Aspectos Externos.

The state of emergency is the state of exception that according to Carl Schmidt and Georgio Agamben is the defining characteristic of sovereign power. In other words, the ability to declare and sustain a state of emergency is the main feature of a sovereign. In this study a pattern has emerged that suggests that the periods of state creation in Central Asia were accompanied by states of emergency. The state of emergency is meant to be an exception from the rule, a temporary suspension of normal politics and the constitutional order. However, the practice of declaring and sustaining a state of emergency as the routine mode of government is not uncommon.

Hosni Mubarak ruled over Egypt for thirty years under the declaration of a state of emergency, which has lasted even longer (since the 1967 war with Israel). The Emergency Law was introduced as a temporary measure to deal with a crisis in the country, but has since been institutionalised with the People’s Assembly extending it every two to three years. One of the main demands of participants of the popular protests on the Tahrir square that culminated in resignation of President Mubarak on February 11 was an end to the emergency rule. The state of Israel has been in a constant state of emergency since the War of Independence in 1948. The Israeli Knesset extends the state of emergency on a yearly basis. Similarly, Syria has been ruled under a state of emergency since the Baathist coup of 1963. Authoritarian post-colonial states seem to function under a permanent state of emergency.

However, it is not only governments in the Middle Eastern states that use states of emergency to expand the powers of the executive and limit civil liberties and human rights of their subjects. The United States also has been in a continuous limited state of emergency for over thirty years declared by several presidents for various reasons. All states of emergency were declared as a response to the perceived threats to national security. The most prolonged one started with the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 but was extended due to the perceived terrorist threat to the peace process in the Middle East, and again after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. While the government and the constitution on the whole have not been suspended, the executive branch’s powers have been substantially expanded and civil liberties curtailed as a result. There is nothing more permanent than the temporary, it seems.

The October revolution in tsarist Russia and the subsequent political upheaval in Turkestan, Bukhara and Khiva, which culminated in the national territorial delimitation of 1924-29 and creation of new states, was the period of emergency politics. The period of the dictatorship of proletariat and civil war was the time when many competing groups contested the right to speak on behalf of ‘the people’. This process was constitutive of the new identities that became the basis for creation and continuing existence of state-like entities for groups designated in the process of delimitation as ‘Uzbeks’ and ‘Tajiks’. These designations were not markers of some primordial essential identities, seeking to find self-determination through Soviet nationalities’ policies. Rather, Uzbekness and Tajikness emerged as the result of the attempt to determine who the relevant ‘people’ were under the complex conditions of emergency.

The second period of state creation that was precipitated by the union-wide movement demanding greater ‘sovereignty’ from the Centre, also culminated in an attempted coup d’etat by a group of communist hardliners calling themselves the ‘State Emergency Committee’ [Gosudarsvennyĭ kommitet po chrezvychaĭnomu polozheniĭu] who tried to prevent the devolution of power to the peripheries and possible shrinking or complete dissolution of the USSR. Ironically, the August 1991 coup only accelerated the dissolution. For Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, this has meant a somewhat unexpected promotion from the status of a union republic to the recognition as independent sovereign states. Out of the multitude of voices speaking on behalf of Tajik and Uzbek people during the perestroika period emerged the authoritative discourse of the Ideology of State Independence in Uzbekistan and the Ideology of National Unity in Tajikistan. Rather than the concrete issues of language and minority rights, environmental issues of the Aral Sea desiccation and political economy problem of cotton monoculture, the governments have successfully depoliticised the dominant discourse of authority by presenting the government as the sole guarantors of the implementation of the goals of the state unproblematically defined as ‘stability’, ‘development’, and ‘peace’.

Historiographic work of the state-controlled academic institutions was tasked with finding the roots of present statehood in the examples of past state-formations in the

territory of the current state borders (in the case of Uzbekistan) or created by peoples that are imagined as direct genetic ancestors of today’s nation (Tajikistan). The dissenting voices within this government-academic discourse are discredited as lacking in authority and basic expertise (the right to speak on the matter) since the issues of ethno-genesis and historiography of statehood are considered the issued that state- authorised scholars only are qualified to comment on. However, the debates regarding the interpretations of history both by state-sponsored and independent analysis, spill into the internet fora and such websites as CentrAsia.ru, Ferghana.ru, and many others become the media for the expression of the competing narratives of selves and others for Central Asians.

This debate is not parochial as international scholars join the discussion and the new academic and ideological idioms are adopted by the Central Asian scholars. Sovietological and constructivist vocabularies have found their way into the debate albeit, it in hybrid forms that seek to discredit the other by pointing out the ‘artificiality’ and newness of their identity and corresponding statehood, while insisting on own identity’s and statehood’s indigenous and ancient status. The ‘Sovietological’ interpretation of the delimitation process as dictated by the divide et emperalogic is called upon by local scholars to make revisionist arguments regarding the proper boundaries along which the political entities’ should had been drawn.

The methodology of ‘discursive encounter’ has proved to be reflective of the evolution and subtle changes in discourse that occurs in reaction to the previous discursive move by the interlocutor(s). It is this process of gradual adjustment of discourse that is reflected in mitigating/intensification of arguments, change in predicates, substitution of referential signifiers and implicit assumption of continuous identity of people as a person through different historical periods, that allows Möbian chains of signifiers to be completed thus concealing the absence of the master-signified. In this study I systematically deconstructed each of the component elements within the chain of signifiers constituting the ideas of state in post-Soviet Central Asian states of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Chapters One to Five reveal destabilising effects that designations of ‘Tajik’ and ‘Uzbek’ have on one another, which is reflected in historiographic practices and the perceptions regarding what constitutes the rightful national ‘homeland’. Tajik

nationalism can be described as ‘external-territory-seeking’, while Uzbekistan adheres to the ‘sovereignty-protecting’ state model within Lowel W. Barrington’s classification of post-colonial nationalisms’ types (Barrington 2006: 16-25). However, there do not exist objectively existing coherent groups that inevitably seek self-determination within the territory of a concrete ‘homeland’. There are, however, individual people that imagine themselves to be a part of a collective person, that come to impersonate and embody ‘the nation’, ‘the state’, or ‘the people’.

Each of the signs in the diagram above is itself unstable: its meaning based on binary pairs of conceptual opposites which necessarily exclude the empirical and conceptual ambiguity and that defer their meaning to the next signifier within the chain. Thus the encounter with the master signifier is constantly discursively delayed, thereby hiding the absence or profound ambiguity of a master signifier.

The research project presented in this dissertation of course has its limitations. Although the aim is to present non-Western accounts of ideas on sovereignty, statehood and independence more sympathetically, to draw the picture of the ‘view from inside’, this study still in large part suffers from the exclusion of ‘subaltern voices’. The elite discourse lent itself to the analysis within the scope of this dissertation due to the higher degree of textual articulation. Further research that looks into popular perceptions of the issues discussed in this dissertation would be needed, that through ethnographic fieldwork, collection of folklore, personal oral histories and group narratives explores the issues of how state is made to work from day to day in Central Asia.