Since late August, seven of the 15 republics of the former Soviet Union celebrated the 35th anniversary of the declaration of their independence. Some marked the occasion in spectacular fashion, such as Uzbekistan and others with more sedate celebrations. But all sought to display and embrace the national identities they have developed since attaining sovereignty.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and the bipolar world of the time came to an end. In the post-Cold War period, widely described as a period of U.S. unipolarity, when there was no power that could seriously challenge U.S. supremacy, the new republics worked hard to strengthen their national identities.
The rise of China, and Russia’s resurgence under President Vladimir Putin, changed the balance of power in the late 2000s.
Today, the dominant narrative – not only in countries of the Global South in general and in the post-Soviet space in particular but increasingly in Western discourse, too – is that the world is shifting toward a different system, a multipolar one.
This multipolarity is on display across the post-Soviet space. The Baltic states, for example, became NATO members in the early 2000s. In Eastern Europe, while Belarus became a close ally of Russia, Ukraine hedged and then inched toward the West. In Russian discourse, Ukraine’s desire to join NATO was a threat to Moscow’s security. Other states in the South Caucasus and Central Asia continue to hedge among the various poles in the emerging multipolar world.
What does security look like for the current post-Soviet states? Has the world indeed become multipolar for these states or has it been multipolar for them all along? There is a plethora of alliances, blocs, and various other groups in the world today, many which border or reach into the post-Soviet space: From the Western-led NATO, to BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization, each built around the perceived national interests of states, their history and power politics in the region. More recently, one could argue, such groups have formed around religious identity, such as the Mecca Pact involving Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye. The world is transitioning toward an international system with several centers of power. Whether we call it a multipolar world or something else, the emergence of different poles seems clear.
In the post-Soviet space, over the past three decades, these poles have largely been centered around Russia, China, and the United States. Chinese expansion in the region has reached unprecedented levels in particular. China has replaced Russia as the main trading partner of most of the Central Asian states. While Russia has pursued an alternative Eurasian security order in the post-Soviet space, China’s economic power and the scale of its economic engagement have made it increasingly dominant through its geoeconomic programs, including the Belt and Road Initiative and other credit and assistance schemes.
Until Russia’s war in Ukraine, security and international relations scholars were broadly discussing and researching how interstate war had declined since the Second World War, with more casualties coming from civil wars and domestic unrest.
In my security and international relations classes, we mostly focused on internal conflicts, conflicts involving non-state actors, and terrorism. This thinking changed in 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, followed by Israel’s war in Gaza in 2023 and, more recently, the U.S. war in Iran. None of these active wars appears to be ending soon. Multiple conflicts and ongoing Cold War-like rivalries indicate that there are several powers fighting for what they believe is their sphere of influence.
While countries in the Global South have been talking about multipolarity for some time, it was only after U.S. President Donald Trump’s shift towards a more isolationist foreign policy for the U.S., as well as his demands for NATO members to look after their own security, that the topic of multiple poles and spheres of influence has became more serious. This was reinforced by the Canadian prime minister’s reference to the importance of middle powers working together in the new world, presented in a speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. The transition toward multiple spheres of influence is accompanied by a shift toward nationalist and isolationist policies.
More recently, Türkiye has emerged as a new pole for the Central Asian states. Four Central Asian states share a common Turkic identity. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan ,and Türkiye are members of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), which brings these countries together around their Turkic identity, while Turkmenistan is an observer. It is perhaps the first organization that unites these states based on their local Turkic languages and culture rather than the prior regional lingua franca, Russian.
It is hard to say if we are now in a fully multipolar world or whether it has always been so for the states in the post-Soviet space. Nationalist tendencies are on the rise in many societies today, for example the rise of Reform U.K. in the United Kingdom, the recent victory of Germany’s far-right AfD, and the growing influence of One Nation in Australia. In this changing global system, we see not only an ideological dimension, reflected in the Western and non-Western divide, but also an identity-driven dimension, as illustrated by the recent Mecca Pact and the OTS. For many states in Central Asia, it remains important to maximize their national interests while coexisting with multiple poles competing for influence in the region – something that has always been the case.
