Then there are some diplomatic affairs that Western newsrooms tend to label as “regional,” an elegant euphemism for “ignore.” One such gathering was taking place in Bishkek this week, featuring a delegation of Central Asian presidents, with Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, as the guest of honor. Perhaps the first part has been changed exponentially. Europe spent the better part of three decades treating Central Asia as an afterthought, a distant patchwork of “stans” worth a diplomatic visit every few years, rarely a strategic priority. That neglect has become harder to justify. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine forced Brussels to hunt for energy routes and trade corridors that bypass Moscow, the region once dismissed as peripheral has quietly become central to Europe’s calculations. Which is why today’s gathering in Bishkek, informal in name only, deserves more attention on this side of the continent than it is likely to get. Every recalibration in this part of Eurasia – who trades with whom, whose pipelines get built, whose ports matter- now ripples back to the old continent faster than most European capitals seem to realise.
The presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan will meet with Aliyev from 30 July to 1 August for a consultative meeting described as informal. There is nothing informal about anything at this level. The list of topics on the agenda – trade, energy, transport corridors, tourism, cultural relations, regional security, resembles a list for a bloc that acts increasingly like one, although not necessarily linked by an agreement. It is Azerbaijan’s participation in this meeting that is the giveaway. Baku is not a Central Asian capital. It lies more on the other side of the Caspian Sea, formally a Caucasus country, equally connected historically and culturally to Trkiye and Russia than Tashkent or Astana. But Azerbaijan has become so helpful to the region’s aspirations that its non-participation in any talk on Central Asian connectivity will be an oddity.
And the secret of how that happens lies in geography, patiently worked: Azerbaijan occupies the western endpoint of the Middle Corridor, the multimodal transportation corridor that is currently discussed in Brussels and Beijing with equal fervor as an option that would bypass Russian territory and provide an alternate route for transporting Chinese goods into Europe. Any country from Central Asia seeking diversification from reliance upon Russia’s rail transportation system requires a dependable partner on the opposite coast of the Caspian Sea. Azerbaijan has been working to position itself as this partner during the past ten years. The summit taking place this week is as much a logistical discussion disguised in diplomatic garb as anything else.
Kyrgyzstan – where the event is being held – offers the clearest illustration of what patient bilateral investment produces. The trade between Baku and Bishkek is limited; $77 million was traded last year, an insignificant amount compared to energy exports of Azerbaijan to Europe. However, it is not the only form of cooperation: there are 105 memoranda signed, a common development fund, a friendship park, schools in honor of famous personalities from Azerbaijan financed by Azerbaijan in Bishkek, and a school in Khidirli village, which used to be occupied by Azerbaijanis, financed by Kyrgyzstan. It is soft power implemented with remarkable consistency; it is the kind of soft power that yields results exactly in times like this one, when a Treaty on Allied Relations should be signed along with the summit.
However, it will be misleading to view all these developments from the purely Azerbaijani perspective. President Tokayev of Kazakhstan and President Mirziyoyev of Uzbekistan, alongside other heads of state attending the talks, have their own considerations for calling for the meeting, which stem from a mutual need to show both Russia and China that Central Asia is more than just a passageway through which two great powers fight over influence; Central Asia is a bloc that can establish its own rules. The participation of President Aliyev enables this objective to be achieved, since the presence of Azerbaijan provides something which the five Central Asian republics lack: a passage through the sea and pipelines into the Turkish and European markets. Given this fact, the event is occurring during a period of geopolitical turbulence, which has once again impacted the region. A drone strike on Kazakhstan’s oil exports has crystallized what years of geopolitical debate had not: the world’s largest landlocked country is facing a significant infrastructure problem.
None of this guarantees the alliance will hold, or that a signed treaty will translate into the kind of integrated market its architects imagine. The region’s leaders have a well-documented habit of signing declarations that outpace delivery. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. A decade ago, the idea that Baku would be treated as a near-member of a Central Asian club, rather than a Caucasus outlier with its own preoccupations in Karabakh and Armenia, would have seemed implausible. Today it is simply how the region does business.
As an aide memoire to Western policymakers who continue to fall back on the notion of “post-Soviet space” to refer to an area that needs to be taught how to behave by Moscow and seduced by Brussels, this week’s meeting in Bishkek should act as an eye-opener, once again. The periphery has been organising itself over the past few years, and so it wants to continue expanding.