OSCE: IS KAZAKHSTAN CAPABLE OF RECONFIGURING THE SECURITY ARCHITECTURE IN EURASIA?

The OSCE summit in Astana on December 1-2 concluded Kazakhstan's OSCE chairmanship and was designed to finalize the results of the year-long foray to reinvigorate this Euro-Atlantic body. Many international experts including Kazakhstan’s policy makers have been divided over the evaluation of the goals and outcomes. One group believes that the main goal of Kazakhstan’s diplomacy at the OSCE was to focus on the regional security issues and to reconfigure the security architecture in the region, making sure that Central Asia is not marginalized in the European security strategy. The other group believes that Kazakhstan’s main goal was no more than placing the country on the international map as an outspoken and visible player.

BACKGROUND: When representatives of 56 member states came together in December 2010 for the first time in 11 years, the event became, in President Nazarbayev's words, “the first OSCE summit of the 21st century”. The Kazakh policy makers put great efforts into making the event happen and ensuring that the member states would support their initiatives. Indeed, for Kazakhstan it was probably the last chance to use the power of diplomacy to cement the security architecture in the Eurasian region and to make sure that Central Asia is not marginalized in European security thinking. It was especially important as other international organizations have failed to prove effective on security issues.

In fact, several intra-regional initiatives – from the Central Asian Union to the Central Asian Forum – have fallen apart due to internal rivalries, competing agendas and institutional weaknesses of the organizations, with the member states not being able to achieve a consensus even in the face of severe security threats from the instability in Afghanistan. On a number of occasions, the tensions between Central Asian states boiled up to the level that they closed their borders and exchanged tough diplomatic statements – even to the point of moving their troops closer to borders with neighboring states.

It is true that NATO could become an important player in the security issues, especially in the context of the recent NATO summit in Lisbon and its newly assured commitment to work on stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan. Stabilization was also a number one priority for Astana. However, NATO's commitment to Afghanistan and Central Asia is seriously undermined by very low public support for the war in many European countries and by recent discussions about accelerated NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan by July 2011. In addition, some political circles in Moscow are still very suspicious of any NATO actions in the Eurasian space, especially a long-term presence in Central Asia. For this and many other reasons, it is impractical if not impossible to build the security architecture in Central Asia around NATO. Even a hypothetical direct Kazakhstani involvement with NATO would jeopardize the country’s relations with both of its large neighbors, China and Russia.

Another multilateral institution, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), has been a possible candidate for building security architecture for Kazakhstan and Central Asia. In fact, it has proven instrumental in solving major security problems such as border disputes. It also provided diplomatic tools for developing new security architecture for member states in the post-Soviet era. However, after its initial success, the SCO has shown signs of institutional and organizational weakness. Both China and Russia have unsuccessfully sought to politicize the SCO to their own political advantage – for example, by trying to secure political support for China’s heavy-handed actions against a separatist movement in the Xinjiang province. These actions were not well received in Astana and other Central Asian capitals. Other attempts to invigorate the SCO have brought scant success as its members struggle to compromise on many issues and to overcome their suspicions and differences.

The Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has also proved incapable of forming the cornerstone for building security and stability in the region. In its early stages, it was in some ways successful in stabilizing the situation, such as by helping to fight off militant Islamic insurgency groups with ties to the Taliban in 1999-2001. However, lately it has become quite inactive and ineffective and it was not able to initiate any security actions during the tragic events in Kyrgyzstan in the summer of 2010.

IMPLICATIONS: Kazakhstan's leadership envisioned the OSCE chairmanship as an opportunity to breach the gap in security issues and, in Foreign Minister Kanat Saudabayev’s words, “to modernize and strengthen the [OSCE] in order to adapt it to the present-day reality”. In fact, the very strengths of the OSCE – conflict prevention and conflict resolution, the wealth of experience and expertise in institution-building in post-conflict environments, and an institutional platform for small and medium-sized member states to deal with big powers on a more or less equal basis – are of great value for all member states. This is especially true for the states closest to two dangerous conflict zones – Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Therefore, Astana managed to achieve several objectives during its OSCE chairmanship, which have wider implications for the emerging security architecture in the Eurasian region. First, during 2010 the OSCE has indeed grown in importance as a useful venue for security dialogue in the region and as one of the area’s key institutions in conflict resolution. This became especially apparent during the political crisis and bloody conflicts in the spring and summer in Kyrgyzstan. Under Kazakhstan’s chairmanship, the OSCE greatly contributed to stabilizing Kyrgyzstan, and helped to conduct a constitutional referendum and parliamentary elections. Second, the summit of the heads of states in Astana reinvigorated the prestige and international standing of the organization itself. Symbolically, this meeting was held almost immediately after the NATO meeting in Lisbon. Both NATO and the OSCE reconfirmed their commitment to stabilizing one of the most complex conflicts in today's world – the war in Afghanistan. Third, the adopted “Astana Commemorative Declaration: Towards Security Community” revived much-needed debates and discussions not only on the future of the organization but also on new approaches to resolving old conflicts (Nagorno-Karabakh) and developing a more comprehensive approach in dealing with “the human, economic and environmental, political and military dimensions of security”. Fourth, from the point of view of Kazakhstan’s and other Central Asian states, the summit, which was for the first time held in the Central Asian region, brought greater attention to this part of the world and with it greater OSCE commitment to stabilizing the region

CONCLUSION: From the point of view of Kazakhstan’s government, the main value of the OSCE has been that it has proved to be a useful and probably the only framework for discussing various security-related issues without taking sides and without jeopardizing relations with competing individual powers or groups of countries. Though during the last few years the standing and authority of the OSCE has faded considerably, it could become a valuable multilateral institution where Kazakhstan could voice its agenda and discuss security issues. This would be true especially if the organization is able to reinvigorate and reinvent itself. The turbulent year of Kazakhstan's OSCE chairmanship has illustrated that the region still faces a number of security challenges, both traditional and non-conventional. Not only did the developments in Kyrgyzstan show the strengths of the organization, they also exposed its weaknesses and flaws. Therefore, it is extremely important to work carefully on the future of the OSCE. First, Lithuania, which will take over the OSCE chairmanship next year, should continue paying greater attention to building OSCE capacities in conflict prevention and conflict resolution. Second, the OSCE should undergo some organizational and institutional transformation, as was discussed during the summit, in order to address future conflicts and challenges in the Euro-Atlantic region more effectively. Third, the OSCE should probably think about the widening of the concept of security and should prepare itself to deal with new non-conventional challenges and to cooperate with other organizations in dealing with old problems.

AUTHORS’ BIO: Rafis Abazov, PhD, teaches at SIPA, Columbia University and Hunter College (New York). He is author of The Formation of Post-Soviet International Politics in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (1999), The Culture and Customs of the Central Asian Republics (2007) and the Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia (2008). He has been awarded an IREX 2010-2011 EPS fellowship (Title VIII program) for research on the post-Soviet era intellectual discourses on political development in Kazakhstan.