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Jannatkhan EYVAZOV
Ph.D. (Political Science), Deputy Director, Institute of Strategic Studies of the Caucasus, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Central Asia and the Caucasus
(Baku, Azerbaijan).
CENTRAL EURASIA THROUGH THE PRISM OF SECURITY: A REGIONAL SYSTEM OR A SUBSYSTEM?
Abstract
The author proceeds from the theory of regional security complexes to answer the question of whether Central Eurasia should, or can, in the present conditions be described as a regional security system.
His studies of the political system of the postSoviet space have made it possible for him to give a detailed description of its present development level, structural and functional specifics, and potential transformations.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
The term "Central Eurasia" is a relative newcomer in academic and political parlance. According to Eldar Ismailov's conception, its geopolitical structure consists of regions in the central parts of the European and Asian segments of Eurasia: Central Europe (Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine); the Central Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan).1 The question is whether these post-Soviet regions can be
1 Eldar Ismailov put forward a new idea about the Central Eurasian region and Central Europe as its sub-region (see: E.M. Ismailov, "Central Eurasia: Its Geopolitical Function in the 21st Century," Central Asia and the Caucasus, No.
2 (50), 2008, pp. 7-29).
brought together within a single Central Eurasian regional security system, or whether we should rely, today and in the future, on the traditional differentiation of these political spaces or look at them as subsystems within the common post-Soviet space?
These are the pivotal questions that I will try to answer with the help of the Theory of Regional Security Complexes (TRSC).2
Central Eurasian Regions: Geopolitical Factors of Development
So far, Central Europe, the Central Caucasus, and Central Asia are fairly independent of each other; this is primarily demonstrated by the different dynamics of security relations. Their security spheres have been developing in very different ethnoconfessional, socioeconomic, and geopolitical conditions. This is a fairly straightforward explanation; in theory, however, we can supply a much simpler answer based on purely geopolitical factors.
Geographically, the three spaces are separated by vast distances which the corresponding countries cannot neutralize because of their inadequate power projection and which does not allow us to look at them as a single, security-wise, macroregion. Their political structures were formed in the absence of direct land contacts among them, while in the past the Black and Caspian seas were an obstacle rather than a connecting link, which decreased the intensity of contacts among the regions' political actors. For obvious reasons, this interfered with forming sustainable amity/enmity perception vectors on a trans-regional scale. This conclusion, however, can be taken as correct if we disregard the external powers and their geopolitical activities in the regions identified above.
In fact, in the past, the regions often remained, and for a long time, the objects of geopolitics rather than geopolitical actors, which means that the exogenous powers played an important role in shaping their security spheres, particularly in creating the perceptional vectors mentioned above. On the one hand, throughout history, the geopolitical activity of external actors has disunited the regions, while bringing them together, on the other. Indeed, Central Europe and the Central Caucasus and Central Asia developed in different power contexts. From the point of view of a common external power configuration, it is much easier to discuss the latter two within a single security system than to attach the first to it.
As essentially permanent objects of geopolitics, the regions belonged to different spheres of power rivalry. The Central Caucasus and Central Asia developed within the power context of the Russia-Turkey-Iran triad, which means that Christian Orthodoxy and Sunni and Shi'a Islam were the main ideological factors that largely contributed to forming the amity/enmity vectors in the regional societies. Central Europe, on the other hand, developed amid a somewhat different set of external powers: Russia-Turkey-the European states (accordingly, the main ideological factors in this case were Orthodox Christianity, Sunni Islam, and Western Christianity).
2 Barry Buzan identifies RSC as "a group of states whose primary security concerns link together sufficiently closely, so that their national securities cannot realistically be considered apart from one another." In 1983, Buzan formulated the conception of the regional security complex in his People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1983). This, as well as the second edition of the same work (B. Buzan, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, Second Edition, Lynne Rienner Publishers Boulder, Colorado, 1991), demonstrated a classical approach to the security complex conception. Much later, together with co-authors (B. Buzan, O. W^ver, J. De Wilde, Security. A New Framework for Analysis, Rienner Publishers Boulder, London, 1998; B. Buzan, O. W^ver, Regions and Powers, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003), he made an attempt to go beyond the limits of the classical conception of the security complex. The authors introduced, among other things, two types of security complexes (homogeneous and heterogeneous) and the securitization conception to remedy the current disparages with the classical conception of the security complex, such as concentrating on the military and political spheres of relations or inadequate attention to the non-state actors, which also create additional vectors of inter-sectoral interdependence.
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The geographic proximity of Central Europe and, to a lesser extent, the Central Caucasus to the powers of Western civilization helped the two regions remain relatively open geopolitically. This, however, does not apply to Central Asia: until the 1990s, the set of external players remained narrow; the countries were closed to the Western powers.
This explains why in Central Europe and the Central Caucasus regional security systems (including all their basic constituents—national states, material components of security interdependence, and sustainable amity/enmity perceptional constructs between the regional countries and between them and the external powers) have been formed earlier than in Central Asia.
The above suggests that early in the 20th century (when the Russian Empire fell apart), these two Central Eurasian regions began forming their security systems, while Central Asia joined in the process much later, early in the 1990s.
On the whole, endogenous factors apart, these regional security systems largely developed under the impact of their geopolitical openness. Today, this remains one of the main exogenous parameters in the development of the regional security systems. The more open and the more pluralistic a political space, the lower the risk of its one-sided monopolization. By the same token, this creates a much better environment for the emergence of sustainable political actors and mutual ties and relations in the material and perceptual-behavioral spheres of security.
Geopolitical pluralism helps to balance out the region's political structure, which makes it fairly independent of the external environment, one of the parameters which make a space a regional system proper. Moreover, evolution toward maturity, moderation, and peaceful security relations among its elements cannot be achieved without balancing out the exogenous geopolitical impulses. The more unstable the power environment, the more chances for a regional system to evolve from "immature" to "mature" anarchy3 and the more stable the process of its security sphere development.
The empirics of the regions discussed here indicates that the overlay mechanisms4 which operated there under Soviet power can stabilize the system. However, this stabilization (which can be described as revolutionary) will only survive as long as the power of the dominant state remains functional and is capable of being projected. The prevailing conflict climate in security relations across the post-Soviet Central Caucasus is the best confirmation of this.
In fact, the Soviet Union by its very existence brought the security spheres of the three regions discussed here closer together. They belonged to one political system with one dominating ideology. Contacts and relations among the societies of these regions intensified and became even deeper within the single economic, cultural, and ideological space. For about 70 years the strictly hierarchical administrative and management mechanism of the Soviet Union was consistently planting common values and shaped common historical memory for the entire population of the vast country. The forced amalgamation of societies within the Soviet Union succeeded, to a certain extent, in setting up a trans-regional security community; this demanded and was accompanied by changes in the previous security perceptions.
The amity/enmity and threats/vulnerability perceptions ascended from the regional to the macro-regional level. This means that social securitization was not longer applied to the regional neighbors and their activity, but to the political actors who did not belong to the "Soviet community" and their attitude to the Soviet Union as a "common motherland." These ideas took root partly because the Soviet Union was constantly involved in geopolitical rivalry, first in Eurasia and, after World War II, at the global level, up to and including involvement in armed conflicts. This cannot but be accompanied by a high level of awareness of the threats and vulnerabilities created by active "hostile" external forces and internal "enemies."
3 For more about mature and immature anarchy, see, for example: B. Buzan, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, pp. 175-181.
4 In this situation the dynamics of the security relations among the members of the RSC is suppressed by force mechanisms of a certain outside power (see: ibid., pp. 219-221).
Disintegration of the Soviet Union undermined the security community which existed there, but autonomous development of the former imperial periphery could not bring about equally rapid devaluation of the perceptional axiological basis of what was called Soviet society. An upsurge in national awareness and attempts to speed up the process of nation-building in the newly independent states on the wave of the fairly rapid collapse of the Soviet system failed to transform, within a short historical period, the values and perceptions well embedded over many decades. This explains why restoration of autonomous security systems in the post-Soviet regions went on amid certain surviving components of the Soviet amalgamated community.5 It should be said that today the main component of this sort is the regional states' certain bias toward the former metropolitan country. This is why Russia's geopolitical influence is generated there not only by geographic proximity and power projection capability, but also by virtue of the preserved social and cultural ties.
There are Russians6 and so-called Russian-speakers in all the newly independent states who are obviously very concerned about the relations between the countries they are living in and Russia; from time to time the Kremlin openly exploited this factor to increase its influence in the corresponding newly independent states.
The Russian language has remained the language of communication across the post-Soviet space (with the exception of the Baltic republics). It dominates at almost all international forums (the CIS, CSTO, EurAsEC, CAEC, SCO, GUAM, and others). The Russian media dominate the information space of the former Soviet Union.
In the late 1990s, the Russian Federation began overcoming its military and economic weakness and has acquired much clearer landmarks. It is too early to say how much time it will take Russia to revive while energy prices are still high and the United States and its allies remain tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan. One thing is clear: in the present conditions no discussion of security systems in former Soviet regions is possible without taking into account the active Russian factor.
Indeed, even in the early and mid-1990s Russia's weakness did not refute the fact that it was the only newly independent state that could project its influence onto all regions of the post-Soviet space. Today, this has assumed different forms: encouragement of separatism; alliance politics; military and economic assistance; and direct military intervention (as in August 2008 in Georgia).
The Regional Security System in the Former Soviet Space
The system that existed in the Soviet Union at the turn of the 1990s went through structural transformation which ended in the disintegration of the Soviet state and the appearance of fifteen newly independent states. In the context of security system evolution, this meant a transfer from one strictly hierarchical actor to a regional anarchical system or, to be more exact, to a regional security complex (RSC). The word "restoration" rather than "transition" is much more accurate in this context.
The RSC that came into being in the post-Soviet space was very specific; its size and the structural and political features set it apart from standard RSCs7 within which security interests are closely
5 In his conception K.W. Deutsch views the "amalgamated community" as an alliance of formerly independent states under the same governance achieved either through non-violent integration or as a result of the classical use of force (see: K.W. Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1957, p. 6).
6 There is information that there were about 25 million ethnic Russians left outside Russia when the Soviet Union disintegrated (see: Ch. King, N.J. Melvin, "Diaspora Politics. Ethnic Linkages, Foreign Policy and Security in Eurasia," International Security, Vol. 24, No. 3, 1999/2000, p. 118).
7 The TRSC offers various types and forms of regional complexes; the most general typology distinguishes between standard and centered RSC. According to Barry Buzan and Ole W^ver, in the centered RSC, the dynamics of secu-
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connected because of geographic proximity8 and are localized by a geographically compact interstate constellation, and in which "the security dynamics of the region are not dominated from the unipolar power at its center."9 According to Buzan and Wsver, the regional system of the post-Soviet space is a "centered great power regional security complex."10
At the same time, the newly independent states formed their own local interstate systems—the regional security sub-complexes in the European part (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine); in the Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia), and in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). The regional sub-systems were relatively autonomous, however Russia preserved its function of a center which bound them together into a "web" interdependence of the Post-Soviet Security Macrocomplex (PSM).
In this structure Russia was the only geopolitical actor that could consistently project its influence on the regional scale; it was the key security factor for all the newly independent states in all the sub-complexes. This meant that the development of local complexes and the dynamics of the security relations among the member states and their ties with the "external" powers were dependent not only on the endogenous factors but also on Russia's geopolitical activities.
Evolution of PSM
Thus, one can admit that, first, the spaces described as Central Europe, the Central Caucasus, and Central Asia can be described as RSCs in full accordance with the development level of their security systems; second, despite their specifics and autonomy today they belong to a much more extensive RSC which covers the former Soviet space; third, in the early 1990s the hierarchical structure of the Soviet Union was transformed into an anarchic structure and formed, to borrow what Barry Buzan and Ole have to say, a "centered great power regional security complex," which here is called the Post-Soviet Security Macrocomplex.
Its evolution, however, revealed several conceptual problems which cast doubt on the PSM idea and provide more opportunities to consider it as a transition stage.
In the most general form they can be discussed within the PSM border issue.
For example, one wonders, while assessing the Caucasian segment of the PSM, whether the Caucasus as a whole should be seen as the RSC or the RSC is limited to three independent states— Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia?
It must be said that in the post-Soviet period several authors tried to apply the TRSC to the Caucasus11; some of them tended to include broad sections in the spatial-political borders of the security region. Bruno Coppieters has the following to say about the spatial outline of the Caucasian RSC: "Both the Transcaucasus and the North Caucasus may be thought of as parts of a larger security complex, comprising Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and part of Russia. The North Caucasus continues to play a decisive role in the future of the Transcaucasus and the Caucasian security complex as a
rity relations are determined by one power found in its center. The authors go on to identify three forms (depending on the specifics of "the central actor") of this type: centered on a great power—Russia in the post-Soviet space; on a superpower—the United States in North America; and, finally, on an institution (institutional RSC)—the European Union (see: B. Buzan, O. Wœver, op. cit., pp. 55-61).
8 See: B. Buzan, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, pp. 188, 189, 191, 195.
9 B. Buzan, O. Wœver, op. cit., p. 55.
10 Ibid., pp. 55, 62, 343.
11 See: B. Coppieters, "Conclusions: The Caucasus as a Security Complex," in: Contested Borders in the Caucasus, ed. by B. Coppieters, Vubpress, Brussels, 1996, pp. 193-204; S.E. Cornell, Small Nations and Great Powers. A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus, Curzon Press, Surrey, 2001; B. Buzan, O. Wœver, op. cit.
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whole."12 Svante Cornell goes even further: ".. .The Caucasus is a region; but more than being a region, it is a security complex: the national security of one of the Caucasian states cannot realistically be considered apart from that of the other two. As far as the three regional powers (Russia, Turkey, and Iran.—J.E.) are concerned, the security of the Caucasus does have a direct bearing upon the national security of these states that justifies their inclusion into the security complex."13
Indeed, the security interests of these powers are involved in the region; or to be more exact, we are talking about an interdependence between them and the Caucasian states which, in some cases, ties together the central (existential) security interests of the three powers and the region. For example, Armenia's territorial claims to Turkey14 and the perceived threats and historical insults caused by the 1915 events in the Ottoman Empire, which the Armenians call genocide, are an interdependence of this type. There is a fundamental interconnection between Iran and Azerbaijan created by the tens of millions of ethnic Azeris living in Iran in the territory which is called "Southern Azerbaijan."15 In both cases, the reference is to the territory and population, two elements of the state's physical base which cannot, by definition, be removed beyond the limits of the state's key security interests.
A similar problem in the European segment of PSM (Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine) is related to the closest geographical neighbors, former socialist allies which joined the EU (Poland and Rumania). We can hardly ignore the obvious national kinship between Moldova and Rumania and the two states' perceptional-behavioral interdependence based on it. It is also impossible to ignore the Western Ukraine and Western Belarus issue with their Catholic Slavic populations, while looking at the web of interdependence which ties Ukraine and Belarus with Poland.
From this it follows that having accepted the above examples of interdependence between the PSM states' security and "external" actors, we should treat not only Russia, but also Turkey and Iran (the Caucasian segment) as parts of the PSM, as well as Poland and Rumania, at least, in the European segment. Iran (with the ethnic Turkmen who live as a compact group in its northern part and a score of still unsettled Caspian problems) should be included in the Central Asian sub-complex together with China (because of the "Uighur factor").
According to the TRSC, it is hardly realistic to expect that these actors can be treated as parts of the corresponding regional PSM sub-complexes; the theory rules out what is called "overlapping membership."16 In other words, one and the same actor cannot belong to two or more RSCs. Hence Turkey and Iran, as elements of the Mid-Eastern RSC, and Poland and Rumania, as part of the European (institutional) RSC, cannot belong to the PSM. The theory describes any power's actual involvement in interactions within different complexes as "overlay" or "penetration."17
It goes without saying that at the theoretical level, any discussion of regionalization in any sphere (the security sphere in our case) calls for a clear delimitation between regional systems. When identifying a constellation of geographically close states as RSC, the TRSC proceeds from the assumption that security interdependence among the constellation's parts is much stronger than between them and the external actors.18 Regional complexes are separated by what is described as a zone of "relative indifference,"19 otherwise any regionalization theory becomes senseless. A power
12 B. Coppieters, op. cit., p. 195.
13 S.E. Cornell, op. cit., p. 391.
14 Armenia claims an eastern part of Turkey called Western Armenia associated with the parts of the Ottoman Empire populated by Armenians. Today they are the vilayets of Erzurum, Van, Agri, Hakkari, Mu§, Bitlis, Siirt, Diyarbekir, Erzincjan, Bingöl, Malatya, Sivas, Amasya, Tokat, and part of Giresun (see: Istoria Osmanskogo gosudarstva, obshchest-va i tsivilizatsii, ed. by E. Ihsanoglu, Transl. from the Turkish, Vol. 1, Vostochnaya literatura Publishers, Moscow, 2006, p. 87 (History of the Ottoman State, Society & Civilization, ed. by Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Istanbul, 2001).
15 Under the Treaty of Turkmanchay of 1828, the territory of Azerbaijan was divided between the Russian Empire and Iran and came to be known as Northern and Southern Azerbaijan.
16 B. Buzan, O. Wffiver, op. cit., p. 48.
17 Ibid., p. 49.
18 See: Ibid., pp. 47-48.
19 B. Buzan, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, p. 193.
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might be involved in the security processes in several RSCs but, according to the TRSC, it can belong to only one regional system; in all other cases, it is a free geopolitical player involved in regional interactions in pursuance of its own interests.
The extent to which the actor depends on regional interaction or, to be more exact, the extent to which these interests are important, is of vital significance. What if the interests concentrated in an "alien" RSC are of an existential nature for it and there are stable amity/enmity perceptions between it and the states of the regional complex which might provoke consistent regional activities? This brings to mind, once more, Turkey and Iran with their potential PSM involvement described above.
The same question arises when one considers the Baltic region after its integration into the EU. If interpreted within the TRSC, the current security system in the Baltic region (with Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia being EU members) does not give grounds to say that their security ties within the European Union are less important or looser than with the Russian Federation and other PSM elements. It would be wrong to believe, on the other hand, that integration has destroyed the security interdependence between the "new Europeans" and the post-Soviet space. Besides, the Baltic precedent makes it next to impossible to exclude its repetition with other PSM states.
Afghanistan can be described as another digression from the PSM idea (in the Central Asian segment). Should this state be regarded as part of the Central Asian PSM sub-complex?
Within the PSM conception, Afghanistan does not fit the structure of the local RSC in Central Asia. Buzan regards it as unrelated to any of the regional systems; it is an "insulator"20 which separates one RSC from another, that is, a segment of the "relative indifference" zone wedged between the security complexes of Central Asia and South Asia. Today, however, this approach can be accepted with a certain amount of doubt.
Indeed, today, the country can be hardly described as an independent and homogeneous actor to the extent sufficient at least for the securitization and creation of common (all-Afghan) security interests in relation to its neighbors. It entered the post-Cold War period in a state of political chaos and inner fragmentation; the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance was going on and was responsible for the country's continued fragmentation. Chaos survived in the post-Taliban period and was intensified by the presence of foreign armed forces in its territory; we can hardly regard it as an actor.
This period in the history of Afghanistan and the question of whether it belongs to any of the regional complexes directly refers to one of the two main problems of identifying RSCs which Buzan described as : ".. .In some areas local states are so weak that their power does not project much, if at all, beyond their own boundaries. These states have domestically directed security perspectives, and there is not enough security interaction between them to generate a local complex."21 In the Central Asian space, Afghanistan looks like one of the weak states described by Buzan; while all the other states (even Tajikistan which lived through a civil war at the dawn of its independence) can be described as relatively more stable, their perceptions and security interests being oriented toward the outside world.
At the same time, there are enough weighty arguments which allow us to count the country among the members of the Central Asian RSC if we look at the region "not from Afghanistan" but from the other members of the same complex. The thesis of the "relative indifference" zone can be used as an argument in favor of Afghanistan's inclusion in the Central Asian RSC.
According to the TRSC, the borders of the regional complexes are formed by "relative indifference" zones, while security interdependence inside the RSCs is much stronger than between them and the "external" states,22 including the "insulators" which form the "indifference" zone.
20 B. Buzan, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, p. 193;
B. Buzan, O. Wffiver, op. cit., p. 41.
B. Buzan, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, p. 197.
21
22 Ibid., p. 193
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Interdependence, however, cannot be one-sided by definition; the same is true of securitization and involvement for the sake of the interests of security. If we agree that Afghanistan, for any internal reason, in particular because of its weakness as a state, does not concentrate its interests on its Central Asian neighbors and does not adjust its behavior accordingly, we should not think that the RSC members are equally uninterested in Afghanistan. From the very first day the RSC appeared in Central Asia, its members have regarded Afghanistan as a source of existential security threats and behaved accordingly in relation to their southern neighbor. They are interdependent at least in an ethnoterrito-rial sense (the northern part of Afghanistan is populated by Tajiks and Uzbeks) and by the so-called new threats: drug trafficking, religious radicalism, etc. This interdependence is objective, however the post-Soviet newly independent states are more aware of this than Afghanistan. This and the possibility that these perceptions (in Afghanistan in particular) will increase fit the securitization conception well.
Moreover, despite its current dependent and fairly pronounced amorphous conditions, Afghanistan is moving toward stronger statehood and a vertical of political power. This and the prospect of it becoming stronger, which will allow it to build up its potential of power projection, will help create a stronger security concept and reorient securitization from internal to external phenomena and processes. This will boost the perceptional-behavioral aspects of interdependence between it and the postSoviet Central Asian states.
On the whole, current globalization and post-industrialism are pulling the rug out from under the "insulator-state" concept. Afghanistan and Mongolia (another "insulator" state according to Buzan), which historically belongs to Central Asia, serve as examples that this function is largely determined by the specifics of their internal development. The further a state has advanced toward post-modernity, the fewer the reasons to describe it as an "insulator." This is fairly obvious because it presupposes its closer economic, social, cultural, and political interdependence with other states.
On PSM Transformation
The TRSC thesis on the "centered great power regional security complex" has been accepted as a model of the regional security system the post-Soviet space assumed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is equally obvious that including other powers besides Russia in these subsystems may devalue the PSM idea; this is true, however, only if we treat it as a relatively static system.
When talking about the present security system across the post-Soviet space we should proceed from its fairly pronounced dynamism and unsteady nature. The Baltic states, in particular, prove that structural transformations are possible.
Even if we agree with the TRSC that "overlapping membership" is impossible, we cannot exclude, in principle, a reorientation of Turkey and Iran's security interests toward Central Eurasia, which might be needed for their involvement into the region's security system. Since the TRSC does not regard the regional systems as static units, the principle of staticity should not necessarily be applied to regional concentration of the powers' security interests.
The TRSC's mechanisms of securitization make it possible to expect these developments. Buzan and Wsver have the following to say about RSC seen through the prism of this mechanism: "A set of units whose major processes of securitization, de-securitization, or both are so interlinked that their security problems cannot reasonably be analyzed or resolved apart from one another."23
In the theoretical-methodological respect, the securitization phenomenon allows the TRSC to rise from the "Procrustean bed" of positivism. In other words, Waltz's structure or, to be more exact, distribution of power in the system is not the main stimulator of the elements' behavior. It is not the
23 B. Buzan B., O. Wffiver, op. cit., p. 44.
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main trigger of securitization as well. As a relative phenomenon, the latter wholly depends on the actor: "Different actors securitize differently: different political and cultural situations enable securitization in different sectors and they have different dynamics."24
While the central security interests of any actor are the product of the securitization process unfolding under the impact of numerous factors, any changes in these factors might transform the interests; hence they might become oriented toward an "alien" political space.
The geopolitical processes underway in Eurasia display dynamism and changeability which generate factors conducive to shifts in the interests of the Eurasian powers. The outlines can be discerned: the deepening energy crisis has already readjusted securitization in this sphere and stimulated interstate competition in Eurasia. It can be said that under the pressure of securitization of the energy, migration, and other non-traditional threats, the European Union has become a holder of clearly formulated security interests concentrated on the post-Soviet space.
Appearance of the Central Eurasian Security Macrocomplex (CSM) composed of three local sub-complexes (in Central Europe, the Central Caucasus, and Central Asia) and, probably, of some other new actors/regions can be accepted as one of the possible scenarios of the development of security relations in the former Soviet space. However, it is too early to assess the potential and, particularly, the timeframe of this sort of transformation. It is obvious that the current lack of balance in the post-Soviet security macro-system is the main obstacle to this transformation.
The unipolarity of the post-Soviet security system and the fact that the main vectors of the development of the security sphere in this space were geared toward Russia and its interests made the regional interstate systems subordinate to it and unable to create ties and relations independent of the only pole. The change in this parameter, that is, the loss of Russia's domination, is the main condition for transforming the "centered" RSC in the post-Soviet macro-region into a "standard" RSC in Central Eurasia.
On the whole, these changes in Russia's status in PSM can be brought about by its very much diminished aggregate national power and power projection capability caused by internal disintegration or by reorientation of the main securitization vectors toward a different space.
C o n c l u s i o n
The above suggests that the question of whether we should view Central Europe, the Central Caucasus, and Central Asia as subsystems of a certain regional security system should be answered in the affirmative. The question of what particular system we have in mind requires an answer: a centered RSC in the post-Soviet space—Russia plus the three sub-complexes discussed above (Belarus, Moldova, and Ukraine; Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan)—because, at least today, these regions have not yet reached an adequate level of transregional interdependence in the spheres of their actors' key security interests to transform them into a single Central Eurasian security system.
However, this should not be taken to mean that this scenario cannot be realized in the post-Soviet space. The evolution of PSM has revealed certain problems in the explanation of the post-Soviet space as seen through the TRSC prism. Today, when the security interests of the neighboring powers (Turkey, Iran, and China) are also involved in the PSM sub-complexes, when the EU expanded to include the states of the Baltic RSC, and in view of the mounting dependence of the security interests of the states of the Central Asian sub-complex on Afghanistan, it has become much harder to identify the exact borders of the PSM. This speaks of instability of the present PSM structure, which provides more opportunities to consider it as a transition stage in the development of the security system in the post-Soviet macroregion.
24 B. Buzan B., O. Wffiver, op. cit., p. 87.
Transition to the structure of a "standard" RSC in Central Eurasia in the form of a Central Eurasian Security Macrocomplex is one of the possible alternatives for the present security system in the post-Soviet space, which can be realized if the only pole of power, viz. the Russian Federation, disappears. This might happen if its aggregate national power and power projection capability are diminished or if it reorients its main securitization vectors toward different spaces.
