The failure of regionalism in Central Asia is a puzzle. Whereas almost all world regions have seen a rise of regional organisations since the end of the Cold War, attempts to establish durable regional cooperation among Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan proofed unsuccessful. Although some of the Central Asian countries participate in wider regional organisations like the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the genuine Central Asian Cooperation Organisation (CACO) was dissolved in 2005. Given the cultural, economic and political similarities between the five Central Asian countries, this lack of a regional organisation is surprising. In contrast to previous work, this paper argues that the failure of regionalism in Central Asia is not so much due to domestic political factors, but more to the extra-regional economic dependence of the regional economies and the impact of external powers within Central Asia. Challenged by the rise of China, Russia uses the EAEU in order to preserve its hegemonic influence over the former Soviet Republics. By joining the Russian dominated EAEU, Central Asia's regional power Kazakhstan enjoys economic benefits which outweigh the potential gains of Central Asian cooperation within CACO by far. Consequently, Kazakhstan follows its extra-regional interests in closer cooperation with Russia at the cost of regional cooperation with its Central Asian neighbours. As a result, the Central Asian countries are unable to build up a unified regional block in relation to extra-regional powers like China or Russia.
The paper provides a conceptual framework of the Special Issue by theorising and analysing the evolving nature of capitalism in emerging economies and the European periphery today. The conventional conceptual tools of comparative capitalism provide a useful structure for the analysis but have not been up to the task of capturing the changing nature of capitalism in the globalised world, in particular the rise of the emerging powers as well as their current crises. Neither do the conventional tools allow one to capture the developments in the political economies of the European periphery since the Eurozone crisis and the advent of austerity policy. In order to adequately assess these developments we need to rethink the comparative capitalism framework in the global context. To do so, we propose a more dynamic conceptual approach better suited to capturing the changing nature of political economies in and beyond the OECD world. We build upon Uwe Becker's open Varieties of Capitalism framework, among other approaches. Our theoretical conceptualisation highlights five aspects: (1) the role of the state as a central force organising the market (2) patrimonialism, understood as a distinct structural mode of political-economic organisation based on clientelism, patronage and informal relations between actors (3) policies and political institutions (4) the role of ideas, and (5) pressures from globalisation and economic crises.
The paper analyses the origins of Russia's statist-patrimonial political economy, marked by insecure property rights and particularistic state-business relations. Based on in-depth interviews, the paper argues that statist-patrimonial capitalism is not only a result of top-down activity of the state sovereign and its corrupt agents but is also a system that rests on the bottom-up contribution of the bulk of economic actors-small and medium-sized firms. This contribution happened-often inadvertently-through informal practices that locked small firms in the 'informality trap' and undermined the security of property. Back in the 1990s some of those informal practices were taken up by companies out of expediency. In the 2000s informality backfired as the state exploited it to violate property rights of virtually any business actor. Thus the advent of statist-patrimonial capitalism was facilitated, among other factors, by the informal choices and practices of business actors in the previous decade.
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