Kazakhstan, Oh Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, after the recent democratic election, has become a one-party state. President Nazarbayev, the former Kazakh Communist Party secretary, swept the country's parliament. The election, like all the previous Kazakh elections, was decried as deeply flawed by international observers. At first blush, Nazarbayev appears to be just another third world dictator who likes to legitimize himself with elections.

Except that it's quite likely that at this point he would win a fair election quite roundly. If he is a despot, he may be one of those rare enlightened sorts, the exact type that a developing country needs. He was a long time Communist official in Kazakhstan, and was very reluctant to take the reigns of an independent state. His was the last of the 15 SSR's to withdraw from the union, and even then it never even went to the trouble of getting its own international dialing code (they still use Russia's "+7"). Upon independence, Nazarbayev led the country on a quite radical course of privatization, following the instructions of Western multilateral institutions. He did use his power to limit political dissent, but unlike in the case of most totalitarian regimes, that dissent was largely coming from anti-reform, anti-West elements.

After the first few years of his reform programs, which he likened to "surgery without anesthetics," the country has experienced 10 years of double-digit economic growth, which has created a happy an influential middle class, quite beholden to Nazarbayev for their prosperity. The opposition today still exists, but pre-election polls had it drawing only 20% of the vote (in the actual election, it drew less than 7%, below the minimum required for parliamentary representation).

This accomplishment is particularly impressive when set alongside the examples of his neighbors: he has managed to leverage the Caspian energy wealth without turning the country into a stifling, stagnant police petro-state such as Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan. He has maintained domestic bliss in a country even more diverse than Tajikistan (only slightly over half of Kazakhstan is Kazakh), which suffered a debilitating civil war for much of the last decade. It seems that the price of having a president-for-life,and the Billions of Dollars he and his family have squirreled away, is actually quite resonable in light of the benefits he has brought.

Now, at the age of 67, Nazarbayev is starting to look spread his legacy beyond the Kazakh borders. There has been talk of a Central Asian union, and Nazarbayev has taken to travelling to his neighbors and giving their leaders pearls of advice, such as to undergo economic reforms before political ones. Relations among the 5 stans have been, in the past, bad to miserable, which has lead to debilitating transaction costs for the land-locked region. Any kind of closer integration would be a very good thing for the region, although it's hard to see it happening any time soon. Uzbekistan, which in Soviet days was the regional oligarch, and still has half of the region's population, has a historical disdain for their Kazakh cousins. Indeed, the very word "Kazakh" means "Adventurer" or "Outlaw" in the Uzbek dialect.