Since independence, Uzbekistan has been known as a country with limited willingness for integration and great caution toward regional initiatives. Uzbekistan has suspended its membership in the Eurasian Economic Community (EURASEC) and has been absent from recent meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Through publicly questioning the effectiveness of those regional organizations of which the country is a member, the Government of Uzbekistan is currently showing the lowest interest in regional structures since its independence. Due to its skepticism about the potentials of regional initiatives, Uzbekistan is at the moment more active in searching for bilateral and multilateral economic allies.

BACKGROUND: After 1991, Uzbekistan became part of various regional integration initiatives both inside and outside the post-Soviet space - CSTO, SCO, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), Special Program for the Economies of Central Asia (SPECA) and Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation Initiative (CAREC). Uzbekistan also participates in regional organizations which have been renamed and merged in the process. The Central Asian Economic Union (CAEU), established by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in 1994, was renamed the Central Asian Economic Community (CAEC) in 1998 after Tajikistan joined it. Four years later, CAEC was renamed the Central Asian Cooperation Organization (CACO) and eventually merged with EURASEC in 2005.

The consensus supporting ambitions to create regional organizations in the early years after independence is now showing a serious fissure. For the last seven months, Uzbekistan has displayed a very low interest in regional initiatives. In December 2008, Uzbekistan suspended its membership in EURASEC, terming the organization ineffective and lacking prospects. Uzbekistan participated neither in the SCO meeting on Afghanistan held in Moscow on March 27, 2009, nor in two CSTO meetings held in Kazakhstan in December 2008 and in Armenia in April 2009. Although the President of Uzbekistan did participate in a CSTO meeting between the ones missed (in Moscow on February 4, 2009), this did not stop speculations on a possible future suspension of its membership. Even if the Uzbek government does not suspend its membership – as the CSTO Secretariat asserted to “Interfax-AMN” on June 9, after receiving confirmation of the Uzbek President’s participation at the Moscow meeting on June 14 – Uzbekistan’s commitment to its membership is still rather fragile. The Uzbek President’s proposal one year ago to merge EURASEC with the CSTO, to create one strong organization on the basis of the two, and calling one of the CSTO meetings from which the government was absent as “useless”, indicates clear evidence of this fragility.

The UNDP Country Background Study described an Uzbek view of regional cooperation mechanisms as consisting of multiple regional organizations with similar objectives that take overlapping agreements and as a result led to conflicting and confusing sets of policies. The Uzbek Government does not hide its dissatisfaction with the inability of these regional organizations to achieve their goals. For example, Uzbekistan’s Ambassador to Russia complained during his meeting with the Chief of the Russian Federation Council on April 4 that the CSTO, CIS and SCO meetings have similar agendas and are represented by the same people. Various meetings held within regional initiatives are growing in number but do not have commensurate results.

IMPLICATIONS: These developments may signify Uzbekistan's changing foreign policy, which prefers bilateral relations to regional initiatives. The Uzbek Government throughout its independence considered bilateral approaches more effective and productive, explaining the government’s limited enthusiasm for participation in regional initiatives. The expansion of bilateral economic cooperation, which the Uzbek Government has over the past several months been undertaking with Brazil, South Korea, Spain, Germany and other countries, and launching a Free Trade Zone in the city of Navoi indicates that the country is taking very active steps to diversify its economic partners and investment projects.

Regional integration could become a reality if each Central Asian country, Uzbekistan in particular, was ready to limit its independence and take joint decisions on regional issues at a supra-national body, and coordinate national legislation and foreign and domestic affairs.  But there are several reasons why the regional states are reluctant to introduce such a body and give up certain elements of their sovereignty. One of them is that the boundaries of the Central Asian countries were artificially created and never existed as independent nation-states before 1991, still trying to create their national ethos. These young nation-states gained their independence only 18 years ago and need to develop a strong feeling of nationhood. In these conditions, establishing any kind of union that usually intends to have a supra-national body is unrealistic. For example, the founding members of the European Steel and Coal Union (EUSC) in 1951 had existed as nation-states for at least a hundred years and more before they were ready to establish a regional body. They also had a bloody history of warfare, among other compelling reasons to limit nationalism.

Uzbekistan’s strong resistance to the idea of conforming to a supra-national body resulted in the submission on June 4 of two out of four conditions for the creation of a joint Rapid Reaction Force within the CSTO. These conditions are that any decision on the deployment of these forces is taken by consensus rather than by majority voting and that deployment of the forces cannot contradict national legislation.

Other factors which are unfavorable for regional integration are the diverging levels of socio-economic development of the regional countries, the direction and pace of political and economic reforms, the orientation of foreign affairs and economic relations, as well as border, water and resource distribution issues. Therefore, it is quite understandable that the political elites of the young Central Asian countries are skeptical toward regional integration initiatives. Fears of what such initiatives could imply include potentially uneven distribution of revenues from regional projects; possible losses rather than benefits from regional integration; risks of economically powerful countries lobbying their interests and overstepping the national interests of less powerful countries; and competition among the countries for regional leadership.

CONCLUSIONS: Uzbekistan is not dogmatically opposing integration initiatives, but rather considers the region to lack a sufficient basis for integration at the moment. Indeed, the current situation in Central Asia implies that the region has few or no objective conditions for creating effective integration organizations. The strong need felt for sovereignty and nationhood that are currently prevailing in the process of nation and state building impede the consensus necessary for integration. The Uzbek Government’s strategy of seeking benefits for the country’s political and economic systems, rather than gaining political prestige by joining regional initiatives, has pushed the government to focus more on evolving bilateral and multilateral cooperation. As a result, in its future perspective Uzbekistan is relying on its long tradition of independence in policy-making that always chooses the "Uzbek way".

AUTHOR’S BIO: Umida Hashimova is an independent analyst based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.