foir_3880

FOI-R--3880--SE
… WITHOUT THE OUTSIDE WORLD.
Russia and China are the two major external powers involved in Central Asia.
Both are concerned by regional issues such as separatism, extremism and
terrorism. If they spread, such trends could have dire consequences for two such
vast nations as Russia and China. Both would therefore rather confine these
issues to Central Asia. It is easy to imagine that Russia and China have a division
of labour in Central Asia: China does the economy and investment; Russia does
security. Neither China nor Russia is hampered in the eyes of the region’s
regimes by strings attached in terms of democracy, political freedom and human
rights. Their value-neutral approach to the region’s mainly autocratic regimes
can be expedient in the short term.
China clings to its economic priorities and works primarily bilaterally and
through the SCO. The SCO has a security dimension. The scale and scope of this
– mainly annual multilateral anti-terrorism exercises involving a few thousand
troops – fosters regional security cooperation, but is too small to create the
potential to make a real difference given the region’s challenges. President Xi
Jinping’s trip to the region in the autumn of 2013 underlined both the importance
Beijing attaches to Central Asia and its preferences for economic relations and
business. China’s ambitions are noted in Central Asia. Many interlocutors
expressed concerns that the interests of small Central Asian states may be
overrun by China, but also noted that the theme of worries about Chinese
influence was absent from the state-controlled media, probably to avoid creating
friction with Beijing.
Russia sees Central Asia as a part of its wider Eurasian integration ambitions.
Russia remains the country most involved in Central Asia’s security challenges,
with good reason. Afghan drugs are having dire effects in Russia. Russia faces its
own challenges with Islamism, both as a militant force and as a competing social
and political model in the North Caucasus, in the Volga-Urals area and among
the millions of Central Asian primarily Muslim migrant workers all across
Russia but mainly concentrated in Moscow (Norberg, 2013). A wider
destabilisation in Central Asia may undermine Eurasian integration. In order both
to increase its own influence and to bolster regional security, Russia is the
driving force behind the CSTO, currently the only mechanism for multilateral
security cooperation involving Central Asian states. This is weakened since
Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan do not participate, but Russia partially
compensates for this weakness through bilateral security relations with both
countries.
Central Asia lacks a multilateral framework for regional cooperation on hard
security issues involving all five states that can make a significant difference
after 2014. The SCO is too limited in scope. The region’s major military power,
Uzbekistan, stands outside the CSTO together with neutral Turkmenistan. As
ISAF is leaving Afghanistan, NATO’s interest in the region is likely to decline.
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