Hurdles on the Silk Road: EU Over-stretch, Central Asian Agency, and the Challenges of Authoritarian Rule

The 2007 Strategy for Central Asia set out an ambitious attempt for the European Union to engage a region (Central Asia) where previously its presence and visibility had been fairly low-key, although not entirely absent. The EU has long been engaged in both humanitarian assistance (to Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan), has funded border management and drugs control programs, alongside a wide range of other activities in the educational and energy sectors. The region provides a useful vantage point to examine the predicament the EU has found itself in when engaging countries towards whom the ranges of applicable carrots and sticks are limited. The strategy identifies stability, security, and the rule of law as the overarching goals. A longer list of objectives are included, some flagship initiatives announced and launched. Importantly, a regional approach is balanced by initiatives tailored to specific countries. The paper examines the origins of EU engagement in the region and focuses especially on the post-2007 period. It finds that EU effectiveness has been hampered by limited resources and over-stretched ambitions (as well as unrealistic goals). It also contends that, long bundled in one regional approach Central Asia, is instead a fairly diverse region, where each individual country exerts a considerable degree of political agency (multi-vectoral foreign policies have helped prevent entrapment or over-dependence on individual actors). Each country require tailored approaches and policies. The paper discusses three sets of dichotomies (functional approaches/ensuring security/maintaining stability vs democracy promotion) and looks at a small number of case studies to ground them empirically in specific instances of EU-Central Asian relations: Uzbekistan (human rights); Turkmenistan (energy); Tajikistan (water); and the region as whole (education).