Kosovo's case - consequences and implications

In a recent visit to Albania, President Bush received a much needed warm welcome by local officials, as well as by the local population. The reason was very simple: in contradiction with international law, Mr. Bush promised Albanians that Kosovo would be recognized as an independent country in a reasonable time period, thus rewarding the region that has the highest level of the organized crime in Europe. He looked very satisfied knowing that there exists a single European nation that actually likes him.

On the other side, the Russian president Vladimir Putin is very satisfied that the current political situation in Serbia corresponds to Russian interests in that part of Europe. Not long ago, the current prime minister of Serbia Vojislav Kostunica declared himself a big follower of the Western ideas in politics. Unfortunately, he did not take into account that he would sacrifice most of his former principles just to stay in power. From making a political union with former Milosevic and Arkan allies to the recent change of the party's status (Democratic Party of Serbia, not to be confused with Democratic Party in Serbia) which explicitly says that the party is against joining the NATO alliance in the future.

Taking into account the strongly entrenched views between the U.S. and Kosovo on one side and the Russian Federation and Serbia on the other, it seams that the (unified?) view of the European Union will have a decisive impact on the future solution of the breakaway region. But again, will it be there a unified EU view regarding Kosovo's future status? It is hard to confirm, particularly since there are many regions in Europe that have similar problems (including a recent widening chasm of distrust between Belgium's two main language communities). The long-run worst case scenario would be a possible recognition of Kosovo's independence without the resolution of the U.N. Security Council, which is unfortunately the most likely scenario considering the current situation.

What impact will it have on world politics? Will other problematic regions in the world take Kosovo's case as a prime example for their ultimate political goals (just to mention the cases of Abhkazia and Taiwan)? I would not be able to give a conclusive answer right now because there is, I believe, currently none.

In the case of the Balkan peninsula, there would be a long term animosity, not only between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, but also between Bosnia (why the Republic of Srpska should not have the same rights as Kosovo?) and Serbia; not to mention a most likely scenario of Serb's rebellion in the northern part of Kosovo (where Serbs make up the majority of the population) against a unilateral declaration of Kosovo's independence. Depending on the general political relations between the Russian Federation and the U.S., Serbia actually might go more quickly into political and economic reforms than it would otherwise do with the region that is economically underdeveloped and has two million insubordinate people.

Yet, by accepting this fact, Serbia would have to give up its highly valued national pride which plays a huge role among the majority of Serbs.

Pre-emption is the only way….says the EU?

In an article entitled, “Brussels Rules OK,” in the September 20th issue of The Economist, readers were told that the European Union has become the global trendsetter in economic regulations regarding everything from trade practices to quality to ethics. The author goes on to suggest that the EU’s “precautionary principle” (which refers to the ways in which EU regulations preempt the behavior, production, and distribution of many global goods), has been more successful than its counterpart, the American style, cost-benefit analysis, (which relies more heavily on market forces and post-production lawsuits) at attracting a global audience for regulatory behavior.

Those supporting its merits value its ability to test potentially harmful products before they hit the marketplace. Supporters see it as the best way to ensure the safety of both the business community and consumers. They argue that by forcing the business community into compliance with harsher environmental and safety issues, the business community as a whole will gain a competitive edge (with the exception of Microsoft, recently ruled as an illegal monopoly in Europe) and consumers will have access to better products.

Those arguing against such “preemption” see things differently. Take for example an article appearing in Stratfor, entitled, “Precautionary Policy: Leaving the Precautionary Principle Behind.” Bart Mongoven argues that for all of its “apparent” benefits and common sense, the precautionary principle is not being employed as a policy prescription, but one that is shrouded in protectionism, stifles innovation, and wastes millions of dollars/euros.

“In early attempts to apply the principle to regulatory decision-making the tendency was to argue that an activity or product should not be allowed until it had been proven not to cause harm. The problem was that despite centuries of careful thought and study, proving a negative remains impossible, so applying this strict standard was never a credible approach. And parsing the issue—for instance, defining whether a practice or substance gave rise to “concerns”—proved too vague for the precautionary principle to withstand scrutiny from legislators and regulators” (Stratfor, May 25, 2006).

So why has the world embraced this European policy; a policy that seems to be utterly counterproductive? Well, it appears that these protectionist policies (let’s face it, that’s what the precautionary policy is) have given a great deal of authority back to the state; a power that many critics have claimed it had been losing for quite some time. Also, the EU has proven to be more powerful than the mighty Microsoft, the face of the American corporation; finding Gates and Co. guilty of illegally dominating European competition and stifling homegrown talent.

In short, many countries/regional organizations around the world (especially those in the throes of industrialization) applaud the measures created in Brussels because it keeps the money in state hands and allows home-grown businesses the opportunity to compete against more powerful multinational corporations. Is this the solution to woes of globalization? I am not too convinced that it is. What I am convinced of is that it will allow Europe to perform two necessary short term tasks: 1.) maintain its position as the standard bearer for global ethics and 2.) keep the United States and its business interests at arms length.

Why Bush and Ahmadinejad Deserve Each Other

Today, I watched Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appearance on 60 Minutes with awe. In an interview with Scott Pelley, the Iranian president refused to provide a single straightforward answer to any of the questions posed to him (at least the ones aired on Sunday night’s broadcast). When faced with such queries as “Can you tell me that you are not sending to weapons to Iraq?” and “Will you pledge not to test a nuclear weapon?,” Ahmadinejad purposefully refused to make himself understood. He responded to “yes” or “no” questions with elaborate—even floral—musings about human nature, world history, et cetera. (He was similarly vague, evasive, and obtuse at Columbia University on Monday).

As the interview progressed, I realized how similar Ahmadinejad and US President George W. Bush are in their political styles and personal habits. Both craft elaborate parallel universes where they are defenders of freedom, peace, and morality. Both refuse to answer questions they do not like. Such refusals similarly take the form of fatuous counter-questions which provide neither context nor content to important issues. (My favorite is when Bush responds to reporters’ questions with “The question I thought you were going ask me was…” and then he answers that question). Both engage in mind-numbing discursive manipulation to frame issues and attack their critics.

Both are so convinced of their own righteousness that fail to see that their respective worlds are falling down around them. Their faith blinds them to problems of their own making. Both men lack any sort of intellectual curiosity (this is born out by their refusal to deal with difficult issues directly and their proclivities towards instant answers without even a millisecond for reflection). Both laugh and smile at inappropriate times, even when talking about death and destruction. Both hide behind affected piety (Ahmadinejad curiously affirmed "I am a Muslim. I cannot tell a lie." in the interview) and accuse the other of apostasy (Ahmadinejad vociferously denied that Bush was a Christian because of his policies in Iraq). When things get tough, they blame others because they have God on their side so obviously they have done nothing wrong.

Do these two deserve each other? Most definitely. But my question is, what have we, the American people, and the Iranians done to deserve them?

Let's Not Forget to Not Remember

A new movie (set for release in August 2008) that chronicles the failed assassination attempt of Adolf Hitler by a German military officer has faced harsh criticism in the court of German public opinion. Valkyrie, starring Hollywood leading man and scientology couch dancer, Tom Cruise, follows the last days of Colonial Claus von Stauffenberg and his plan to destroy the Third Reich from within; an act that demonstrated rather boldly the fact that not all Germans living under Hitler were arm-band wearing, swastika-waving, Nazis. Yet apparently in contemporary Germany, the past, even when it is portrayed heroically, is still very much a part of the guilty present.

In this age of globalization, humanity tends to think about tomorrow much more than today, let alone sixty years ago. But in Germany, and in particular Berlin, it seems that the past is omnipresent. Take for example the Holocaust Museum. Not only is its content designed to serve as a constant reminder of the final solution, but so too is its location. Sitting across the street from the Bundestag, the Holocaust Museum was intentionally placed there to serve as a physical reminder to each and every member of the German political establishment.

Yet memories and memorials and are one thing, what about the Cruise film? Well, it turns out that Mr. Cruise has apparently broken two of the most sacred social and political taboos in Germany: a deadly cocktail of Nazi symbolism and scientology. In Germany, the law stipulates that both the Church of Scientology and any representation of Nazi symbolism are against the fundamental features of democracy and are therefore, against the law. In fact, the German criminal code is clear to indicate that any representation of Nazi symbolism whether it’s in the form of a political party, a swastika, or a verbal or written denial of the Holocaust can carry a prison sentence of up to three years.

So what has Cruise done? Well, actually nothing; that is by American standards, a standard that will judge Tom Cruise by his shortcomings as an actor. To Germans however, their troubled past, complete with swastikas and armbands will be brought to life for the world to see by a member of the Church of L. Ron Hubbard. For Mr. Cruise’s sake, I hope he has left enough room on the mother-ship.

Austria Doesn’t Fear Bruno…Why It Should

Sacha Baron Cohen is on the verge of unleashing his third motion picture Frankenstein: the Nazi-fetishizing Austrian fashionista Bruno. While the Cambridge-educated comedian’s other creations—Ali G and Borat—enraged the black identity police and the Kazakh government respectively, Bruno does not even register on Vienna’s radar. When confronted with a question about Baron Cohen’s next movie project, an Austrian Foreign Ministry official responded, “Bruno who?”

Despite being the birthplace of Hitler, the Austrians seem to have moved on from worrying about historical stereotypes, especially in light of media attention surrounding the government’s recent imprisonment of the British historian and Holocaust-denier David Irving. While Viennese diplomats may not be taking much notice of the faux reporter who argues that the fashion-illiterati should be "put on trains and shipped off tocamps," the same cannot be said for the country’s tourism industry. According to one report:

"Panic is now spreading among Austria’s tourism marketers, who fear that the gay fashionista, Bruno, will trigger images of a country brimful of Nazis instead of the advertised mountains, blue lakes and pretty girls in Dirndl folk costumes. If Borat’s success is indicative, they are justifiably terrified. Bruno’s air-headed adoration of Adolf Hitler could well remind prospective visitors that Austria still has a number of unresolved issues with its Nazi past, not to mention an active and rather successful rightist party."

Perhaps the tour marketers understand the mass-mediated global environment a bit better than Viennese policymakers. In today’s world of over-stimulated, under-educated, culturally-confused Western youth, your country is only as good its last pop-cult reference. Austrians wrongly assume that the average American 20-year old knows much more about their country than they know about Kazakhstan. I would be willing to bet that they would wrong at least half of the time. I am not saying that American youth are brimming with facts about Nauryz, kumiss, Kashagan field, the Nazarbayev clan, etc., but that they know very little about Austria. If you polled one on the street, I think you would be lucky to pry a single viable factoid from their brain. Given such unhappy realities, the country’s governmental image-makers would be wise not to ignore Baron Cohen.

Kazakhstan’s diplomatic legions made the best of a bad situation when Borat shoved their country into the spotlight. They worked hard to counter Baron Cohen because they knew that he had more power than they did among certain sections of the general public. Over time, they tamed their out-of-control national brand. The Austrians have a false sense of confidence about the resonance and content of their country’s image. This comes from being the descendent of one of Europe’s largest empires, Austria’s special role in the Cold War as a neutral meeting ground for East and West, and most recently from EU insulation. Austria is situated completely within Europe—mentally and physically. Of course Brits, Slovaks, and Swedes know something about Austria because the trains run through there. But what about the Americans?

It’s time to wake up and smell the Starbucks. If Vienna’s Scheißendummführeren do not counter Bruno, there will be a generation of American youths that think all Austrians are gay, fascistoid Schantineux.

Local Policy, Global Cities

Local controversies around particular proposals from Mayor Bloomberg's new long-term plan for New York City have emerged recently, ranging from congestion pricing to zoning, and others. These proposals would entail immediate local repercussions if enacted and, therefore, should obviously be of concern to residents and other local stakeholders. However, what I think has been missing from the debate is the following: how does New York's long-term development affects its standing as a significant node in the network of global cities? Should the global economy be concerned about the specifics of New York's development?

Particular constellations of cultural, transportation, educational, and other infrastructures in New York attract and sustain the global components within the city that connect directly to global flows; examples of those global components being the finance industry, corporate headquarters, and such. In other words, many of the individuals who have chosen to live in New York in order to work in Wall Street do so in large part because of the cultural vibrancy, excellent transit options, and related amenities the city offers, and, in the same token, many of the institutions headquartered in Wall Street have done so in large part because of the communications and transportation infrastructures, and the cadre of highly educated individuals concentrated in the city. In recognition of this point, Hong Kong's chief executive said recently of New York and London:

"It’s not only merchant bankers and the Financial Times. You need art, you need the West End, you need Wimbledon. They all need the Yankee Stadium and Broadway – that’s all in the make-up of a good city.”

The policy decisions that made possible these city amenities, like "the Yankee Stadium and Broadway," were taken at the local level, yet their implications have outgrown the local and national scale to become enmeshed in a global scale. The growing significance in global affairs of cities has entailed the increasing globalization of urban policy, as urban policy has global repercussions and global trends influence the direction of urban policy. So, debates surrounding congestion pricing in Lower Manhattan should matter not only to New Yorkers, but to all concerned about the global economy.

Cognoscenti of the world, procreate

Idiocracy, a little-known American movie from 2006, depicts a frightening dystopia: in the year 2505, we are all idiots. Generation after generation, educated, intelligent, and career-oriented couples continue to have less kids, if any at all, and later in life. Meanwhile their less enlightened peers happily outbreed them. The cumulative effect of this particular kind of dysgenics is a dumbing-down of human society that has less to do with the evils of television than with demographics and the gradual deterioration of our gene pool. Heady subject for a silly comedy.

Idiocracy speaks to the well-attested fact that poorer, less educated people are having larger progenies, while the rich and/or educated choose career or leisure in detriment of the reproduction of the species. This demographic time bomb is old news for many Lebanese, Israelis, or Serbs in their respective backyards, but has planetary consequences. Most of the billions of people to be added to the total of human population in the coming years will be born in the developing world. In the developed world, immigrant families gift their ungrateful hosts with both cheap labor and breeders. Most young Westerners today are empty-nesters that either can´t or don´t want to procreate to ensure that their kin doesn´t die out. In a recent Pew Research Center survey in the United States, the category "having children" ranked second to last among nine conditions for a succesful and happy marriage, taking a whooping 24-point-drop from 1990. "Sharing household chores", "adequate income", "good housing", "shared tastes", and "shared religious beliefs" were all deemed more important than children ("Agreement on politics" was the only one that scored worse than children, some forty points away from similar categories, such as shared tastes or shared religious beliefs. It spooks me that arguments about the removal of your toddler´s foreskin, which movie should win the Oscars, or which curtains look good in the living room, could be more important than the politics of your significant other. But that´s a whole other post).

Demographics and genes are also the subject of one of the most original books published this year. In Farewell to Alms, economist historian Gregory Clarks argues that the cultural and genetic transmission of capitalist values among the British population over centuries allowed it to escape the Malthusian trap and jumpstart the Industrial Revolution that moved some societies from poverty and underpopulation to relative affluence and drastic population growth. With a controversial thesis, Clark will now feature prominently in the academic debate over the rise of the West, which ranges from David Landes´emphasis on cultural values to Jared Diamond´s emphasis on environmental happenstance. And its title, a modified version of Hemingway´s famous novel, surely aims at putting it at the center of the development debate as well -more aid, says Sachs, less aid, says Easterly. To me at least, the most thought-provoking part is that these capitalist values (nonviolence, literacy, and a willingness to save and work long hours) spread and prevail due to a change in the nature of human population. In England, during the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution, the upper classes bred more effectively than the lower classes, whose infants died in massive numbers. This resulted in downward social mobility, as the progeny of the rich and educated, moving away from privilege and idleness, gradually took over their occupations. As Clark puts it, "the modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages." The Samurai in Japan or the Qing in China, however, were strikingly unfertile.

If you are reading this and a torrent of objections to Clark streams through your thoughts, don´t rush to reply this post with your comments. First, find a mate. Be fruitful. Multiply.

French Politics as Unusual

That crushing sound you hear is the death of French politics as usual. On the left and the right, the old guard is making a mockery of themselves as the enfants terribles Nicholas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal remake the French political landscape.

Jacques Chirac—now thankfully ensconced in obscurity—did what he could to hand the Left a victory earlier this year, but despite his poor governance and attempts to undermine his own party (the ridiculously named Union for a Popular Movement or UPM), the people of France gave the son of a Hungarian aristocrat a chance. It seems, at face value, to have been the right choice.

Sarkozy, who is not afraid of hard work (or telling anybody he’s working hard), may come across to the uncareful observer as both Bush-like and liking Bush. While there may be something to the latter, the former analogy is far off the mark. While George W. Bush spent his first few months in office tapping cronies for key jobs before retiring to the ranch to cut brush, Sarkozy boldly built a cabinet of the old and the young from the left and the right. In his government, familiar faces like Bernard Kouchner (Foreign Minister), the left-wing founder of Medicins sans Frontieres, have been joined by an unfamiliar, but astoundingly adept, coterie of political operators, most notably Rachida Dati (Justice Minister). He has reorganized ministries, begun a reform process, plastered over the divisiveness of the presidential election, brought the Bulgarian nurses home, and hammered out a new vision for the country in one short summer. The only valid criticism leveled against him by the socialists is that he “steals our best people” (Kouchner, Jack Lang, etc.).

Despite this success he has brought the right, his arch-nemesis and UPM rival Dominique de Villepin still continues to heap derision on Sarkozy even as he faces a damaging inquiry his own role in a smear campaign against Sarkozy. De Villepin is a product of the old French right with its grandes ecoles, recondite networks, and disdain for the average citizen of the republic. Sarkozy—though seemingly an ideologue—has proven himself beyond ideology, a French Putin if you will, less the secret police background. Of course, he makes the old guard nervous. He has no use for them. He hit the ground running and did not pause to make sure he was scratching the right backs.

This brings us to the Left. Segolene Royal has intimated that the Socialist Party (PS) leadership undermined her campaign. She understates the matter. They wanted her to lose to show that new is bad. But she handled herself wonderfully against the obviously better situated Sarkozy. I believe she emerged from defeat with a mandate for change—not for France, but for the PS. Her post-election split with longtime companion Francoise Hollande, who is currently the head of the PS, was both appropriate and overdue. He had slowly transmogrified into her primary political stumbling block—a frenemy of the most dangerous sort.

He and the other “elephants” (as the old leadership of the PS are known) are loathe to tinker with the party, fearing that such re-engineering will delay their return to power. What they fail to grasp is that continuing to propagate 1970s-style socialism will prevent them ever returning to power (unless they are pitted directly against Le Pen’s forces of darkness). In Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere, the socialists have adapted to the realities of globalization and the fact that Big Business is not the Devil. However, France’s socialist party has spun itself warm but suffocating cocoon—and when Royal made some missteps early in the campaign (countenancing the statocide of Israel, supporting an independent Quebec, etc.) she allowed herself to get trapped in that cocoon. But judging from her recent invective against the party’s leadership, she has learned her lesson. When you see her speak now you realize that Royal mad as hell and she’s not going to take it anymore. I wish her luck, but reform—like revolution—is a messy business. I hope she has the staying power to see her new project through. With Sarkozy dazzling the masses and the media, she might just have the cover she needs to get the job done.

Now if only we in America could hope for such an embarrassment of riches as the French enjoyed in the most recent presidential elections.

New PM for Russia, But Does It Matter?

An unexpected shake-up within the Russian government has the wonks all atwitter. The media have prematurely crowned a man whose name they don't even utter as the next Russian president. But does it really matter?

Today, Vladimir Putin accepted the resignation of the Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov and nominated the hitherto low-profile Leningrader Victor Zubkov to fill the spot. It seems like 1999 all over again when Putin himself emerged from the shadows to become the heir-apparent to Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically-elected president of the second Russian republic. However, something is different here. Yeltsin was ill, unpopular, tired, and beaten. Putin is hale (judo-chop!), adored (in the words of Borat, "Like Stalin!"), invigorated (by America's Iraqi morass), and indefatigable (maybe because he's a teetotaler). In other words, he's not going anywhere. Yes, yes--we all know Putin is stepping down at the end of his second term to make way for a new Russian president--ostensibly Zubkov. However, Putin only promised to step down from the presidency. Unlike Mr. Bush who is already salivating about "replenishing the ol' coffers" after leaving office and whose administration is on auto-pilot, Putin is stepping up the political stakes and bringing his "A-game."

As Hans and Franz used to say--or was it Gov. Schwarzenegger--"hear me now and listen to me later:" Putin is going to Ukrainianize the Russian political system at the last minute by making the head of government more powerful than the head of state. However, unlike Ukraine where a Westernizing president was hamstrung by a pro-Russian PM, Putin will find nothing by pliant (if not supine) acquiescence to his electoral legerdemain. Using that tried-and-true Russian system known as "government-by-telephone," Putin will emasculate the office of the presidency in his final hours in office by transferring power to the office of Prime Minister. But before that, he will then utilize Russia's spectral political party structure to ensure his party-of-the-month (name suggestions for the upcoming election: Russia Rocks and You Suck! and Putin or Die) wins election thus enabling him to be appointed PM at his leisure. Voila, the master of political prestidigitation (see my chapter in George Kassimeris' Playing Politics with Terrorism) will have done it again. All legal and keeping with letter if not spirit of his previous declarations.

Now the bigger picture. Is this good or bad for Russia? Definitely good. Russians can expect better healthcare, a more reliable economic system, and certainly more respect internationally than was the case during the chaotic Yeltsin era. Is it good for the rest of us? If you are Polish, Latvian, or Georgian, then a chill is probably going through your spine right now. But what about the Chinese, Indians, Western Europeans, and Americans? The forecast is mixed.

As a PM with more power than Blair could have ever dreamed, Putin will undoubtedly continue to make Russia stronger. A strong Russia is not only desirable, it is a must for the security of Eurasia. But there is a price to pay, and we've already seen the preview: petro-politics where the losers freeze to death; American college students unable to leave Russia because they bought some Soviet baubles from a babushka; long-range Russian bomber flights in the Atlantic and Pacific; the "father of all bombs" tested publicly yesterday; etc.

With these tidbits in mind, we all need to start preparing ourselves for Putin version 2.o.

Kazakhs Eyeing the Latin Alphabet

Last week, EurasiaNet reported that Kazakhstan is officially investigating the cost of switching from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. The openness with which this question is being addressed tells us much about global culture, decolonization, Russian influence in its "near abroad," and international political economy.

While there have long been advocates amongst the Kazakhs for a change to the Latin alphabet, it only recently that the country's powerful nigh omnipotent president Nursultan Nazarbayev has officially back such a move. The change would lead to the use of two alphabets in the country where Russian-speakers still outnumber those whose primary language is the Turkic tongue Kazakh. The Azeris, Uzbeks, and Turkmen--all Turkic cousins of the Kazakhs--rapidly adopted the Roman alphabet after independence from the Soviet Union. However, the Kazakh government was reticent to do so. On the one hand, remaining within the Cyrillic orthographic space aided relations with its neighbor to the north (Russia). The neutrality-loving Turkmen, the Americanophile Azerbaijani, and the anti-Yeltsinite Uzbek governments all happily distanced themselves from the Russian linguistic, cultural, and political space in the wake of the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991. Language politics was simply a cultural extension of a larger set of policies. We saw this boldly underscored as Uzbekistan's paranoid president Islam Karimov backed a return to Russian-language education after being cold-shouldered by the Americans in the wake of his bloody crackdown on political protest in Andijon a couple of years ago.

Closer to home, keeping Cyrillic enabled Russophones (Russian, Ukrainian, German, Uzbek, Chechens, Koreans, Uyghurs, and others) to more easily adapt to the new "state language," i.e., Kazakh. Keeping a lid on the brain drain of Russian technocrats, educators, scientists, and businesspeople was a major factor in preserving both Russian's role a "language of inter-ethnic communication" and a Cyrillicized form of Kazakh. After a decade of Russian emigration, the trend has stopped. Many Russian emigrants from Kazakhstan have actually decided to return to the country realizing they have better opportunities as a "national minority" (although they loathe this term) under the Kazakhs than as an "immigrant" in Russia (where they are treated no better than other economic migrants from the old southern tier of the Soviet Union.

This is not the first time an alphabet change has been influenced by international politics. Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) literally outlawed the adapted Arabic script that Ottoman Turkish had long employed. While it took a generation of surreptitious Arabic scribblers to die off for his vision to be fulfilled, the decision to embrace the Roman alphabet proved seminal. Turkey started a slow gravitational shift towards the Latin world, and now sits on the doorway of Europe (both physically, legally, and mentally). Within Soviet space, script choices have long been shaping politics. After the Bolshevik revolution, many of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia were forced to adopt a Latin script (and abandon their Arabic writing systems), but fearing the spread of pan-Turkism from Anatolia, Stalin quickly ordered these language to adopt Cyrillic creating a generation of schizophrenic writers and readers. The Baltic states--Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--existed outside this orthographic madness. After their incorporation into the USSR after WWII, the Balts preserved their alphabets which made learning other European languages much easier. The Belorussians, Ukrainians, Tajiks, and Kyrgyz (along with the Kazakhs and others) were locked into a Cyrillic-informed (and policed) mindset which was a subset of the Soviet world (with the exception of anti-Soviet Yugoslavia, albeit still a communist country).

In today's globalized world, the Kazakhs along with Russian Kazakhstanis (i.e., ethnic Russian citizens of Kazakhstan) are extremely cognizant of the power of the Internet, the English language, and neo-liberal norms of international business. Crafting a a Latinized form of Kazakh will undoubtedly add to the Kazakh people ability to better interface with the outside world, but especially in developing their nation into a vibrant information economy (buoyed by wisely invested petro-dollars). Kazakhs are enthusiastic about their nation resuming an important place in the global chain of commerce. A "new" Silk Road is indeed possible, but it will take openness and engagement on the part of the Kazakhstanis (Kazakh, Russian, and others) to accomplish this. The Latin alphabet is part of this transition. And unlike the Cyrillic, it lacks the overtones of imperialism which characterize the usage of so many writing systems around the globe, simply because the Kazakhs are choosing it of their own free will. [Note: The Kazakhs have no deeply emotional ties to their current script--it is a slightly altered version of the Russian alphabet which ill-fits the manifold Turkic vowels of Kazakhs. Prior to the adoption of a Cyrillicized standard Kazakh written language, Kazakh educated elites worked in the Russian, Persian, or Arabic languages. This makes any change much easier to swallow.]

Now to the bigger picture. Both Russia and Kazakhstan see their state coffers filling up with oil money. This enables Almaty to easily bankroll the expensive switch to Latin lettering, while simultaneously endowing Russia with the confidence to bid farewell to Kazakhstan as a Cyrillic-only space (besides, the Kazakh elite continue speaking Russian at home even if they ponitificate in Kazakh in public while their kids watch Russian MTV and read Russian glossy lad's mags or fashion rags). A few years ago, the Kremlin might have balked at such a move taking it as a sign of Western intrusion, but today Putin no longer worries about American meddling in his backyard. Washington is so distracted by Iraq that the country cannot even manage affairs in its own backyard, i.e., Latin America.

To the Kazakhs, I say "Welcome." To the Russians, I say "We'll see you in about 25 years."