A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Independent Central Asian Republics 289
ity.” Now, at the threshold of the third millennium, the drawbacks of
barred access to maritime routes seem once more to haunt landlocked
Central Asia whose centrality may become a liability rather than an
asset.One potent compensation should be a modified intensification of
trade and other relations with the area’s immediate neighbors – Russia,
China, the Indian subcontinent, Iran.When discussing the Silk Road
trade of antiquity, it was axiomatic to say that it was a trade of highpriced
and easily transportable commodities – such as silk or china or
spices.Yet even this trade did not quite hold ground when forced to
compete with maritime routes.
In the academic and philanthropic field, American universities and
foundations have hosted a steady stream of individuals, delegations, and
conferences invited or held to study a broad scale of matters ranging
from the American way of democracy to business methods and technological
know-how.On the United States side, a question mark has been
the fate of Radio Liberty, a Munich-based organization sponsored by the
United States government that for many years has broadcast news and
programs to the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union, thus
also to those of Central Asia; there is an Uzbek, a Kazakh, a Kyrgyz, a
Turkmen, and a Tajik desk.The creation of Radio Liberty was based on
the premise that its broadcasts were the only channel through which
peoples ruled by Moscow could obtain objective and meaningful news.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of the republics have
made Radio Liberty obsolete, some argue, but its future nevertheless
seems assured.Together with its sister organization, Radio Free Europe,
whose broadcasts have served what were once the Soviet satellites in
Eastern Europe, it has only been scaled down and moved from Munich
to Prague.A somewhat analogous organization has been the government-sponsored
IREX (International Research Exchange; located at
first in New York, then in Princeton, and since 1992 in Washington),
which has supported academic research by American scholars in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union and vice versa.During the Soviet period,
the participation of Central Asia, though not unheard of, was rare; after
its liberation, the area joined the organization’s activities with a vengeance.In
contrast to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, IREX has not
been scaled down but expanded since the events of 1991, and it now
stands in the vanguard of the organizations sponsoring academic cooperation
between Central Asia and the United States.
The People’s Republic of China occupies a place of special importance
among the Central Asian republics’ neighbors.First of all, its long