Launching a call for Central Asian union in his address of the nation delivered on March 18 in Parliament, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev provided rich food for speculations in neighboring countries. He chose emotionally charged words to get across his message to Turkic-speaking brothers who should be “worthy of our common ancestors who would always see us together”. Were these words pronounced sincerely, or were they aimed at scoring points on the international scene? The first skeptical voice about Nazarbayev’s good-will gesture came from an unofficial source. The Russia-based website Ferghana.ru quoted Foreign Ministry officials in Uzbekistan as saying that the Kazakh President’s integration initiative meant as much as “another call for show, unfounded and far from reality. The same source said that the integration call was motivated by the necessity “to deflect the attention of the people from regional problems or boost his [Nazarbayev’s] image as an active supporter of Central Asian cooperation”. It is hard to say whether these comments were really made by some Uzbek officials out of jealousy towards an effective move made by Kazakh President, or was a canard let out by a third party to drive a wedge into the already fragile relationship between the rivaling neighbors.

At any rate, as soon as the Central Asian union concept was put forward, Kazakhstan reaped its first laurels of political success on the international level. Meeting the Kazakh permanent representative to the United Nations Yerzhan Kazykhanov, the Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Kieran Prendergast praised the integration initiative, and particularly the call to set up a single market and common currency in Central Asia as a stabilizing factor in the region. Kazakhstan was promised UN backing in its integration effort.

The Kazakh leader went further in promoting his image of an ardent advocate of integration and did not miss the opportune moment to win verbal support for his initiative from his Tajik counterpart Imomali Rakhmonov in a telephone conversation on February 23. The Tajik President, however, did not show much enthusiasm for Kazakhstan’s Central Asian union scheme and advanced his own proposal of holding an informal discussion of cooperation between heads of Central Asian Cooperation Organization (CACO) member states. For Tajikistan, it seems, the pressing issue of rational use of water resources in the region is more important than a vaguely outlined Central Asian union. Imomali Rakhmonov has good reason to be cautious about Central Asian integration. Nursultan Nazarbayev in his address to the nation specifically named only Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan as would-be members of a Central Asian Union which, in his view, should be modeled on the European Union and must be an effective instrument in fighting terrorism, drug and human trafficking, illegal migration and proliferation of conventional weapons in the region. In his message to Nazarbayev, Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev voiced strong support for Central Asian integration. Islom Karimov of Uzbekistan, on his part, cleared away the embarrassment caused by the above-mentioned press reports through a telephone conversation with his Kazakh counterpart to express his formal support for the Central Asian union idea. Demonstrating readiness to mend fences with its neighbors, Uzbekistan announced the completion of landmine-removing operations in the Shohimardon enclave of Kyrgyzstan. In anticipation of extremist incursions from border areas in springtime, Uzbek security forces resumed discussion of common security measures.

However, all these friendly gestures do not mean a real step towards integration. The only partner of Kazakhstan which attaches due value to Nazarbayev’s call for Central Asian union seems to be Russia. Moscow cannot put up with the gloomy prospect of irretrievably losing its former domains in Central Asia. The Kazakh President’s call for integration comes at a time when Kremlin is desperately trying to bring back unruly Uzbekistan to its fold, and feels increasingly uncomfortable with Western troops stationed there. In recent years Moscow had to swallow bitter pills of humiliation caused by a series of setbacks. The highly uncertain future of the Single Economic Space (a quartet of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan conceived to develop into a political union) after the Ukrainian orange revolution, added to the headaches of Kremlin. The proposed Central Asian union to some extent revives the diminished hope of forging a pro-Moscow alliance in the region tied together by common currency and economic infrastructure. Central Asian states would serve as a buffer zone for Russia warding off the threat of military blows from Islamic extremists.

In essence, Kremlin policy-makers merely regard the would-be Central Asian Union as an initial step towards implementing the scheme of a Russian-dominated Eurasian Union in the CIS. The Secretary-General of the Eurasian Economic Community Grigoriy Rapota said that “a regional union of Central Asian states will have a positive impact on the activities of current interstate organizations on the territory of the CIS”. Aleksandr Dugin, leader of the Russian Public Movement, commenting on Nazarbayev’s integration concept, assessed it as an “irreproachable and timely move, a step towards the strategy of integration into a Eurasian union in the post-Soviet space”. No one could be more eloquent.