The interplay of narratives on regionness, regionhood and regionality: European Union and Central Asia

ABSTRACT

This paper identifies the interplay between narratives on Central Asia as a region. It compares European Union (EU) narratives with those of the five post-Soviet states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. By doing so, it investigates the manifestations of narratives, stories and narrators who continue to construct and convey certain discourses about the region, comparing EU discourse and that of the local political elites in Central Asia, respectively. By looking at official discourse conveyed by the presidents of the countries and in key foreign policy documents, the interplay of narratives as dialogues between narrators is analysed, thus expanding into ideational analysis, an emerging trend in the literature on post-Soviet Central Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• regionness
• Central Asian region
• narratives
• self-articulations
• regionalism

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Professor Rick Fawn, Dr Oleg Korneev and Dr Karolina Kluczewska for organizing the workshop in Brussels in July 2019, and for initiating the discussion on multiple aspects of European Union–Central Asia cooperation. Thanks also for providing comments on the initial draft, along with the two anonymous reviewers who reviewed and provided useful feedback on the draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 An organization consisting of China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Additional information

Funding

The initial draft of the paper was presented at the workshop on ‘Transformation of EU Approaches towards Central Asia’ in Brussels, Belgium, 10 July 2019, and was organized in the framework of the research project ‘Contested Global Governance, Transformed Global Governors? International Organizations and “Weak” States’ (GLOBALCONTEST) funded by the French National Research Agency (grant number ANR-16-ACHN-0034).