Policy Options for Resolving Post-Soviet Ethnic Conflict

Robert M. Cutler

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Policy Options for Resolving Post-Soviet Ethnic Conflict

• Managing Conflict in the Former Soviet Union, CSIA Studies in International Security. Alexei Arbatov, Abram Chayes, Antonia Handler Chayes and Lara Olson (editors). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
• Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in and after the Soviet Union: The Mind Aflame. Valery Tishkov. London: Sage Publications for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1997.

0. [Preliminary Remarks]

These two books are perhaps the most significant recent works on the origins and regulation of ethnic conflict in the post-Soviet area, yet there could not be a greater contrast between them. Valery Tishkov became director of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology in Moscow during Gorbachev’s perestroika era and is a former Minister of Nationalities in Yeltsin’s government. This work draws on his inside knowledge of major events as well as on extensive primary research and an encyclopædic knowledge of the literature. It is a brilliant tour de force that makes available to English-readers an extremely wide range of Russian-language ethno-historical and conflict-analytic work. Its length, acute criticism of dominant Western theories and analyses, and lack of a unified methodological approach will probably diminish its appreciation by Western scholars. In the opinion of this reviewer, however, the idiosyncratic combination of these characteristics, married to Tishkov’s comprehensive familiarity with the situations, is one of the work’s strengths and contributes to its acuity. It is precisely the author’s political engagement, combined with his use of personal reminiscences, interviews, notes and conversations, as well as documents from his files as Minister and institute director, which give his work its special

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qualities. When deployed by someone like Jack Matlock, these qualities are lauded.

A good review should outline the arguments of the items under review and evaluate them. With only two books under review here and with both of them of such heft and authority, the summary of their arguments will necessarily be extended. Therefore the first section of the review indicates in a more cursory manner how the books are constructed and complement one another. This section will include some details as to the basis for the conclusions of the book edited by Arbatov, Chayes, Chayes and Olson, which is below denoted the ‘ACCO’ volume. The second section of the review examines in detail the structure and argumentation of Tishkov’s monograph. It turns out that the two volumes share two case studies and that their general conclusions are mutually related. Therefore the third section of this review compares their treatment of the Ingush- Ossetian conflict and of the situation of Slavophones in Kazakhstan, and it compares also the volumes’ respective policy recommendations. The fourth section of this review evaluates those recommendations on the basis of an examination of Central Asian conflict situations in. the former Soviet area. The fifth section of the review is a summary and conclusion.

1. Overview

Tishkov’s study is strongly policy-oriented and profoundly critical of Western theories of ethnic conflict, Sovietology and ‘post-Sovietology’. Although area specialists should recognize the work’s value, several of its characteristics militate against its being extremely well received in the North American social-science community. Tishkov states his own criticisms of even dominant theories of the genesis of ethnic conflict, as if these criticisms were matters of simple fact: which they are. However, he does not elaborate a synthetic social- scientific framework for testing the theories he criticizes. He is thus neither ‘scientific’ nor ‘systematic’. Over-attention to these aspects of his work risks obscuring from view the fact that his propositions are nonetheless well argued; indeed, his thoroughness and encyc1opaedism turn his eclecticism into a virtue. If this work does not receive the attention it deserves, that will be because it is not ‘comparable’ to works by Western specialists and does not fall within a Western major research paradigm. This does not make it any less comprehensive and knowledgeable a work. During the Soviet period, Western specialists on Soviet-area affairs strongly discounted testimony even by Soviet- trained specialists—and especially by Soviet-trained specialists—and participants in Soviet policy issues. The reception that Tishkov’s book receives will be a good indicator of whether and to what degree this parochialism may have changed.

The ACCO volume is a collection of essays by Russian and American scholars that succeeds in making available to English-readers a moderate Russian perspective on selected cases of ethnic conflict and in establishing the difficulties in promoting the deeper involvement by international organizations in their resolution. However, the ACCO book is oddly structured and marred by the

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absence of an overall controlling hand as well as by certain organizational and presentational shortcomings that limit its value. After a relatively thin introductory Part One, Part Two presents six case studies: in Russia (North Ossetia and Ingushetia), in Ukraine (the Crimea), in Moldova (the Transdniester region), in Latvia (the Slavophone question), in Kazakhstan (the Slavophone question again) and in Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia). The case studies are each written by a specialist from the Policy Analysis Section of the Council of the Russian Federation (the upper house of Parliament). Chayes and Chayes make clear from the outset that these case studies ‘do not aim for complete scholarly objectivity’ but rather for presentation of ‘a moderate Russian perspective’ (p 3). Arbatov argues that ‘imbalance and even bias’ (p 20) are warranted in pursuit of presenting perspectives not widely available in the West. As counterpoint, a commentary by a young American scholar, usually a Harvard or MIT graduate student, complements each case study.

The collection of six case studies is idiosyncratic. Three are by a single author, Edward Ozhiganov, who by himself accounts for over half of Russian- authored case-study page count, three-sevenths of the total Russian- authored page count and over one-third of the whole book. Moreover, the graduate-student commentaries on Ozhiganov uniformly draw attention to his consistent myopia, his minimization of the role of outside forces in the development of the conflicts, his derogation of international organizations in search of their resolution and his rather transparent sympathies (for Moscow while against the Crimean movement and Kyiv, for the Transdniestrians while against Chisinau, for the southern Ossetes and Abhaz while against Tbilisi).

While Ozhiganov’s chapters provide background and some detail for these case studies, like the rest of the ACCO book they are marred by a deficient and inconsistent scholarly apparatus. This is the result of a lack of co-ordination of the division of labour among the editorial team, for which no one is individually responsible. However, it is justified and possible, without appearing churlish, to call attention to such representative lapses as the transliteration, within ten pages, of the name of Nezavisimaia gazeta’s military observer variously as Felgengauer and Felgenhauer (p 414, n. 2, and p 424, n. 11); the consistent misspelling of the name of the President of Kazakhstan as Nazerbaev throughout the text, notes and index; or the location of the ‘Sinthizian-Uighur [sic] autonomous region in northeastern China [emphasis added], which lies on the eastern border of Kazakhstan’ (p 294, n. 29). With the exception of a few of the graduate-student commentaries, all cited works and article titles are given in English translation, complicating the identification of the originals. To give but two examples: although items published in Sukhumi are clearly not Abkhaz (else they should have been published in ‘Sukhum’), whether they are in Georgian or Russian is unclear; and the language of items published in Vladikavkaz by a university press whose name is also given in English can only be guessed. Also it is increasingly standard bibliographic practice to cite physical locations where rare or ephemeral items such as these are conserved. Finally, the case studies and Ozhiganov’s in particular, are marked by an over- reliance on Itar-Tass reports.

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None of these observations detracts from the principal merit of the ACCO book, which is that it succeeds in its intent to provide more widely in English certain ‘moderate’ nongovernmental specialized Russian perspectives.

The main policy argument of the ACCO book is that in the Russian view, international organizations have not played enough of a role—or not an effective enough one—in settling conflicts in the former Soviet area. From the American collaborators, the argument is that the US has no effective policy regarding the participation of international organizations in conflict resolution in the former Soviet area. Thus Osipova concludes (p 70) that there was no concerted international action at all as regards the Ingush-Ossetian conflict and that the Council of Europe would be the best place to pressure the Russian government. Yusupovsky suggests (p 264) that the full range of institutions including the OSCE, the Council of Europe and human rights NGOs as well as UNESCO could act as ‘mediators in negotiations between Russia and Latvia on questions connected with the future of the Russian community in Latvia and monitor the observation of human and citizenship rights’. According to Barsamov (p 323), ‘the CSCE and the United Nations have been the most active and influential organizations in Kazakhstan [as regards the Slavophone ethnolinguistic issues], but the Council of Europe has also made a number of visits’. The remaining three case studies are those by Ozhiganov. He concludes that in the Crimea (p 133), the CSCE, European Parliament and United Nations have all ‘show[n] their clear support for Kiev’s [sic] actions’ and that international organizations in general ‘cannot be relied upon as unbiased arbiters in promoting the effective resolution of crisis situations’ in the former Soviet area. As for Moldova (p 189), he observes that the CSCE has played ‘a significant part in the negotiations between Moldova and Russia on the political status of Transdniester and the withdrawal of the 14th Army’ but calls into question its approach, which he calls (p 207) ‘extremely formal and one-sided’. Finally, he asserts that in South Ossetia, the OSCE was the only organization that produced results but ‘inevitably ran into the problem of how to apply international law to the complex issues involved in the conflict while adhering to OSCE principles of national and human rights’ (p 370), while in Abkhazia he questions whether the situation would be much different without the UN and OSCE involvement (p 398).

2. Tishkov’s accomplishment

At this juncture, it is appropriate to outline the contents of the Tishkov book. Subsequently, his policy recommendations will be compared in detail with those emerging from the ACCO volume and the two sets of recommendations will be evaluated against the actual situation on the ground in Central Asia. Tishkov’s book is divided into three main parts, plus introduction and conclusion. The first part comprises five chapters: an introduction to ethnicity in the Soviet and post-Soviet context, a history of Soviet ‘ethnic engineering’, a review of ethno- politics in the former Soviet area as from the early 1990s, an analysis of territorial and ‘spatial’ (including economic and environmental) issues on power

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struggles over ethnic territories, and an analysis of temporal-demographic (particularly cultural and linguistic) origins of conflict. Part Two, ‘Case Studies’, comprises also five chapters: Russians leaving ‘Central Asia and Kazakhstan’, the Osh conflict, the Ingush-Ossetian conflict, the Chechen War up to early 1992 and the Chechen war since early 1992. Finally, Part Three, ‘Governing Conflicting Ethnicity’, comprises three chapters: an inventory and analysis of post-Soviet nationalisms and their types, ‘identities in transition’ in ‘Rossia’ (sic and distinct from ‘Russia’, as explained below), and a lengthy list of ‘strategies for ethnic accord’ in the post-Soviet states. Add to this a general introduction and a conclusion that accuse scholars in East and West of ‘destroying reality through theory’, in a manuscript of 200,000 words including 34 tables and 15 figures, with a bibliography listing nearly 500 works cited and one senses the impatience with which this book will be received in certain Western academic circles.

Chapter 1 reviews Western and post-Soviet ethnographic approaches and observes that the ‘primordialist’ school is still prevalent in the former Soviet area. Tishkov also reviews the ‘ethnos’ theory and Gorbachevian innovations on the Stalinist- Khrushchevist schools of ethnographical analysis. He criticizes all these viewpoints and maintains that ethnicity is a socially constructed meaning. Indeed, the signal virtue of Tishkov’s monograph is that he treats ethnicity as a social construction yet limits himself to the empirical cases at hand, avoiding abstract discourse disconnected from the life and history of the social groups concerned in his empirical studies. As such, although he nowhere cites Karl Deutsch, Tishkov may be regarded as a continuator of him. In Tishkov’s hands, this approach relativizes the meaning of ethnicity, thus making it amenable to policy influence by those who are in a position to affect the deployment, construction, and reconstruction of such meanings and of the power relations among the sub-elites and intellectuals who propagandize the ethnic rank- and-file.

Chapter 2 is a comprehensive survey of the history of Soviet ethnic engineering from the Bolshevik revolution up through the middle of the Gorbachev period. Chapter 3 covers the disintegration of the Soviet Union from the standpoint of national construction, including the failure of the ‘new’ Union Treaty, through 1992–1993. Tishkov refutes the ‘triumph of nations’ catchphrase coined by Hélène Carrère d’Encausse to signify the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He correctly points up the role of scholars and intellectuals in constructing allegories of nationalism and illustrates the autonomous significance of the strategies and incentive structures of sub-elites and their individual members. These are not necessarily related to the aspirations of those ethnic groups that they say they represent. Tishkov discusses and compares the declarations by leaders in Tatarstan, Bashkiria, Yakutia, Checheno-Ingushetia, Kalmykia and elsewhere throughout the Russian republic in support of this interpretation.

Indeed, his emphasis on the need to distinguish the individual-level incentive structures of particular members of sub-elites is a leitmotif of the work applicable to cases of ethnic mobilization beyond the Soviet area. This seems implicitly to be his main justification for asserting (p xi) his own approach to be

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‘methodological individualism’ while in the next breath insisting that he does not subscribe ‘to one single exclusive concept or cultural theory’. His criticism (p 187) of ‘the limited nature of the objectivist methodology’ would have to apply also to methodological individualism. It seems his invocation of methodological individualism is mainly an antidote to the late Soviet version of historical materialism, which denied any autonomy to individual agents in the explanation of social change. Tishkov owes at least as much to historical sociology and the study of collective social change although, as his next chapter makes clear, he does not entirely subscribe to the ‘resources’ approach that typifies the work of Charles Tilly. Like Tilly, however, Tishkov is fundamentally anti-Durkheimian in his approach to studying protest, discontent and violence.

Chapter 4 discusses territories, resources and other elements of power, and begins to set the background for the case studies in Part Two of the book. Chapter 5 gives example after specific example of facile policy-oriented conclusions drawn by Western scholars, often based on ‘their uncritical belief in the misleading results of Soviet census data concerning language behavior and language status’ (p 84). As mentioned, Tishkov draws on personal files, personal notes, personal conversations and personal experience in this work, to produce an evaluation of the situation that arguably no one else could authoritatively offer. In this sense, his argument is ‘nonfalsifiable’. However, it is precisely this sort of knowledge that allows Tishkov to demonstrate how changes recorded from one Soviet census to the next cannot be regarded as reflecting the true situation (e.g. pp 89–91). This is one place where Tishkov’s experiential knowledge of Soviet census procedures and nationality issues in particular cannot be adduced as an argument against the validity of his criticisms of Western scholars. Throughout this chapter, the shallowness of much of Western social-science scholarship on Central Asia in particular in the Soviet and early post- Soviet period comes in for repeated criticism. Tishkov is further able to use his intimate and detailed knowledge of the Soviet and post-Soviet situations to render verdicts on some general Western social theories, insofar as they do or do not apply to the Soviet and post- Soviet area. On the basis of serious scholarly work carried out in the Soviet area both before and after 1991, for example, he is able to conclude (p 111) that ‘Samuel Huntington’s thesis [about ethnicity and culture] does not work for the interpretation of cultural cleavages, at least on the territory of the former USSR’.

Of Tishkov’s five case studies in Part Two, two address conflicts also covered in the ACCO volume and are therefore discussed further below. Chapter 7 analyzes the Osh conflict. Tishkov begins by criticizing both the frustration- aggression theory and the idea of ‘structural violence’. He also fundamentally criticizes from several standpoints the ‘Minorities at Risk’ project (pp 135–136). His approach in this chapter involves the micro- analysis of ethnic violence as opposed to the study of mass group conflicts. He uses for his data the texts of court rulings. This is especially useful in view of the obligation of social scientists to use available data even when no comparable dataset may exist in other instances and to construct their research designs in such a manner as to

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exploit idiosyncrasies of the dataset itself. Tishkov treats mass ethnic violence as distinct from politically manifested ethnic insurrection, noting that the former ‘seems to build up towards explosive but short-lived manifestations if it does not evolve into planned military actions with established front lines and organized paramilitary or military units’ (p 141). Along several criteria, he therefore distinguishes it from mass unrest. He analyzes the sociological background characteristics of the perpetrators and of the victims, and specifies the motives and mechanism of violence, including rumours, ‘group think’, myth-based solidarity and social paranoia. Since Tishkov is not ignorant of the possible biases introduced by an exclusive reliance upon the court texts, he supplements these with intensive attention to the social context in which the violence was perpetrated.

Chapters 9 and 10 deal with two phases of the Chechen war, respectively up to the end of 1991 and as from the beginning of 1992. Tishkov begins chapter 9, as he begins other chapters, with a survey of explanatory models or theories that have been proposed to explain the case at hand: in this instance, the Chechen crisis. He mentions the ‘conspiracy theory’ (citing a newspaper article by Ozhiganov as an example, particularly the oil and money motives) and admits that this economic factor, including its criminal aspect, did play an important role; however, he remains sceptical of this explanation. He cites the interpretation that the conflict was an unsuccessful blitzkrieg by Russia agaiast a self-proclaimed independent Chechnya and traces this near-stereotype back through the Western historiographic tradition of Islamic studies and Russia, and to Alexander Bennigsen in particular (p 184). According to Tishkov, even the more nuanced Western analyses, which emphasize Russian military violations of mass human rights, failures of leadership and the inability of negotiations to resolve political disputes, have a large debt to that tradition. He further criticizes the ‘civilizational-ethnographic romanticism’ of the ‘clash of civilizations’ hypothesis—be this hypothesis of Christian or Islamic origin—and deconstructs it (p 186) into ‘a widespread practice in ethnography, whereby a cultural complex is constructed by an outsider- professional, for whom field research mainly means writing a text with an indoctrinated informant’.

By virtue of his personal experience as former Minister of Nationalities in Yeltsin’ s government, Tishkov is able to give a number of examples of the highly personalized character of the conflict and how the personal relationships among the principal political figures affected the subsequent course of events. He is also one of the few social scientists to remark (e.g. p 188) emphatically and repeatedly—and correctly—on ‘the problematic role of the mass media as participants in the conflict once the professional creators of electronic images and newspaper texts have created a version (or versions) of the conflict in dramatically marketable forms and then return these versions to the participants themselves—influencing not only their attitudes but also the behaviour of the participants, at times more strongly than the military orders’.

This chapter contains the most detailed yet concise and relevant summary of the history of the Chechen ethos from its origins up until the 1944

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deportation that I have seen (pp 188–192). The trauma of that deportation is underlined along with an analysis of the various statistical sources concerning its magnitude. Analyses of other statistical data (pp 194–198) summarize the evolution of Chechen social affairs and their political significance in Russia after World War II up to the outbreak of the insurrection. The data are not

mechanically recited but rather integrated into the overall discursive narrative called ‘building Chechen loyalty’. In this way, Tishkov is able convincingly to point to sources of underlying social tensions and conflicts despite the superficial inter-ethnic stability apparent on the ground at that time. He recounts the emergence of Dudaev as the leader of Chechen nationalism and correctly estimates that this was ‘a milestone in the history of Chechen conflict’ (p 200). He also recounts in enlightening detail the intricacies of struggle among various Chechen social and political formations, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the context of the Soviet disintegration, the Gorbachev–Yeltsin competition and the transfer to Chechnya of some weapons from Georgia under Gamsakhurdia. So doing, he also introduces appropriate aspects of the Ingush national movement and its relations with the Russian republic’s administrative structure within the USSR including relations with North Ossetia.

The second chapter on the Chechen War begins with the end of 1991, by which time ‘the “Chechen revolution” was assuming its own active content and developmental logic largely independent of Moscow’ (p 207). Tishkov examines divergent explanations of the formation of new political structures in the region and the profound economic crisis resulting from the upheaval there. He correctly emphasizes how the secession of the territory brought significant economic benefit to the initiators of independence (and other strata of Chechen society) through evasion of Russian export rules, particularly for oil. He emphasizes that ‘Moscow did not awaken to the situation in the Chechen republic until the spring of 1994’ (p 214) and, analyzing the Khasbulatov factor in the summer of 1994, concludes (p 218) that this ‘played an important role in Yeltsin’ s decision to introduce armed forces into Chechnya, although the president’s principal reason was to bolster his own declining popularity’. Finally he gives reasons (lack of assimilation, social and economic problems, accelerated modernization, transfer of weapons from the Russian arsenal) why Chechnya became one of the first actors to implement a radical scenario of sovereignty. In conclusion he lists a whole series of factors that the federal regime ignored, might have done, ought to have done and could have done, starting in late 1991. It is hard to disagree with his final conclusion that Yeltsin’ s self-proclaimed inability even to speak with Dudaev was an idiosyncratic factor that goes a great distance towards explaining the final tragic outcome.

3. Common case studies and policy recommendations

The two books share case studies of Kazakhstan and the Ingush-Ossetian conflict. For the ACCO volume, these two case studies are among the strongest essays in the book, even though the Ingush-Ossetian study is better integrated

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into Tishkov’s work (as a natural lead-in to his discussion of the Chechen War). In the ACCO volume, Osipova tends to blame the Russian government for ignorance and short- sightedness, minimizing the effects of third parties or broader social and political structures. However, her conclusion (p 75) that Russia must develop within its borders a nationality policy that ‘ensures peaceful coexistence and cooperation among its many ethnic groups and enables these groups to satisfy their national cultural needs’ complements Tishkov’s conclusion about how Russia should pursue a policy concerning Russians outside Russia in the former Soviet area. Tishkov’s own case study of the Ingush-Ossetian conflict bears the phrase ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the title and gives further examples of the broader themes of his work as mentioned above.

Barsamov’s case study of Kazakhstan for the ACCO volume suggests (pp 328–331) several possible scenarios for the longer-range development of relations between Kazakhs and Russians in Kazakhstan: these may be grouped into the scenarios he considers very unlikely (three separate types of administrative- territorial change), rather unlikely but not out of the question (civil war between the two ethnic groups, a confederate Kazakhstani- Russian state), unlikely (maintenance of the status quo, national-cultural autonomy for the Russian population, Russian assimilation), possible (creation of a civil state throughout which the two ethnic groups of equally represented: a once realistic but now unrealized hope), and likely but potentially dangerous (continued Russian emigration). Although this chapter does not seek to distinguish different political and social forces within the Kazakh ethnos that may differ among themselves over the proper ethnic policy, it is a very capable examination of the origin and development of ethnic politics in Kazakhstan as a whole.

Tishkov deals with the whole of ‘Central Asia and Kazakhstan’, a phrase inherited from the Soviet vocabulary. He surveys demographic and ethno- cultural data from the entire region: actually the verb ‘survey’ does not adequately denote the in-depth nature of his analysis. In conclusion Tishkov, rather than tracing scenarios like Barsamov, suggests (p 134) that Russia adopt ‘a long-term and consistent policy of supporting and defending ethnic compatriots abroad on a basis of inter-state cooperation within a framework of internationally recognized norms and practices’. In contrast with the ACCO studies, Tishkov here advocates a pro-active policy on the part of Russia, not necessarily relying on existing international organizations. The ACCO case study of Russians in Latvia, as well as the generally positive outcome now observable, lends weight to Tishkov’s conclusion.

Each volume also includes three concluding chapters that seek to synthesize the respective work and present policy-relevant conclusions. Arbatov’s chapter in the ACCO volume reaches principally the same conclusions as the aggregate of case studies, but without apparently drawing on them. It is a more Eurocentric perspective than likely characterizes the principal foreign policy makers in Russia today. This is a fair portrayal of a moderate Russian view from the mid-1990s. However, one remarkable aspect is the definition, by even so sophisticated an observer as Arbatov, of ‘Central Asia’ as comprising only

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Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tadjikstan (with Azerbaijan added to the category). For Arbatov, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are to be classed with Georgia and Armenia because (p 443) they all ‘need Russian security guarantees in the form of a Russian military presence to protect their outer borders against foreign threats’: presumably China in the case of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, although Arbatov never clarifies whence this threat arises. This seems a rather superficial distinction. Arbatov seeks a new Euro-Atlantic security framework and settles (p 456), by process of elimination, on the OSCE as the only existing organization capable of providing one. Chayes, Olson and Raach make a complementary argument in the book’s concluding chapter, insisting (p 536) on the need ‘to engage Russia in a truly cooperative enterprise for dealing with external and domestic controversies through the major international organizations’. As they observe in their concluding remark, this is necessary even if the US must assume an unaccustomed junior role.

Tishkov’s policy recommendations are summarized in Table 1. He arrives at them after two penultimate chapters that first survey the nature of post- Soviet nationalisms and then focus on the Russian Federation and its multifarious ethnic groups. In the latter, chapter 12, he attempts to drive home his case for the neologism ‘Rossia’, which he first introduced in the beginning of the book. For this, the rationale is common sense. The Russian language has different words for the state (Rossiya) and for the people and their language (russkii). He points out the contradiction in referring, for example, to the ‘Russian army’ in Chechnya (many troops were not ethnic Russians). This is in line with Yeltsin’s introduction a number of years ago of the noun rossiyane to refer to the citizens of the federation. As reasonable as this suggestion is, it is not clear whether it will be generally adopted in the English language.

4. Comparative synoptic analysis of Central Asian conflicts

How to evaluate the recommendations of these two works? Let us distinguish four types of conflict situations, of which at least one example of each is present in Central Asia.

1. Absence of conflict. Here the goal is conflict-prevention. If peace is threatened, then the goals may be peacekeeping and/or peacemaking. Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan are cases where conflict—i.e. internal conflict or conflict with Russia—is absent.
2. Conflict of interest. In this instance the principal goal is conflict-resolution. Subsidiary goals are conflict-reduction and conflict-management. Uzbekistan exemplifies a case of conflict of interest with Russia.
3. Implicit or explicit threat of coercive force. Here the principal goal is conflict-reduction; subsidiary goals are conflict-management and conflict-resolution, with peacekeeping possibly as an end in itself. Kazakhstan exemplifies a case of implicit or explicit threat of coercive force by Russia.
4. Military conflict. The principal goal is conflict-management. Subsidiary goals

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are conflict-reduction and conflict- resolution, with peacekeeping possibly as a means to peacemaking. Tajikstan is an example of open military conflict in which Russia is involved.

Table 2 summarizes the relations among types of conflict situation and types of goals in this enumeration. (Note that the first is similar to Tishkov’s definition in the first column of Table 1; the second and third, similar to his second column; the fourth, similar to his third column.) The cases are then summarized below, on the basis of materials in the works under review and additional information adduced by this writer.

4.1. Absence of conflict: Turkmenistan

Despite the economic conflict over gas exports, Russia’s relations with Turkmenistan have been the least problematic in nearly all of Central Asia. There are no security problems between the two countries and relations between them have focused on the development and exportation of natural resources. Turkmenistan was the second biggest producer of natural gas in the former Soviet Union, next to Russia. Western interest in Turkmenistan is relatively recent and originally focused on facilitating arrangements for Ukraine’s payments of its debts to Turkmenistan for natural gas supplies. Turkmenistan retains the heavy hand of the old regime and has not greatly returned the relatively small amount of Western interest demonstrated.

4.2. Absence of conflict: Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan has not had significant relations with Russia since independence. Its officially announced foreign policy priorities give pride of place to China, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. Russia and the US are somewhat less central though far from unimportant. Kyrgyzstan has no border with Russia and Russian- speakers are valued for their skills. President Akaev has promoted reform and received international praise as well as financial support for this, despite authoritarian tendencies recently in evidence. Aside from events in the Fergana Valley in 1989, which attracted international attention but little in the way of practical security assistance, the country has not been involved in international conflicts. Thus there has been little Western engagement in either of these two countries, with the exception of engagement for economic reform in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan has proceeded with marketizing and democratizing reforms and has reaped the benefit of Western engagement, mainly in the field of positive international publicity but with rather little economic result either in commerce or in investment.

Given the relative absence of Western interest in these two countries and the relative absence of conflict in them, the principal instruments applied by the

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West have been ‘ideological’ (in the non-pejorative sense), viz. the moral bully pulpit of developed capitalism an its associated democratic tendencies.

4.3. Conflict of interest: Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan has had conflicts of interest with Russia, but these have not engendered threats of coercive force. These conflicts of interest have mainly concerned exports of primary materials from Uzbekistan and the military situation in Tajikstan. By the time Russia got around to defining its interests in Tajikstan, Uzbekistan had played its supporting military role there: the question which Tajikstani faction held the levers of power was already answered. This was about the time that Russia began to seek to reinforce the CIS organizationally and to give it a higher institutional profile. In part because of disagreements over the situation in Tajikstan, Russia’s relations with Uzbekistan have been distant. The West’s diplomatic instruments towards Uzbekistan have been principally economic, seeking through bilateral interstate relations to promote marketization. In 1995 these began to bear fruit, although ‘privatization’ was still limited to sell-offs of large state firms to foreign buyers and the signature of contracts with the largest Western companies for investment in the metallurgical and machine- building sectors. The IMF’s failure to impose its desired macroeconomic policies illustrates that available means in this situation are limited to economic instruments and do not extend to legal- financial instruments.

4.4. Threat of coercion: Kazakhstan

Western interests in Kazakhstan have been fairly clear from the beginning. First, there was the need to regulate of the question of nuclear arms following the break- up of the Soviet Union; largely through US efforts this interest was satisfied. Second, it has been in the West’s interest to promote the development and export of natural resources in Kazakhstan, particularly energy. This requires implantation of domestic legal and economic regimes complementing the norms of the international trading system, and with Western assistance there has been significant progress in this. Third has been the question of a law on property in agricultural land, which would provide a solution to the ethnic strife notably between Russians and Kazakhs in the north of the country. Indeed the issue of a law on property in agricultural land held up the passage of a law on property in land generally. This in

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turn stunted the growth of small and medium enterprises since the absence of title to land means that an entrepreneur could be arbitrarily dispossessed of a factory. The solution was first to privatize housing (property in residential land), then to make possible the creation of industrial enterprises (property in industrial land), and only then to tackle the problem of property in agricultural land.

Western governments and multilateral institutions were in the forefront of seeking a pacific arrangement. The EU around Aqmola and the US Agency for International Development in the north experimented with various legal arrangements such as 99-year transferable leases, or 10-year trial leases with ownership to be given based upon the results of agricultural production by the particular farmer. The law proposed by Nazarbaev to permit private ownership in land was approved by the Kazakhstani Parliament in 1994 by a very close 66–56 vote, with 10 abstentions, several weeks before Parliament was suspended. In the end, the law was voided when Nazarbaev extraordinarily dissolved Parliament. His executive rule in the interim before new elections generally confirmed by decree such laws already passed; but the agricultural-land property law was not made the subject of such a decree. Oddly enough, neither book under review mentions this important episode. It is only one example of the cogency and power of legal and financial instruments in the service of Western diplomacy. Moreover, it demonstrates that exclusive reliance on the ‘traditional’ multilateral international security organizations (such as recommended by the ACCO volume) can lead to overlooking other institutional instruments for ameliorating conflict situations.

4.5. Military conflict: Tajikstan

Tajikstan is a case of open military conflict. In Russia this situation was interpreted as a test of Russia’s resolve and as a failure .of the CIS to adopt a common military strategy. This resulted from the Russian inability in 1992 to act as effective mediator among the Tajik factions. The basic cleavage between the sides is not between communists and islamists, nor is it between clans. It is, rather, a war between regions, based on opposing identities. The so-called clans are not irrelevant, but the real issue is the apposition .of social networks that developed under Soviet administration. These provided the organizational basis for furnishing security goods after the Tajik state apparatus fell apart in conditions of general economic deprivation. From the facts about Tajikstan one would suppose that the West either has relatively little interest or relatively little leverage. Western governments have, however, worked informally through international organizations to promote a settlement. Even more active have been para-governmental and non-governmental organizations in the West with dedicated if limited resources. For example, the Center for Preventive Diplomacy of the Council for Foreign Relations in New York, funded by private American philanthropy interested in peace and development, has had recent successes.

5. Summary and conclusion

When the Soviet Union began to fall apart in the late 1980s, it had been decades since any Western power had had a genuine opportunity directly to influence

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events in the Soviet area. Although the West was not accustomed to having interests in many of these newly self-constituting international regions, it had not lost the habit of engaging in diplomatic conduct according to established norms. This was, indeed, a necessity. The West after 1989 therefore acted as if it had interests and its actions were interpreted by all concerned as intended to promote those interests. It was assumed that the West acted in such-and-such a manner because it supposed that it could thereby achieve such-and-such a goal. Western behaviour thus created its interests in the minds of those concerned, who reified that behaviour into interest.

An interest, whether defined by an objective analyst or by a concerned international actor, comprises four components:

1. An interest is grounded in historical inheritance including international usage and custom.
2. Upon this ground an interest proceeds from knowledgebelieved to be true, including a ‘definition of the situation’ where the interest may be asserted (i.e. a cognitive framing of the problem being confronted).
3. On such a basis, that interest projects into such a situation the particular norms arising from the interested party’s particular experience. These it either implies or explicitly asserts to be universal (e.g. the naturalness and desirability of ‘democracy and the market’).
4. Based upon the assumed ‘definition of the situation’, an interest is realized through the particular interested party’s exercise of power, i.e. behaviour, intended to bring about a future state of affairs that is consonant with the particular norms asserted to be universal.

To summarize: The knowledge expresses the actor’s understanding of the present situation based upon its historical inheritance. The particular norms formalize that knowledge through projecting that understanding of that inheritance into the future. The exercise of power is behaviour that is designed to realize those norms.

Table 3 schematizes the above country sketches (and materials from the two works under review) in the terms here introduced. For purposes of comparison, all NIS are classified, although only those in Central Asia are here discussed.

1. If there is no conflict, as in Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, then the key component of interest that determines the emergence of conflict is the historical inheritance. The most efficient instruments of Western influence are ideological.
2. If there is conflict of interest, as between Uzbekistan and Russia, then knowledge and understanding determine the exacerbation of conflict. The West’s most efficient instrument of influence to restrain that development are economic, though not to the exclusion of ideological instruments.
3. If there is the implicit or explicit threat of coercive force, as in the case of Kazakhstan’s relations with Russia, then the key component of interest that determines the exacerbation of conflict is particular norms. The most efficient instruments of influence are legal-financial, though not to the exclusion of economic or ideological instruments.

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4. Based upon the assumed ‘definition of the situation’, an interest is realized through the particular interested party’s exercise of power , i.e. behaviour, intended to bring about a future state of affairs that is consonant with the particular norms asserted to be universal.

We may conclude: the smaller the NIS, the more practicable is Western engagement; and the larger the NIS, the more required is that engagement. Peacemaking and peacekeeping tend to require the deployment military and ideological instruments. Conflict regulation in its various forms (conflict- prevention, conflict- resolution, conflict-reduction, and conflict- management) favours the deployment of economic and legal-financial instruments of policy. For Western politicians, these are politically less costly, although their deployment is not feasible in states whose governments do not fully control the territories over which they assert sovereignty.

Western policy encounters four possibilities:

1. Engagement may be neither practicable nor required. In this case, there is no need for policy.
2. Engagement may be required yet not practicable. In this case, policy must be designed first of all to make possible what is necessary. Examples of policy instruments in this instance include confidence-building measures and the provision of specific incentives for specific actions.
3. Engagement may be practicable yet not required. In this case, policy must be designed according to what should and should not be made possible. Much economic policy is concerned with precisely this question.
4. Engagement may be both practicable and required. In this case, policy must be designed to capable of outgrowing itself if necessary. The US Cold War policy of containment, which was implemented as escalation dominance but which transcended that specific strategy, is an example.

Which of these four possibilities obtains, will vary with the geographic domain and the issue areas pertinent there. Inspection of the cases of Western engagement in Central Asia produces the following conclusions:

1. Western interest does not determine Western engagement; however, practicability determines Western interest. Situations where engagement is neither practicable nor required tend to evolve into situations where engagement is both practical and required. This occurs in the following manner.
2. When economic or legal-financial issues are key, engagement moves from being not practicable to being practicable, and once practicable it becomes required by the force of things. The case of Kazakhstan exemplifies this pattern.
3. When military issues are key, engagement moves from being neither required nor practicable, to heing required yet not practicable, whence means are sought to make the engagement practicable. Tajikstan provides an example of this pattern.
4. When military and economic/legal-financial issues are both present, then ideological/political issues are added. The experience of the multilateral Black Sea cooperation and the much less successful initiatives for Caspian cooperation furnish examples of how the settlement of military and strategic differences allows issues of economic reform to come to the fore. These cannot be comprehensively resolved without commonly subscribed, hence multilateral, legal-financial arrangements.

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The recent collapse of Russian finances only emphasizes what should earlier have been obvious, viz. that the Western quest for post-Soviet stability must seek to optimize not just the domestic economic or international financial stabilization: but, as a prerequisite to the political stability, also the regularization of the transnational and reciprocally multilateral financial relations among the NIS including Russia. Western policy has in general dealt with this issue on an only ad hoc basis. The states in the former Soviet area are ensembles of national legal regimes that represent the interface between the national economy (and society) of the individual state and the dominant norms of the international political and economic order. Transnational currency and financial relations are and always have been central here, regardless of the countries concerned. The effects of the contraction of the ruble zone to Russia alone in 1993 made this clear early on. Microeconomic policy areas such as privatization and price reform are linked to the creation of systems for accounting law, property ownership, inheritance law, contract law and bankruptcy law; macroeconomic policy areas such as convertibility, currency reform and international borrowing are linked to the development of foreign trade, banking and insurance systems. Within this framework there are three policies of special significance: coordination of foreign direct investment (including the laws that govern it), macroeconomic stabilization and currency cooperation. These are an integrated policy area but have not been treated as such in international public policy toward the NIS. Even Tishkov overlooks them.

The most successful indigenous Central Asian multilateral initiative deals precisely with those policy areas. That initiative, motivated by Kazakhstani diplomacy, originally involved the establishment of a common economic space with Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, including not only a customs union but also currency co-operation and a trilateral development bank that has received substantive support from the EU and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. This co-operation makes good sense: the national economies of the countries complement one another, and they already participate in an economic and financial union aimed in the first instance at currency stabilization. The principal obstacle to its further development is the status of the Uzbek som: it is not freely convertible and subject to multiple exchange rates in the country.

The West would do well systematically to promote indigenous multilateralism within the former Soviet area in respect of multilateral financial and payments issues. However, the West’s power-politics interests get in the way of this: directly, because of the desire to avoid creating blocs; and indirectly, by promoting the preoccupation with power-political concerns by elites and sub-elites in the former Soviet area. However, as Tishkov comprehensively demonstrates, such a preoccupation only slows the NIS populations’ access to food, shelter, and medical care on a regular basis. It is these populations—considered (as Tishkov shows necessary) as distinct from their elites and sub- elites—that have the weakest voices in Western and international policy councils.

Another indigenous project for multilateral financial co-operation that the West may reasonably promote, in addition to the Central Asian Union, is a payments union in the South Caucasus.

 
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