The foreign policy of Kazakhstan: shaping and development (1992-2000)

The development of Kazakhstan's foreign policy had been influenced by its long borders with Russia and China and a high proportion of Slavic population. Kazakh leadership understood that the country's development as an independent and sovereign state preserving its full territorial integrity which Almaty declared its major strategic goal called for a delicate foreign-policy maneuvering necessary to balance Russian and Chinese interests with regard to Kazakhstan. At the same time the development of relations with the US also became an essential element of Kazakhstan's foreign policy. It was seen as a means to make Washington interested in the consolidation of Kazakhstan's independence, thus allowing Almaty to avoid overdependence on Russia and China. As early as in 1992, President Nazarbaev defined the maintaining of multilateral and flexible military-political and economic balances as the guiding principle of the country's foreign policy. Later this doctrine came to be known as the strategy of multi-vector and balanced foreign policy. Kazakhstan's approach to its Central Asian neighbors was ambiguous. On the one hand, Kazakhstan demonstrated its aspiration to the regional leadership, on the other hand it sought for the special relationship with Russia and preferred not to interfere with the contradictions that were occurring in the southern part of Central Asia. Generally, the 1990s were a successful time for the development of Kazakhstan's foreign policy. Maintaining close security and economic ties with Russia, Astana gained Moscow's de facto agreement to the country's evolution toward monoethnicity, Russia's refusal of dual citizenship for Russian speakers and concessions on the Caspian Sea status. Fears of confrontation with China did not materialize; by the end of the decade, Astana and Beijing solved the border problem, implemented the confidence-building measures in the military realm developed within the Shanghai Five framework, and began to cooperate in the oil and gas sector. Kazakhstan's trade and investment relations were greatly diversified. However, by the late 1990s the American vector of Kazakhstan's foreign policy had not been consolidated to the extent necessary to counterbalance the relations with Russia and China. Kazakhstan's aspirations for leadership in Central Asia had to confront Uzbekistan's rival ambitions and Turkmenistan's resistance. It was only in 1999-2000 that the Kazakh leadership began to put more money into the national armed forces and to strengthen the southern border. On the whole, the 1990s were a time when the prerequisites and conditions allowing for the pursuit of the multi-vector and balanced policy were being forged but the actual progress in its implementation remained limited. Having largely succeeded in the development of the national statehood and economic reconstruction, Kazakhstan was only beginning to position itself as a pole of the nascent regional subsystem.

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