Key assumptions
The following key assumptions form the background to our analysis of Central Asia and its evolving position in global geostrategy.
1. Through the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Central Asia has effectively been turned into a Russia-China condomunium.
2. For China, the importance of the SCO can hardly be overstated. It enables it to exercise influence in a region that was until recently wholly under Russian authority. It provides it with a means of limiting US influence in the region. And, most important of all, it provides an effective mechanism for combating separatism in Xinjiang. The SCO specifically commits its members to cooperate in the fight against the "three evil forces" of terrorism, separatism, and extremism.
3. The SCO also has economic ambitions, and it has ambitions to act as a unit in foreign policy. These ambitions for the SCO to deepen the economic interaction of its member states and to develop common positions on "international and regional affairs" might give the impression that the grouping is more in the way of a prototype European Union than a Nato. In our view both are wrong assumptions.
4. Samuel Huntington, in his Clash of Civilizations thesis, argued that the core states of the major civilizations are supplanting the two Cold War superpowers as the principal poles of attraction and repulsion for other countries. He points out that countries tend to bandwagon with countries of similar culture and to balance against countries with which they lack cultural commonality. The core states of the main civilizations tend to attract those that are culturally similar and repel those that are culturally different. He then goes on to argue: "For security reasons core states may attempt to incorporate or to dominate some peoples of other civilizations, who, in turn, attempt to resist or to escape such control (China vs Tibetans and Uighurs; Russia vs Tartars, Chechens, Central Asian Muslims)." He concludes: "The world will be ordered on the basis of civilizations or not at all. In this world the core states of civilizations are sources of order within civilizations and, through negotiations with other core states, between civilizations."
This points to an essential truth about the SCO. Because it comprises the core states of two major civilizations (Orthodox Christian and Sinic) plus outposts of a third civilization (Islam), the SCO cannot develop into some kind of Central Asian European Union or Nato. Essentially, the SCO is a Russia-China condominium in Central Asia reflecting Russia’s decline, China’s rise, and the continuing need of both Russia and China to control what happens in the region.
5. The SCO is presently in a dynamic phase because Russia has taken the pragmatic view that it is better to share influence in the region than to lose it altogether, because the Central Asian rulers welcome a diminishing of Russia’s influence but don’t want to swap that for instability that might threaten their privileged positions, and because China sees it as a vital means both of suppressing separatism in Xinjiang and of extending its influence into a region where until recently it had none.
6. However, the present dynamism of the SCO should not obscure the underlying truth that it is a marriage of convenience between Russia and China with the acquiescence of Central Asia’s ruling elites. In the present circumstances it is a sensible arrangement that satisfies all parties, but it is one that is vulnerable to a number of possible future developments, including any divergence of interests between Russia and China and any desire by the peoples of Central Asia to gravitate more towards their cultural roots.
These are the essential assumptions on which CourcyInt analysis of Central Asia is based. Developments that might affect any or all of these assumptions are constantly monitored, and the assumptions themselves are under constant review.