Nation Building and Ethnicity in the Foreign Policies of the New Central Asian States

When independence came to the republics of Central Asia—a freedom more forced on them than acquired or won—the five new countries of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan began their existence not only with no experience in the formation and conduct of foreign policy, but even more fundamentally, with almost no way of defining their national self-interests, for the simple reason that these territorial divisions were drawn to impede the exercise of statehood rather than encourage it.