EU
- Central Asia meeting of ministers is scheduled to
take place in Astana, Kazakhstan, later today. Three
ministers will represent Europe: Foreign Minister of
Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Germany chairs the
EU at this point), EU Representative to Central Asia
Pierre Morel, and EU Commissar for Foreign Contacts
and Policy of Neighborliness Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
Portuguese Ambassador to Russia Manuel Kurtu is to be
present too (Lisbon will replace Berlin as the US
chairman in the second half of the year). The
Europeans will be meeting with foreign ministers of
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
Turkmenistan will be represented by a deputy foreign
minister.
The EU is out to work out a strategy of dealing with
Central Asia. The ambitious idea belongs to German
diplomacy. Making preparations for the EU
chairmanship last autumn, Steinmeier pulled off
something unprecedented for Western diplomats and
visited all five capitals of the region. As a matter
of fact, his visiting schedule made Steinmeier the
last foreign official to meet with the Turkmenbashi
who passed away in December 2006. Liberalization of
regime in Turkmenistan that followed Niyazov's demise
may turn out to be a major milestone in the relations
between the European Union and Central Asia.
Should Turkmenistan prove itself ready for a dialogue
with Europe, the role of the "bad boy" in the region
will shift to Uzbekistan. This is the country the
European Union slapped sanctions on in the wake of
the outrage in Andijan in May 2005. Certain recent
developments allowed for the hope that the sanctions
would be lifted or at least eased soon but... The
Uzbek authorities pressed criminal charges (activity
without license and concealment of income) against
Natalia Bushuyeva, Die Deutsche Welle correspondent.
Michael Laubsch, the head of the Eurasian Transit
Group and a prominent German expert, told Vremya
Novostei that this episode reminded him of the
tragedy of RL correspondent Ogulsapar Muradova who
had died in prison in September 2006, several weeks
after the arrest.
Muradova's death upset the European Union
sufficiently to ruin the signing of a trade accord
with Turkmenistan then. Laubsch claims that what
information he got from the EU headquarters in
Brussels and Foreign Ministry of Germany indicates
that "the situation with the Die Deutsche Welle
correspondent may have a counterproductive effect on
the talks in Astana." "The European countries that
were fairly undemanding with regard to the Central
Asian regime are running out of patience," the German
expert said. "The impression they are finally getting
is that the promise of the reforms is but a trick."
Nothing in the meantime is going to interfere with
the central political event in Astana today, namely
the audience with President Nursultan Nazarbayev. EU
visitors will tell the host what hopes they pin on
Kazakhstan as the guarantor of European energy
preparedness. Nazarbayev will inform his guests of
the plans of the reforms.
Arkadi Dubnov, Vremja Novostei, p. 5
With oil prices spiking in recent years, the petrostates' windfall is staggering, and this sort of wealth should be a godsend for impoverished, post-Soviet countries. However, a salutary impact is by no means a given when one is speaking of unaccountable governing systems where small groups of elites control a large part of the resources. With the exception of Norway, which enjoyed the advantage of having accountable institutions in place when it began to develop its hydrocarbon wealth, the track record of lands rich in energy resources is rather poor.
Defining The Petrostate
Much of the study concerning energy-rich states and democratic accountability has focused on the Middle East. However, the recent rise high oil prices have focused attention on the energy-rich lands of the former Soviet Union. Whether the post-Soviet petrostates can escape the poor development outcomes of the earlier generation of countries that relied on oil and gas as their principal economic engine remains a significant question.
With so much money flowing into these countries, the stakes are raised for powerful elites who dominate these countries' politico-economic systems and control these formidable resources.
No less important, and indeed directly linked to domestic-development issues, is how these countries choose to exert their growing international influence.
While there is no ironclad definition of a resource-based economy, one frame of reference is those for which natural resources account for more than 10 percent of GDP and 40 percent of exports. This threshold is easily met in the cases of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. More than half of Azerbaijan's current GDP and 90 percent of its exports are accounted for by oil and gas. In the Kazakh case, GDP is 30 percent and nearly 60 percent of exports come from oil. Oil and gas exports account for about 60 percent of Russia's federal budget revenues and two-thirds of its exports.
The Root Of All Evil
The "resource curse" -- along with associated pathologies of energy-led development -- may in fact already be rearing its head. In each of these post-Soviet countries, there is an increasing dependence on energy as the chief economic driver, as well as a growth of the state bureaucracy and official corruption.
With so much money flowing into these countries, the stakes are raised for powerful elites who dominate these countries' politico-economic systems and control these formidable resources. To protect their positions, they limit scrutiny of their activities by silencing the press and intimidating political opposition, civil society, and other independent institutions.
The crackdown on the press in all three countries has been particularly systematic. Journalists' murders, increasing media takeovers by regime-friendly concerns, and the careful selection of broadcast news to control what ordinary citizens can and cannot see have become standard operating procedure. In 2006 in Azerbaijan, for example, there were a host of measures imposed by the authorities to exert greater control over the media. These included a decision by the National Television and Radio Council to require Azerbaijani broadcast companies to acquire a license to re-broadcast programs from such news sources as the BBC and RFE/RL, effectively taking them off the air as of January 1, 2007.
The Russian authorities too have targeted the local affiliates that broadcast programming from RFE/RL. Meanwhile, Gazprom-Media, a branch of the state-controlled gas conglomerate, has expanded its share of the Russian print-media market. The Internet is coming under greater scrutiny from the authorities.
The increasingly tight control of the information sector serves as a barometer of sorts for the entrenchment of the petrostate and the corruption that is one of its hallmarks. A recent paper produced by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) emphasizes the point that in resource-based economies restricted press freedom is among the critical factors enabling corruption to flourish.
International Petro-Politics
The Kremlin, having already effectively muzzled independent organizations and voices at home, is now pursuing an international dimension to its anti-democratic campaign. Russia's leadership has apparently set its sights on limiting the ability of organizations such as the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to scrutinize its conduct. In 2005, Russia launched a campaign to limit the election-monitoring capacity of the OSCE, whose Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has set the standard for evaluating the conduct of elections in Europe and the Eurasian region. That campaign may be aimed at limiting these organizations' ability effectively to monitor upcoming elections in Russia (in 2007 and 2008) and in Kremlin-friendly autocratic states.
In its immediate neighborhood, Russia has also played the energy card to exert pressure on countries that represent the critical test cases for democratic reform in the CIS -- Georgia and Ukraine -- as well as on supposed allies including Armenia and Belarus.
The energy stakes are particularly high for Europe. EU imports of Russian energy,for instance, are expected to grow from 50 percent to 70 percent over the next decade and a half. However, with these petrostates' coffers already swollen with cash and no significant declines in energy prices in sight, the West is likely to confront increasingly assertive petro-diplomacy for the foreseeable future. These factors suggest that the community of democratic states should devise a coordinated response to the challenge, including the pursuit of a serious policy of energy independence.
Meanwhile, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan all have ambitions to be more deeply integrated into the global economy, to expand business with the EU and the Western community, and to be accepted as "normal" countries. They seek the prestige and benefits of membership of Western, rules-based organizations, while typically offering up only the trappings of accountable democratic institutions.
All three countries belong to the OSCE, which Kazakhstan hopes to chair in 2009. Russia and Azerbaijan are members of the Council of Europe. Both Russia and Kazakhstan hope to join the WTO by the end of this year. Those aspirations suggest that these countries should at a minimum be required to live up to the commitments they have made to these rules-based organizations and adhere to their accepted standards both at home and internationally.
Christopher Walker is director of studies at Freedom House. He is co-editor of Freedom House's annual survey of democratic governance, "Countries At The Crossroads."