Rentierism, Dependency and Sovereignty in Central Asia

61 st Political Studies Association Annual Conference
Transforming Politics: New Synergies
19 - 21 April 2011
Novotel London West
Panel: ‘Embedding Democracy’
Rentierism, Dependency and Sovereignty in
Central Asia
Dr Wojciech Ostrowski
University of Dundee
Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Mineral Law and Policy
Carnegie Building
University of Dundee
Dundee
DD1 4HN
Scotland
w.ostrowski@dundee.ac.uk
Do not cite or circulate without author’s permission
Copyright PSA 2011
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Twenty years after becoming independent states, all five Central Asian republics can be broadly
characterised as rentier and semi/quasi-rentier states. The ‘classic’ rentier states Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan rely on rent (wealth) that derives directly from the sale of oil and gas while semirentiers
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan rely on rent that comes from a combination of indirect taxation
of labour remittances obtained in Kazakhstan and Russia, international aid, leasing access to
territory and drug trade. Uzbekistan, which is heavily dependent on the sale of cotton, gold, gas on
the international markets as well as labour remittances, and, to a lesser degree leasing access to
territory falls somewhere between Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan on the one hand and Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan on the other. The economic composition of the Central Asian region, which began
taking its current shape with the unprecedented increase in oil prices in the beginning of 2000s,
starts mirroring the Middle Eastern style “division of labour” that developed between oil-rich Gulf
and oil-poor Arab countries, as well as Pakistan and other states which have been greatly
dependent on labour remittances that their citizens earn in the oil-rich states (Chaudhry 1989;
Addleton 1992; Hinnebusch 2003)
The dependency of the Central Asian republics on rent has a far reaching impact on these
countries’ foreign policy, their relationship with Russia and state sovereignty. In the case of
Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, lack of viable alternatives to oil and gas exports and full
dependency – until very recently - on the Russian controlled pipeline system has substantially
narrowed their room for manoeuvre and allowed Russia to maintain the upper hand in its
relationship with Central Asian oil and gas exporters. In sharp distinction to Kazakhstan and
Turkmenistan, Uzbek overreliance on cotton allowed the ruling regime to pursue the most
independent foreign policy in the region the durability of which is, however, highly questionable
due to unstable cotton prices on the international markets. Kyrgyz and Tajik dependency on
foreign aid, labour remittances and leasing access to territory forced ruling regimes to largely
subordinate their foreign policies to the politics of the regional or international powers on which its
economic survival currently depends on. The dependency on outside ‘patrons’ explains both the
presence of the US and Russian military basis on Kyrgyz territory and Tajikistan’s strong ties to
Russia. In short, the key role that rent plays in the survival of the Central Asian states has either
hampered these countries’ sovereignty, or made its maintenance very difficult.
Rentierism and Sovereignty
The rentier state concept attempts to elucidate the impact that rent derived especially from the sale
of oil and gas on the international markets has on the nature of the states as well as the political
systems of the resources and energy-rich counties. Thus, those working within the rentier state
tradition focus on those states in which the economy is dominated by rents rather than by
productive enterprises like agriculture and manufacturing, and where the origin of the income is
external. In addition, the rent is generated by small elite, the majority being only involved in the
distribution or utilization of it, and the state being the principal recipient of these rents. A rentier
state accordingly plays a central role in distributing this wealth to the population (Beblawi 1987:
51–53).
The rentier state concept was initially crafted by the North African and Middle Eastern
scholars (Mahdavy 1970; Beblawi and Luciani 1987; Skocpol 1982; Chaudhry 1989; Crystal
1991; Brynen 1992; Shambayati 1994; Okruhlik 1999) and over time has been applied to other
areas of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa (Yates 1996; Clark 1997; Frynas 2004; Soares de
Oliveira 2007) and South America (Karl 1997). In recent years, with various degrees of success,
the rentier state concept was also applied to post-Soviet Central Asia and Caucasus (Kuru 2002;
Ishiyama 2002; Franke et al. 2009) and even to Russia (Luong 2000; Kim 2003; Wood 2007). The
fact that the rentier state concept travelled across space and time and endured as a valid notion is a
testimony to the initial analysis by the Middle Eastern scholars who correctly decoded and
described the dynamics of the rentier state and its impact on the political systems of the non-
Western, post-colonial (rentier) states (Ross 2001). Terry Karl, in her study of Venezuela written
almost thirty years after the rentier state concept was first applied, argued that in essence all rentier
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states can be characterized by the same fundamental economic policy pattern: ‘maximizing the
external extraction of rents for subsequent distribution through public spending according to a
political logic’ (Karl 1997: 197).
At the same time, the success that the rentier state concept enjoyed has lead a situation in
which the notion has been overstretched. The critiques pointed out that the concept was applied to
various cases that did not necessarily meet Hazem Beblawi’s criteria, hence, faced the danger of
losing its intellectual appeal (Okruhlik 1999; Smith 2004). One of the key problems have been
these states whose economies over-rely on remittances, outside aid (rent) and for these reasons
have been quickly grouped together with the oil-gas-rich countries. Giacomo Luciani correctly
noted that while remittances are an important flow of income - which contains a rent component -
it does not accrue directly to the state, therefore the term rentier state is not fitting here. He went
on to argue that the state may attempt to tax the income of economic migrants, but is in no position
to do so before it is repatriated. Thus, economies which rely on remittances according to Luciani
do not constitute a full blown rentier state but rather a rentier economy (1987: 68-70). Beblawi
called these sorts of states ‘semi-rentiers without oil’ (1987: 59)
The distinction between oil-gas-rich rentier states and semi-rentier states that rely on
remittances, international aid has important implications for the state-society relationships and
arguably also an impact on a country’s foreign relationships. In the traditionally understood rentier
state, rent provided the state with an extremely large and powerful economic and social role that
has fostered the long term stability of the ruling regimes and has allowed it to survive internal as
well as external crises (Anderson 1987; Ayubi 2001; Karl 2007; Omgba 2009). The ruling elites of
the semi-rentier state which do not have access to abundant income, are expected to be affected by
changes in the regional as well as the global economy and are inevitably less stable, and thus,
likely to adapt to the changing environment (Brynen 1992). For instance, they are likely to
liberalize some aspects of their economies and at times political life but do not go so far as to fully
democratize (Hinnebusch 2000). By the same token, the foreign policy of the semi-rentier state is
more prone to change and also much more dynamic. This is due to the simple fact that the labour
remittances or international aid constitute the basis for a much weaker and less stable alliance
between ruling regimes and regional, international powers than oil and gas. Hence, semi-rentier
states can attempt to switch alliances from one patron to another (Clapham 1996). The oil-gas-rich
rentier states are different in this respect since they are often interlocked in long term economic
and military relationships with outside powers. These relationships tend to endure – mainly due to
the physical nature of oil and gas - regardless of major political shifts at the regional or global
level (Noreng 2002; Shaxson 2007). At the same time, the existing difference between rentier
states and semi-rentier states should not obscure the fact that – at its most fundamental level - both
foreign policies are entangled and shaped by various types of dependencies; dependencies which
inevitably pose vital questions concerning state survival, state security and ultimately the
sovereignty of rentier and semi-rentier states as the example of Central Asia confirms.
Rentierism, Dependency and Central Asia
The rentierism and economic dependency in post-Soviet Central Asia is a direct result of two
legacies a) the Soviet Union and b) the neo-liberal project which reached its high point with the
collapse of the communist regimes in Europe and, all but name, in Asia. The Soviet Union, due to
its long term domination of Central Asia shaped it economically and politically while neo-liberal
enterprise allowed the post-Soviets elites to consolidate key structural elements of the Soviet
system that proved vital to their rule which has been traditionally based on patronage and favour.
Consequently the collapse of the Soviet Union in Central Asia, at the time a much hailed ‘rupture’,
overtime came to signify merely a launch of a post-Soviet narrative - where stress from the outset
was firmly put on the Soviet element – rather than a creation of something intrinsically new and
unique.
Today’s dependency of the key post-Soviet Central Asian economies on rent income, the
origins of which are external, rather than by productive enterprises is largely a legacy of the role
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that Central Asian republics had in the Soviet economy as suppliers of cotton, oil, gas and minerals
to existing manufacturing centres, located primarily in the Russian areas of the USSR. The role of
Central Asia in the Soviet Union economy was further entrenched by a net of transport networks
which were built to serve the larger Soviet project (Odum and Johnson 2004). The resource
dependent nature of the Central Asian economy on the eve of independence was actively
reinforced by post-Soviet ruling elites. Their actions were motivated by two factors a) lack of any
apparent alternatives to commodity based economies and b) their unbridled lust for power and
wealth.
From the late Khrushchev era until early into Gorbachev’s rule, regional Central Asian
cadres were groomed and controlled by Moscow through an elaborate system of patron-client
relationships (Roy 2000; Dave 2007; Khalid 2007). The prime function of the Soviet Central Asian
elites, who firmly sat on the top of their own patron-client pyramid, was to assure that the
republics met their quotas (something that they often failed to do) and to keep the population in
check and under control (something that they almost never failed to do successfully). The Central
Asian Soviet elites, who much to their own surprise overnight (Olcott 2002), became rulers of the
newly independent states choose to rely on the existing industries and patron-client based political
structures as long as these allowed them to maintain relative social peace and successfully keep
them in power (Luong and Weinthal 2001).
Whereas the Soviet Union set the material and political stage on which Central Asian
elites had been operating it is important to recognise that the post-Soviet economic structure was
also significantly shaped by the nature of the economic order that developed outside the Soviet
Union and the larger socialist world in the late 1970s and 1980s. It should be remembered that
1991, a year in which the Central Asia republics gained their independence, was also one of the
high points of the neo-liberal project, a project which significantly aided the transformations of the
Soviet Central Asian republics into rentier and semi-rentier economies and reinforced and
deepened separations in the Central Asian economy which is today reflected in the regional
“division of labour”.
In reference to the first point, the price liberalisation that followed the disintegration of the
USSR, and which was actively encouraged by the advocates of the neo-liberal enterprise, instantly
rewarded countries rich in natural resources and their rulers. The amounts of money to which
yesterday’s apparatchiks gained access was unimaginable to them only few years earlier, the
‘success’ was dazzling. Thus, the benefits that the liberalisation brought and the prospects of
opening global markets ensured that the foundations of a rentier post-Soviet economy and its
specific mentality were firmly put in place.
In reference to the second point, the key Central Asian republics Kazakhstan and
Uzbekistan, which during the Soviet Union were vital to the regional economy and its economic
future, managed to largely maintain and consolidate their dominant positions in the 1990s, whereas
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan resource-poor and heavily subsidized by Moscow were in steady
decline. The ‘winners’ in the global neo-liberal ‘casino’ were those Central Asian republics that
could offer commodities (mainly oil and gas) which Russia and the external world still wanted. As
a result of this two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were
widely grouped together with the ‘excluded’ – from the neo-liberal project - regions of the global
South (Rotberg 2004), which often through a shadow criminal economy tried to re-integrate
themselves into the global economy. Philip Le Billion argued that the activities of those excluded
from the neo-liberal enterprise revolve around tax evasion, tax paradises and smuggling schemes,
some involve drug trafficking, money laundering, and illegal migration (2001: 576). All of the
above are a firm feature of today’s Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan and are largely responsible for their
political and economical decline as well as systemic political violence.
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan
The legacy of Soviet patterns of development have been most visible in Uzbekistan, where cotton
constituted a vital part of the economy from the Second World War onwards, and in Turkmenistan
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which besides being a cotton producer also became an important exporter of natural gas since the
1970s. In the beginning of the 1990s both countries substantially benefited from buoyant cotton
prices which allowed ruling regimes to maintain the status quo without any major economical and
political reforms. In the 2000s, both regimes tried to preserve the situation from the 1990s. Hence,
Uzbekistan deepened its dependency on cotton and in later years gold, gas and on labour
remittances and Turkmenistan turned almost fully to gas exports. The Turkmen’s regime
concentration on gas exports accelerated after the rise in gas prices in the beginning of the 2000s,
and the failure of the ISI program introduced by the government in the late 1990s.
In Uzbekistan the cotton production can be traced back to the nineteenth century when it
was one of the key suppliers of cotton to Tsarist Russia. Cotton production rapidly expanded in
the Soviet Uzbekistan in 1950s and 1960s and by the 1980s the republic was qualified as a
‘monocultural economy’ with some 65 per cent of cultivated land being devoted to cotton
production. The so-called ‘white gold’ accounted for about two-thirds of the Republic’s
agricultural output and the Uzbek SSR produced 62 per cent of all cotton grown in the Soviet
Union in late Soviet times. On the eve of independence, Uzbekistan was the fourth biggest cotton
producer in the world and the second leading exporter (Spechler 2008: 19-20).
The much talked about mechanization of the countryside – part of the so-called
equalization policy (Rodgers 1974; Liebowitz 1987; Ozornoy 1991), which aimed at equalizing
the levels of economic development and living standards of the country’s diverse nationalities and
regions - did not take place. In the late 1980s more manual workers – largely woman, children and
students – were picking cotton by hand than 20 years before. According to one author, in 1981
about 35 per cent of the overall harvest was hand picked (Gleason 1991: 348). In the mid-1980s in
Uzbekistan more than half (around 58 percent) of the population worked in agriculture. The
overwhelming majority of those living in the country-side were ethnic Uzbeks whereas industrial
management and skilled labour was primarily comprised of Russians and other Slavs who
populated two urban centres (Luong 2002: 68; Lubin 1984). Finally, most of the cotton output
during the Soviet times went to cotton mills in the Russian republic. It was then sold on the
international markets through centralized foreign trade agencies, ‘with little benefit to the growers’
(Pomfret 2006: 143-144).
On face value, the relationship between the imperial core and the colonized periphery
closely mirrors the type of dependency relationship that could be found in the Middle East
(Hinnebusch 2003: 35). However, in the Soviet Union the actual situation on the ground was much
more complicated and not as clear-cut as in other parts of the world (i.e. post-colonial sub-Saharan
Africa and South America). It should be kept in mind that at the time of independence, the Uzbek
economy was more diversified than the economies of other Central Asian republics. It included
agriculture, light and heavy industry, and branches of primary products (Gleason 2003: 117).
Furthermore, in Uzbekistan the level of literacy, public health, and education for women exceeded
regional levels (Spechler 2008: 26). Yet, the preservation of those Soviet ‘achievements’ proved to
be highly problematic to the Uzbek post-Soviet regime which in the face of the post-Soviet chaos
largely abandoned other sectors of the industry in favour of cotton and thus began a process of
steady retreat of the state with far reaching consequences for education, public health and the role
of women in society (Kamp 2004; Spechler 2008).
The turn towards the cotton industry in the post-Soviet period was significantly
accelerated due to the favourable cotton prices on the international markets in 1992-96, a move
which left a lasting legacy on today’s Uzbekistan (Luong and Weinthal 2001). Deniz Kandiyoti
argued that in order to fully understand post-Soviet trajectories of the Central Asian republics,
students of the region should not only take into account ‘the historical specificities of their colonial
encounters but also very different modalities and temporalities of their insertion into world
capitalist markets’ (2002: 282). It is argued here that the initial policies and choices of the post-
Soviet regime firmly linked the future of the country to the volatile commodity prices on the
international markets. This argument is supported by the fact that despite the collapse of cotton
prices towards the end of the 1990s, in the beginning of the 2000s the primary commodities,
together with cotton fibre, still accounted for 75 percent of merchandise exports, with cotton alone
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accounting for about 40 percent (Gleason 2003: 119). In the second decade of independence the
Uzbek government attempted at cushioning the fall in cotton prices with a partial liberalization of
its economy. Yet, the cotton industry remained subject to state orders and state control.
The winners in the new Uzbekistan have been those at the apex of power and their clients
(Collins 2009: 270; Ilkhamov 2007). According to a report by the International Crisis Group,
money obtained from the sale of cotton circulates within a small elite, and rarely if ever enters the
agricultural financing system: ‘[o]ne estimate is that as little as 10 to 15 per cent of the income
generated by the sale of cotton goes back into agriculture thus to the farmers (2005: 4-5). The
development of the oligarchy that governs today’s Uzbek cotton industry goes back to the 1970s
when a ‘clear-cut cotton nomenklatura had developed, with ‘cotton-barons’ dominating the
[cotton] complex, making use of falsified output and yield data, illicit trade practices and forced
labour’ (Spoor 1993: 11; see also: Rumer 1989; Vaksberg 1991; Khalid 2007). The effects of the
so-called ‘cotton curse’ are best visible in the large numbers of labour migrants to Kazakhstan and
Russian. In 2004-2008 as many as 2.5 millions Uzbeks left the country - a fact that the Uzbek
government has officially denied – and by 2008 remittances consisted 13 per cent of the Uzbek
economy (ICG 2010a: 3). The workers who until the recent introduction of Western Union carried
their earnings back home in cash were subject to indirect taxation by the state agencies at various
steps of their journey (Collins 2009: 268).
Other important sectors of the post-Soviet Uzbek rentier economy have been gold and
energy sales – mainly gas – which account for 14% of export value. Gas is transported through the
Russian-owned Gazprom pipeline network via Kazakhstan (Spechler and Spechler 2009: 358-
359). Finally, towards the end of the 1990s and in the first half of 2000s, the Uzbek government
established strategic alliances with the US which further deep the rentier character of the Uzbek
state and economy (Hiro 2009: 173-176). In 2000 Uzbekistan received considerable amounts of
equipment under the Foreign Military Financing programme. Military alliances deepened on the
eve of the ‘war on terror’ which led to the establishment of a small military base in Uzbekistan in
which around one thousand personnel were stationed. During the first year the base earned the
Uzbek government around $450 millions in grants and credits (Spechler and Spechler 2009: 366).
However, the military alliance was abruptly terminated by the Uzbek regime in 2005 (Rumer
2006), prompting a turn towards Russia and China and search for new grants, credits and deals
(Hiro 2009: 190).
Today’s Uzbekistan is a well diversified rentier state whose roots can be directly traced
back to the Tsarist and Soviet period. The regime survives primarily due to rent obtained from the
sale of cotton, gold and gas which allowed it to fuel patrimonial networks and to pay for fairly
large military and security apparatus. In this respect the Uzbek regime is very similar to neopatrimonial
regimes which have ruled various parts of the Middle East (Hinnebusch 2006) as well
as sub-Saharan Africa (Le Vine 1980; Bratton and van de Walle 1994; Bratton and van de Walle
1997). The remittances indirectly allow the government to maintain social peace and subsidise
wages of the local bureaucracies even though the regime does not want to acknowledge this.
Turkmenistan is another Central Asian state with a rentier character, which even more than
Uzbekistan, took its shape during the Soviet period and blossomed in the post-independent period.
The critical juncture in the development of the Turkmen rentier state was the period
towards the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s when natural gas came to dominate
the republic’s economy. According to one author as early as 1970 the SSR Turkmenistan supplied
24 percent of natural gas in the Soviet Union whose share rapidly rose to just under 33 percent by
1975 (Ebel 2000: 4). Today Turkmenistan ranks as the word’s fourth largest potential gas
producer, after Russia, the United States, and Iran. Outside the natural gas sector, the industrial
base of the Soviet Turkmenistan was grossly underdeveloped and traces of the modern industry
(particularly textile enterprises) that existed survived solely thanks to the Soviet central subsidies.
The Soviet planners left the republic underdeveloped largely due to its remote geographical
position.
Another important element of the Turkmen economy – similarly to Uzbekistan – was
cotton production. In the 1980s, more than 50 percent of the republics population was employed
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on the cotton fields (Gleason 1991: 342), its sole major agriculture product. A major boost to
cotton production was provided by the completion of the Karakum Canal (over more than 1,200
kilometers) which diverts water from the Amu Darya into the southern desert regions of
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. On the eve of independence cotton, oil and gas made up 80 per cent
of Turkmenistan’s industrial economy (Gleason 2003: 107). Furthermore, the cotton industry was
still the largest employer in the country whereas gas guaranteed the most significant revenues to
the national government (Anceschi 2009: 66).
Leading on, similarly to Uzbekistan the bulk of the cotton produced in Turkmenistan
during the Soviet times was preceded and manufactured outside the republic in the northern
industrial centers in Russia and Ukraine. Similarly gas was sent through an inter-Union pipeline
system, ‘to the European zone of the Soviet Union, whose high demand for fuel could only be
satisfied by massive imports of oil and gas from other regions of the USSR’ (Anceschi 2009: 66).
The collapse of the Soviet Union strengthened the regime’s dependency on gas and cotton as well
as on the pre-existing relationships with its economic partners. As in the case of Uzbekistan the
key in Turkmenistan’s quick transition towards a rentier economy was price liberalization which
followed the disintegration of the Soviet Union ‘[t]his enabled Turkmenistan to charge world
market prices for the gas it supplied to its former Soviet era customers in Ukraine, Georgia,
Russia, and other countries’ (Gleason 2003: 109). In the first two years of the post-Soviet Union
period, Turkmenistan was second only to Russia in benefiting for adjusting prices to world levels
(Ancseschi 2009: 72). On the negative side Turkmenistan like Uzbekistan very quickly became
over-exposed to volatile – or cyclical - energy prices on the international markets (Stevens 2008)
and firmly linked their post-Soviet fate with the Russian controlled pipeline system, a dependency
which was only recently broken.
It appears that the new Turkmen regime was acutely aware of the situation in which it
found itself. For instance, in the beginning of the 1990s the Turkmen government actively
participated in efforts to build a pipeline which would run under the Caspian Sea and connect
Turkmenistan to non-Russian markets. Those efforts largely failed by 2000. In the next phase,
Turkmenistan in classic rentier-state-style, embarked on an economic program of ISI. Since the
mid-1990s the government financed the development of a modern textile industry processing
domestic cotton and silk, which became the centrepiece of ISI (Pomfret 2006: 93). However, the
much hyped modernization resulted in the production of low-quality manufactured goods that
could not compete on the international markets (Ancseschi 2009: 75). The main reason for this
failure was a lack of technical capacity.
At the same time, the Turkmen regime did not attempt at far reaching economic
liberalization. Rather two key sectors of gas and cotton stayed in government hands, which acted
to maintain strict administration and financial control over them. State controls over the economy
allowed the ruling regime to fuel and uphold a vast patronage system (Collins 2006: 303). Kiren
Chaudhry has argued that historically rulers of the rentier states in the Middle East were also
extremely hostile to the free market which they viewed as being politically dangerous because ‘a
functioning market provides opportunities for mobility that undercut lineages and traditional rights
of privileges, thus threatening the status quo. Market creates inequalities in wealth that may not
match existing patterns of income distribution, status, power, and entitlements; they dislocate
groups in both the political and economic realms’ (1994: 4).
Following the same logic of non liberalisation and upholding existing structures strategy
the Turkmen regime also successfully attempted at sustaining parts of the Soviet welfare system
throughout the 1990s, as argued by Richard Pomfret: ‘[t]he universal benefits from the Soviet era,
such as pensions at 57 for woman and 62 for men, were supplemented by free provision of gas,
electricity, water, and slat for residential use’ (2006: 90). Again the behaviour of the Turkmen
regime mirrors that of the Middle Eastern and North African regimes. John Entelis argued that in
the Middle Eastern and North African states ‘a sort of “ruling bargaining” was struck by the
leadership with its people at independence under which the populace gave up its rights to
independent political activity in return for the state’s provision of social welfare’ (1996: 45). This
does not mean, however, that an ordinary person or every region in the country is a winner.
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In rentier states, state investment funds often are disproportionately directed towards the
provision of services and infrastructure to those areas of the country which are predominantly
populated by the ruler’s tribe. Already in 1970, H. Mahdvy, who first advanced the rentier-state
concept, warned that oil states create an impression of prosperity and growth whereas in reality
‘the mass of the population may remain in a backward state and the most important factors for
long-run growth may receive little or not attention at all’ (1970: 437). In Turkmenistan by the end
of the 1990s the heavily subsidized agriculture sector still employed about half of the
economically active population. Students above grade 5 were forced to harvest cotton and the
number of students in higher education ‘fell from 40,000 in 1991 to less than 10,000 by 2004’
(Pomfret 2006: 97-99; see also: Lewis 2008: 80-81). An argument could be made that the quasi-
Sultanistic Turkmen regime (Cummings and Ochs 2002; Chelabi and Linz 1998) is pursuing an
active policy of de-diversification of its economy reminiscent of the politics of Mobutu in Zaire –
also a rentier state - in the 1970s and 1980s which has had tragic long term consequences for the
country (Young and Turner 1985; Dunning 2005).
Finally, the Turkmen regime has been hostile to all forms of regional co-operation (Oloctt
2005) pursuing a policy of virtual isolation from the outside word. Again the rentier effect largely
explains why that is the case. Historically, key energy-rich-states in the Middle East – Saudi
Arabia or Kuwait – had been also hostile to regional co-operation. In the context of the Middle
Eastern states it resulted in the fiercely negative attitude of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states to the
idea of Pan-Arabism. The issue of artificially drawn colonial border lines does not interest those
elites whose states have been ‘blessed’ with petro-dollars. Hence, the movements which strongly
rely on the symbols which emphasize the unity of all Arabs have been most unwelcome in the oilrich
states. 1 Instead, rulers strongly support the movements which use Islamic symbolism. Nazih
Ayubi asserts that an important function of what he calls petro-Islam, which stresses an
interpretation of religion that is both excessively ritualistic in style and conservative in socioeconomic
content, ‘is to keep the oil wealth away from other Arabs’ (2001: 233).
Kazakhstan
Resources-based economies that Turkmen and Uzbek rulers inherited from the Soviet Union,
coupled with an autocratic regime and a lack of human capital to diversify their economies, made
the turn towards rentierism somewhat inevitable. Kazakhstan, which today also closely resembles
a rentier economy, started its transformation towards rentierism from a very different point when
compared to its regional counterparts. The disintegration of the Soviet Union hit Kazakhstan, a
middle income country in the beginning of the 1990s, incomparably harder than its southern
neighbours since the country’s entire industrial structure was inseparably intertwined with that of
Russia. In response to the crisis, the Kazakh regime decided to privatise huge, collapsing
enterprises (to a very mixed effect) and itself turned its attention to oil and gas. The oil and gas
sectors were largely underdeveloped during the Soviet era but had a capacity to attract foreign oil
companies and much needed FDIs, which they did. The increase in oil prices in the 2000s
strengthened the Kazakh dependency on resources and led the regime to largely abandon other
sectors of the economy. By the end of the 2000’s, the turn towards rentierism was completed.
As discussed in the previous section the relative economic success of Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan in the beginning of the 1990s can be largely explained by the interests of the outside
world in the commodities they had on sale. Kazakhstan, despite its overwhelming richness in the
natural resource, initially found itself on the other end of the equation. This was largely due to
three reasons a) remote location of many of the deposits, b) inadequate or non-existing transport
links to the outside markets and c) shifting interests of the global mining industry which in the
beginning of the 1990s chose to turn its attention to South American deposits and not the post-
Soviet once (Bridge 2004).
1
Other states such as Syria or Libya, which do not have large oil revenues at their disposal, have tried to
inspire loyalty among their people through non-state ideologies, i.e. Pan-Arabism.
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Leading on, in the Soviet Union the development of the republic’s extractive industries
followed an enclave type of pattern which mirrored the experience of colonial Africa or nineteen
century South America. Thus, development was regionally concentrated but little, if any,
investment in ancillary industries. The large extractive enterprises were closely linked to
enterprises in other part of the USSR or ‘imperial’ core. It should be added that the same was true
for Kazakhstan’s industrial economy which mainly concentrated in primary sectors like ferrous
and nonferrous metals, fuels, electricity generation, metallurgy and machine building, and
chemical. The industrial economy was build around ‘one-company towns’ in which production
concentrated on intermediate products. Those products had to be sent to factories in Russia for
further processing and manufacturing (Peck 2004: 60-62; Pomfret 2006: 43; see also Cummings
2000; Olcott 2002). In short, without the Soviet economy there was hardly any Kazakh economy
one could speak off.
The overwhelming economic problem that Kazakhstan faced in the beginning of the 1990s
was exacerbated by two additional factors. The enterprises within the border of the newly
independent Kazakhstan were old and suffered from chronic underinvestment during the late
Soviet era. Thus, the enterprises needed huge funds in order to become commercially attractive.
Furthermore, the Russian, German and Slavic managerial and engineering classes which worked
on major enterprises in the north of country began migrating back to Russian and other republics.
In the first decade of independence almost two million people left Kazakhstan (Sinnott 2003; Dave
2004).
The response of the Kazakh government to the mounting economical crises, which
followed the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet economy, was to privatise existing
enterprises in the mid-1990s. The Kazakh ruling elite hoped that through privatisation it would be
able to shift responsibility from itself to the private sector for running the enterprises and
maintaining social peace in ‘one company towns’. Yet, the proposed privatisation did not generate
much interest among multinationals. Instead the country’s key assets were bought at a very low
price by little known outside companies whose real identity was disguised by company’s off-shore
registration. In the years to come most of them failed to meet their commercial or social
obligations and instead engaged in widespread asset striping (Ostrowski 2010). The privatisation,
the so-called ‘sale of the century’, deepened the existing economic and social crises in the country
(Nazpary 2002) and fully opened the doors to crony capitalism which was accompanied by
rampant corruption (Cummings 2002, 2003; Furman 2005; Murphy 2006; Dave 2007). As a result,
the Kazakh political system throughout the 1990s began retreating to a pre-Soviet logic of zhuz
(horde), tribes and clans (Schatz 2004).
In the face of collapsing economy and growing social problems the Kazakh ruling elite
turned its full attention to oil and gas which were the only two sectors able to attract the interest of
major international companies from the beginning of the 1990s. In the post-OPEC world,
Kazakhstan, where production on major oil fields began only in the 1980s and which had an
enormous potential for the future, presented foreign oil companies with a unique opportunit they
were not going to miss. The regime on its part created institutional structures – an early version of
the National Oil Company and oil laws - which best suited the interests of the outside companies.
The regime further allowed companies to entrench their position in post-Soviet Kazakhstan by
signing a whole host of Production Sharing Agreements which clearly favoured outside companies
(Ostrowski 2010). The bond forged in the 1990s between oil companies and the Kazakh regimes,
to some extent, mirrors the relationships between Saudi Arabia and the western oil companies in
the 1950s and 60s (Vitalis 2007; Yessenova 2007).
The gamble which the Kazakh elites took in the in the first decade of independence to
stake their future and that of the country at large solely on oil paid off in 2000 when a consortium
of western companies discover a Kashagan oilfield, which is the largest oil find in the past 30
years. Accidentally, the discovery was followed by a rapid rise of oil prices on the international
commodity markets throughout the 2000s finally bringing much needed revenues (Pomfret 2005:
867-868). This in turn allowed the regime to increase social spending as well as the all important
public sector salaries (Ostrowski 2009: 348-351). What is more the increase in the revenues also
9
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gave the regime leverage in its relationships with the foreign oil and gas companies (Nurmakov
2010; Ostrowski 2010). At the same time, Kazakhstan’s growing dependency on oil and gas
exports meant that the country will have to heavily rely on Russian controlled infrastructure for
some time to come. According, to one assessment, around 84 per cent of Kazakhstan’s oil export
still passes through Russia to the international markets (ICG 2007: 9; see also Ipek 2007).
Today’s Kazakhstan strongly resembles a classical rentier state 2 . Its full dependency on
commodity markets became all too visible during the financial crises in the late 2000s which in
Kazakhstan manifested themselves in an almost instantaneous collapse of country’s banking and
building sectors. The Kazakh political system largely follows a regional pattern of neopatrimonialism
while its economy is shaped and dominated by few oligarchs and their cliques
(Kjærnet et al. 2008). However, there are two important differences with Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan. Firstly, the Kazakh regime is much more liberal and less oppressive than its
regional counterparts,(Olcott 2005) and secondly, it recognizes the limits of the politics based on
informal networks. It has been argued that the regime’s long term ambition is to create a political
and economical system in which formal institutions would play a much bigger role (Ostrowski
2009). This should facilitate the rise of much more stable political structures which, however, will
not be democratic in outlook.
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
Kyrgyzstan’s economy, similarly to that of Kazakhstan was badly affected by the collapse of the
Soviet Union, but is not rich in exploitable and exportable natural resources. Hence, in the
beginning of the 1990s it decided to liberalise its economy and, at least partly, the political system.
This manoeuvre allowed the post-Soviet regime to obtain sufficient foreign aid/rent, from various
Western governments and agencies, which helped to smooth the transition from the USSR.
However, this source of rent inevitably dried up and in the second decade of independence the
Kyrgyz state began relying on the inflow of remittances and leasing access to territory. The
economy of Tajikistan, the poorest republic in the Soviet Union, was almost completely devastated
and looted during the civil war in the beginning of 1990s. Today, Tajikistan is held together by
remittances sent by labour workers that have been migrating predominantly to Russia, as well as
foreign aid. Having said that, it was also estimated that as much as third of the population depends
on drugs and weapons trade.
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan on the eve of the independence found themselves in a much
more difficult economic situation than any of the other three Central Asian republics discussed so
far. This was due to two factors a) both are resources-poor, thus they could not benefit from the
price liberalisation in the beginning of the 1990s in the same way as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
did, and b) neither of the two had a developed and well functioning economic base. In the Soviet
Union the Kyrgyz economy was not highly industrialized and ‘much of the industry that the
republic did have was tightly integrated into the Soviet military-industrial complex, which left the
republic especially vulnerable after the dissolution of the USSR’ (Pomfret 2006: 71). Tajikistan
was the poorest of the Soviet republics, with 40 per cent of its budget coming from subsidies (ICG
2009: 1).
The response of the Kyrgyz elites to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which had far
reaching social and economical effects, was to fully embrace the discourse of democracy and free
market economy as advocated by IMF and World Bank at that time. This in turn won the country
the support of ideologically driven major international donors and some Western governments
(Gleason 2001: 173-174). Both parties between 1992 and 2000 poured $1.7 billion into
Kyrgyzstan, a substantial amount of money which greatly aided the Kyrgyz government in
smoothing out the transition from the Soviet Union (Pomfret 2006: 82-83). Yet, the outside
aid/rent slowly came to an end by early 2000s as donors became increasingly disillusioned with
2 Kazakhstan anticipates a total investment of $52 billion in its oil and gas sector by the second decade of
2000s (Olcott 2005: 88).
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Kyrgyzstan’s ever more authoritarian political regime and the lack of liberal economic reforms
(Lewis 2008: 123-124; Hiro 2009: 296-298).
Tajikistan did not go through the process which is normally understood as a ‘transition’
from Soviet to post-Soviet system. On the eve of independence, the country collapsed into a civil
war which formally lasted from 1992 to 1997, however, significant political violence continued
until 2001 (Heathershaw 2009). According to some accounts, the civil war came about as a result
of the collapsing Soviet economy in the late 1980s which was unable to subside Tajikistan any
longer to the same levels as it did in the past. Thus, in the early 1990s poverty, youth
unemployment, corruption and competition for the resources between regionally-defined groups
were seen as the key reasons for the outbreak of hostilities (Lynch 2001; Akiner 2006). The war
took the lives of 50,000-100,000 people and had a devastating impact on the country’s economy
(Nakaya 2009: 260). By the mid-1990s the industrial sector, state property and bank assets were
looted and much of what had any productive value left the country. The physical infrastructure was
also largely destroyed. On the eve of the new millennium Tajikistan was ranked among the poorest
countries in the world (Pomfret 2006: 65-69).
Since the early 2000s Kyrgyzstan’s and Tajikistan’s economies have followed very similar
trajectories. Firstly, both countries overwhelmingly rely overly on labour remittances which
Kyrgyz and Tajik workers send home from Russia and Kazakhstan. According to some recent
studies ‘Tajikistan has the world’s highest promotion of remittances to GDP. In 2007 remittances
comprised 36% of its GDP, or $1.8 billion, while Kyrgyzstan ranked fourth in the world, with 27%
of GDP or $322 million’ (Marat 2009: 7). Secondly, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – or rather
country’s ruling elites – greatly rely on income obtained from leasing land to foreign powers.
Kyrgyzstan is home to both Russian and the US military base. The Manas US air base since its
creation in the early 2000s has become increasingly important to the Afghanistan war effort,
something that the Kyrgyz elite tried to use to extract more rent through – rather unskilfully –
playing Russian and Americans against one another (ICG 2010b). Tajikistan in 2004 agreed to
become host to a Russian base after the Russian government agreed to write off a large part of the
bilateral debt. Thirdly, both countries are slowly falling prey to organised crime, which is playing
a growing role in their economical and political life (Marat 2006; Kupatadze 2008).
Today, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are semi-rentier states. In essence their internal stability
is indirectly linked to the oil and gas prices which shape the economic fate of Russia and
Kazakhstan and in turn determine the levels of remittances that Kyrgyz and Taijk workers will be
able to send home. The place that Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have in a regional economy is largely
the outcome of an insignificant role that both countries played in the Soviet economy which
collapsed and left them with a reservoir of cheap, young labour but little more.
The Foreign Policy of Central Asian (Rentier and Semi-Rentier) States
The Kazakh and Turkmen autocratic regimes from the first years of independence attempted to
translate the advantage of having substantial natural resources on their territory into consolidating
their rule and their countries sovereignty. The pursuit of greater independence resulted in
diametrically opposed foreign policies with Kazakhstan coining the term of the so-called “multivector”
foreign policy (Cummings 2003; Bukkvoll 2004), whereas Turkmenistan opted, uniquely
in the post-communist space, for a policy of “Positive Neutrality” (Anceschi 2009). In both cases
post-independence foreign policy became an important part of the state ideology and aided rulers
in strengthening their grip on power. However, in neither of the cases have they led to limiting the
countries’ dependency on Russia, quite to the contrary. The growing reliance of both states on oil
and gas resources, reinforced by a lack of economic diversification, strengthens Kazakh and
Turkmen dependency on the Russian controlled pipeline system, a dependency which both ruling
regimes found extremely complicated to overcome for various internal and external reasons. Yet, it
has to be said, that this relationship of dependency in the case of Turkmenistan has been partly
balanced by growing Russian reliance on Turkmen gas (Kandiyoti 2008).
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In the case of Kazakhstan, the reliance on the Russian controlled infrastructure reinforced
by geographical proximity and an ethnic Russian minority living in Kazakhstan, has led to the
decision on parts of the ruling regime to largely follow the Russian lead on the international stage
(Cummings 2005; Dave 2007). Thus, the Kazakh regime pursues the long term goal of not
antagonizing Russia but to rather grow in strength next to it, at least for the time being. Rather
tellingly, Kazakhstan only began consolidating its relationships with China in the mid-2000s after
Chinese-Russian rapprochement, whereas the influence of Western oil companies has been largely
limited to oil enclaves. Turkmenistan, contrary to Kazakhstan engaged on the one hand in a series
of disputes concerning the price of gas sold to Russia and Ukraine through Russian controlled
pipelines, and, on the other hand, chose to pursue a policy of virtual isolation from the outside
world. The change at the apex of power of the ruling regime in the second half of 2000s was
marked by a continuation of foreign policy rather than a meaningful shift towards greater openness
(Anceschi 2008).
The situation has been very different in the case of Uzbekistan which overwhelmingly
relies on cotton and gold, and whose exports to international markets do not depend to the same
extent as in the case of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan on Russian controlled infrastructure. This
situation has allowed the Uzbek regime to manoeuvre rather freely between Russia, US, European
states as well as China (Spechler and Spechler 2009). This highly flexible foreign policy leads not
only to the consolidation of the ruling regime and suppression of internal dissent, but also greatly
increases Uzbek sovereignty. Thus, when compared to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
emerges as a unique case in Central Asia since it is the only state that managed to end its direct
dependency on Russia. At the same time, Uzbek independent foreign policy is built on very weak
foundations. Over the last two decades, the ruling regime failed to diversify the country’s economy
away from cotton, the prices of which are highly unstable, and instead became increasingly reliant
on indirect taxation of labour remittances by different levels of the state bureaucracy. Hence, the
maintenance of the Uzbek version of “multi-vector” foreign policy and state sovereignty is a
serious challenge to the authoritarian regime.
In recent years, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, similarly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan also
declared the intention of pursuing a “multi-vector” foreign policy. However, while in the Uzbek
context the multi-vector policy has been framed as an outcome of strategic repositioning and in
Kazakhstan as an expression of the regime’s inspiration to achieve full sovereignty, in the Kyrgyz
and Tajik cases the policy of “multi-vector” policy has been rather a reflection of a position in
which those states found themselves on the regional “chessboard” (Spechler 2008). In both cases,
the almost full dependency of aid and labour remittances significantly narrows a leader’s room to
manoeuvre and inevitably undercuts these states’ sovereignty.
Conclusion: Rent and Sovereignty in Central Asia
Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union Central Asian republics are still shaped by the
Soviet policies the legacy of which has been chiefly upheld and reinforced by the neo-liberal
project. In the new post-Soviet reality the rulers of the three Central Asian states Turkmenistan,
Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan largely embraced the role that was envisioned for their republics by
the Soviet planners. The privatisation of state assets by the elites in the 1990s has guaranteed them
access to rent, the constant flow of which quickly became their main preoccupation. As a result of
this, an interest of the ruling cliques in state sovereignty has been directly and unbreakably linked
to the issue of rent and its control. That is to say that whoever guarantees a steady flow of rent is
also seen as a strategic partner and a best guarantor of a country’s sovereignty. The situation is
largely the same in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
A political reality in which private interests are a key political and economical determinant
is a product of an elite which was shaped by imperial project and accepted its values. In this sense
Central Asia follows a path travelled by other post-colonial resources-rich states (Gammer 2000).
And if history can tell us anything we can safely concluded that rent will chiefly determine the
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political calculations of the Central Asian rulers for the time to come. This in turn will most likely
have a negative impact on these republics’ sovereignty.
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