Central Asia is becoming a region on its own terms

For much of the post-Soviet period, Central Asia was treated less as a political region than as five neighbouring states sharing geography, infrastructure and a difficult Soviet inheritance. Regional initiatives came and went, border disputes persisted, and outside powers often appeared more capable of creating “Central Asia plus” formats than the Central Asian states were of building a durable framework of their own.

That description is increasingly out of date.

Since 2018, the presidents of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have met regularly in the Consultative Meeting of the Heads of State of Central Asia. The format was deliberately modest. It was not designed as a union, a bloc or a supranational organization. At the group’s second meeting in Tashkent in 2019, the leaders explicitly rejected the idea that their consultations were a step towards creating another regional organization.

Seven years later, that caution has not disappeared. But the cooperation around it has changed in both depth and character. The region is slowly becoming more organized without becoming more supranational. That distinction is important because it points to a model of regionalism that does not follow the European path of integration.

From dialogue to habit

The Consultative Meetings began with a simple political purpose: rebuild trust and make direct dialogue among the region’s leaders routine. This mattered in a region where bilateral disputes had often blocked wider cooperation.

Over time, however, dialogue has started to produce its own infrastructure.

In 2023, the leaders approved regulations for a Council of National Coordinators, which gives the consultative process an element of continuity between summits. In 2024, they adopted the “Central Asia – 2040” concept, setting long-term priorities for regional cooperation. In 2025, the seventh Consultative Meeting in Tashkent produced a Concept of Regional Security and Stability, as well as a catalogue of security risks and preventive measures for 2026–28.

None of these measures creates a supranational authority. Yet together they represent something more than diplomatic symbolism. They establish routines, expectations and a growing policy agenda around which the states can coordinate.

The political geography is evolving too. Azerbaijan joined the Consultative Meeting as a full participant in November 2025. That decision widened the format beyond Central Asia’s traditional five-state definition and strengthened the link between Central Asia and the South Caucasus. But the more revealing development is not the number of participants. Instead, it is the fact that the region’s core consultative mechanism has become valuable enough to expand.

Trust before institutions

The most striking feature of Central Asia’s new regionalism is the order in which it is developing.

European integration is often understood as a process in which cooperation becomes progressively embedded in common institutions, legal obligations and delegated authority. Central Asia has moved in the opposite direction. Political rapprochement came first. Institutions have followed cautiously and selectively.

The March 2025 border treaty between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan is a good example of why that sequencing matters. The countries’ long and at times violent border dispute had been one of the clearest symbols of the region’s fragmentation. The treaty did not emerge from a regional court or commission. It was a bilateral political settlement, supported by an improved regional climate in which dialogue had become more normal and the costs of unresolved disputes more visible.

This does not mean that regional formats caused every bilateral breakthrough. They did not. But they have helped create a political environment in which resolving disputes reinforces a larger regional project rather than remaining an isolated diplomatic event.

The same logic is visible in the spheres of water, energy, transport and trade. These problems cannot be managed effectively inside national borders. Yet Central Asian governments remain reluctant to surrender authority to a regional centre. Their answer has been pragmatic coordination: ministerial contacts, bilateral and multilateral agreements, summit-level political direction, and a gradual expansion of common frameworks.

This could be described as sovereignty-preserving regionalism: more cooperation without a corresponding transfer of sovereignty.

Why outside partners should notice

External actors have already begun to respond to Central Asia as a more coherent regional space.

The first European Union–Central Asia Summit, held in Samarkand in April 2025, upgraded relations to a strategic partnership. Its agenda covered transport connectivity, critical raw materials, water, energy and climate – issues that make little sense if approached only through five separate bilateral relationships. The EU’s own Central Asia strategy seeks a “closely interconnected economic and political space”.

This creates an important lesson for Europe. Supporting Central Asian regionalism does not require encouraging the region to reproduce the EU’s institutional architecture.

There is a temptation to measure regional cooperation against European integration and see the absence of a regional commission, parliament or binding legal order as evidence of weakness. In Central Asia, however, those very absences may be part of what makes cooperation politically acceptable.

The region’s governments value strategic autonomy. They also operate under different political systems, economic structures and foreign-policy constraints. A flexible, consensus-based model allows them to coordinate without forcing agreement on every issue or creating fears of domination by a larger neighbour.

That flexibility has costs. Cooperation that depends heavily on presidential political will can lose momentum. Consensus may delay difficult decisions. Light institutions can also struggle with implementation when national interests diverge.

The test, therefore, is not whether Central Asia will build an EU-style system. It is whether the habits and mechanisms created since 2018 can survive leadership changes, crises and renewed disagreements.

A region on its own terms

The next phase may already be beginning. At the 2025 Tashkent summit, Uzbekistan proposed transforming the Consultative Meetings into a more strategic “Community of Central Asia”. This new group would be supported by a rotating secretariat and stronger roles for national coordinators. Whether the other states will embrace this level of institutionalization remains to be seen.

The eighth Consultative Meeting, held in Avaza, Turkmenistan, on October 8, 2026, provided further evidence of this gradual institutional evolution. Meeting formally in a six-party format with Azerbaijan for the first time, the leaders signed a joint statement and a decision on the Consultative Meeting’s regulatory documents. The outcome reinforced the pattern of more structured cooperation without requiring a supranational model.

The proposal nevertheless reveals how far the debate has moved. In 2019, leaders were careful to stress that they were not creating a new regional organization. By 2025, the discussion had shifted towards how much institutional structure their cooperation might need going forward.

Central Asia’s regionalism is therefore best understood not as integration delayed, but as a different political experiment. The region’s states are testing how far cooperation can advance while sovereignty remains firmly national.

For Europe and other external partners, the practical implication is straightforward: engage the region as a region, but do not assume that successful regionalism must eventually look European.

Central Asia may never become a union. It may not need to. Its significance lies in demonstrating that a group of states can become more regional by building trust, habits of consultation, and selective institutions before deciding how much integration they actually want.

Jakhongir Isaev is a head of Department at the NGO Center for Sustainable Development in Uzbekistan. His work focuses on sustainable development, regional cooperation, and Central Asia’s international engagement.