![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
The paper analyses the multifaceted discourse of development and nation-building in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. It addresses the regional clan–central elite relations and Nursultan Nazarbayev regime's legitimating agenda through the Kazakhstan 2030 Strategy for development. The economic developmental component in Nazarbayev's ideological discourses is primarily an exercise of control over regional economic and political elites and that helped building further legitimacy for the regime in various socio-ethnic constituencies on both the regional and central levels. Kazakhstan 2030 was deployed by the regime to substitute the Soviet version of ideology, legitimize the regime among various ethno-lingual audiences, and discipline the behaviour of regional elites. The paper shows how the study of elites’ interests can best explain the nature of national ideology and development projects.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Dr Gül Berna Özcan for the fantastic work undertaken behind this edited issue, and for her many valuable comments and longstanding support and interest in my work. Her detailed comments and suggestions were invaluable and my experience working with her during the workshop on Social and Economic Development in London was a great inspiration in writing this paper. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that helped to shape my argument, and Professor Deniz Kandiyoti for attentive reading of the paper which helped me to shape the argument. I am also indebted to my supervisor, Dr David Lane, and numerous colleagues at the University of Cambridge and beyond who have helped me to conceptualize this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The archival analysis (Fund 5-H, presidential archives) of the early post-Soviet discussions in the so-called ideological committee in the Presidential Administration (Administratsiya Prezidenta, AP) revealed this double-faceted dilemma of the regime. On the one hand, majority of the ruling elites (many of whom still remain in power up to the present) emphasized the importance of the commonly shared value system that until the late 1990s still was called ‘ideology', but distinguished from the one-party Communist ideology of the Soviet period. On the other hand, President Nazarbayev himself was openly against setting one dominant ideology, but rather allowing the multiplicity of views which would not overspill or radicalize the situation in the ethnic–linguistic divide. These discussions are followed even after the publication of Ideinaia konsolidatsiya kazakhstanskogo obshestva kak uslovie progressa Kazakhstana (The Societal Ideational Consolidation as a Condition for Kazakhstan's Progress, 1993), the regime's ideological programme.
2 The disparity of the state language acquisition and use () in both communities where many ethnic Kazakhs are not fluent in their native language creates further tensions in the identity politics in contemporary Kazakhstan.
3 In an interview with Central Asian Monitor, a political newspaper in Kazakhstan, the famous political analyst and writer Daniyar Ashimbayev stated that the development of the so-called ‘clan' system in contemporary Kazakh politics went through the stages of kinship selection of the ‘political office' team but moved towards the personality centred financial groups. According to this analysis, in such a system it is more or less easy to identify the leader of the group. Ashimbayev stated: ‘There is [Timur] Kulibayev's group which is very strong. There is Kelimbetov.' But where one group's interests end and another group's starts ‘is a very difficult question’, he concluded. Most powerful figures are usually associated with the stronger power position in the centre (Khen Citationn.d.; also Maksudov Citation2013).
4 For the Kazakhstan 2030 Strategic Program in English, see www.akorda.kz/, for example. Here I use a direct quotation from the English text of the strategy; further in the text I use my own translations.
5 One of the enquiries into the issue by Madi Alimov's (Citation2013) piece entitled ‘Un-ideational country: Kazakhstan's state ideology is still under construction' (Bezideinaia strana. Gosudarstvennaya ideologiia v Kazakhstane vse eshe strukturiruetsya) in Central Asian Monitor, a newspaper that has raised numerous and continuous debates on the absence of state ideology in Kazakhstan, asserted that ‘such popular searches for national idea which is supposed to consolidate the society were ineffectual’.
6 The investments committee is currently based under the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies that has been headed for a very long time by young and powerful Asset Issekeshev. The Strategy for the Development in Kazakhstan has advanced through years; in the 2000s one of the main discourses of development was directed towards the technological and innovative development led by the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies. Current paradigms of the regime's development strategy are directed towards the green economy, and the forthcoming Expo-2017 is solely dedicated to this discourse.
7 Stavrakakis (Citation1997, 263) defined ‘discursive/symptomal reading' as a process of ‘demonstrating how a given ideological field is the result of a montage of heterogeneous “floating signifiers”, of their totalisation through the intervention of certain “nodal points”'.
8 Prior to the 16 December 1991 independence, the Republic of Kazakhstan declared its sovereignty on 25 October 1990. My analysis of the official press, such as Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, as well as the Kazakh press, for example, Ana Tili, Qazaq Adebieti, demonstrates the formation of two distinct discourses of sovereign Kazakhstan within the Soviet Union and the future Confederation of the Independent States (as it was envisioned by Nursultan Nazarbayev) and the independent Kazakhstan post-1991. Many of the processes and discourses of state-building started forming during the ‘sovereign’ period of late 1990 and throughout 1991 and then transformed during the independence era. Both periods saw very little differentiation in the top ruling elites of the country.
9 The strategy text suggests that the perspective and development plan originates as a blueprint for all of the parts of the state (government, society, centre and regions as these are loosely identified in the text itself) but also by the Head of the State (Nazarbayev). The text reads as a powerful proposal from the first person, the Head of the State (as it is mentioned in some parts, e.g., on page 85), Nazarbayev himself.
10 Nazarbayev (Citation1998/Citation2005, 100) from the Priority # 2: Domestic Political Stability and Consolidation of the Society.
11 Nazarbayev (Citation1998/Citation2005, 90), ‘Kazakhstan's Mission'
12 Nazarbayev (Citation1998/Citation2005, 99), from the Priority # 2: Domestic Political Stability and Consolidation of the Society.
13 See also in Greenfield (Citation1993) for a similar argument.
14 For example, see President Nazarbayev's 2005 address to the nation.
15 Nurlan Balgymbayev died on 14 October 2015.
16 In 1998, the ex-prime minister and main manager behind the privatization policy in Kazakhstan, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, also formed one of the first strong oppositional campaigns against the Nazarbayev regime forming the Republican People's Party and opening the first oppositional press, such as the newspapers of ‘451° by Fahrenheit' and ‘XXI Century' (see Kondyzgakova Citation2001 for a discussion). Although Junisbai and Junisbai state that ‘despite his considerable success in garnering support in the West’, Kazhegeldin's parties and oppositional work did not have ‘much impact on Kazakhstan's political development' (Junisbai and Junisbai Citation2005, 378). Kazhegeldin continues publishing his texts even presently on the pages of Novaya Gazeta Kazakhstan, which is very prominent among urban intelligentsia and the so-called Kazakh creative class.
17 The Law on Public Administration of Kazakhstan (1999) did not directly quote the Kazakhstan 2030 text, but it reflects on its core values of the ‘Professional State' of disciplined and responsible work of the public servants.
18 The Kazakhstan 2030 Strategic Program in English (Kazakhstan 2030 Strategy Citation1997/Citation2013; and see note 4), text quoted from the Priority 7 Professional State, 37.
19 Nazarbayev (Citation1998/Citation2005, 125), Professional State section.
20 The strategy and every presidential address to the nation, which followed similar developmental and managerial structure, had to be replicated in the official regional media, especially in print. Special meetings and public discussions were organized on the matter and the Kazakhstan 2030 (which was published as a brochure) was widely disseminated regionally.
21 Elbasy in Kazakh means the Leader, Father of the Nation. The 2010 Law on the Leader of the Nation in Kazakhstan stated the special role of President Nazarbayev and expanded his representative powers.
22 Mangilik Eli in Kazakh means Eternal Nation. Mangilik El or Eternal Nation was presented as a new national idea for Kazakhstan which combined the main values of Kazakhstan's independence – tolerance, unity, stability and rights of all – and was announced by President Nazarbayev during his annual address to the nation in January 2014.
23 Initial projects were designed by the prominent Kazakhstani sociologist Sabit Zhussupov; for his collection of articles, see Zhussupov (2008).