Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev met with his counterpart from Uzbekistan, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, during his state visit to Tashkent on December 21-22. Some 40 commercial agreements worth $2.5 billion were signed over two days while the two leaders also reached a border-demarcation agreement. Most significantly, the two countries signed the Treaty on Allied Relations. “It would be no exaggeration,” Tokayev said, “to call this document historic [and indeed] a breakthrough.”
Background to the Treaty on Allied Relations
Tokayev is no stranger to regional diplomacy. In the first decade and a half of his country’s independence, he served as Kazakhstan’s deputy foreign minister, foreign minister, deputy prime minister, prime minister, and state secretary. His leadership in developing the Treaty on Allied Relations with Uzbekistan marks a re-inauguration of autonomous economic co-operation amongst the Central Asian states. It is a promising indicator that they are again tending toward such co-operation outside Russian influence.
Post-Soviet co-operation between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan began with the Central Asian Union, created in 1994 and which also included Kyrgyzstan. This organization soon expanded to include Tajikistan and was renamed the Central Asian Co-operation Organisation (CACO). However, after Russia joined CACO a few years later, it was absorbed by the Moscow-directed EurAsian Economic Community (EurAsEC). This killed Central Asia’s first attempt at autonomous economic co-operation and integration. Uzbekistan withdrew from EurAsEC three years later in 2008.
In 2015, EurAsEC was superseded by and absorbed into the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), another Moscow-dominated economic integration project designed to maintain and project Russian influence across the former Soviet areas. Of the EEU’s five full members, only two — Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan — are from Central Asia while Uzbekistan is an observer. Western sanctions against Russia have further stalled the EEU’s already sluggish integration momentum and confirmed the diversion of its non-Russian members’ trade outside this bloc.
What the new Treaty achieves
Although the new Treaty is not the equivalent of NATO or the Collective Security Treaty Organisation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, it still constitutes a landmark founding document of autonomous Central Asian co-operation. “Treaties of allied relations” have been signed by other post-Soviet and Asian countries in recent years. These are mainly enhanced agreements that in the Soviet tradition used to be called “friendship and co-operation” agreements.
Such agreements leave the door open to deepening co-operation in other spheres. Currency integration was not directly discussed, but this new co-operation will certainly help Uzbekistan to better implement the convertibility of its national currency, the Som. It was only in 2017 that Uzbekistan’s Som became freely convertible into Western currencies. Foreign direct investment in Uzbekistan had suffered greatly from its absence, hindering any dynamic growth during the whole reign of Mirziyoyev’s predecessor Islam Karimov, who led Uzbekistan from 1989 until his death in 2016.
There is significant potential for an important future deepening of this newly established bilateral co-operation. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan reached an agreement, for example, to create a working group chaired at the level of their deputy prime ministers, with a view toward establishing a joint foreign trade company. A series of other specific agreements for industrial co-operation point toward a certain degree of general economic integration. The two countries also agreed, during the recent negotiations, to create a Supreme Interstate Council and an Inter-Parliamentary Council.
The Treaty in the context of Kazakhstan’s foreign policy
Kazakhstan’s Treaty on Allied Relations with Uzbekistan will reinforce Central Asian geo-economic cohesion, greatly needed in the face of their two powerful neighbours, Russia and China. As confidence and trust build in the bilateral relationship, the alliance could deepen to provide modest mutual guarantees for security assistance. At the same time, Kazakhstan continues its longstanding “multi-vector” foreign policy, which (as discussed above) Tokayev has directly shepherded in his various political roles for a decade and a half after his country’s independence.
This strategy notably includes economic co-operation with various European countries and the United Kingdom as well as with South Korea and Japan in East Asia. This year, Tokayev launched yet another diplomatic initiative to add more countries to Kazakhstan’s list of foreign policy “vectors”. Notably, Astana is now pursuing a new “Turkic vector” that includes not just the Republic of Türkiye but all member-states of the Organisation of Turkic states (OTS), which was recently created—following a suggestion from Kazakhstan itself—on the basis of the former Turkic Council.
The OTS represents nothing less than an organisational restructuring and transformation of the Turkic Council and its affiliated institutions, providing them with a legal personality as a fully-fledged intergovernmental organisation. This “Turkic vector” complements and strengthens trans-Caspian initiatives for trade and logistical connections, in particular the Trans-Caspian International Transit Route (also called the “Middle Corridor”). The OTS also adopted a visionary road-map for the Turkic world in 2040.
Conclusion
The bilateral Treaty on Allied Relations between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan—Central Asia’s two largest and most important states—creates again a potential for relatively autonomous economic integration in the region. Azerbaijan is already an important player in the newly enhanced Turkic space co-operation, which increasingly has multilateral aspects. Thus, Baku is playing an important trans-Caspian and facilitating role in trilateral co-operation with Turkiye and Turkmenistan. The new treaty between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan further reinforces this regional tendency toward relative autonomy, and it deserves the support of all countries interested in preserving geopolitical balance in the region.
