Martha Brill Olcott - Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise

A decade ago few Westerners had heard of Kazakhstan, the second largest of the Soviet republics and a source of vast undeveloped oil, gas, and other mineral reserves. After independence in 1991, Kazakhstan started to appear in the Western newsmost notably when the United States helped the Kazakhs dismantle their nuclear weapons, and later when Chevron and Exxon/Mobil signed agreements to develop major Kazakh onshore and offshore oil reserves. The countrys vast size, its oil and gas, and its pivotal location make it of strategic importance to the United States, our Western allies, and Kazakhstans two powerful neighbors: China and Russia.

The most multi-ethnic of all the states carved out of the former Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has been led through its independence and up to the present day by Nursultan Nazarbayev, a president determined to make his country into a bridge between Europe and Asia. Kazakhstan, though, suffers from many of the problems faced by Russia, with whom it shares a three-thousand-mile border to the North. It too has spent nearly the last two decades working to establish the structures and mechanisms that make civil society, markets, and government work. The extent to which Kazakhstan has succeeded in these endeavors and the degree to which it has veered toward the perils of corruption, authoritarianism, and the suppression of civil society are the subject of this book.

Martha Brill Olcott, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment and an internationally respected expert on Central Asia, looks at the first decades of Kazakhstans existence in the context of its political and historical legacy, its geography, and its economic and social development. Originally published in 2002, and quickly established as a leading work in its field, Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise? has now been updated to reevaluate whether Kazakhstan is coming closer to realizing its economic and political potential, and to explain how Kazakhstans international role has expanded.

While the strategic prize of Caspian oil and gas reserves remains an important factor driving U.S. and other Western interests, Olcott shows that far more is at stake for both the people of the region and U.S. interests than the successful building of oil and gas transit routes. One indicator of the countrys new international role is that Kazakhstan has the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2010, the first Soviet successor state to hold that office, and a post won despite Kazakhstans questionable democratic credentials.

The consolidation of political and economic power among a privileged elite and growing intolerance of political dissent became the distinguishing characteristics of Kazakhstans state-building strategy in the late 1990s. Olcotts trenchant analysis explains how and why the country has made only fitful progress toward opening up its political process since then. She offers a far more positive assessment of economic developments, describing how Kazakhstan has weathered the current global economic crisis, its hard-hit banking sector, and what lessons have been drawn as to the need for greater economic diversification and increased transparency. Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise? will be of value to scholars and policy makers alike. This revised and updated edition will make an important contribution to understanding the pitfalls of state building and the dangers these pose for regional and global security. Kazakhstans success would mean another large and growing economy that could serve as a stabilizing influence just beyond Afghanistans borders. But in failing to fulfill its promise Kazakhstan would create new risks in an already deeply troubled region.

Jessica T. Mathews
President
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

T he first edition of this volume has been nearly a decade in the making, and would never have been possible without the financial support of a number of sources. The genesis of the project was a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation, which provided support to the Foreign Policy Research Institute (in Philadelphia) for an early version of this study. The Dean of Facultys office at Colgate University, where I taught until taking early retirement in 2001, has also contributed to some of the research costs of the original book project. Mostly, though, both editions of the book are the result of the generous support of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and its Russia and Eurasia program. Some of the travel for the first edition was provided by the Central Asian American Enterprise Fund, on whose board of directors I served from 19942000.

The opportunities that I had as a board member deepened my understanding of how Kazakhstans economy operates, and first sensitized me to the many shades of gray that color its landscape. I also benefited from serving, albeit briefly and sporadically, as a consultant for several Western energy and gold-mining companies, giving me an understanding of the technical difficulties associated with developing Kazakhstans resources as well as just how challenging it is to mount a world-class project in the Kazakh environment.

Kazakhstan is no longer a remote and forbidding place. Unlike in my earlier works, in this volume I am able to draw extensively on the written work of other Americans who have done fieldwork in Kazakhstan for the first edition of the book. A whole generation of young scholars are making important contributions to the field, and I have found the writings of Pauline Jones Luong (Yale University) and Bhavna Dave (University of London) particularly useful in this endeavor, and have benefited from my conversations with them. At various stages of the initial project, I also benefited from consultations with William Fierman (Indiana University), Gregory Gleason (University of New Mexico), and Sally Cummings, all of whom have spent long periods of time doing research in Kazakhstan in recent years.