International Relations

Turkestan is a participant in several international and multilateral organisations.  With no real traditional allies beyond its immediate neighbours, the successive governments of Turkestan have often seen international bodies as a way to develop needed alliances and project influence in the world.  These are some of the bodies of which Turkestan is a part:

Organisations

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LoN flag
The League of Nations is Ill Bethisad's premier international arbitration and peacemaking organisation, composed of regional working groups themselves made up of individual nation states.  Almost all nations of the world are members of the League, with all the benefits and responsibilities that entails, though some nations might not participate more than a token amount.
Those used to the primary world's United Nations should be aware that the League has some very sharp teeth in the shape of draconian punitive sanctions:  if the League places your country under sanction, then nothing goes in and nothing comes out.  One thing you really don't want is to have the League of Nations decide that your country is deserving of full League condemnation.


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SRL flag
The Silk Road League is primarily an international cultural organisation for the Mongolian and Turkic worlds.  Its members include fully sovereign independent states and several Russian Republics, which are given the status of Associate members.  In practice there is little or no difference between the status of full members and that of Associate members; both are considered more or less equal partners in the League.  The status is mostly a historical artifact from the earliest days after the dismantling of the SNOR regime, when it was very unclear exactly how the relative powers of the Russian federal government and those of its constituent republics would be delineated.
It is under Silk Road League auspices that the triennial Central Asian Games is organised, as well as the yearly Silk Road International Festival dedicated to traditional regional crafts and the arts; member nations also hold periodic summit meetings to discuss issues important to them all.


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Map of OASSA (2009)
A subset of the Silk Road League is the Central Asian Free Trade Association (OASSA), a voluntary-membership customs union open to all members of the SRL.  This is a new facet of the Silk Road League, and there has been much high-level discussion over all of the ramifications of this step towards greater economic partnership.  Some nations (notably Uyguristan) are suspicious that what begins as "partnership" will end in complete economic integration.


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Flag of the Riga Pact
The Riga Pact and its economic equivalent CMAEC were Snorist-era international bodies founded by the Russian nationalist SNOR regime to bolster its image abroad and to manage its array of client states.
While the Riga Pact was in many ways a true multilateral defensive alliance, its ultimate aim was to provide defence in depth for the Rodina itself; the various satellite states were seen by the Russian central planners and strategists of the Riga Pact as ultimately expendable.
CMAEC was sometimes more of a burden on the client states.  It was designed mostly as a way for Russia to exert control over the satellites, managing their economies from afar in a way which benefited Russia first, and secondarily the CMAEC alliance.


COPEN is Ill Bethisad's equivalent of the primary world's OPEC; the Community of Petroleum Exporting Nations.  Like OPEC, it can be quite Arab-centric, though the greater levels of exploitation of several fields in the rest of the world (notably the Teņiz Oilfield in the northern Mazandaran, i.e. Caspian Sea) gives some of the non-Arab, non-Middle Eastern states more of a voice in this important economic engine.
Also, the higher profile and generally greater integration of green energy from renewable sources (such as wind and solar) means that COPEN is not quite so economically musclebound as its equivalent OPEC.