Kazakhstan: from “half past eight” to “ten to nine”

By Vestnik Kavkaza

Last autumn the position of the foreign minister of Kazakhstan was taken by Erlan Idrisov who used to be the ambassador in the USA. In late January he undertook a voyage to the European Union countries, but ahead of this he visited Moscow and told Russian experts about priorities of Kazakhstan’s internal and foreign policy and Russian-Kazakh relations.

Kazakhstan has established itself as a state, the head of the Foreign Ministry believes. Our launch environment was unique because we were the most vulnerable in institutional, personnel, and geopolitical spheres. The huge territory, demographic weakness, a small amount of people, great dispersion in the population structure, long boundaries, economic underdevelopment, the weak structure of economy, underdeveloped institutes. When the Soviet Union collapsed, many foreign and our own observers thought that Kazakhstan would fail to establish. Today we can see that despite these predictions, Kazakhstan has taken a firm line for building its future. Due to targeted policy which consisted of creating the idea, transforming it into a concept, choosing the team for its realization, finding financial, economic, and human resources, developing a scheme of the team work, Kazakhstan established itself as a state. This stage took all 1990s. We underwent difficulties of ruining the Soviet concept when we had to exit the ruble zone and so on. You all know it quite well. As the result we understood that we should develop our own strategic plan.
 
The strategic plan of development became The Strategy 2030. It included seven key strategic directions which touched on essential things. First is political sovereignty and all external factors connected with it. Second is the political reform and establishing a stable society. Third is deep economic reforms. Fourth is a healthy way of life, i.e. the social segment, education, health care system, and so on. Fifth is energy, resources, gaining financial resources for providing a stable movement. Sixth is our transit potential of logistics development. And the seventh is good government. These are seven directions which formed The Strategy 2030 by our President in 1997.

Young educated people were involved, and we also relied on foreign experience. We treated it selectively. We travelled, watched, listened to, and absorbed. As the result we developed the concept 2030 which is popularly called “half-to-nine.” It was working for 15 years.

Even foreign observers cannot deny that our indexes are good – the economic growth, the social growth, the institutional growth, the personnel growth. We realize that it is not a reason for wishful thinking. We understand that global problems wait for us in the future.

The head of our state proposes a new initiative – the new vision 2050. “Ten minutes to nine.” I think people will call it so. We are giving a creative appraisal and analyzing what we have done for 15 years of the strategy.

Independence and statehood
We have registered our boundaries at this period. For such a geographically big state as Kazakhstan it is a great goal to register boundaries legally. Moreover, we have great neighbors – China, Russia, the Central Asian states. The length of our boundaries is more than 400 thousand km. Considering our human resources, it was difficult to fulfill this task either politically or physically. But we have seriously advanced in the problem of demarcation.

As for the economic sphere, look at the indexes of the World Bank, the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, AMF, and other banks, independent private ranking agencies “Fitch,” “Moodies,” and so on. Everybody says that Kazakhstan has made great strides. We found ourselves in the middle, in the good middle.

Healthy way of life
Education, health care system, the social sphere - a lot of work was made here too. The pension reform is working. Some countries take it as a model. There are different views on pension funds, but the fact is that the reform was established, it was formed institutionally.

Education was under a special focus of our President. Our whole educational system, especially higher education, was transformed into a competitive system. Primary school and high school are obligatory. There should be no illiterate people in Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan’s educational ranking is 99.7%, which is one of highest in the world.

Energy
We tripled oil production during the years of independence. At the moment we belong to the group of stably exporting states. Export of our energy sphere is 1.7 million barrels per day We are the leaders of uranium producers in the world. Kazakhstan is ready for shifting to “green” economy.

Infrastructure
We have built thousands and dozens of thousands of automobile roads. We have extended the net of railways and complete correcting mistakes in the transport structures which we inherited from the Soviet Union. We have serious plans for construction of railways. By 2015 we will finish circling Kazakhstan by railways and by automobile roads. The heart of these plans is the project West China-West Europe through Russia. It will be a powerful and great transcontinental project which will be beneficial for China, Kazakhstan, and Russia.

“The year 2050 points to a change of generations, so that the country will not be lost in the stream of history and continue to move confidently on to the mid-century. But partnership with external forces is also an important component. The main forces are our immediate neighbors. Russia has a special place. But naturally we will not be limited to this geography, we are open to the entire world. Our multi-vector approach should work. We will build the closest relations with Russia. We will construct intense relations with China. We will develop close relations with our neighbors in Central Asia. We will develop serious relations with the EU, the USA, with India, Japan, Singapore, etc. We will develop a network of favorable relations so that our internal efforts will be most effective,” Idrisov stated.

Answering to the question by the editor-in-chief of Vestnik Kavkaza Alexei Vlasov on making Russian-Kazakh expert societies’ cooperation be oriented at realization of the Eurasian integration project, Idrisov said: “Difference of opinions is very important from the point of view of growth, the more you communicate in this atmosphere, the more productive it is, because a difference of opinions stimulates growth. This is my philosophical message. The Russian political expert field is vast, so one cannot complain about the lack of opinions. We can ask how professional, how expert, how independent they are. Only a truly independent opinion is valuable. As for bringing together  expert efforts, this is a new angle. In our integrational efforts we pay little attention to this question. This is a big loss. We should consider a new direction of integration, how to involve independent non-state powers in the process of integration. I think it can only be useful if we will be getting some contribution from independent experts, we can bring together economists, political scientists, sociologists, because integration is an encompassing process. We say that our space will live in new conditions and on new principles – economic efficiency, political profitability, united by common interests in the future. And, obviously, it cannot be solved only at state level.”