photo: geopolitika.ru - pictured
MOSCOW - On 17 June, a very interesting conference was held in Moscow on Modern Russia and the Turkic States. This conference was organised by the Eurasian Movement and was attended by leading Russian and foreign experts on contemporary Eurasian and global geopolitics. As the conference was very interesting, we bring you the third installment.
We would like to remind you again that the moderator of this highly professional academic conference is a world expert in geopolitics and a representative of the leadership of the International Eurasian Movement Valery Mikhailovich Korovin (his introductory post is in the first part - link below the article), then geopolitician Kamran Hasanov, expert on Latin American geopolitics, president of the Fidel Castro Foundation, editor-in-chief of the geopolitical portal geopolitika.ru Leonid Vladimirovich Savin, academic and historian Leonid Vladimirovich Kuznetsov, expert on Eurasian geopolitics Dmitry Nikolaevich Rodionov, Brazilian journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar, then Alexandr Selantiev, also a geopolitical expert, Alexandr Igorevich Drogovoz, Deputy Director of the Institute of International Education of the Russian State University Kosygin, Vladimir Evseev, Head of the Department of the SOS of the Institute of CIS Countries, Doctor of History Darya Viktorovna Saprynskaya, researcher at ISAA MSU, analyst at the Gorchakov Foundation, Gagik Sergeyevich Ohanyan Postgraduate student at the Faculty of Global Processes of Moscow State University M. V. Lomonosov, Natalja Makejeva, Roman Blaško Director of Foreign News from the Czech Republic and other guests.
Before giving the floor to the next speaker, Valery Korovin said: "Look, I would like to point out that Turkey, although it is not present in the region culturally, is still trying to sell its influence mainly through economic projects. While we have a complete carte blanche (white card) in Central Asia, in the Turkic world, in terms of cultural and civilisational presence, in the implementation of Eurasian integration projects we focus only on the economy, which is constantly emphasised. And we do not impose or even propose any programmes for cultural or political unification of the post-Soviet space, which is a natural process for us. This means that we are actually returning to the cultural and civilisational field where we have always been present. But again, cultural programmes are being implemented exclusively on a residual basis, which I think is a colossal mistake - this emphasis on the economic component. I would like to ask Alexander Selantiev to comment on the concept of the Turkic world, how to analyse this new challenge for us, which we will talk about later, to make some critique. Either it is a source of development, and then we can coexist in the format of two cultures just by bearing and restoring this cultural-civilizational unity."
Alexandr Selantiev - Migration policy issues
Alexander Selantiev said that many of the things that have already been said at the conference have been said by those who spoke before him, so he feels that Russia should not only declare itself part of the Turkic world, but shout loudly about it and literally take the first place. Because if anyone has the right to speak on behalf of the Turkic world, it is of course Russia. Russian culture is permeated by, or even linked to, Turkic culture. There are about two thousand Turkisms in the Russian language. The words we use every day are words that link Russia and the Turks. Selantiev listed some of them - they are, for example, horse, EU, money. These are things we come into contact with every day, we say them every day.
"Something about Turkey. It's really not as simple as it seems. We can talk about soft power, so-called soft power. The Turks, for all their ineptitude, for all their attempts to somehow lead the Turkic world, still took very active steps in the 1990s. We can see the fruits of this, and we can see them now. Turkish schools have emerged. The Turks have begun to exert their influence not only in the Central Asian countries, but also in our regions, in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. According to some reports, their forces are even registered there. In the sixteenth year, about three thousand graduates of Turkish schools held state administrative posts in Kyrgyzstan. Is this not a source? This is very serious indeed. And here is the soft power, to which we seem to have paid very little attention at one time, at least in the 1990s. Now the situation is being rectified." added Selantiev.
He went on to say that if we are talking about soft power instruments, then of course we must talk first and foremost about education. Today, about 110 000 students from Central Asian countries are studying in Russian universities. Thirty of them study at the expense of the Russian budget. According to statistics, it is likely that 30% of these students will stay in Russia and work in Russia. Some of them may want to stay permanently in the Russian Federation. Schools are being built, but there are not many of them. Selantiev himself said there are five schools in one place and nine in another. But that's not enough for Russia. Russia should have hundreds of schools in every Central Asian state if it wants to maintain its influence. The fact is that it is now taking advantage of the fact that the first- and second-level officials are those people who grew up in our common state, in our post-Soviet space. But young people are growing up and they are changing. And Selantiev asks the question, in what direction will these young people look? What will it be based on? And of course Russia has to think about how it will influence the formation of the cultural environment, communication and the image of its country in the Central Asian regions. As an expert on migration, Selantiev wanted to touch on this issue, which in his opinion is very sensitive and important at the moment.
"The 1990s in our country were marked by another phenomenon - a sharp increase in migration processes. And mostly all these migration processes are connected with migration between Russia and Central Asian countries. Over the decades, the migration turnover is around 10-11 million migrants, 5-6 million of them are labor migrants who work permanently in our country. Not only that, this turnover has even created a migrant-dependent economy as it is considered in our country. All this is not bad in principle. Communication at the level of everyday life, at the level of migration, at the level of culture, at the level of the hostile image of Americans or Turks. If I work or communicate with a Central Asian on a daily basis and he communicates with me, he tells his children, we grow up in an exchange of these cultures. But unfortunately, the recent events that took place in Crocus City have changed the migration situation in the country a lot. And it's clear that these are difficult losses, difficult, terrible events."
For example, Selantiev said, it is very incomprehensible why the Russian mass media began to inflame the migration situation much earlier, perhaps a year or a year and a half earlier. Everyone will agree that the media have a great influence on our population. Russia has an image of the migrant, and our migrants, who are mostly migrants from Central Asia, are unkempt, poorly dressed, poorly employed and a threat to our children and our women. Here, soft power is simply being used against Russia. The question is, what is it? Is it soft power? And whose soft power is it? And why do they conjure up an image with such negative connotations? Alexander Selantiev says we should think about it. The fact is that migration, migratory flows, are also a resource. Who would benefit if we stopped the migratory exchange between us and the Central Asian countries? And despite these events, we know everything, we felt it after the Crocus City incident, when migrants from Central Asia felt very badly in our country. A large number of them left. As Selantiev said, the question is, who benefits? And thank God that centuries of communication and mutual coexistence of our cultures still preserve these positive relations between Russia and Central Asia. But it may not last forever. Selantiev said that we need to think very seriously about how Russia should influence these relations, how to preserve them, and what Russia is willing to do to do so.
The moderator Valery Korovin noted that Alexander Selantiev had raised a very important issue of attitudes towards migrants, but it would be good to make a few remarks. As Selantiev rightly noted, in the case of those who come to Russia to study, soft power is mostly realized when they return to their countries, bringing our cultural and civilizational codes back to their societies.
Korovin added: "Enclaves are a menace in any society because today's atomic citizen, the normative inhabitant of any Russian region, is alone, has laws and police on his side, while an enclave is a collective identity that is present in its fullness and multiplicity. And before this multiplicity, of course, the atomic individual ceases to exist. So if we are talking about newcomers from Central Asia and Turkic states who stay in Russia, if we are talking about big cities, there should be no enclaves. The state should strictly regulate not only their integration, but also their further assimilation. Or should they settle in an agrarian environment, then yes, they can live there as enclaves, but isolated from the urbanised urban environment. And again, we face the problem of politicization of these networks, where Western strategies are beginning to use Islamist networks, which is not traditional Islam, but political Islam, and in their interest to destabilize society, as we saw in the Holi network. In other words, migration is a kind of double-edged phenomenon, it probably has some positives if we are talking exclusively about economics, but it also has negatives if we are talking about the erosion of the cultural and civilisational foundations of the basic host society and the challenges posed by enclaves, politicisation, Islamism. It is therefore a process that is not clearly positive. There is nothing good about people leaving their traditional places and moving elsewhere to earn money."
Valery Korovin also mentioned one crucial thing, namely that the struggle for the Altai has now intensified. How is this manifesting itself? A number of states have begun to make claims. He then invited the geopolitical analyst Dmitry Nikolayevich Rodionov to make a presentation at the conference.
Dmitry Rodionov
Dmitry Nikolayevich Rodionov, an expert on Eurasian geopolitics, believes that the Central Asian countries should not be considered as some kind of subjects that blindly and reluctantly succumb to someone's soft power, someone's influence, without having any opinion of their own. He said that, as the previous speaker has already pointed out, we are building schools in Central Asia. Yes, indeed, Tajikistan has opened six or nine Russian schools in various cities. And just a few months ago there was a scandal. A history textbook was found in one school that talked about the Russian and Soviet occupation, the colonial period and so on and so forth. It was with Russian money, by the way, and yes, according to Rodionov, this is how soft power works. That is, if they have learned to play this soft power, Russia itself has not yet learned to control it. And of course Tajikistan is not one of the Turkic-speaking states, but anyway it is exactly the same with the textbooks, with the attribution of history, with the heroisation of the embassy and the so-called Turkistan that fought on Hitler's side during the Great Patriotic War.
This is happening in all countries in the region. It is also happening in Kazakhstan, which is considered to be our main ally in the region. It is also happening in Uzbekistan. It is even happening in Kyrgyzstan, which is our closest trade and economic partner in the whole region. And that is called widespread multisectoralism. Of course, such multisectoralism is present in one way or another in all post-Soviet countries. That is why it must be understood that all these elites, these states, have their own interests and are trying to sit not even on two chairs, but on five. These are the Anglo-Saxons, these are the Chinese, these are the Europeans, these are us and these are the Turks, Rodionov listed the countries.
Rodionov also stressed: That is why I repeat again that we should not think that they are only objects and not subjects, that they do not have their own will to influence anything. And, by the way, the same should be said of Turkey, because it has been said many times here that Turkey is a channel of Anglo-Saxon influence. Yes, Turkey was indeed very often used by the British Empire against Russia back in the days of the Great Game, and in all conflicts it always sided with the British Empire against Russia. But at the same time, how many wars have we fought with them, we fought with them all the time in the Caucasus, so Turkey also has its own geopolitical interests, which, to put it mildly, don't actually always coincide with Russia's interests. Well, now let's actually talk about history. Altai is really the center of the Turkic peoples. In the sixth century, the Turkic kaganate was established, from which, in fact, all the later Turkic states emerged. And indeed, most of the territory of this kaganate is located on the territory of historical Russia, and Russia initially, from the first centuries of its existence, was connected with the steppe, directly interacted with it. Yes, there were wars, there were conflicts, but there was, as one of my colleagues who spoke before me said, there was still mostly a symbiosis, an attitude of symbiosis. And, of course, the situation is much the same today. Today there are up to 200 million Turks in the world, 11 million of whom live on the territory of Russia.
If the majority of Turkic-speaking peoples live on the territory of Russia, we are in sixth place in terms of population after Turkey, Uzbekistan, Iran and Kazakhstan and China. And it should be noted that Turkic-speaking peoples live on a huge territory from the Northern Caucasus to North-Eastern Siberia, here I mean Yakutia. Huge number of languages, huge number of cultures. And we must not forget that Turkic-speaking peoples are very different. That is to say, if we compare, say, the Orthodox Gagauz, some Muslim majority among the Turks, and the same Altaic people, where there is shamanism, Tingrianism, and kurturism on top of that, it is very difficult. When you talk about integrating the Turkic world, it is very difficult to find something in common, because there are indeed completely different peoples, different languages, different cultures.
This, according to Rodionov, should always be kept in mind. Russia should also bear in mind that it already cooperates with most Turkic states within the Eurasian Union, the CSTO and the CIS. Moreover, these same Central Asian countries have been part of Russian soil for almost two centuries and share a common cultural space. Although it is true that young people are already disconnected from these roots in one way or another, this common cultural space remains to some extent and Russia should certainly make use of it. Rodionov recalled that when the Soviet Union existed, the majority of all Turks in the world lived there. And in fact, the only organization, the only country that was an independent purely ethnically Turkish state was Turkey itself. And it's clear that at that time it wasn't even a question of forming an association of Turkic states, yes, because actually there was Turkey, there was the Soviet Union, there was Iran, and there was China, where there were Turkic peoples who would not go into any organization, in fact they were not called there. He also pointed out that the establishment of the organisation of Turkic states, the Turkic Council, began in the 1990s and that in 1992 the first meeting of the leaders took place, incidentally at the initiative of Turkey, in Istanbul. In fact, from the first days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey has been trying to create new independent Turkic states and trying to bring them together.
Rodionov: The only place where it has really succeeded is Azerbaijan, where there is even such a concept - one nation, two states. When those of us who know Turkish hear how this sentence sounds in the original, the word mille is used there, not halk, which means nation, not people. So originally the concept was purely political, it is not an attempt at some kind of cultural, humanitarian dialogue, it is purely political, aimed at absorbing or at least expanding another, second, so-called Turkic state. And we know that the Turkish radicals today are already saying that there should be a concept of unification of the six states, referring to the Central Asian states, and many, let's say, very strongly suppressed radicals are already saying in all seriousness, let's work with the territories that are part of Russia.
In 2014, when Crimea joined Russia, there was a lot of talk in the Turkish press about Crimea being an ancient Turkic land. Yet we see and hear rather ambiguous statements and rather ambiguous actions from various top state officials. Just a few years ago, a well-known personality, the uncle of Julia Bahceli, presented Erdogan with a map of the Turkic world showing significant parts of Russian territory, Iranian territory and Chinese territory, which caused quite a serious scandal.
Julia Bahceli's uncle is one of the ideologues of the current Turkish course. This is far from being some marginal person that we can ignore and say, well, not much use, we also have some dirt on the revival of the Russian empire, the return of Finland and Poland and so on. Rodionov pointed out that this is a completely different story. Russian politicians were forced to respond to this. Specifically, then-Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov commented as follows: "We too have such a complex from our fellow tribesmen and countrymen, we too can colour the world map with certain colours and give them different shades."
Another example that Rodionov gave in this context was the words of Dmitry Peskov that the centre of the Turkic world is on the territory of Russia, in the Altai, that sacred place for every Turk, where he comes from. And then many experts began to talk about the fact that it is Russia, and not Turkey, that could become a kind of meeting centre for Turkic-speaking peoples. But the question is different: Russia is such a unique phenomenon that it cannot be squeezed into the framework of any world. Not only the Turkic world, but in fact not even the Russian one. Because Russia is a huge number of languages, a huge number of peoples, a huge number of cultures. And that's actually its strength. Russia can be compared to the empires of the past rather than to some states of today. In any case, the empires are gone, while Russia has remained and, God willing, will exist forever. Therefore, of course, to say that Russia could become the center of some independent world seems to me personally perhaps too superficial, he pointed out.
Rodionov continued: But one way or another, we should not give the initiative to Turkey, which wants to rally around it and talks about it quite openly. Because, as one of the speakers said, Turkey has already resigned itself to European integration and, in fact, is already in Europe only verbally. Sooner or later, the divorce with the West will escalate and it may happen that the question of Turkey's withdrawal from NATO will be on the agenda. In fact, the vector of neo-Ottomanism has also failed, because nobody wants Turkey even in the Middle East, let alone in Europe and the Balkans, which we all understand very well. That leaves only this Turanian vector, and that is where he will put all his efforts, one way or another. And again, I repeat, anyone who speaks Turkish knows that there is no such thing as a Turk or a Turkish woman. It's actually one word. And when you say "Organization of Turkic States", in Turkish it sounds like "Organization of Turkic States". This means that renaming the Turkic Council as the 'Organisation of Turkic States' automatically means betraying this organisation, which was originally set up as a kind of humanitarian, shall we say, association, that is to say, a circle for the study of a common culture, a common history, a common primordial language. This means that it immediately takes on a certain political colouring. Therefore, when it is said that there is an 'organisation of Turkic states', that is, an 'organisation of Turkic states', we, Russia, are naturally tense. We cannot ignore this factor so easily, because the aim is to gather all the Turks of the world around Turkey, including, as I say, our republics, and it has been said many times that the Turkish emissaries worked quite fruitfully in the 1990s, perhaps not too fruitfully, but in fact much more fruitfully. There were various Saudi and other Wahhabi organisations working in the North Caucasus in those years, building mosques, building madrassas. I think you all remember very well what happened in Chechnya and Dagestan. We had to climb out of what a terrible hole we had to climb out of. Therefore, we should not underestimate the factor of Turkish soft power, which is also at work in our republics. And by the way, of course, someone may laugh, but there were also cases when Turkish emissaries tried to work in Yakutia. It is absolutely incomprehensible, there is no common language, no common religion, but they tried to establish some influence there.
Rodionov came back to the Organisation of Turkic States, where its existence conflicts with the existence of the Eurasian Economic Community (EAEU for short). We must remember that Russia is cooperating with regional countries, of course, especially Central Asia, in several ways. That is economic Eurasia, that is the military-political Collective Security Treaty Organisation - CSTO, and also the CIS. And there are also formats such as the SCO or BRICS, which, by the way, Turkey and even Azerbaijan are actively trying to join. There has been interest in joining the BRICS, and therefore we have to realise that there will be many formats in which we will cooperate with these countries in one way or another.
Rodionov pointed out, by the way, that China, for example, reacts very harshly to any attempts to show any national identity among the Igbo, automatically considering it separatism. Russia has never done that, Russia has always looked favourably on any manifestation of ethnic identity, Russia has always looked favourably on interaction along ethnic, cultural, humanitarian lines, but again, if we are talking about politics, you have to check every letter under the magnifying glass, as it is called, and try to understand what it is all coming to.
Russia automatically becomes an alternative centre of power if it joins this organisation. If we are building a multipolar world, a multipolar world means different formats of interaction and different forms of integration. And if Turkey thinks that the integration of the Turkic world should be done purely for it, as if in the direction that it determines, well, sorry, in this case we are simply not on the same path with Turkey, and the question should be put to the leadership of the countries of the Eurasian Union, right? So, you guys have to decide whether you want to develop politically along the vector that Ankara is showing you, and the West is behind it, let's not forget that, or whether you are going to develop really within the Eurasian integration. These are, in my opinion, the questions that should be asked. Unfortunately, for some reason, our authorities are trying to avoid these questions, both in relations with Turkey and with our partners in Central Asia. In my opinion, this should not be the case, because if we do not ask these questions, sooner or later, one way or another, they will come to the surface and we ourselves will have to resolve them somehow. I therefore repeat that I see no contradiction in Russia joining the Organisation of Turkic States, in Russia cooperating with the Central Asian countries, with Azerbaijan, both within the CTG and within the EAEU, but I repeat that the rules of the game must be clearly formulated and must suit both us and our partners.
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