persuaded and socialised (neo-liberals) into regional order

• New Great Game

• Regional elites
• Regional academics (links to ‘Heartland’)
• New Great Game in the West – Neo-Realism; Geopolitics

• The Failure of Understanding

• Assumes international competition and conflict;
• Exaggerates international interest and intervention;
• Under-estimates local and regional factors

2. Same Old Ideas? Neo-Sovietism in Central Asia

• The locating of ‘Central Asia’ (Tsentralnaya Aziya)
• The idealising of ‘stability’ (stabilnost)
• The identification of political ‘authority’ (avtoritet)

• What’s new in Neo-Sovietism?

• Authoritarianism over Totalitarianism
• Dispersed production – discursive quality

3. An Illustration: Regional Reaction to the Andijon Uprising

• Central Asian regionalism based in Neo-Sovietism conditioned the aftermath in four ways..

• It produced ‘Central Asian’ versions of the ‘Facts’ which departed from the understandings of the international community

• It transmitted the imperatives ‘Stability’ and ‘Authority’

• It, thus, provided the immaterial basis for Uzbekistan’s Split With the United States

• It provides space for the increased influence of Russia and China across the region

4. Post-revolutionary Kyrgyz-Russian Relations

• Regional reaction to the revolution

• Post-revolutionary dynamics

• Military
• Economic relations
• Political norms/institutions

• Spatial and identity basis of relationship

• Alliance as association (soyuznicheskiye otnosheniya)

• Possibility of a formal blok?