Vladimir Putin (R) greets Nursultan Nazarbayev in Moscow, Russia. (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)
It looks like Kazakhstan’s leader is about to make U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s life a little easier. President Nursultan Nazarbayev has proposed changing his country’s name to Kazakh Eli, dropping the “stan” that links it to its Central Asian neighbors (and, apparently, throws off foreign dignitaries like Kerry, who notably once referred to “Kyrzakhstan” in reference to neighboring Kyrgyzstan). With Nazarbayev himself putting forward the proposal, there is actually a good chance that the name-change might come to pass. The 73-year-old ruler, who has been in power for more than two decades, is no stranger in this arena, having already changed and renamed Kazakhstan’s capital city.
On the surface, the change to “Kazakh Eli” looks like a good way to distinguish Kazakhstan in a region full of country names with “stan” suffixes. Indeed, Nazarbayev acknowledges as much in a statement released by his office on Friday:
In our country’s name, there is this ‘stan’ ending which other Central Asian nations have as well. But, for instance, foreigners show interest in Mongolia, whose population is just two million people, but whose name lacks the ‘stan’ ending.
Unlike its neighbors, Kazakhstan boasts a robust, oil-rich economy which has grown steadily over the past two decades to become the largest in the post-Soviet region.
via eurasiapolicy.com
The effort to continue to attract foreign investment might be aided through a dissociation from the poverty-mired Central Asian region (not to mention from the instability brought to mind by Afghanistan and Pakistan). There are already plenty of indications that Kazakhstan has undertaken other efforts to overhaul its image on the international stage — even hiring former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as a public image consultant — in service of its economic goals.
However, the move likely has as much to do with Nazarbayev’s regional political strategy as it does with his government’s international (mainly Western-oriented) image make-over. The proposed “Eli” suffix, would revise the country’s name to mean “Nation of the Kazakhs,” as opposed to the current “Land of the Kazakhs.” The more explicitly nationalistic meaning of the country’s name points to Nazarbayev’s push away from Kazakhstan’s Soviet legacy through an emphasis on ethnocentrism. Moscow’s nascent “Eurasian Union” push — which would draw Kazakhstan along with Belarus into a neo-Soviet regional alliance with Russia — is likely a growing concern for Nazarbayev, who has quietly expressed reservations at the scale of the partnership.
As close as its alliance with Russia may be, Kazakhstan’s robust efforts to attract investment from the West show that it is unlikely to be interested in being boxed in by Russia either economically or politically. Laying the groundwork for its pivot away from its Soviet legacy could be a smart move for Nazarbayev. Though given fellow former soviet satellite Ukraine’s struggles with this very same issue at the moment, it’s also one loaded with political consequences.
