The Constraints of the Past and the Failure of Central Asian Regionalism, 1991–2004

This article examines the failure of regional integration in post-Soviet Central Asia. It proposes a narrative of the rise and fall of Central Asian regionalism between 1991 and 2004 centered on the perceptions and expectations of the region’s republics. The argument is that these states did not emerge from the USSR in an ideational vacuum, where their construction of self at the international level was to be defined from scratch. Rather, the Central Asian elites inherited pre-existing understandings of the role and place of their respective state in the new international system. At the regional level, an actual and a perceived set of power relations led to incompatible preferences and strategies, thus making it impossible to find common ground for Central Asian regionalism.