THREE CRITICAL TERM PRESIDENCIES IN ASIA: TURKEY-CICA, KAZAKHSTAN-OSCE, RUSSIA-CIS (II)

Today’s Zaman
Feb 3, 2010

Kazakhstan’s active participation in regional organizations in
Asia, along with its possession of energy resources and a balanced,
multidimensional foreign and energy policy, is consolidating its
position on the international stage day-to-day.

Moreover, it has seized an important opportunity in which its
harmonization with European criteria will increase. It is very likely
that this will affect other Central Asian countries in implementing
democratization and observing a balanced, multidimensional foreign
policy.

Russia and CIS

The CIS, which was founded under the leadership of Russia in 1991,
had been dysfunctional until now for various reasons, but especially
due to the problems between member countries (Russia, Azerbaijan,
Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Moldova).

This organization continues to hold a privileged place in Russia’s
foreign policy. The shuttle diplomacy that Russia, which plans on
benefiting from the organization’s ties with former Soviet countries,
is undertaking with Asian countries shows that it has plans to
introduce new initiatives during its term presidency in 2010. Since
the establishment of the Eurasian Economic Community in 2001, Russia
has been striving to develop a common economic space between members
and to make the ruble the common currency. This could be taken as a
sign that Russia is planning to continue exerting its influence over
the former Soviet countries.

Turkey-Kazakhstan-Russia

On the other hand, when we look at the ties between Turkey,
Kazakhstan and Russia, we can conclude that it will be easy for
these three countries to engage in cooperation on an institutional
level because their current bilateral relations are already at
a very advanced level. While Turkey has been working to increase
its bilateral relations with Russia to achieve a multidimensional
strategic partnership since 2003, it has managed to bring relations
with Kazakhstan to the highest level by signing a strategic partnership
agreement in September 2007.

Trade volume between Turkey and Russia has reached $40 billion, making
Russia Turkey’s biggest foreign trade partner, and the trade volume
between Turkey and Kazakhstan increased eight-fold between 2003 and
2009. As for Russia-Kazakhstan ties, they have extensive relations
in many sectors from energy to defense. After all, Kazakhstan has a
strategic and essential value for Russia, which accounts for 70 to
80 percent of Kazakhstan’s foreign trade, revealing the high level of
relations between the two countries. In this way, the three countries
can use their cooperation and relations to solve existing problems
in the region to ensure security and stability in Asia by means of
the CICA, the OSCE and the CIS.

Concisely, the three organizations are strategically important, not
only in terms of the countries that will hold their term presidencies,
but also in terms of their member countries. These organizations
offer opportunities that have the potential to increase security and
stability in the region. In this respect, these three organizations
are expected to assume a more active and constructive role in
solving the problems in Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia,
South Ossetia and Georgia. The year 2010 offers enormous opportunities
for critical players in Asia such as Turkey, Kazakhstan and Russia,
which have coincidentally assumed the term presidencies of three
different institutions in the same year, to create a profile that
shows that they have a tremendous ability to solve existing problems,
specifically problems related to security and stability in Asia.

*Muharrem EkÅ~_i is a doctoral candidate in the international relations
department at Ankara University. He is an expert on foreign relations
in the Turkish Parliament.