Below is the Executive Summary, Preface, Introduction, and first chapter of Dr. Sanat Kushkumbayev’s Silk Road Paper, Gone but Not Forgotten: The Central Asian Union, 1990-2005.
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Executive Summary
The post-Soviet landscape of Central Asia, characterized by an intricate web of cultural ties, shared histories, and political ambitions, presents a unique case of regional integration that has both fascinated and perplexed international observers. From 1991 to 2005, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan worked assiduously to develop regional cooperation, an effort that had to contend with conflicting national interests and external geopolitical pressures.
The early years following the Soviet dissolution ushered in a moment of hope for a “Golden Age” of integration. Between 1992 and 1998, regional leaders embarked on ambitious initiatives aimed at constructing a new order that would facilitate collaboration and mutual development. However, as idealism gave way to pragmatism, the stark realities of internal and external challenges emerged.
From 1998 to 2002, the dynamics within Central Asia became increasingly contentious, with external powers asserting their influence and regional leaders jockeying for position. Despite the opportunities for collaboration, the interplay between national ambitions and external interests led to a dilution of collective efforts and a hesitation to fully commit to regional integration paths.
Still, the accomplishments of Central Asian regionalism were significant, especially coming at a time when the states of the region were focused primarily on the building of national sovereignty. In other words, they always saw the strengthening of sovereignty as entirely compatible with the development of regional cooperation.
The later phase, from 2002 to 2005, witnessed a significant decline in the momentum for regional initiatives against the backdrop of geopolitical shifts and mounting internal crises. The influence of larger powers, particularly Russia, shifted the focus of regional cooperation away from original Central Asian projects, culminating in key initiatives like the Central Asian Cooperation Organization (CACO) being subsumed into broader Eurasian frameworks.
This comprehensive analysis underscores the complexity of Central Asia's road to regional integration, highlighting the intricate balance between national aspirations and the overarching influence of external geopolitical factors. It serves as a crucial reflection for policymakers, analysts, and scholars interested in the intersection of regional dynamics and global geopolitics. In particular, as Central Asian states are once again embarked on a quest to deepen and institutionalize their regional cooperation, the lessons of the past attempts to build regional institutions will be valuable to the region’s leaders as well as external supporters of this process.
Preface
Why are the five Central Asian countries that gained independence with the collapse of the USSR the only world region that lacks region-wide structures? Thirty-five years after the collapse of the USSR, Central Asia is still without its own joint consultative bodies, organs empowered to take decisions to advance the common good, and a permanent region-wide secretariat covering diverse mutual concerns.
One common answer to this question is to blame the region's diversity of peoples and languages. But for all the differences among the peoples of Central Asia, the bonds uniting them are far deeper than those of the countries that comprise ASEAN and other successful regional organizations. A second explanation blames the countries' post-independence leaders who, it is claimed, were competing too frontally with one another to collaborate.
This remarkable paper by Sanat Kushkumbayev offers an entirely different approach to the question of regional cooperation within Central Asia. Basing his analysis on an exhaustive review of heretofore neglected documents, this Kazakh scholar demonstrates that leaders of the region's newly sovereign states all took a decisively regional approach from the outset, even as they worked to strengthen their separate sovereignties.
Here for the first time is an overview of the remarkable Central Asia Union launched in the late 1990s. So successful was this initiative that Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, asked to be admitted as an observer, which he followed two years later with a request for Russia to become a full member. With no international support to do otherwise, the Central Asian presidents assented and within short the Central Asia Economic Union was dead, replaced by Putin's Eurasian Economic Community. It was above all Moscow's imperial hangover that thwarted Central Asia's emergence as a full-fledged world region with its own structures for cooperation.
Yet Central Asians never flagged in their desire to have their own regional organization. Their deft but prolonged struggle is now bearing fruit. Regularized consultations have been set up in many fields and the governments themselves are seeking joint approaches to matters as diverse as border regimens, tariffs, visas, education, and security. With the addition of Azerbaijan to their group, the presidents are creating a "Greater Central Asia," with its own interests and approaches to many issues of the day.
In short, Dr. Kushkumbayev's important paper not only brings to light a neglected past but points the way to a collaborative and positive future.
S. Frederick Starr
Chairman
Central Asia-Caucasus Institute
Introduction
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a new, complex, and often turbulent chapter in the centuries-old history of Central Asia. The five republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—bound by a shared past, interwoven economies, and deep cultural ties, suddenly faced the daunting task of building sovereign states and defining their place in a rapidly evolving global order. From the outset, the idea of regional integration was not only appealing but appeared to be a vital strategy for survival and development.
The Soviet legacy—both its positive aspects, such as unified infrastructure systems, and its negative ones, including environmental disasters like the Aral Sea crisis and the prevalence of monoculture economies—combined with the new threats and uncertainties of the post-Soviet transition, compelled emerging leaders and political elites to seek collective responses.
The decade from 1991 to 2001 was marked by intense experimentation with integration: ambitious initiatives were launched, landmark agreements signed, and a variety of regional institutions established. Yet this was also a period of growing contradictions—of clashing national interests, personal rivalries among leaders, and the increasingly assertive presence of external powers, each pursuing its own geopolitical and economic agenda in this strategically vital region.
In a geopolitical environment where each external power pursued its own, often conflicting, interests, the region found itself constrained by a familiar logic of divide and rule—one that limited the maneuvering space of Central Asian states and complicated their efforts to forge a cohesive regional identity.
This article traces the complex and often winding path of Central Asian integration over a fifteen-year period—from the first steps taken amid the Soviet collapse to the eventual absorption of the last purely Central Asian initiative, the Central Asian Cooperation Organization (CACO), into a broader Eurasian project led by Russia. It examines the driving forces behind integration, the key phases of its development, the stated goals versus actual outcomes, and the deeper structural challenges that ultimately hindered the realization of many of its most ambitious visions.
The Roots of Regional Integration
The years 1990–1991 served as a prelude to independence for the Central Asian republics—a moment of profound strategic choice: to pursue sovereign statehood in isolation or to seek collective strength through regional cooperation. The region’s leaders, shaped by the Soviet system and acutely aware of the costs of fragmentation, leaned toward the latter. Their early overtures toward dialogue and cooperation were driven by both deep-rooted historical and cultural affinities and the urgent challenges of the post-Soviet transition.
The foundations for integration were embedded in centuries of shared history. The peoples of Central Asia, linked by Turkic and Persian cultural legacies, a common religion, and overlapping traditions, had long coexisted across the region. This civilizational common ground—reinforced by the legacy of the Silk Road—offered fertile soil for mutual understanding, even as the process of nation-building began to emphasize distinctions.
Equally, if not more, significant were the dense economic interdependencies inherited from the Soviet command economy. Central Asia’s republics were bound together by integrated energy and transportation systems, and by a regional division of labor that left each state reliant on its neighbors. Power grids, gas pipelines, and rail and road networks had been designed without regard for future national borders. The abrupt severing of these ties after 1991 triggered a deep economic crisis, marked by industrial collapse and plummeting living standards—conditions that compelled leaders to coordinate crisis responses and explore ways to preserve or adapt the shared economic space.
Water management emerged as a particularly acute and unifying issue. The overexploitation of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers during the Soviet era, with little regard for ecological consequences, had led to the catastrophic shrinking of the Aral Sea. This environmental disaster, which directly affected the livelihoods of all basin states, became one of the earliest and most enduring drivers of regional cooperation—even before the Soviet Union had fully disintegrated.
The transitional context was also shaped by the personalities and backgrounds of the region’s leaders—Islam Karimov, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Askar Akayev, Rakhmon Nabiyev (and later Emomali Rahmon), and Saparmurat Niyazov. Most were products of the late-Soviet nomenklatura, sharing a common worldview and administrative experience. This “Soviet code” informed their strategies in the early independence period: prioritizing political stability, consolidating personal power, and seeking external partnerships. Shared concerns over potential destabilization, rising nationalism, and religious radicalism further encouraged episodic alignment and joint approaches to security and development.
Against this backdrop, the first institutional steps toward regional cooperation were taken even before the Soviet collapse was complete. On June 22–23, 1990, at the initiative of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the leaders of the five Central Asian republics convened in Almaty for their first consultative summit.1 The meeting set a precedent for direct regional dialogue on a broad range of issues—from political uncertainty to economic hardship and the prospects of a new union treaty that would safeguard republican sovereignty. The summit concluded with the signing of the region’s first five-party agreement on economic, scientific-technical, and cultural cooperation, laying the legal groundwork for future collaboration. The Aral Sea crisis was also prioritized, leading to the creation of a joint commission.
A second summit, held in Tashkent on August 13–14, 1991, continued the dialogue. Leaders reviewed the implementation of earlier agreements and discussed the draft Treaty on the Union of Sovereign States, focusing on the division of Soviet assets and the continued raw-material orientation of their economies. The meeting resulted in the establishment of an inter-republican Consultative Council, with a working group based in Ashgabat—an early attempt to institutionalize cooperation. Notably, a representative of Azerbaijan (at the prime ministerial level) participated in the signing, hinting at a broader geographic scope for early post-Soviet consultations and foreshadowing Baku’s later engagement with Central Asia.
The third consultative meeting, held in Ashgabat in December 1991, was a coordinated response to the final collapse of the USSR and the signing of the Belavezha Accords. President Niyazov’s proposal to form a confederation of the five Central Asian republics, though ultimately shelved—partly due to concerns voiced by Nazarbayev about appearing confrontational—reflected a search for alternative models of unity. Upon learning of the formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) without their participation, the five leaders issued a joint statement on December 13, 1991, expressing their desire to become equal co-founders of the CIS and emphasizing the need to account for regional specificities. This unified stance paved the way for their full accession to the CIS in Almaty a week later.
The Ashgabat summit also produced an agreement to construct the strategically significant Tejen–Serakhs–Mashhad railway line, underscoring that even amid political turbulence, infrastructure development remained a shared priority.
In sum, the period of 1990–1991 laid a critical foundation for regional engagement in Central Asia. Driven by shared legacies, acute economic dislocation, and common transitional challenges, the republics’ leaders began to establish mechanisms for consultation and signed the first agreements of the post-Soviet era. These early steps—taken while the Soviet Union was still unraveling—reflected a growing awareness of the need for collective action and marked the starting point for a more complex and sustained search for regional integration in the era of full independence. Understanding this formative phase is essential to grasping the trajectory of integration efforts that followed.
Author’s Bio:
Dr. Sanat Kushkumbayev is a Chief Research Fellow at the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies (KazISS). He also serves as a Professor at the L.N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University in Astana. He holds a Doctorate in Political Science, with a focus on regionalism in Central Asia, from al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty, where he previously worked as an Associate Professor. With 28 years of experience in research, teaching, and public service—including roles in academia, think tanks, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—his expertise focuses on foreign policy, international relations, regional cooperation, and security issues in Central Asia. His latest book, Kazakhstan and Central Asia: Between the Challenges of the Past and the Future, was published in 2022 by KazISS.
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Until early 1993, the countries of the region continued to use the Soviet-era designation Middle Asia and Kazakhstan (Srednyaya Aziya i Kazakhstan).