ABSTRACT
Our study has been concerned not with the role of Inner Asia in world politics, but with the ways in which the heritages of institutions and values of this region have been adapted in the twentieth century to the challenges of modernity. Our conclusions about these processes, and how they compare with those in other regions of the world, have been presented in chapter 14. Yet Inner Asia should not be seen simply as a laboratory of political, economic, and social processes. It is also a frontier of Soviet and other West European, Chinese, Japanese, and American security interests. The contemporary competition for influence in Inner Asia is as much a competition of policies of modernization as it is a competition of political and military power.
