Kazakhstan turns 34 this December. Not a milestone that demands fireworks. For a country, this is still a restless, sometimes awkward age: old enough to carry scars, young enough to make mistakes, and confident enough to believe it can matter.
Aida Haidar.
If we count from December 16, 1991, Kazakhstan is an undeniably young state. If we count from 1465, when the Kazakh Khanate emerged, and the long, uneven experience of statehood began, then this country has lived several lifetimes. It has known famine, repression, demographic engineering, and cultural erasure and yet it endured. That matters because a country’s diplomacy is never just policy. It is memory translated into behavior.
I often think of Kazakhstan as a thirty-something: occasionally obnoxious, sometimes too eager to prove itself, but already aware of what it wants and of what it never wants to repeat. There is ambition here, and there is caution. Fire in the eyes, but also an instinct to read the room. That combination is not a weakness. It is a survival skill.
Yes, the numbers are impressive. Growth rates hold firm despite global turbulence. Investment keeps coming. Living standards, measured coldly by indexes, place Kazakhstan ahead of much of the region. The Human Development Index puts the country firmly in the “very high” category; inequality, governance and corruption remain persistent pressure points. Progress and problems often go together — no country gets only the good headlines. But numbers are not where this story gets interesting.
What genuinely defines Kazakhstan today is its understanding that diplomacy is not decoration: it is infrastructure. From the very beginning, Kazakhstan chose a multi-vector foreign policy not out of ideological enthusiasm, but out of necessity. Geography leaves no room for naïveté. Under President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, that approach has become more deliberate and more finely calibrated. Kazakhstan does not build its external relations on an “only with our own” principle. Instead, it balances, sometimes uncomfortably, often pragmatically, among the European Union (EU), China, Russia, the United States and others.
The EU remains a core partner as Kazakhstan moves beyond raw-material exports into processing and technology. China is rapidly expanding investments in infrastructure and resource processing, Russia remains a key traditional investor, and the US and other Western partners are deepening cooperation in areas from green energy to transport corridors. This is not fence-sitting. It is recognition that a one-dimensional economy and a one-directional foreign policy is a liability in a fractured world.
But at 34, the question is no longer only what Kazakhstan can extract from the international system. It is what it can contribute to it.
This is where global diplomacy itself is changing. As Al Jazeera columnist Jonathan Whittall recently argued, the age of unipolar diplomacy is fading. Quoting Antonio Gramsci, he describes our moment as an “interregnum” — a time when the old world is dying and the new one is struggling to be born. In such periods, power does not disappear; it relocates.
New diplomatic centers are emerging not through dominance, but through credibility and access. Doha’s evolution into a mediation hub, South Africa’s legal challenge at the International Court of Justice, and the formation of broader, legitimacy-based alliances all point to a shift: influence is no longer monopolized by superpowers alone. It is increasingly shaped by states that can talk to many sides and are trusted enough to try.
This logic is strikingly close to what Kazakhstan has been calling for. In his speech at the UN General Assembly this September, President Tokayev warned openly about the erosion of trust in multilateral institutions and argued that reform is no longer optional. He called for a more adaptive UN, a reformed Security Council with wider representation, and a stronger role for responsible middle powers. That last phrase matters.
Middle powers are not neutral bystanders. They understand how power feels when it is imposed and how fragile peace becomes when voices are excluded. Whittall writes that diplomacy must move beyond the idea of a “master key.” The future belongs to those who carry many keys and know which door to open and when. This is where Kazakhstan is ahead of the curve. It engages early. It speaks to actors others avoid. It invests in dialogue long before it guarantees applause. It understands that relevance in the coming world will belong not to those who shout the loudest, but to those who remain useful when certainty collapses.
At 34, for a person or a state, responsibility becomes unavoidable. It is no longer enough to articulate principles. The harder work is to apply them quietly, persistently, sometimes without recognition. To contribute to stability even when it brings no immediate reward. Much credit belongs to Kazakhstan’s diplomatic corps and political leadership. But the deeper asset is its people. A society shaped by loss and resilience develops a sharper sense of proportion. Kazakhs know when firmness is required and when compassion is non-negotiable. That instinct is political capital.
In a world sliding away from simple hierarchies, Kazakhstan’s greatest strength may not be its location or its resources, but its lived understanding of suffering and its refusal to turn that experience into bitterness. If the age of the master key is ending, this is not a bad moment for a country that has always survived by carrying several.
