The German federal government can’t find a strategy for Uzbekistan – and the most populous country in Central Asia is getting closer and closer to Russia and China.
For decades, the government of Central Asian Uzbekistan has been pursuing a “multi-vector foreign policy” and within the framework of this has expanded or curtailed relations with various major powers. But no matter how close Uzbek relations with Russia, China or the USA were: the country always had special relations with Germany – until now.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, there were mass movements for their own states in the Baltic States, in the Ukraine and also in the Caucasus. In the five Central Asian republics, on the other hand, things remained relatively calm at the time. These areas were already industrialized in the early phase of the Soviet Union and the cultural policies of local cadres allowed new nations to emerge within the framework of the Soviet multi-ethnic state. The standard of living in Soviet Central Asia rose for decades. At the end of 1991, Boris Yeltsin learned that Ukraine had broken away from Moscow. The then prime minister of the Russian republic realized that from then on he would remain in the Soviet Union, above all with the Central Asian republics, and dissolved the USSR without further ado.
Many tourists in Uzbekistan come from the EU
In the three states of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the old political elites simply continued to rule after the end of the Soviet Union – the Communist parties changed their names, but there were hardly any major changes in the political systems. A civil war broke out in Tajikistan, which only ended in 1997. Only in Kyrgyzstan did a liberal democracy emerge for three decades, which, however, recently got into troubled waters.
Source: Berliner Zeitung