ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, Eurasia and Central Asia in particular have been transformed into the world’s geostrategic cockpit. If the 11 September assault was wholly unforeseen, the same must be said for its consequences, whether on the part of the perpetrators or the world at large. None could suspect the turmoil into which Eurasia has been plunged, nor indeed the abrupt global realignment, which has become simultaneously its counterpart and energiser. All the major powers in Eurasia – Russia, China, Pakistan, India, Iran and Turkey – to which must now be added the immediate military presence of the United States in Central Asia and its current operational involvement in Afghanistan, are now evidently committed to the search for ‘stability’, however variously defined. It even comprises in extremis President Karimov’s formulation of ‘stability at any price’. Multiplicity of motives, the admixture of cooperation and competition, make it difficult to speak of the actions of a ‘Eurasian concert of powers’, desirable though that might be. Reality presents a different face, rather one of a great disparity of parties and a multiplicity of agendas, of alliances compounded of political cosmetics and bonded only by temporary convenience, the glue of bribery, organised crime, the maintenance of authoritarianism, in the absence of any durable ‘socio-political basis’.
