Diverse Cultures Share a Commitment to Peace

The ties between Europe and Kazakhstan stemming from economic relationships are easy to understand given Kazakhstan’s vast natural and energy resources and rapid economic expansion. However, Kazakhstan also offers a unique bridge to Asian and Central Asian cultures and an example of divergent cultures living in harmony.

Kazakhstan is the most Westernized and culturally diverse of the five nations of Central Asia. It is also the most open society in the region with thousands of its people, especially students, travelling to and studying in Western Europe and elsewhere each year. And, only 20 years after proclaiming national independence from the Soviet Union, its traditional cultural elements, including music, film and history have begun to be more understood in the West.

But Kazakhstan and Europe also share a diversity of cultures and a desire for those ethnicities and religions to live in tolerance and harmony. Kazakhstan’s achievement of developing a tolerant multi-religious and multi-ethnic society of about 70 percent Muslim and 25 percent Christian among its 16 million people holds lessons for the nations of Western Europe.

“Studies of the Kazakh model of interethnic tolerance and social cohesion have been translated into 56 languages and distributed in all (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) OSCE countries. The book, Kazakhstan: An Integrated System of Unity and Harmony, has been published in many European languages and the issues of tolerance and public cohesion are widely discussed at international venues,” said Yeraly Tugzhanov, the deputy chairman and head of the Secretariat of the Assembly of the People of Kazakhstan (APK). “Kazakhstan’s model of interethnic tolerance and social cohesion has been presented before the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Vienna, the United Nations at its headquarters in New York and has been praised by foreign experts… Amid pessimistic predictions of a feared ‘clash of civilizations’, Kazakhstan presents the world with an example of organic cultural unity and dialogue.”

Kazakhstan is also working to share its culture with the West on a more individual basis. Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said in May that Kazakhstan was going to set up a new visa-free system for tourists from all countries in the 34-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This will cover most of the nations of the EU and all the major Western European states. The move is expected to greatly expand Western European tourism to the largest nation in Central Asia. The group’s 34 members include most EU countries, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

But the deepest and most enduring bonds between the peoples of Kazakhstan and Western Europe exist in their shared commitment to preserving and advancing their societies through peaceful and mutual cooperation. The European Union grew out of a commitment among its peoples to avoid the horrors of the two world wars that devastated their continent in the first half of the 20th century. As soon as Kazakhstan became independent, its president and people took the historical decision to renounce all nuclear weapons and work for a world free of the scourge of nuclear weapons.

This convergence of values between Kazakhstan and the nations of the EU exposes the falsehood of the myth that civilizations are doomed to clash, as the late American political writer Samuel Huntingdon claimed. On the contrary, the two regions share a commitment to international peace, cooperation, and the peaceful spreading of open societies and democratic institutions.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 855