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Kenan ALLAKHVERDIEV
Ph.D. (Philos.), associate professor at the Political Studies and Political Administration Department, Academy of State Administration under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan (Baku, Azerbaijan).
ETHNOPOLITICAL DIMENSION OF NATIONAL SECURITY AND GLOBALIZATION CHALLENGES
Abstract
The author has undertaken the challenging task of looking at the complex set of issues that invariably arise when two highly sensitive social aspects are dis-
cussed in tandem: the nation’s ethnopoliti-cal development and the national security strategy. To achieve this he has probed into various approaches to the problem and
analyzed the challenges and threats caused by globalization in the ethnopolitical sphere at all security levels (global, regional, and national). The author has managed to trace the evolution of ideas about the ethnopolitical dimension both in political science and practical politics. These ideas have developed from the original view that the ethnic issue has completely blended with the social sector of the security system to the scientifically substantiated acceptance of security’s ethnic dimension and, conse-
quently, to the recognition that the ethnop-olitical aspect of the security issue needs a theoretical and methodological foundation as well as political-legal institutionalization. The author has made an attempt to apply his own conceptions to the Central Caucasus, the key zone of the Caucasian Region and Central Eurasia, in accordance with the latest ideas of the Eurasian geopolitical expanse offered by the Institute of Strategic Studies of the Caucasus (ISSC, Azerbaijan).
I n t r o d u c t i o n
The events of the turn of the 21st century have already raised a wave of in-depth discussions about the nature of the current transformations in the main strategic principles of national security. V. Baranovskiy of Russia has offered three major considerations: “First,” writes he, “national security is an issue that can be used in numerous and varied contexts. Second, it is an inalienable part of the political context and is widely used in professional and public discussions as well as in official documents... Third, this issue is directly related to various social spheres. It is connected, in one way or another, with the military and foreign policy spheres and the economy. It is related to democracy and human rights issues because both can be easily discarded under the pretext of national security needs.”1 Indeed, the globalization imperative of the 21st century has been incessantly offering food for thought in the form of new questions and problems to be discussed: we need to analyze the ties among different types and levels of national, regional, and international security, which make them mutually dependent; the transformation of the meaningful foundation of national security in the context of the incessantly emerging new challenges and threats; and the impact of the national security’s new dimensions on the nature and formation of the newly independent states’ domestic and foreign policies.
These issues are discussed through the prism of their ethnopolitical dimension and actualized within the following issues: the nature of the contemporary ethnopolitical processes in the context of the contemporary threats to national security; discussion of the ethnopolitical aspects of national security; the key ethnopolitical contradictions and the most pertinent problems of ensuring ethnopoliti-cal security; the set of challenges and threats to ethnopolitical security in the transit states; and the formation of ethnic policy there.
Ethnopolitical Processes in the Context of Threats to National Security
To clarify this and many other aspects of the same issue, we should primarily identify the main thing: can two, conceptually very complicated notions—ethnopolitical processes and national security—be discussed within the same context? Wouldn’t it be more productive to discuss them as individual and unrelated issues?
1 V. Baranovskiy, “Natsional’naia bezopasnost: kontseptual’nye i prakticheskie aspekty,” Materialy seminara “Strategia razvitia,” 22 April, 2002, Moscow, 2002, p. 7.
We all know that national security is a very complicated functional system with numerous levels teeming with never-ending processes of interaction of the vital interests of the state, society, and individual, and their opposition to domestic and foreign threats. This means that security cannot be described as an isolated topic of study; it is a systemic and integral phenomenon that makes it possible to study society and its interests as a dynamic process.
In the 21st century, the very idea of security moved away from the traditional interpretation of first, the state’s physical survival and its right and ability to realize itself within the international system; and second, guaranteed peace within certain territories and political expanses. Today, national security has been placed in a wider context and acquired additional dimensions: no longer limited to military-political dimensions, it has acquired new, no less important, ones: political-economic, socio-ecological, and other socially important dimensions without which national security can no longer remain stable. The social environment in which these tasks were resolved has changed, too: in the past the state operated in two strictly mutually independent (internal and external) spheres; today, globalization has made the division less clear.
It has been written2 that the mounting globalization and regionalization, as well as internationalization of all aspects of social life brought about by integration, are gradually removing the line (which becomes provisional) that separates internal and external security, while many of the threats (international terrorism, drug trafficking, information and technogenic catastrophes) cannot be traced back to only one source. An academic analysis of the trends obvious in the security sphere and the related forecasts for the 21st century have already demonstrated that the threats, challenges, dangers, and risks are becoming more interrelated; more likely than not, one threat is nothing more than a link in a long chain of threats.
The question of the nature of contemporary threats, challenges, dangers, and risks holds a special place in the security-related range of problems.3 The academic community has so far not been profound enough when dealing with these concepts. There is the tendency to substitute an analysis of the risks for an analysis of the threats to national security; potential and real threats are not distinguished, while the etymology of “threat” and “danger”—two key concepts—remains vague. Art 3 of the 1992 Law of the Russian Federation on Security says for example: “The threat to security is a sum-total of the conditions and factors that endanger the vitally important interests of the individual, society, and the state.” The Law obviously regards threat not only as close to the concept of danger, but also revealed through it. The Law on the National Security of the Republic of Azerbaijan offers a somewhat different interpretation: threat is treated as a sum-total of conditions, factors, and processes. The security-related conceptual documents of other countries (the U.S., France, China, etc.) add to the variety of the concept’s definitions.
In fact, complete unification of the theoretical and methodological foundation of security-related research is hardly needed. Comparative analysis reveals that unification is desirable at the terminology level; it should not extend to the empirical level, which should preserve its specificities and original academic and practical-political approaches. This will help us preserve regional specifics and reflect the endemic nature of the real national requirements and interests.
The above considerations have not prevented individual attempts to generalize universal threats to vast continental expanses. A. Tsyganok of Russia describes the following as Europe’s main threats in the context of 21st-century globalization:
2 See: A.V. Vozzhennikov, Natsional'naia bezopasnostRossii, Moscow, 2002; Obshchaia teoria natsional'noi be-zopasnosti, ed. by A.A. Prokhozhev, Moscow, 2002; B. Buzan, People, States and Fear. An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, Colorado, 1999, and others.
3 Fore more detail, see: A.L. Ross, Theory and Practice of International Relations: Analytical Approaches, Newport, 1997; P.A. Tsygankov, Mezhdunarodnuye otnoshenia, Moscow, 1996; B.L. Job, The Insecurity Dilemma: National, Regime, and State Securities, 1992; T. Terriff, S. Groft, L. James, P. Morgan, Security Studies Today, Cambridge UK,
1999, and others.
■ First, today so-called international terrorism remains the obvious and main threat.
■ Second, the frozen conflicts in Transdniestria and the Southern Caucasus, as well as the unresolved Balkan and Arab-Israeli conflicts, the still pending territorial issues in Europe (Den-mark-Luxemburg), Kosovo, and Europe’s outlaying areas (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) and Central Asia (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan).
■ Third, proliferation of WMD, failed states, and organized crime are as dangerous for Europe.
■ Fourth, the mounting Chinese threat, porous borders, and the still controversial border stretches of Russia, India, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Taiwan, and China.
■ Fifth, seats of tension in the Middle East created by potential unsanctioned missile launchings (probably with nuclear warheads) from the territories of North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan.
■ Sixth, the threat of foreign military intervention of the neighboring states in violation of the U.N. Charter.
■ Seventh, the threats created by the totalitarian regimes the unpredictable behavior of which will preserve tension for many years to come.
The Russian author believes that the new cross-border threats (drug trafficking, illegal migration, etc.), the threats to pipeline and energy systems, and the threats in the information sphere are the worst non-military threats for Europe.4
A. Utkin has demonstrated a wider approach. He believes that there are five powerful forces that are acting as globalization challenges today and pushing the world community to a new state of being: fixed unipolarity; globalization of the world economy; the weakening of nation-states; the quest for a civilizational identity; and the mutiny of the world community’s poor majority.5
Other authors might point to different combinations of strategic threats and their modifications in the sub-continental, regional, and nation-state contexts. The constants connected with the ethnic (national) differentiation of the planet’s and individual countries’ population are very important geopolitically because in geopolitics (and in the general security theory) the states (which exist either de jure or de facto or are just developing into states) play the key role. They are integral and relatively independent (or even self-sufficient) organisms with interests, values, and aims of their own.
Meanwhile, national and ethnic factors are largely responsible for not only the strength and content of the states’ interests and ambitions, but also for their very emergence, development, and destruction. For this reason the development of ethnic (national) communities into states is seen as a general trend of the emergence and functioning of a sovereign nation-state, that is, a systemic ethno-political process.
An ethnopolitical process should be interpreted as the interaction of fairly large population groups, each possessing a clear ethnic identity, on the one hand, and definite (real or desired) sovereignty institutes, on the other. In this way, the demands these ethnic groups put forward immediately develop into political demands (broader sovereignty), while political, economic, or humanitarian demands acquire ethnic hues and are realized through the mechanisms of ethnic mobilization, etc.6
No general discussion of the contemporary state of ethnopolitical processes can be complete without a discussion of certain trends of their strategic development. Today, we can clearly discern three variants of ethnopolitical development of the formerly Soviet nations.
4 See: A.D. Tsyganok, Novye ugrozy dlia Evroaziatskogo kontinenta v usloviakh globalizatsii, Institut razvitia grazhdanskogo obshchestva i mestnogo samoupravlenia, available at [http://c-society.ru/main.php?ID=234053&ar2= 30&ar3=14]; idem, Novye ugrozy i opasnosti XXI veka dlia Evroaziatskogo kontinenta, Moscow, 2004.
5 See: A.I. Utkin, “Geostruktura XXI veka,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1 September, 2000.
6 See: D.V. Dragunskiy, “Etnopoliticheskie protsessy na postsovetskom prostranstve i rekonstruktsia Severnoy Evrazii,” Polis, No. 3, 1995, p. 40.
■ First, the hypertrophied omnipresent ethnic factor discerned in the social and political development of contemporary nations. It is commonly accepted that an excessive ethnic bias in public and political life (without any extremist trends) cannot be accepted either by nationstates or by multi-national states.
■ The second variant reveals a trend toward the unified life-style of all peoples, their maximum assimilation, and blending with the titular ethnocultural expanse. Not so long ago, this was the acceptable or even desirable variant (the attempt to create a Soviet super-ethnos can serve as an example). As a result, the national self-awareness of ethnoses and individuals becomes politicized and conflict-prone.
■ The third variant looks preferable for the post-Soviet nations under the conditions shaped by their past: ethnopolitical integration of nations during multi-national development in the newly independent states.
This means that the issues related to the political nature of ethnicity (and the role of ethnic factors in the national security issues) are not only of theoretical, but also of purely practical interest. The last decade has seen the increasingly frequent use of new definitions of security: economic, ecological, social, technological, information, foodstuffs, fuel, communication, sanitary and other types of security defined by corresponding branches (spheres) of activity. This has already raised the question of how the role of the ethnic factor in the national security system should be described and which definitions should be used for this purpose: ethnopolitical aspects of national security, security in the ethnic sphere, or ethnopolitical security.
Security in the Ethnic Sphere or Ethnopolitical Security: General Approach
There is no shortage of forecasts in the media supplied by the leading research centers that in the 21st century national states will be divided into ethnic micro-states. On the other hand, in the globalization era there is no shortage of signs that statehoods reduced to ethnic dust will be replaced by invisible global governance. America, Russia, the European and all the other states will be involved in the process.
This inevitably adds “combustible material” to the bloody conflicts all of us can watch with our own eyes: ethnic conflicts have developed into the key national security problem in many countries. It was not without a great amount of concern that American analysts pointed out in the National Security Strategy for the New Century that: “Globalization, however, also brings risks. Outlaw states and ethnic conflicts threaten regional stability and progress in many important areas of the world.”7
Should these outbursts of ethnic activity be dismissed as side-effects of globalization? Globalization is a catalyst, nothing more and nothing less: it does not primarily breed ethnic conflicts.
There are at least two levels—internal and external—behind all ethnopolitical conflicts. The internal dimension consists of the actors’ (ethnoses’) active involvement in the political process, which from that time on can be described as an ethnopolitical process.
The external dimension of ethnic conflicts gradually develops into a geopolitical problem (the Kosovo conflict, which can be described as an international legal precedent, may serve as an example). No wonder the majority of the governments drawn into such conflicts tend to explain them by international interference (either real or imaginary) in their domestic affairs.
7 National Security Strategy for a New Century, Introduction, The White House, December 1999, p. 1.
History has taught us that the line between the non-violent ethnopolitical conflict and its armed stage is easily crossed. According to British sociologist and expert in international relations E. Luard, between 1400 and the present about half of the armed conflicts in the world were international conflicts that involved states. In the four post-World War II decades, only 37 of the total number of 127 large-scale wars were international conflicts. According to the Diplomatic Academy of the RF Foreign Ministry, the share of international conflicts between 1945 and 1989 was even smaller: 22 of 147 of the large-scale armed conflicts were of an obviously international nature, while the others were mostly domestic conflicts.8
Ethnopolitical conflicts are rooted in the nature and objective circumstances in which ethnona-tional communities live and function: the natural geographic boundaries of ethnic community distribution do not coincide with the political map of the world. In this way, the territories occupied by states become an arena of struggle for national (ethnic) states; this gives rise to ethnic movements and breeds ethnic conflicts.
Today, the world is populated by 3 to 5 thousand ethnic groups; the total number of ethnic minorities is much larger because many of the ethnoses are separated by state borders. Two hundred and sixty-nine ethnoses are more than 1 million strong; 90 percent of nations and nationalities live in multinational states. This does not add stability to the world. We all know that 99 countries of the world have 291 ethnic minorities “with a risk factor” living on their territories. Here is information about the states involved in armed conflicts in 1988: 63 of 111 such conflicts can be described as domestic, while 36 were described as “wars connected with state order,” which means conflicts between the government and the opposition that demanded autonomy for an ethnic community or region. State-organized acts of annihilation of members of ethnic or political groups cause many more losses than all other forms of conflicts taken together.9 Errol A. Henderson, who studies conflicts, has described ethnic conflicts as “one of the world’s greatest killers.” According to his information, over 26 million forced migrants had to flee for their lives from 50 large ethnic conflicts in 1993 and 1994; each of these conflicts claimed about 80 thousand lives. Between 1918 and 1988, 32 percent of the international conflicts had ethnopolitical dimensions to them.10
The above suggests that “classical multinational states complete with the attributes of ethnic policy (economically justified borders, ethnicity as a status, etc.) call to life another objective socio-historical requirement: planetary uniformity designed to overcome these attributes. On the other hand, globalization has great potential for self-destruction—it accelerates powerful migration flows that add to the world’s ethnic diversity; this is happening everywhere, including in the previously more or less homogenous countries, and is creating numerous ethnopolitical problems:
— Sharpened contradictions between the titular and non-titular nations, as well as between the so-called center and ethnic fringes (enclaves);
—Pronounced ethnic reductionism, which looks at the political, social, economic, and cultural processes through the prism of ethnic self-identity;
—Deepened ethnonationalism and ethnoregionalism;
—More emphasis on the rights and status of ethnic minorities;
—Accents shifted from political-civil to ethnic identification, etc.”11
8 See: Obshchaia i prikladnaia politologia, ed. by V.I. Zhukov, B.I. Krasnov, MSCY, Souyz Publishers, Moscow, 1997, p. 195.
9 See: M.A. Medvedeva, “Etnopoliticheskiy konflikt kak faktor ugrozy mezhdunarodnoy bezopasnosti,” in: Filoso-fia XX veka: shkoly i kontseptsii. Nauchnaia konferentsia k 60-letiu filosofskogo fakul’teta SPbGU, 21 noiabria 2000 g., St. Petersburg, 2001, p. 156.
10 Ibidem.
11 K. Allakhverdiev, “Globalization and Ethnic Policy in the Caucasus: Between the Beetle and the Block,” The
Caucasus & Globalization, Vol. 1 (2), 2007, pp. 10-11.
Ethnic conflicts and wars have neither territorial nor sociopolitical localization; they are not the product of any historical period or a geopolitical organism. One tends to agree with those who say that so far the general security conception has failed to take due account of the ethnopolitical dimension.12
This raises the question of how the ethnopolitical dimension of national security can be defined: either as ensuring security in the ethnic sphere, or as security in the ethnopolitical sphere?
There is no straightforward answer to this question. All issues found at the crossroads of ethnic politics and national security are very complicated per se; they are complicated because they are involved in various spheres of public life and academic studies (terminological, methodological, etc.).
According to those who profess a constructivist (post-modernist) approach, ethnicity is a specific description of the main spheres of public life (political, economic, spiritual, etc.). Ethnicity is functioning in these spheres and manifests itself through them, and therefore it is not an independent subjective-objective sphere. The following can be described as the cornerstone: “Nature does not know the ethnic per se, which means that the ethnic can be described either as an artificial artifact or an artifact formed by each individual creating his own cognitive picture of the social world.”13 This context reduced even the acutest forms of ethnopolitical conflicts to all sorts of combinations of “habitual” sociopolitical, economic, and other causes. In its extreme form this approach crops up as an unconditional rejection of the ethnic factor as one of the national security determinants. “Military, economic, social, ecological, and information security are the basic components of national security.”14 This means that we should discuss the ethnopolitical (ethnic) aspects and factors and the way security issues betray themselves in the traditional social institutions and spheres of social activity.15
Those who oppose the above approaches (reflected, first and foremost, in the theory of pri-mordialism) proceed from what they see as the obvious, viz. the entire complex of ethnic relationships, as well as ethnic life as a whole, together with the related features (ethnic history, psychology, mentality, etc.), is functioning as a special social substance—the ethnic sphere. Since in this case we are dealing with the “real existence of the ethnic substance, which is active and which produces ethnically tinged phenomena,”16 the extreme primordialists go as far as concluding that “it is the nation and the ethnos that exist as absolutes, while everything beyond them are relative.”17 Since in the last few decades demonstrations of ethnic identity and politicization of the ethnic have become aggressive and dominant, those who side with the above approaches believe that the academic community should concentrate on studying security issues in the ethnic context. The most consistent of the supporters go as far as trying to identify a new segment in the national security structure—ethnopolitical security.
Significantly, the accents in the subject-range of academic discussions are being rapidly shifted. As distinct from the previous years, with the post-modernist approach dominating the discus-
12 See: S. Panarin, “Bezopasnost i etnicheskaia migratsia v Rossii,” Pro et Contra, Vol. 3, No. 4, Problemy bezo-pasnosti, Moscow Carnegie Endowment, Moscow, 1998, p. 9.
13 S.E. Rybakov, Filosofia etnosa, Moscow, 2001, p. 18.
14 Z.A. Zhade, “Natsional’nye interesy i bezopasnost Rossii v kontekste geopolitiki,” Politologicheskie, etnopo-liticheskie i kulturologicheskie nauki, 2005, p. 60, available at [http://www.vestnik.adygnet.ru/files/2005.2/123/ jade2005_2.pdf].
15 See: M.A. Medvedeva, op. cit., pp. 156-158; N.A. Molchanov, “Terminy i opredelenia, ispol’zuemye spe-tsialistami zarubezhnykh stran pri razrabotke problem natsional’noy bezopasnosti,” Strategicheskaia stabil’nost, No. 3, 2000, available at [http://www.sipria.ru/ss20_03.html]; Obshchaia teoria natsional’noy bezopasnosty; P.G. Belov, Kategorii i metody natsional’noy bezopasnosty, Moscow, 2002; K.Kh. Ippolitov, Ideologia natsional’noy bezopasnosti, RSPB, Moscow, 1997; V.I. Bovsh, Natsional’naia bezopasnost i istoricheskoe soznanaie natsii, Moscow, 2002; B. McSweeney, Security, Identity and Interests. A Sociology of International Relations, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999.
16 S.E. Rybakov, Natsia i natsionalizm, Moscow, 2001, p. 8.
17 R.G. Abdulatipov, Paradoksy suvereniteta. Perspektivy cheloveka, natsii, gosudarstva, Slavianskiy dialog Publishers, Moscow, 1995, p. 31.
sions of the relations between ethnopolitics and security, the conference convened in Krasnodar in 2003 to discuss the issue was called “Ethnopolitical Aspects of Security in the Seats of Conflicts and Zones of Potential Tension in the Caucasus and Siberia.”18 The trend toward shifting priorities in Russian political science was further demonstrated by the All-Russia Scholarly Conference dedicated to the 15th Anniversary of the Regional Center of Ethnopolitical Studies of the Daghestan Scientific Center of the RAS held in Makhachkala in October 2007. Announced as a conference designed to summarize the results of Ethnopolitical Stability in the South of Russia under the Globalization Conditions19 project, it was carried out under the title of Ethnopolitical Security of the South of Russia in Globalization Conditions. This was more than a mere change of titles. The conference made an attempt to formulate a categorial definition of ethnopolitical security based on poly-paradigmatic synthesis and describing it as a system of measures designed to prevent and settle conflicts (ethnic, social, political, and those emerging between confessions or within one and the same confession) by balancing the interests of individuals, ethnonational and social communities, society, multinational peoples, and the state.20
It is too early so far to discuss which of the above approaches can be described as more correct: this calls for a detailed analysis of both approaches, which is impossible within the framework of one article. Here I shall limit myself to saying that because of the extremely complex and multi-dimensional nature of the object that forms the cornerstone of ethnopolitical security, it cannot be reduced to a set of relatively simple theses borrowed from ethno-political studies and the national security theory.
The following presents, in concise form, the results of an analysis of academic writings on the subject.
■ First, the terms used (including the above-mentioned “ethnopolitical aspects of national security,” “security in the ethnic sphere,” “ethnopolitical security,” etc.) are frequently devoid of strictly academic content where their logical and conceptual definitions are concerned. More likely than not they are used as attractive linguistic-semantic units. As such they call for more profound categorial approaches.
■ Second, nation and nation-state formation is an undoubtedly deeply rooted historical process. It is equally clear that the nation-building process has been accelerating since the early 20th century. Indeed, only 15 states of the present 200 existed in 1910; every new period of geopolitical shifts (World Wars I and II, the collapse of the colonial system and world socialism) merely accelerated the process. Today, there are more dividing lines between the state-forming nations and ethnic minorities. We can hardly agree that “those who did not have and do not have a statehood of their own should not claim the status of a nation until another whim of history changes this. Rational national policy should avoid such whims to preserve the nations and prevent new nations coming to the fore.”21
■ Third, anyone wishing to analyze the ethnopolitical processes in the globalization context should not concentrate on the conflictogenic factors and processes (one of which is the right of nations to self-determination). From the theoretical and especially practical points of view
18 “Etnopoliticheskie aspekty bezopasnosti v konfliktnykh ochagakh i zonakh potentsialnoy napriazhennosti na Kavkaze i v Sibiri. Konferentsia. Krasnodar, 23-26 oktiabria 2003,” Mezhdunarodnye protsessy. Zhurnal teorii mezh-dunarodnykh otnosheniy i mirovoy politiki, available at [http://www.intertrends.ru/three/o14.htm].
19 See: Etnopoliticheskaia stabil’nost Yuga Rossii v usloviiakh globalizatsii (headed by D.Sc. (Philos.) A.-G.K. Aliev, Ph.D. (Philos.) G.I. Yusupova, RTsEI DagNTs RAN), available at [http”//adaptation.iea.ras.ru/report/2006/ subprogramme.pdf].
20 See: Etnopoliticheskaia bezopasnost Yuga Rossii v usloviiakh globalizatsii. Vserossiiskaia nauchnaia konferentsia, Regional’ny tsentr ethnopoliticheskikh issledovaniy (RTsEI) Daghestanskogo Nauchnogo Tsentra RAN (oktiabr 2007), available at [http://kavkz-uzel.ru/newstext/news/id/1199967.html].
21 “Natsional’nye menshinstva v sud’be gosudarstva,” available at [http://www.vtk.interro.ru].
it is much more productive to concentrate on the means and methods for preventing such developments and creating new transnational multi-ethnic units. This approach becomes crystal clear if we take into account that globalization is weaving a web of mutual dependencies and mutual penetrations not only, and not so much, between national states. It is uniting different ethnic identities into a global unit at a new civilizational level above the borders and barriers that separate nations. I should say that many of the futurological scripts of the future of ethnoses take it for granted that the determining factors of nation-building and their specific features will weaken, while the principle of ethnic self-determination (especially the extreme forms of its realization) will lose its urgency.
■ Fourth, the challenges and threats of globalization have already confronted all peoples (with and without their own states) with a dilemma—either to preserve their ethnic identity in its historically shaped form or look for a new formula for harmonizing their ethnosocial content. In the near future the choice will become even more urgent: the current trends of world development indicate that, in the final analysis, this choice will determine the nations’ historical fates and their ability to become an organic part of global civilization. Today ethnic conflicts are developing into an international geopolitical problem. Solutions will affect many countries and peoples, even those outside the states in which any given ethnopolitical conflict first appeared. This means that no country, especially a poly-ethnic one, can indulge in ignoring its ethnic problems and contradictions if it wants to preserve its national security.
■ Fifth, none of the theoretical trends engaged in ethnic relations and ethnic policy studies dominates over all the others or is generally accepted. This methodological vagueness becomes even more pronounced when we try to apply methods and tools used by other sciences in the ethnic sphere. This is true, among other things, of the national security theory and interdisciplinary novelties. One tends to agree with L. Despres, who wrote that different theoretical paradigms may produce different descriptions of ethnic processes when applied to the sphere of ethnic relations, since they will ascribe their specific meanings to the same situations.22
■ Sixth, the gap between the international legal norms that establish the framework of state sovereignty and the globalization processes that allow international and regional organizations to interfere in the domestic affairs of states (ethnic conflicts included) is widening. The world’s leading states and the international supra-national actors are accused of neoimperialism, “dual standards,” intentions to redivide the world, etc. New multi-dimensional systemic processes are emerging at the crossroads where the ethnic and security meet; on the other hand, the same crossroads invite a revision of real national interests, a process that leads to a qualitatively new hierarchy of long- and medium-term aims in their realization.
■ Seventh, throughout most of the 20th century those who wrote about the ethnic sphere were not inclined to use the term “security.” In the West, “ethnos” meant “people” while the national-ethnic features of social-historical communities were revealed through the category of ethnicity. Soviet and post-Soviet academics had different paradigmal priorities: ethnology helped the academic and political elites accept and use the term “ethnos.” At the same time, in the West and the Soviet Union/Russia, ethnoses were diffused so to speak in the social-historical entities that dominated academic efforts in the 20th century: classes (Marxism),
22 See: L. Despres, “K razrabotke teorii etnicheskogo fenomena,” Etnos i politika. Khrestomatia, Moscow, 2000, pp. 27-28 (see also: L.A. Despres, “Toward a Theory of Ethnic Phenomena,” in: Ethnicity and Resource Competition in Plural Societies, ed. by L. Despres, The Hague, 1975).
population groups (stratification theory), states (etatist ideology), and all sorts of totalitarian and ideological constructs. The report on the Human Development Index (HDI) published in 1994 by the U.N. Development Program fit perfectly into the contemporary background. It identified key human security aspects (economic, political, foodstuffs, ecological, personal, and health security) and mentioned the threat to social and cultural security that destroys traditional units (the family, community, organizations, and ethnic groups) and launches destructive trends in social life. They cannot be measured, however the results could be catastrophic.23 The document says nothing about ethnopolitical security; it does not mention similar or identical concepts close to the idea of being protected against external and internal threats created by the totality of ethnic relations in territorial-political areas. In fact, this confirms once more that the bloody ethnopolitical conflicts of the late 20th century took the world community unawares: it was totally unprepared to deal with the processes of ethnic consolidation and mobilization and the related problems. These processes change the ideas about the philosophy of ethnic security in the globalization era. Eleven years later, in 2005, the report presented by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP) admitted that the mounting threats remained underrated and raised the question about “redefining security and building collective security.” It reads in part: “For much of the twentieth century violent conflict was the product of a breakdown in relations between states. Today, violent conflict is a product primarily of the failure of states to prevent, contain and resolve conflicts between groups.”24 The U.N. diplomats demonstrated no mean agility by maneuvering between Scylla of “territorial integrity” and Charybdis of the “right of nations to self-determination,” but the very obvious security threats force them to support the conclusions of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty: “In security terms, a cohesive and peaceful international system is far more likely to be achieved through the cooperation of effective states ... than in an environment of fragile, collapsed, fragmenting or generally chaotic state entities.”25
Political science and political practice at the turn of the 21st century show that the ideas of the ethnopolitical dimension of the topic of study have changed:
(1) efforts to diffuse the basic ethnopolitical problems in the social or cultural sectors of the security system by using academically neutral terms (ethnopolitical aspects of national security) failed.
(2) they had to recognize that there were institutions that protected national interests in the ethnic sphere in the “security in the ethnic sphere” formula.
(3) there is the awareness that the “ethnopolitical security” concept, as part of the national security system, calls for theoretical-methodological substantiation and political-legal institutionalization.
Today, in the era of globalization and the fears and hopes it is breeding, as well as transformation of the causal foundations of the world-shattering conflicts, the change in the theoretical-methodological paradigm as applied to the ethnopolitical processes has acquired special urgency. The same applies to the need to create a new research field. This paradigm can be revealed as a connecting link between the existential description of the ethnic sphere and the integrative nature of security. An
23 Quoted from: Z.Z. Biktimirova, “Bezopasnost v kontseptsii razvitia cheloveka,” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovre-mennost, No. 6, 2002, pp. 139-140 (for the complete text of the report see: Human Development Report 1994, available at [http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr_1994_en.pdf]).
24 Human Development Report 2005, UNDP, Chapter 5, pp. 179, 162, available at [http://www.sarpn.org.za/docu-ments/d0001522/7-HDR2005_chapter_5.pdf].
25 Ibid., p. 162.
investigation of the correlating ties between them will show us the ethnopolitical dimension of security (at all levels and in all structural types) expressed both quantitatively and qualitatively. From this point of view, ethnopolitical security is a multi-dimensional and multi-level functional system in which real national interests are translated through ethnopolitical aggregation and articulation; this system can be described as a necessary condition for optimizing the modernization of any polyethnic society.
Threats to Ethnopolitical Security in the Central Caucasus
Let’s have a look at how the above conclusions and the ethnopolitical security paradigm apply to the Central Caucasus, the key zone according to the latest structuralization of the Eurasian geopolitical expanse offered by ISSC of Azerbaijan for the Caucasus and Central Eurasia as a whole.26
The author completely agrees with the principles of geopolitical structuralization of the Caucasus suggested by E. Ismailov of Azerbaijan. He has identified the following political-geographic subregions:
(1) The Central Caucasus, including the three independent states (Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia);
(2) The Northern Caucasus, consisting of the border autonomous state formations of the Russian Federation;
(3) The Southern Caucasus, including the ils of Turkey bordering on Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia (South-Western Caucasus) and Iran’s northwestern ostans (South-Eastern Caucasus).27
The symbiosis of the multitude of self-sufficient cultural worlds makes the Central Caucasus absolutely unique as the crossroads of diverse cultures and languages, civilizational influences and borrowings. The Central Caucasus is a geographic and a geopolitical phenomenon as well as a cultur-al-civilizational entity. It is commonly seen as the strategic line that separates Europe from Asia; it is the meeting place of Eastern and Western local civilizations. It has accumulated the diverse and contradictory experience of ethnic relations: cooperation and strife, conflicts and good-neighborly coex-istence.28
26 See: E. Ismailov, M. Esenov, “Central Eurasia in the New Geopolitical and Geo-Economic Dimensions,” in: Central Eurasia 2005. Analytical Annual, NA&CC Press, 2006, pp. 11-43; P. Darabadi, “Centra Eurasia: Globalization and Geopolitical Evolution,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 3 (39), 2006, pp. 7-13.
27 See: E. Ismailov, Z. Kengerli, “On the Caucasus Category,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, Vol. LVIII, No. 5, 2002, pp. 290-295 (in Russian and Azeri); idem, “The Caucasus in the Globalizing World,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 2 (20), 2003, pp. 135-144; E. Ismailov, V. Papava, The Central Caucasus: Essays on Geopolitical Economy, CA&CC Press® AB, Stockholm, 2006, p. 12.
28 For more detail, see: B. Coppieters, “Conclusions: The Caucasus as a Security Complex,” Contested Border in the Caucasus, VUBPRess, Brussels, 1996; P. Goble, “Geopolitika postsovetskogo iuga Kavkaza,” Kavkaz, No. 2, 1997, pp. 14-16; A. Rondeli, “Specific Features of the Formation of the Regional Security Complex in the Southern Caucasus,” in: Post-communist Democratic Changes and Geopolitics in the Southern Caucasus, Tbilisi, 1998 (in Georgian); G. Guliev, “Geopoliticheskie kollizii Kavkaza,” Tsenral’naia Azia i Kavkaz, No. 3, 1999, pp. 23-29; K.S. Gajiev, Geopolitika Kavkaza, Moscow, 2001; P.G. Darabadi, Geoistoria Kaspiiskogo regiona i geopolitika sovre-mennosti, Baku, 2002; S. Chervonnaya, Conflict in the Caucasus: Georgia, Abkhazia and the Russian Shadow, Gothic Image Publications, Glastonbury (U.K.), 1994; S.E. Cornell, Small Nations and Great Powers: A Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict in the Caucasus, Curzon Press, 2001, and others.
The deep-cutting changes of the early 1990s that affected the social and economic foundations bred new mass sentiments: in the post-Soviet reality, the traditions of ethnic good-neighborly relations, national and religious tolerance, and conflict prevention proved dead. The region’s contradictions and conflicts are rooted in the ethnocratic egotism of the local politicians who, after grabbing political, ideological, and information resources, acted (under pressure of circumstances) on a grand scale while remaining mercenary-minded individuals. I have in mind the Armenian, Abkhazian, and South Ossetian leaders, who never stopped to ponder on the effects of their claims to the territory and culture of their neighbors. This brought nothing but bloodshed to the Central Caucasus; occupation of the adjacent territories, and changed political and geographic boundaries. The international conference “Conflict Transformation in South Caucasus” held in Tbilisi in 2001 cites the number of victims within this region alone as 1.5 million; this could not but lead to rather serious socioeconomic consequences.29
According to Bruno Coppieters of Belgium, the fact that ethnic relations were moved into the sphere of politics and security was one of the key factors behind the flare-ups of conflicts in the Caucasus in the post-Soviet period. He has also pointed out that the obvious intention to raise the ethnic issues related to domestic and regional policy to the level of security issues made ethnic compromises in the Central Caucasus impossible.30
The public remains convinced that the region’s conflicts are the product of the region’s past. This means that the entire diversity of the social processes of the 20th century is reduced to ethnic relations. In other words, ethnic reductionism triumphs. There is the tendency to squeeze the contradictions of the past into the present-day context of geopolitical and ethnopolitical realities. The conflicts of the past are revived in the so-called historical memory, which tends to ignore the long periods of cooperation. This is how ethnocratic policy is formed.
Regional security in the Central Caucasus is a post-Soviet conception, a political catch phrase of the globalization era associated, no matter how strange this may seem, with the disintegration of the imperial expanse. Jannatkhan Eyvazov of Azerbaijan, who has been studying the problem for some time now, has written: “As soon as the Caucasus withdrew from the sphere of total Soviet control, the process of regional inter-state organization gathered momentum. The ethnic conflicts, sub-regional de facto alliances and counter-alliances reflected the compatibility and incompatibility of security interests. They stemmed, directly or indirectly, from the relations among the newly independent states and regional powers. In this way, restoration of the relations in the security complex was intensified in the late 20th century.”31 Here it should be added that more profound and integrated studies of the deep-cutting ethnopolitical factors of the national and regional security systems in the Central Caucasus will help the political elite and world community achieve stable peace and sustainable development for the region.
So far, however, the efforts needed to use the already accumulated security-related tools and methods in the ethnopolitical sphere have not been made. A collective fundamental work dealing with the problems of the Southern (Central.—K.A.) Caucasus does not offer a single view on ethnopolitical security, even though eleven authors, who covered 209 pages, touched upon the subject of regional conflicts.32 This means that the post-modernist approach still dominates in academic studies and continues to camouflage ethnopolitics as a different social sphere.
It seems that the ethnopolitical problems may move, albeit slowly, toward consensus through abandoning authoritarian-great power methods (political intrigues, mass clashes, ethnic purges, and
29 See: The South Caucasus Network for Civil Accord. Conflict Transformation in South Caucasus. Materials of the First International Conference, Tbilisi, 9-11 December, 2001, Tbilisi, 2002, p. 103, available at [http://www.pressclubs. org/downloads/caucasus.pdf].
30 See: B. Coppieters, Federalism and Conflict in the Caucasus, The Royal Institute of International Affairs, London, 2001.
31 J. Eyvazov, Bezopasnost Kavkaza i stabil’nost razvitia Azerbaidzhanskoi Respubliki, Baku, 2004, p. 108.
32 See: The South Caucasus: A Challenge for the EU, EU Institute for Security Studies, Paris, 2003.
deportations). The globalization era presupposes that politicians should learn the lessons of history and that the Central Caucasian nations should share responsibility for regional peace and stability and national security; they should never forget their past achievements—they should be promoted and emulated. In principle, ethnic contradictions can be kept under state and public control, they can be regulated by law and settled according to the principle of fairness that will not encroach on the states’ territorial integrity. This international legal imperative should be treated as a priority when we deal with conflict situations.
Analysts have pointed out that the 20th century was a century of outbursts of ethnic separatism, bloody ethnic conflicts, and wars that rocked many countries. “As the 20th century drew to its close we could accept its main lesson: we need an international order with the necessary political, economic, and financial tools to avert and settle all outbursts of ethnic separatism and ethnic con-flicts.”33
This fully applies to the present ethnopolitical stage in the Caucasus: there are more obvious sentiments of ethnic and national identities and homogeneity and more active processes of national state-building. It is no secret that these processes encourage the idea of ethnic self-determination and are responsible for the far from unambiguous ideas about its realization:
—autonomy in a multi-national state;
—political and territorial separation from the state, or separatism with the aim of creating an independent state;
—reunification of peoples scattered across several states;
—unification with another culturally and historically kindred state.
The political developments of the last two decades revealed that the above can be described as ethnic separatism which, when combined with other factors, contributed to nearly all the armed conflicts in the Caucasus. Most academics and politicians agree that the Armenian-Azeri conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh is the central link in the long chain of armed ethnopolitical clashes in the region. Brenda Schaffer, Research Director, Caspian Studies Program, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University’s believes: “Central to the development of the Caucasus and Caspian regions is resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.”34 The conflict deprived Azerbaijan of 20 percent of its territory, now occupied by Armenian armed forces, and generated the problem of about 1 million refugees and forced migrants. This upsets the regional balance and prompted other ethnic conflicts fraught with territorial losses for other states. I. Shukiurov has pointed out in this connection that “separatism badly hit all newly independent states in the south of the CIS, apart from Armenia”35 and has defined this as one of the major specific features of postSoviet ethnopolitical development in the Caucasus.
Military analyst A. Tsyganok described all ethnopolitical transformations conducive to the conflict type of ethnic relations as follows: “Throughout the latter half of the 20th century the world knew over 300 ethnic conflicts that from time to time slid into violence. Armed confrontation cannot be ruled out even in those cases when the sides in the ethnic conflicts are not completely aware of what caused the contradictions in the first place, but are always ready to mold an enemy out of a neighbor. Nagorno-Karabakh and the Armenian-Azeri relations may serve as an example
33 Iu. Morozov, V. Lutovinov, “Etnoseparatizm kak ugroza natsional’noy, regional’noy i global’noy bezopasnosti,” available at [www.e-journal.ru].
34 Testimony before Congress: “The Caucasus and Caspian Region: Understanding United States Interests and Policy,” 10 October, 2001 (quoted from: The South Caucasus Network for Civil Accord. Conflict Transformation in South Caucasus. pp. 77-78, available at [http://www.pressclubs.org/downloads/caucasus.pdf]).
35 I. Shukiurov, “Armenian Separatism as a Crisis Factor in the Caucasus,” Resurrection—21st Century, No. 10,
2000, p. 79 (in Azeri).
of the above: this is a clash between the ‘historical claims’ of the two countries to the same territory. The conflict is not an ethnic one: it is caused by the fear of small ethnic groups of losing their ethnicity and lifestyle. Ethnic stereotypes are the tools the elites on both sides used to mobilize the population.”36
A. Dashdamirov of Azerbaijan believes that the conflict is much wider: it creates problems not only for the Central Caucasus, but also for the world community, which has either to legalize the results of armed aggression of one Central Asian state against another or to restore the sovereign rights of one of the sides and thus reassert international order based on respect for sovereignty. This makes Karabakh not merely an ethnic or territorial, but also a geopolitical conflict that threatens peace and stability in the geostrategic context.37
There is no shortage of expert assessments and analytical studies of the Karabakh problem; however, there is a common agreement that the first separatist movement on the post-Soviet expanse that developed from an internal ethnopolitical crisis into an inter-state armed conflict became the smoldering seat of regional tension and an object of the world’s community close attention. This means that its settlement will bring stability and security not only to Azerbaijan, but also to the Central Caucasus. Peaceful settlement may serve as the pattern for other regional conflicts.
In this way, the ethnopolitical security of any country is the categorical imperative for all Central Caucasian nations and for the region as a whole. I believe that no matter how important all spheres of social life (economic, socio-political, cultural, etc.) are, the future of national statehoods and the countries’ involvement in the globalization processes primarily depend on ethnopolitical security, the object of which is being born before our eyes in a painful and bloody process.
J. Rothschild, an American expert on ethnic politics, has demonstrated a very interesting approach to the subject. He has identified the errors that should be avoided and warned against the destructive impact of ethnocratic impulses on social development. We have already seen that it is very easy to mobilize the ethnic factor under conditions of ethnic, social, economic, resource, etc. asymmetry. The author is convinced that ethnocratic intentions should not be ignored or underestimated and that politically organized ethnicity should be monitored, while the international community and the states should pursue adequate policies in relation to states that produce migrants.38
This means that the idea of state sovereignty of any nation should be limited to human rights; that is, the Central Caucasian states should trim their involvement in public affairs and allow the individual to choose freely, irrespective of his nationality. The Central Caucasian statehood is obviously ethnocratic—there is no doubt of this (there is only one state language in each of them, while the titular nations enjoy wider rights on the official and everyday level). To keep the ethnocratic trends in check, these countries should recognize the ethnic-national minorities and support them. Democracy is the best tool for establishing a stable economic and political order based, among other things, on regulated ethnic-national relations.
Globalization, which took many people unawares, challenged mankind with the need to find political and axiological paradigms and models of coexistence of ethnoses, cultures, and civilizations (in the security context, included) able to channel the natural processes of ethnic revival toward the joint peaceful creative efforts of large and small nations. If neglected they might produce confrontation and the urge to enlarge their Lebensraums.
36 A.D. Tsyganok, “Karabakhskaia godovshchina,” Polit.Ru, 5 December, 2007, available at [http://www.polit.ru// author/2005/10/18/karabakh/html].
37 See: Round Table in the Azerros editorial office “Problema uregulirovania karabakhskogo konflikta,” available at [http://www.azerros].
38 See: J. Rothschild, “Etnopolitika,” in: Etnos i politika: Khrestomatia, ed. by A.A. Prazauskas, Moscow, 2000,
p. 163.
C o n c l u s i o n
Now that a system of challenges and threats confronts globalization, it is increasingly important to ensure security in the ethnopolitical sphere, the key factor of the entire national security system. This should be done for the sake of better ethnic relations; this should be done to help ethnoses adapt themselves to the current socioeconomic and political changes. This is, in fact, one of the key conditions in which the individual, society, and the state can feel absolutely safe.
It should be said that the contemporary theoretical approaches to national security are too vague when it comes to security issues; they tend to underestimate some of the methodological aspects of shaping national security strategy. Indeed, there should be no uniformity when it comes to strategic decisions and their realization in the security sphere. The time has come to speak freely about the ethnopolitical issues relating to national security: so far political science has tended to avoid them. We can even say that political science and political practice have reached the point where they should start looking into the causes of the globalizing world’s conflict nature and follow their development from predominantly inter-state to predominantly domestic conflicts. The theoretical-methodological paradigms used to grasp the meaning of the ethnopolitical processes should be changed; what we need is a new research space that will bring together ethnopolitics and security.
This means that the theoretical-methodological and applied studies of the ethnopolitical dimensions of national security (ethnopolitical security) will lead to clear ethnic policies. It is vitally important, in this context, to neutralize all attempts to use ethnic identity for political aims. It is no less important to prevent ethnic conflicts as a tool for settling ethnopolitical confrontation. We should create all sorts of models and programs designed to overcome the negative results of such confrontation. The state and public institutions should step up their efforts in this sphere; we might need new structures designed to neutralize the threats to ethnopolitical security created by the unfolding ethno-social processes.
