Astana as the Global Brand in the Heart of Eurasia

Abstract

This chapter looks into the official projection of Kazakhstan as the heart of Eurasia. It focuses on state rhetoric where the logic of governance has placed foreign policy at the epicenter of propagandist discourses seeking identity redefinition. The integration of nation building and foreign policy making has emerged as a critical narrative for regimes throughout the region where foreign policy evolved into a recurrent element of official propaganda. The external policies pursued by elites in these states intend to redefine public perceptions of the spatial and temporal dimensions of statehood to reinforce the domestic power of the incumbent regimes. The incorporation of foreign policy making within nation building, in these contexts, are however germane to regime building and post Soviet leaders assigned foreign policy a temporal dimension in which the states’ external outlooks acted as the link between the past and the present. In Kazakhstan, strategies of identity redefinition channelled through the spatialization and historicization of foreign policy were carried out through the progressive readjustment of the focus of foreign policy rhetoric. The progressive intensification of Kazakhstan’s Eurasianist rhetoric was accompanied by the acceleration and intensification of identity making where the leadership channelled a substantive portion of its identity shaping efforts through its Eurasianist discourse. The final section of the chapter moves on to an examination of Astana as a national brand. This is interesting as it shows how a materially constituted locus of power can become a socially constructed label or idea. The making of the city points to how a provincial town became a capital city and was elevated to global status.