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  • How to Suborn Great Powers
  • James Sherr (bio)
Alexander Cooley's Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-19-992982-5 (hardcover)

Even if it does nothing else, Alexander Cooley's latest book, Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia, will remind us that we are well into the revisionist phase of understanding what did—and more importantly, did not—change in the countries of the former Soviet Union after the end of the Cold War. Let us hope that the mood is contagious. The World Bank, the European Commission, the U.S. Congress, and the "better" business [End Page 164] consultancies are still well-provisioned with individuals promoting reform with the rectitude of English Whigs promoting enlightenment.

Some ten years ago, Ivan Krastev reflected on the consequences of pretending that "reform has nothing to do with cultures."1 As Cooley demonstrates, patrimonialism is not only a culture but a tenacious and adaptable system. The tsarist dispensation was patrimonial as a matter of principle. The Soviet state, between purges and liquidations, was obliged to compromise with local (and often tribal) variants of patrimonialism, and the post-Soviet states of Central Asia are patrimonial to the core. The "who-whom" in these countries is not conservatives versus reformers but networks of patrons and clients that knit society together, as well as divide it. The norms of this world are organic rather than rational, informal rather than public; and its public institutions for the most part are either decorative or captive. Rent-seeking is pervasive, and resources and power are interchangeable. What Vladislav Inozemtsev stated about Russia applies in Central Asia with a vengeance: "what Westerners would call corruption is not the scourge of the system, but the basic principle of its normal functioning."2

As the title implies, Great Games, Local Rules is largely the story of how external powers—very great ones, indeed—have had to accept local rules as the price of presence and access. In the case of Russia, many will find this surprising. As the author notes, "above all, Moscow has sought regional primacy" and "of all the great powers, it easily possesses the most extensive array of regional ties" (p. 51). Even if one excludes the intra-elite and institutional linkages that survived the Soviet dissolution, the Russian Federation has an unequalled array of soft-power resources, notably the remittances provided by the region's migrants (which account for 49% of Tajikistan's entire GDP). It is also the only country with a plausible military counter to the region's destabilization. Just as much as its Soviet predecessor (or any liberal state), contemporary Russia is the bearer of rationalist, integrationist agendas (recently, the Eurasian Union). What Cooley manages to show is that, despite these ambitions and assets, Russia's agendas have been adulterated, parried, or bent to serve local interests.

Not surprisingly, it is the United States, with its metronomic litany of reforms and rights-driven causes, that has suffered the greatest rebuffs (notably after the Andijan episode of 2005). Yet, in ways that are both edifying and dispiriting, Washington has adapted to realities on the ground, maintaining [End Page 165] and in some ways expanding the military presence it secured in the wake of September 11. The picture the book presents of the political prerogatives assumed by the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command—utterly disorienting to any product of the British military system—is a story in itself. But, according to Cooley, the "erosion of U.S. credibility... as an exporter of democratic values... and accompanying loss of prestige remains the greatest casualty of Washington's engagement with the Central Asian regimes" (p. 164). He finds it "doubtful that this steady decline in overall U.S. regional influence will be reversed" in the wake of the Afghanistan withdrawal (p. 164).

Thus far, it is China that has accumulated the biggest prizes. Beijing has broken the Russian energy monopsony, whereby Russia once could buy Turkmenistan's gas for derisory sums and sell it on the European market at oil-indexed prices. Unlike the European Union, which...

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