Current opinion

Rethinking the Turkic world

by Hugh Pope

When Central Asia makes the headlines, it is almost always at moments of shock or bewilderment in the West. Last year, attention flashed in and out of focus on a barely controlled revolution in the Kyrgyz Republic, a bloody massacre in the police state of Uzbekistan and another wild swirl of coup rumors in Azerbaijan. Even in times of calm, perceptions of the Muslim states of the former Soviet Union have often reflected the world's often superficial knowledge of the region: dire predictions of Islamic revolutions, fascination with the weirdness of rulers' personality cults or fanciful legends of the riches of the old Silk Road.

There are certainly preposterous and scary sides of life in the Caucasus and Central Asia. But the caravan of history has moved a long way in the past 15 years. One of the Caspian Sea oil export pipelines initially dismissed as an absurd “pipe dream” will start pumping oil this year to the Mediterranean, bringing a useful 1% addition to world oil supplies. The vast and resource-rich country of Kazakhstan, lost in a hyper-inflationary spiral in the early 1990s, has raised its credit rating beyond that of Russia to equal that of states in eastern Europe. Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, waterlogged and bereft of color in 1990, now enjoys the buzz and overbuilding of its new status as an international oil boom city.

For sure, some of these ex-Soviet regimes are brittle. Most are insecure and undemocratic, being based on the former communist parties of the republics, which rightly fear they could be the victims of any true Central Asian common market or any pooling of political identity. Central Asian rulers therefore foster an artificial and prickly sense of national separateness to keep their peoples in bondage, as, say, has long been the case in the Arab world. And as elsewhere in the developing world, change is more likely to come through power shuffles within the ruling elites rather than bloody revolutions. But few now suggest -- as many did in the early years after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed -- that these countries themselves will not survive intact. Although weak in themselves, most of the new states have succeeded in balancing the interests of superpowers around them. None will allow any of the others to take control of the region. For the first time in more than a century, Turkic states are free of any monopoly of external domination, whether by Russia, China or the United States.

New identities; a new world

The make-up of Central Asian populations and economies has also changed and new identities are being created. After 70 years of deliberate suppression by the rulers of the Soviet Union, and a half century of Tsarist restrictions before that, the world has now begun to hear of and accept as legitimate Turkic peoples previously thought to be utterly remote: independent nations for Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, and new, more autonomous status for groups like Tatars or Tuvans. Most of these new nations are inexperienced and fumbling forward along the pattern of developing nation states, rediscovering or making up new national myths and histories along the way. The process can look clumsy and even brutal to well-established states in the West. Nevertheless, there are at the same time other deeper developments that, from points of view of language, culture, history, have brought a new world into life since Moscow's power over its southern periphery collapsed in 1991.

This tangle of uncoordinated elements, I believe, is leading to the emergence of a new and important Turkic world. Speakers of Turkic languages now number some 140 million people -- one of the ten largest language groups on the planet. Self-conscious Turkey, which long saw itself as 'the last independent Turkic state,' has been joined by five Turkic fellows -- Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic. The population of Tajikistan includes a large Uzbek minority, China has an awakening Uygur Turkic minority of at least eight million people (half of the population of its vast northwestern province of Xinjiang), and the mother language of perhaps one quarter of the population of Iran is Azeri Turkish -- including the family of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And the four million Turkish immigrants in Europe rival the numbers of the Irish.

Converging features

Despite Turkey's commercial energy, the mineral wealth of the Caspian region and the strategic possibilities Central Asia, the Turkic world does not yet add up to the sum of its many parts. It is like the old Silk Road, whose many paths link the Turkic peoples between Asia and Europe, but which has never been one clear-cut highway.     When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the United States, fearing instability, did fan a bout of Turkish-led enthusiasm about a new political dimension to the long-forgotten Turkic world. This brought about a heady series of meetings in the early 1990s at which presidents, professors and satellite television executives all tested the planks of what seemed to be a new Turkic platform. Concrete achievements were hard to pin down, but they influenced each other. Even now, when asked to cite a role model, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan still first cites Turkey's Kemal Ataturk. But he, as with all leaders of Turkic states, is wary of any 'big brother' role for Turkey, which Ankara was never equipped to handle. Most Turkic communities and countries -- including Turkey -- have in practice followed Atatürk's lead, eschewing any pan-Turkic adventure and giving priority to their own local national development.

Beneath the radar, nevertheless, convergence and familiarization continues on many fronts. A background drumbeat of Turkic meetings -- which, it should be remembered, simply did not exist before --- continues. Lip-service is always paid to Turkic brotherhood. The simple lifting of the Cold War barriers between Turkey and its old hinterland around the Black Sea and the gateways to the Turkic east has allowed a big rise in trade and tourist travel. Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and the Tatar Republic have all now switched to Turkish-style Latin alphabets, even if they are all slightly different. Languages like Uzbek and Azeri have replaced Russian as the official language, and are now developing fast. A new commercial region that focuses on Turkey's dynamic metropolis of Istanbul has become well-established. International companies from Kodak to Morgan Guaranty Bank use Istanbul as a base to reach the east. When big contracts are awarded in the former Soviet Union -- in Russia and the Turkic states alike -- much of the subcontracting goes to nimble Turkish companies. In the Kazakh cultural and commercial capital, Almaty, five hours' flight east of Istanbul, the leading new hotel is a brass-and-marble luxury spaceship that is Turkish-built, Turkish-managed, Turkish-catered and named after the Turkish capital.

The next generation

There is no question of any real Turkic political unity -- and it's worth remembering that in the past, such unity has only happened by chance under conquerors like the Mongol Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, a phenomenon unlikely to resurface today. In the Turkic east, Russian is still the language of business and political elites, and is likely to remain so for some years. And for Turkey, the relationship with Russia is many times more important than its ties with any one of the new Turkic states. But the changes set in motion in 1991 are slowly changing Turkic societies on the inside. Outside, there is growing acceptance of the word ‘Turkic’ itself: there is now even an American Association of Teachers of Turkic Languages, based in Princeton University and putting out colorful posters in U.S. campuses to attract students. Slowly, the idea of a Turkic world is becoming more meaningful to new generations, who, as these countries grow wealthier and more confident, will use it to help redefine themselves and their nations.

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About the author

Hugh Pope has reported from Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia for more than two decades. For much of the past decade he was the Istanbul bureau chief of the ‘Wall Street Journal’, covering events in the broader Middle East. His writing has appeared in the ‘Washington Post’, the ‘Los Angeles Times’, the London ‘Independent’ and the ‘Georgetown Journal of International Affairs’. He has lectured widely, including at London's Royal Academy of Arts and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Pope is also the author of ‘Sons of the Conquerors: the Rise of the Turkic World’, an account of travels among Turkic peoples and communities from China to America. Published in New York, London and Istanbul in 2005, this book was selected as one the London-based ‘Economist’ magazine's 45 “best books of the year”. More information and extracts are available at: www.sonsoftheconquerors.com

Born in South Africa in 1959, Pope was educated in Britain and received a BA in Oriental Studies (Persian and Arabic) from Oxford University in 1982. He is the co-author, with his first wife Nicole, of ‘Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey’, selected as a New York Times “notable book” in 2000. He is now preparing a new book on the Middle East.

( DIPLOMAT  -  April 2006  -  Ankara )