Myth and Reality in Kazakh Ideology
Analysing Kazakhstan’s Foreign Policy: Regime neoeurasianism in the Nazarbayev Era
this study intertwines two narratives: Kazakhstan’s state policy of continuing union state politics with russia, and independent state appropriation of an ideological narrative to legitimize the nazarbayev regime. the contrasts between the deep ideological forms of eurasianism, the complexities of independence, unionism, and multivector foreign policy, and the self-aggrandizing use of theory, history and state by the ruling family are all woven together into a cogent narrative.
Ultimately what Anceschi uncovers here is a “frailty policy” — too useful to abandon, too brittle to be used for much longer. Mostly the work is an examination of the appropriation and application of old excuses to new problems. regime neo-eurasianism is for Anceschi an excuse for russian unionism, masked in independent state mythmaking, ethnonationalist justification, and a shadow pluralism poorly constructed as multivectorism. What is missing from the study though is any future projection of what form regime neoeurasianism will morph into once its usefulness has been fully extracted by the state.
A series of dichotomies are explored in this appropriation and deployment of ideology as policy. Kazakhstan’s russia “one-way dependency” is good analysis, as is the friction between ethnopolitics and Kazakhstan’s foreign policy. these are together contrasted with the Ussr’s “centralized pluralism” and the revisionist soviet historiography used to rewrite colonial spaces into a russified narrative. for the soviet Union, eurasianism was ideological mythmaking, but for independent Kazakhstan it is political state mythmaking. this contemporary friction is expressed in the reemergence of unilateralism and ethnonationalism in russia and the nominal emergence of Kazakhstan’s pluralism and multivector foreign policy. the multiplex of Kazakhstan’s relationship with regime-legitimizing ideology thus descends into fractals the closer the level of examination.
the book follows Kazakhstan’s post-soviet political history across 1991-2020, an ambition that ultimately falls short due to its reliance on soviet historiography methods and the limitations of examining only political and not ideological forms of eurasianism. Anceschi does engage with the Khanate histories and the contemporary government appropriation of historiography for mythmaking. And he constructs a narrative around national myths creating longerterm path-dependencies to solve short-term political problems.
But for a book on eurasianism it actually spends very little time on eurasian ideology. A book on Kazakhstan’s indigenous forms of eurasianism as political legitimacy with no mention of “non-regime eurasianism” is a bit thin. similarly, the formation and application of eurasianism in Kazakhstan in relation to either islam or tengrism remains unexplored. the central thesis of classical eurasianism was that the turkic influence was important in forming the political institutions of russia and eurasian countries that later became russian speaking. for russia, this means taking turkism, islam and to a lesser extent Buddhism seriously in political constructions in eurasia that include polities of Buryat, tuva, Oirat, Kazakh, Uzbek, and tatar. Kazakhstan’s regime interpretation of neo-eurasianism inhabits the same landscape. But islam is only mentioned twice by Anceschi, both times as a threat, while tengrism is not even mentioned. in defense, Anceschi does note that the concept of turkestan and appeals to turkicness have played no part in Kazakhstan’s regime neo-eurasianism, which has been almost wholly divorced from intellectual eurasianism. exploring this lack of tengrism, turkology, or islam would have been interesting though. Without serious engagement with the social structures that Kazakhstan’s neo-eurasianism finds itself in friction with, our
understanding of forces that will shape its future political institutions remains weak.
the sections applying political institutions to economic developments are the more interesting. Anceschi explores the failures of monetary integration under the ruble zone, which Kazakhstan at first supported and then abandoned. the development of the eurasian economic Union is covered, and the failing and projected failing examined. Overall, Anceschi pushes for an analysis that early Kazakh independence politics lacked eurasianism, was outward looking and state-building, but that elements institutionally within it could be contrived to be eurasian, and were later coopted into a regime-legitimizing narrative.
the problems with the book are the same problems of scholarship within the region: historical methods that have not been updated from soviet academics, little modern political science methodology, and tired state-centric and chronological methods of enquiry and historiography. the writing reminds one of Harold Laski, a target of Orwell’s Politics and the English Language: double negatives, poor use of dependent clauses, and devolution into jargon. the phrase “to all intents and purposes” occurs 14 times in a book of only 150 substantive pages. similarly, expressions beginning with “inevitable” occur 14 times. With such historical determinacy one may wonder why the book was written at all if the developments described were so inevitable. Heavy reliance on contemporary secondary sources on other regional states contrast with extensive tangents on the author’s specialization in turkmenistan. And the proliferation of latinized russian expressions (evraziiskaya strategiya) is neither cute to the specialist nor helpful to the generalist. Ultimately, this short book feels unformed, like a series of introductions and conclusions, of bread and salad without the lamb shashlik.
Anceschi, though, does peer into a future of Kazakh eurasianism that itself may not have enough light to see into the looming darkness of the mid 21st century. Kazakhstan’s regime neoeurasianism has been now so sanitized to serve regime purposes that its countermovement may result in a nationalist resurgence, rather than what so many visitors to post-soviet Kazakhstan have witnessed: an open, pluralistic, tolerant, secular, progressive and inspiring social landscape. the ideology that has helped the regime to maintain control, stifle social innovation, repress the economy, and black out political opposition, though, is one that it is hard to see surviving due
This short book feels unformed, like a series of introductions and conclusions, of bread and salad without the lamb shashlik. Anceschi, though, does peer into a future of Kazakh Eurasianism that itself may not have enough light to see into the looming darkness of the mid 21st century.
to its inability to undergo renewal. regime neoeurasianism has served its purpose for one generation of political power. for Kazakhstan’s future, though, a revision of both political ideology and political institutions is needed if the spirit of pluralism embedded in eurasianism is to be a useful guide to Kazakhstan’s future.