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At one time, Henry Kissinger asked the question: «Who should I call to talk to Europe?» The lack of an answer to this question indicated the absence of a decision-making center in the European Union.
If today someone asks the same question about Central Asia, he will not receive an answer either. There is no one to speak on behalf of the region today.
However, Central Asia, unlike Europe, is not going to create any supranational structures. For all states of the region, issues of sovereignty are very important, in addition, they had the opportunity to make sure that integration structures by themselves are not capable of ensuring real cooperation. Regional integration projects launched in the 90s of the last century with the participation of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan ended in failure. The Central Asian Economic Community, which aimed at the gradual formation of a single economic space, had a solid legal base (more than 250 different treaties), an Interstate Council at the presidential level, councils of prime ministers, ministers of foreign affairs and defense, as well as the Executive Committee as a permanent working body of the Interstate Council. But the effectiveness of these structures, as the participants themselves acknowledged in the end, was practically zero. In 2002, at a meeting in Almaty, the leaders of the four states admitted that the integration project had failed. And Turkmenistan, which proclaimed a policy of neutrality, did not participate in such projects in principle.
Today, all five Central Asian states are ready to expand multilateral mutually beneficial cooperation and deepen regional cooperation. Their leaders said at last year's meeting that the demand for a trusting dialogue, political consultations and practical interaction between them is increasing many times over.
But if someone tries to find out the position of Central Asia on a significant regional issue, for example, regarding the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, he simply will not have anyone to ask.
The architecture of regional security should be formed by the Central Asian states themselves, taking into account the interests of all external players. But at the same time there is no need to create any new institutions of regional cooperation — at least at the current stage. It is enough just to increase the efficiency of using the instruments that our countries already have.
Kazakhstan has always sought to attract the capabilities of international organizations to address regional problems. In his speech at the 47th session of the UN General Assembly in November 1992 in New York, Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed creating a UN regional center for preventive diplomacy in Central Asia. He proposed to place the headquarters of this center in the then capital of Kazakhstan — Alma-Ata. Later, in 2004, when the question arose about the practical implementation of this initiative, Elbasy turned to the Turkmen leadership with a proposal to locate this center in Ashgabat.
Today, the UN Regional Center for Preventive Diplomacy for Central Asia (UNRCCA) has actually taken over the organization of expert support for regional cooperation. It holds annual meetings of the Central Asian Expert Forum focused on the Consultative Meetings of the Leaders of Central Asian States. On June 4 and 22 UNRCCA held an online meeting with the institutes for strategic studies of the countries of the region. On June 12, he initiated and organized an online meeting at the level of deputy foreign ministers of the Central Asian countries and Afghanistan, which was also attended by representatives of the EU and OSCE.
Another international structure, whose opportunities the countries of Central Asia could use is the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia. The President of Kazakhstan announced the need to convene the Meeting at the same session of the UN General Assembly in 1992. Today, 27 states are participants in the Meeting.
The CICA is not an organization; unlike the OSCE, it does not have an institution of observers. But there are guidelines and a catalog of confidence-building measures, with which the countries of the region already agree, and which can be taken as a basis, since the issue of confidence-building measures in Central Asia is very relevant.
Contradictions on the Tajik-Kyrgyz border over undivided sections of the border remain unresolved. Of the 971 km of the common border, only 60% have been described so far. In the past year, it has repeatedly escalated into mass clashes of local residents, in which military personnel from both sides intervened. This year also began with armed clashes. And in May, clashes took place not only on the Tajik-Kyrgyz, but also on the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border.
On May 1 of this year, water broke through a dam on the Sardoba reservoir in Uzbekistan. At the same time, the border regions of Kazakhstan were flooded, more than 30 thousand people had to be evacuated. The accident did not become a cause for conflict. The Kazakh side provided assistance to the Uzbek side, in particular, satellite images of the affected territories were transferred, which helped to correctly assess the scale of the threat. Uzbekistan sent rescuers and equipment to the Turkestan region of Kazakhstan.
Why a completely new dam was broken is now being investigated by the Uzbek prosecutor's office. And the presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in a telephone conversation agreed «to work out the issue of creating a permanent high-level special group» on the joint use of water resources.
Meanwhile, transboundary water resources have always been the focus of our governments' attention, but they did not help to identify the threat of a dam break. And the reason is not that the level of the negotiators was not high enough, but that the interests of the parties on this issue do not coincide.
This situation is not an exception, but a rule in Central Asia. All countries, through whose territory common rivers flow, have claims to each other. So many books have been written about the region's water problems that one can compose a whole library of them. However, problems remain. The only consolation is that the situation is the same all over the world. Right now, Ethiopia's construction of a hydroelectric power station on the Blue Nile has put it on the brink of war with Egypt.
Informal meetings on the sidelines of the SCO summits can become a platform for «checking the clock» and discussing conceptual approaches to regional cooperation.
Secretaries of Security Councils can meet not only in a bilateral format, but also on the sidelines of the International Meeting of High Representatives in charge of security issues organized by the Russian Security Council.
Foreign ministers have long been practicing meetings on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
The situation with economic cooperation is more complicated. On the one hand, the Central Asian states do not have to create their own regional financial institutions. They already have such experience, and this experience is unfortunate. Instead, they can use the EAEU + Eurasian Development Bank (EDB) operating in the format. Its members are not only members of the Union, but also Tajikistan, Moldova also plans to join it. If Uzbekistan joins this bank, then there will be access to financing for regional projects.
On the other hand, the pandemic of the new coronavirus has shown that the Central Asian states have neither a common economic agenda nor mechanisms to coordinate their interests. The anti-crisis plans adopted by each of the Central Asian countries do not imply any joint action.
All Central Asian states are involved in projects under the China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). They all strive to link national economic development programs with these projects. But they still do not have a unified position on the IPP.
The region has its own club of gas exporters, united by the Turkmenistan — Uzbekistan — Kazakhstan — China gas pipeline with a throughput capacity of 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year. But this club began to gather only after China in March of this year announced a reduction in imports and asked the exporting countries to agree on a proportional reduction in gas supplies through the pipeline.
Another example of the lack of an agreed position among the countries of the region is the construction of the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway, which can become an alternative to the transport corridors passing through the territory of Kazakhstan.
For more than 20 years, this project (the protocol on the creation of a tripartite working commission was signed back in 1997) remained at the stage of discussion — it was too complicated and expensive. However, since the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, infrastructure projects have acquired value in their own right for Beijing.
For Kazakhstan, the importance of transit traffic has been increasing recently. China State Railway Group estimates that rail traffic on the China-Europe route increased 27 percent from January to April to 262,000 TEU (twenty-foot equivalents). According to the national company «Kazakhstan Temir Zholy», in the first four months of this year, container traffic through Kazakhstan increased by 45% compared to the same period last year and amounted to 136.5 thousand TEU.
In these conditions, the prospect of creating a new transport corridor in the coming years, which will reduce the time for transporting goods from East Asia to the countries of the Middle East and Southern Europe by 7 days, cannot but be alarming.
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Today Central Asia is a collective participant in the dialogues between diplomatic departments with practically all external players with long-term interests in Central Asia. These are the USA, the European Union, China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea. Perhaps only Turkey and Iran have chosen a different format of interaction (cultural, linguistic and, in the case of Iran, Caspian).
All these dialogues have developed not because the Central Asian states have any common, agreed approaches to cooperation with foreign partners. In general, all our countries want investments, sometimes loans, but for their own projects. But the European Union and the United States have outlined their interests in the region and the principles on which they intend to work here in special strategic documents. For example, a new US strategy in Central Asia, published on the State Department's website in February this year, said: «Close relations and cooperation with all five countries will promote American values and serve as a counterbalance to the influence of regional neighbors.» Other dialogue partners also have their own vision of Central Asia as a region. And only the Central Asian states themselves do not yet have such a vision.
Central Asia needs to propose its own region-wide agenda for all dialogues and meetings. If we don't, our partners will propose an agenda. For example, at a regular meeting in February this year, the United States proposed an anti-Chinese agenda, which is absolutely unnecessary for any of our countries.
In addition, Washington traditionally builds its strategy in Central Asia around the Afghan issue. On May 27, the first meeting in the «USA — Uzbekistan — Afghanistan» dialogue format took place at the level of the heads of diplomatic departments. It was mainly about security and economic cooperation in border areas, but some issues touched upon the interests of other Central Asian states. This is the future of such large-scale projects as the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline and the CASA-1000 power line. Therefore, the State Department does not rule out that in the future, the same format of dialogues with Tajikistan and Turkmenistan will be launched.
Kazakhstan does not participate in these projects. Meanwhile, in the new concept of Kazakhstan's foreign policy, approved on March 6 this year, it is said that Kazakhstan needs to consolidate the status of a leading state in the Central Asian region. This means that we should use our comparative advantages to solve common problems.
For example, start developing regional projects in the field of digitalization. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in its recent report «COVID-19 crisis response in Central Asia», recommends paying attention to both the digitalization of public services (while noting the Kazakh portal egov.kz as one of the best in the world), and the development of electronic commerce, creating digital platforms for business.
This does not require the creation of supranational structures. It can be an international consortium based on the principles of public-private partnership.
With regard to public services, the experience of Kazakhstan and the competence of Kazakhstani specialists can be used. For the digitalization of private business, experts from the countries with which we are in dialogue can be involved — from the USA, EU, Japan, South Korea. These countries could also finance regional projects as their strategies in the region include promoting greater connectivity and independence.
Considering that these countries are allies, and their geopolitical interests in Central Asia largely coincide, such projects could be multilateral, according to the scheme — European money + Japanese specialists + Korean equipment.
There can be many options. But at the origins of the project should be the desire and readiness of all countries in the region to implement such a project.
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