Clan and politics in Uzbekistan

This thesis explores the phenomenon of clan-based regional solidarity groups and their role in the political life of the Republic of Uzbekistan. It argues that the weak solidarity of the Uzbek ethnie is at root a function of historical socio-cultural and geographical patterns that were conducive to segmented identities, primordial ties, and deep regional cleavages that still characterize Uzbekistan today. Because of their noncollaborative nature, clan-based regional solidarity groupings vitiate attempts to foster the sort of national synergy expected of contemporary states. The cleavages they spawn prevent the aggregation of consensus and undermine a sense of citizenship in an overarching political order. Attempts by modernizing elites to transcend these primordial ties and to forge an Uzbek national identity run the risk of provoking fierce resistance and regional power struggles that will further fragment, if not destroy, the already fragile state. It is doubtful that Lenin's policy of laying the foundations for unity through equalization would have overcome these historic patterns. It is certain that Stalin's policy undercut any progress by perpetuating and accentuating pre-existing clan/regional sub-ethnic divisions and power struggles among the republic's leadership groups, leaving the masses undisturbed to carry on their traditional ways. The Brezhnev era merely extended the Stalinist pattern. Gorbachev's attempt, in the final years of the Soviet Union, to overcome the Stalinist legacy was rejected jointly by Uzbek masses and elites. When independence was thrust upon an unwilling and unready Uzbekistan in 1991, President Islam Karimov embarked on his own attempt at nation-building through a fusionist approach in which all regions were to be equitably represented in government institutions. Yet in practice, Karimov too has been drawn into selecting key personnel on the basis of clan/regional identities, in a manner that may undermine the conditions necessary for creating a new national identity. At the broadest level, this thesis reaches the grim conclusion that the persistence of clan/regional dissonances diminish the Republic of Uzbekistan's chances of becoming an integrated nation-state and hamper its successful transition to democracy.