Integrating domestic politics and foreign policy making: the cases of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan

Abstract

Matters of domestic political consideration exerted a major influence on the processes of foreign policy making established and developed by the authoritarian leaderships of post-Soviet Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The preservation of internal authoritarian stability and the political survival of the national regimes have therefore constituted the key foreign policy ends set by decision makers in Ashgabat and Tashkent. This article unveils and discusses the interconnection between domestic politics and foreign policy making in post-Soviet Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan by looking comparatively at the dynamics through which the regimes manipulated foreign policy to consolidate their internal power. In particular, this article will analyse the crucial role played by foreign policy in the regimes' responses to perceived threats to their political stability.

Keywords:

• Turkmenistan
• Uzbekistan
• foreign policy
• authoritarianism

Notes

According to Article 52 of the 1992 Turkmen Constitution, the President ‘… manages the implementation of foreign policy, representing Turkmenistan in relations with foreign governments, appoints and recalls ambassadors and other diplomatic representatives of Turkmenistan in other countries and in intergovernmental and international organizations, and accepts the credentials and departures of the diplomatic representatives of foreign governments …’ For the full text of the 1992 Turkmen Constitution, see: Turkmenskaya Iskra, 19 May 1992, pp. 1–3.

For the full text of the 2008 Turkmen Constitution, see: http://www.turkmenistan.gov.tm/_ru/laws/?laws=01dw [Accessed 12 August 2009].

The President of the Republic of Uzbekistan, according to Article 93 of the Constitution, does ‘represent the Republic of Uzbekistan in domestic matters and in international relations; … conduct negotiations, sign treaties and agreements in behalf of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and ensure the observance of the treaties and agreements signed by the Republic and the fulfilment of its commitments; receive letters of credence and recall from diplomats and other representatives accredited to him; appoint and recall diplomats and other representatives of the Republic of Uzbekistan to foreign states; present annual reports to the Oliy Majlis on the domestic and international situation’. For the full text of the Uzbek Constitution, see Press Service of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan (2004a).

The Turkmen government tried to overcome these difficulties by resorting to the most disparate strategies, including the appointment of foreign citizens to head its diplomatic representations abroad. For instance, Halil Ugur and Nejdet Göktepe, two Turkish businessmen with significant business interests in Turkmenistan, were appointed in early 1992 to represent the Turkmen government as its consuls in Ankara and Izmir.

In the early 1990s, the slogan Politika Turkmenbashi: Otsenka liderov mirovogo soobshchestva (‘The Politics of Turkmenbashi: Opinions from the leaders of the international community’), appeared on a daily basis on the pages of Turkmenskaya Iskra. Ultimately, this propaganda campaign aimed at internationalizing the figure of the late Turkmen President.

In presenting the evolution of the impact of domestic factors on Turkmen and Uzbek international relations, this section has adopted chronological boundaries that marked key developments in the relationships between the Great Powers and Central Asia. The argument advanced in this section is located at the intersection between the domestic and the external, the national and the global. Key developments at regional level – including the deployment of Operation Enduring Freedom or the accession to power of Vladimir V. Putin – held significant relevance for Turkmen and Uzbek foreign policy. Therefore, such developments not only represent benchmarks for Russia's domestic politics or for US military policy in Central Asia, but they also held key relevance for the emergence of change within Turkmen and Uzbek foreign policy making.

Throughout the post-Soviet era, the clashing geopolitical interests of the international political actors involved in Central Asia have been often been framed in the analytical context of the New Great Game. Such expression, formerly used to label the British-Russian rivalry in Central Asia during the late nineteenth century, regained its former currency. Interestingly, different phases of the post-Soviet era witnessed the involvement of different categories of actors in the regional geopolitical arena. In the 1990s, Great Game analysis focused mostly on the competition between regional actors, namely Iran and Turkey, and in particular on their attempts to export to Central Asia their respective models of development (Ahrari 1994). In the post-2001 era, the focus shifted on the Great Powers, as Central Asian geopolitics have been more increasingly defined in relation to the competition among the United States, the Russian Federation and, more recently, the People's Republic of China (Rumer et al. 2007). These two incarnations of Great Game analysis did nevertheless share an analogous conceptualization of Central Asia's geopolitical dynamics. In both cases, the Central Asian regimes have been presented as political actors with minimal room for manoeuvre when it came to interacting first with regional actors and, more recently, the Great Powers.

US non-governmental and governmental criticisms of the regime's poor human right record was raised even in the lead-up to the signature of the US–Uzbek partnership (see Donovan, 2002).

Russo-Turkmen relationships improved exclusively at bilateral level, as Turkmenistan continued to abstain from participating in the CIS. In August 2005, Turkmenistan unilaterally downgraded the status of its membership in the CIS to a merely associative one.

This accession was preceded, in February 2006, by Tashkent's entry into the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEc), a Russian-led multilateral organization focused on trade and economic cooperation. Following the Uzbek accession to the EurAsEc, the Kremlin began to exert significant pressure on ‘Uzbekistan to rejoin the Collective Security Treaty Organization’ (Blagov 2006).

Uzbekistan also relinquished its membership in the EurAsEc in November 2008.

The Uzbek regime repeatedly expressed its concern about the impact that the energy priorities of upstream states might have on Uzbekistan's irrigational needs and, indirectly, its agricultural potential. In November 2008, the government of Tajikistan announced the imminent construction of a rather extensive system of dams, which was ultimately aimed at increasing the Tajik energy export potential. Dushanbe's plans attracted the attention of the Uzbek regime, which preferred nevertheless to articulate its concern about the project by underlining the latter's environmental impact. In that particular instance, specific factors – closely connected with the Kremlin's energy priorities – aligned Moscow's position to those of the upstream states. Russia's refusal to side with Uzbekistan was met with irritation in Tashkent, and, indirectly, contributed to accelerate Uzbekistan's exit from the EurAsEc.

On 9 April 2009, an explosion in the Turkmen–Uzbek branch of the Central Asia-Centre Pipeline caused the interruption of the gas trade between Russia and Turkmenistan. The two parties immediately produced diverging assessments of the event: the Turkmen government accused Gazprom of sabotage while Russian officials underlined the technical nature of the explosion. As Turkmenistan pressured the Kremlin for a renegotiation of the export price Gazprom agreed to pay according to the gas deal of January 2009, the dispute between the parties continued for almost nine months. The finalization (December 2009) of a new gas deal – which set the price Russia agreed to pay for Turkmen gas at about US$250 per thousand cubic metres (tcm) – did settle the dispute, and normal gas traffic between Turkmenistan and Russia could finally resume on 10 January 2010.