Whether the West would promote regionalism for its own sake or as a check to Russian power is neither here nor there as far as I’m concerned, because the result is the same: assimilation of Central Asia into the current global system.

I’ll explain my views on the EU and USSR in a separate post. With regards to Marxist isolationism vs. Liberal debt-based integration, first, I should clarify that by “isolationism” I mean more like Russia’s historically been Winnie the Pooh to the Central Asian honey.

Second, your assessment that isolation or loans are just instruments of ideology is precisely my point, as well: Central Asia will be just as imperialized by the “democratic” Liberal West as it was under Marxist Russia.

In the same vein I would argue that there is a huge difference between the EU and the USSR for example. Your analogy would make dictatorship and republics the same process because it both cases initiative, resources and sovereignity are transferred to a central government. Under the USSR, Moscow could and did rule over the other countries and force a uniform ideology. The EU contains monarchies, parlimentary democracies, and republic, and no one country has power over another. No country is giving up anything it doesn’t agree to give up.

I have to say that I am totally lost when you compare ceasing outside intervention to demanding that loans be given. Giving loans comes with strings attached about how those loans be paid–that’s outside intervention. Also, I don’t really see that lack of outside intervention is a core belief of Marxism anymore than giving loans is a core belief of a liberal economic policy. Both are just instruments in the ideologies.

I would really like to see your ideas fleshed out in a longer piece.