Rentierism, Dependency and Sovereignty in Central Asia

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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 4 Copyright PSA 2011
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 5 Copyright PSA 2011
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Rentierism, Dependency and Sovereignty in Central Asia

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