ABSTRACT
Central Asia is a diverse region in terms of its history, culture, ethnography, and geography, especially when Kazakhstan is included as is customary among Western experts. Despite this fine tuning of the nationalist issue, all the states took steps as early as 1989—two years before the coup—to give ethnic majorities a special status. All the leaders have continued to move in a nationalist direction to broaden their base of legitimacy, but at rates determined mostly by internal political alignments. The death of the Soviet Union posed immediate challenges for the leaders of these new states, who ranged from Eastern-style potentates in Turkmenistan and unvarnished Communist Party conservatives in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, to Gorbachev-style party reformers in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Nationalism, or perhaps ethnic tension to be more precise, can become a serious destabilizing factor throughout Central Asia as events since 1989 have underscored. Nationalist and inter-ethnic conflict are also likely to delay the development of the region's substantial energy resources.
