CC BY
48
Kanan ALLAKHVERDIEV
Associate Professor, Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan
(Baku, Azerbaijan).
GLOBALIZATION AND ETHNIC POLICY IN THE CAUCASUS: BETWEEN THE BEETLE AND THE BLOCK
Abstract
This article analyzes two key aspects of the ethnopolitical processes underway in the Caucasus in the context of globalization: how globalization affects the ethnic processes proper, and how it is reflected in the forms of their political institutionalization. The author looks into
two opposing global trends that have gained momentum in the 21st century: ethnic consolidation and ethnopolitical mobilization, on the one hand, and the integration of ethnic groups and quest for new forms of global community, on the other.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
In the late 1980s, ethnopolitical problems came to the fore all over the world, capturing the minds of the academic and journalist communities and the imagination of ordinary people who authored books, articles, and essays on the urgent issues of the world’s contemporary developments. Indeed, mankind watched how states (the Soviet giant empire among them) fell apart; and how ethnic wars and ethnocide produced millions of ethnic refugees and forced migrants. And the list goes on.
The globalization-related problems are much harder to grasp for the man-in-the-street and much harder to analyze for the academics: Is the process a natural outcome of the world’s previous development, and what are its consequences? These and similar questions raise a flurry of confusion and no unequivocal answers.
In fact, the two problem groups outlined above are closely interconnected, not only because they belong to the same “field of diffusion,” but also because their dispassionate scholarly investigation is hindered by several common factors: the strong emotional background, heterogeneous aspects lumped together, substitution of abstract constructions for very specific concepts, etc. These difficulties must be overcome when analyzing the “globalization-ethnicization” tandem; this is especially important in the case of the Caucasus, a region of numerous conflicts. Here we have to seek and find answers to many challenging issues:
• How can two diametrically opposite processes—globalization and ethnicization of life—unfold in the same spatial-temporal expanse?
• Can the Caucasian peoples, in principle, switch from the dominant ethnopolitical imperatives to universal global values?
• What will globalization bring to the Caucasus: peace, democracy, prosperity or another bout of bloody repartition of borders, division of territories and resources that will produce dwarf or mutant states?
Globalization and Ethnicization: Two Sides of the Same Coin?
When looking at the ethnopolitical situation across the post-Soviet expanse (especially in the Caucasus), researchers are usually in the habit of merely registering the facts—the method being of little academic value. Indeed, how do we profit from a simple statement of the fact that in the Caucasus the Soviet Union’s disintegration revived national-ethnic problems that had lain dormant for many decades,1 or from accepting the subjective idea that the Russian radicals led by Boris Yeltsin played a decisive role in the process by supporting the national separatists in other republics?2
Indeed, the post-Soviet Baltic republics with “tension zones” of their own (Ignalina with its predominantly Russian population and Salcininkai populated by Poles in Lithuania and the Russian-populated Narva District in Estonia) have never known vehement ethnopolitical conflicts. In Latvia, the Russian population, which comprises nearly 50 percent of the republic’s total population, is a factor of ethnopolitical tension.
When trying to explain this and similar paradoxes, academics tend toward oversimplification by saying that the post-Soviet nations’ cultural level and mentality3 varied from state to state, or that the current ethnic problems are rooted in the past histories of ethnic relations,4 or are caused by the struggle for property and economic resources,5 or that the great powers are
1 See: V.N. Lysenko, “Etnopoliticheskie konflikty v postkommunisticheskom prostranstve,” Etnopolis, No. 5, 1995, pp. 56-70.
2 See: S.V. Cheshko, Raspad Sovetskogo Soiuza: etnopoliticheskiy analiz, Moscow, 1996.
3 See: “Postsovetskoe prostranstvo: etnopoliticheskie problemy (po materialam obsuzhdenia za kruglym stolom ‘Kuda idet Rossia?’” Sotsiologicheskie issledovania, No. 1, 1977, pp. 34-55, No. 2, 1997, pp. 77-94.
4 See: E.D. Panarin, Natsional'nye problemy na postsovetskoy territorii, St. Petersburg, 2001, pp. 20-24.
5 See: St. Cohen, “‘Vopros voprosov:’ pochemu ne stalo Sovetskogo Soiuza?,” AIRO-XXI Publishers, Moscow-Dmitri Bulavin Publishers, St. Petersburg, 2007, pp. 102-103.
playing their “big games,”6 etc. Fiona Hill of the United States has pointed out that comparing the Caucasus with the Baltic states, which were and still are concerned with the same issues— integration into Europe, cooperation with NATO, etc.—produces highly interesting results. The Baltic countries, which acted together, succeeded, even though it was not easy, to formulate common aims. They are all different and their histories are unique, even though sometimes very similar. Nothing of the sort can be seen in the Caucasus: there is no common agenda to promote joint development of the Transcaucasian republics. There is no cooperation among them, and this is the main stumbling block.7
There are also academic works that explain the current ethnopolitical situation by the region’s civilizational specifics inherent in all the nations and uniting them into a civilization8 determined, among other things, by archaic ethnosocial features: the clan, teip, patriarchal way of life, parochialism, etc.
Western political thought, which serves as the intellectual denominator of European and international integration, regards the deepening ethnopolitical contradictions in the Caucasus and the trend toward smaller states as an archaic feature inherited from the pre-capitalist or totalitarian past. Francis Fukuyama has written that it was economic forces that boosted nationalism when they replaced class with national barriers, thus creating centralized and linguistically homogeneous entities. Today, the same economic forces are working toward liquidating the national barriers by setting up a single world market. The very fact that our generation or the one after us might not live long enough to see the final political neutralization of nationalism does not mean that this will never happen.9 This is a politically correct position that can be described as rational if taken as a forecast, but, as a scholarly effort, it fails to provide an adequate analysis of the Caucasian developments.
It is safe to say that the nature and course of the ethnopolitical processes cannot be explained by their own inherent features as the cause of their own existence. To create an effective scholarly model of the genesis of the ethnopolitical processes we should seek external impulses, determinants of a higher order that initiate these phenomena in a latent way and correlate with the intermediate and final results.
Globalization interpreted as a historical process through which mankind looks into its genetic substance, a very complicated process, which Teilhard de Chardin called “curling,” may play the role of a universal impulse. According to the French philosopher, nations have already reached the threshold of mutual dependence beyond which there is no place for the settlement of international conflicts by reshaping borders. One of the founders of global evolutionism predicted that the “phenomenon of man” would develop into the “phenomenon of mankind,” which, in the final analysis, opens the road to removing everything that divides people.10
We can even say tentatively (the issue calls for further theoretical and empirical reconsideration) that certain aspects and forms of proto-globalization have been present throughout the history of mankind. I have in mind the great empires of antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as the global colonial empires of the New Age. Most American researchers date the early globalization stages to 1492 and the era of Geographic Discoveries. After analyzing the data for 1601-1833, Emily Erikson and Peter Bearman concluded that it was the dishonest merchants and sailors of the East India Trading Company who were responsible for globalization.11
6 This aspect is in fact a problem in its own right, brilliantly formulated by I. Berman, Vice-President of the American Foreign Policy Council, in “The New Battleground: Central Asia and the Caucasus,” The Washington Quarterly,
Vol. 28, No. 1, Winter 2004-05, pp. 59-69.
7 See: “Kak razreshit konflikty na Kavkaze?” Washington ProFile, 29 December, 2004.
8 See: R.G. Abdulatipov, “Kavkazskaia tsivilizatsia,” Nauchnaia mysl Kavkaza, No. 1, 1995, pp. 50-62.
9 See: F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York, 1997, p. 275.
10 See: P.T. de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, Transl. by Bernard Wall, Harper Perennial, New York, 1976.
11 See: “Shest vekov globalizatsii,” Washington ProFile, Issue 84 (310), 23 July, 2003 [www.washprofile.org].
The 20th and the early 21st centuries can be described as an era of competing globalist development projects: the libertarian and the communist, the colonial and the civilizational, the multipolar and the unipolar. Even if one element of the pair proved unviable (the communist one, for example), this does not mean that its alternative—the libertarian variant—has scored a “complete and final victory” and emerged as the only possible variant. Charles Handy is quite right when he writes that “capitalism has proved itself superior to communism, but has failed, thus far, to show that it has the complete answer to our desire for progress.”12 A. Utkin, in turn, also points out globalization’s conceptual specifics: “The term ‘globalization’ is a metaphor invented to clarify the meaning and nature of contemporary capitalism.”13 Indeed, Latin America, which is “going red” before our eyes, casts doubts on the generally accepted opinion that the liberal market model of social relations has scored a final victory.
Globalization, understood as movement toward worldwide interconnections based on communications, the merging of national economies, and the emergence of new international forms of infrastructure, is bound to lead to mutually exclusive trends. The 18th IPSA World Congress discussed globalization and its contradictions: the globalization/Westernization/modernization correlation; the contradictory correlation between the globalization processes and national sovereignty and national interests; the contradictions between identity and globalization, between the growing national selfawareness of numerically small ethnic groups and their development in the absence of adequate representative (national-state) structures in the countries where they live and in the world; the contradictions between the national-ethnic relations and consciousness in the epoch of globalization; the globalization/migration contradictions; and the growing threats of nationalism and separatism against the background of unfolding globalization.14
More elements can be added, but the currently obvious contradictions of globalization fit into one of the following problem ranges:
1. The threats and challenges born by globalization (international terrorism and crime, drug trafficking, slave trade, etc.), the scope and consequences of which have outmatched its unique advantages.
2. The vague relations between nation-states and quasi-state formations, between ethnic groups and supra-national structures.
3. The unipolar world and the gradually emerging opposing factors. The pillars of the AngloSaxon planetary hegemony are gradually being undermined by other global trends, such as the shrinking number of those who use English as their native language (currently 7 percent), while Chinese is the native language of over 20 percent of the global population; the steadily decreasing share of Christians, as opposed to the steadily growing share of the Muslims, etc.
4. The elite nature of globalization which has deepened the abyss between the world’s regions: the rich are growing richer, while the poor are becoming even poorer.
An analysis of the above shows that globalization is exacerbating the following:
• Development problems—the rich North and the poor South;
• Global problems—the democratic West and the authoritarian-totalitarian East.
12 Ch. Handy, The Hungry Spirit. Beyond Capitalism: A Quest for Purpose in the Modern World, Broadway Books, New York, 1998.
13 A.I. Utkin, Globalizatsia: protsess i osmyslenie, Moscow, 2001, p. 9.
14 See: Iu.V. Irkhin, “XVIII Vsemirny kongress Mezhdunarodnoy assotsiatsii politicheskoy nauki o problemakh globalizatsii,” Vestnik Rossiiskogo universiteta druzhby narodov. Political Science Series, No. 3, 2001, pp. 36-44.
No wonder there is the opinion that the “new world order” might turn out to be a “new world disorder.”15
In view of the above, globalization can be described as a geo-historical process that has already involved, on different scales, all sides of public life and various regions, which thus received different impulses and development vectors depending on their parameters and development quality. The eth-nopolitical processes of today can be discussed in this context from two points of view: first, the way globalization affects the ethnic processes proper, and second, its impact on the forms of their political institutionalization.
There is every reason to believe that in the 21st century these two directly opposing global trends will become even more pronounced: on the one hand, the widespread processes of ethnic consolidation and ethnopolitical mobilization betray a disuniting trend; on the other, ethnic integration and the emerging new forms of global community play a unifying role.
These trends are obviously two sides of the same globalization process, but in different regions (states) one of them might prevail. In a large number of nations of Eurasia and Africa, the socioeconomic development level of which remains below the threshold of the industrial epoch, globalization is (and will remain for the next several decades) a catalyst for classical capitalist processes that will call to life the “national spirit” and create ethno-nations and national states.
This explains the Soviet Union’s disintegration as the rejection of a historically unviable globalist model that opened the road toward a different regional development model. The Baltic republics, whose peoples had already developed historically by this time,16 merely became national states with constitutional traditions. In fact, the Soviet Union’s demise helped to restore their lost sovereignty. No wonder that constitutional political, civil nationalism with social and even democratic features is typical of them.
In those regions and countries in which ethnonational unity was half-baked and where the national-state order (ethnopolitical consolidation) was not completely formed, ethnic activation emerged as the main trend obvious elsewhere in the world. This defrosted another mechanism of protection and adaptation—ethnonationalism—based on the policy of ethnic domination and zealous defense against the real or invented domination of “alien” nations. Driven to its extreme, the adaptation mechanism yields what looks like absolutely opposite results: the process of national-state development proceeds as ethnocratic and national imperialist, two phenomena that reject supra-national trends and alien features. I have already written that contradictions are inherent in globalization, which, as a geo-historical process, manifests itself not as a unilinear advance, but rather as a sinusoid with nations and regions scattered along it.
Globalization and ethnicization, two poles of a single historical process through which the planet is developing into a “global village,”17 coexist in an internally complex dialectics of mutual transitions. In the “global village,” in which nothing can remain secret and in which everyone is responsible for everything, classical multinational states complete with the attributes of ethnic policy (economically justified borders, ethnicity as a status, etc.) call to life another objective sociohistorical requirement: planetary uniformity designed to overcome these attributes. On the other hand, globalization
15 Globalization and Antiglobalization: Dynamics of Change in the New World Order, ed. by Henry Veltmey-er, Aldershot, Hants, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005; A.S. Blinov, Natsional’noe gosudarstvo v usloviakh glo-
balizatsii: kontury postroenia politiko-pravovoy modeli formiruiushchegosia global ’nogo poriadka, MAKS Press, Moscow, 2003.
16 In the Middle Ages, the Eastern Baltic tribes (the Lits, Zemaite, Zmud, Livs, Ests, and others) were drawn into ethnic transformations that produced the Lithuanians, Letts, and Estonians within the Holy Roman Empire, a European quasi-state at the time. The well-known dictum that it was not the nation that created the state, but the state that created the nation has been confirmed by the Baltic nations’ development (see: E. Hobsbaum, Natsii i natsionalizm posle 1980 g., St. Petersburg, 1998, p. 68).
17 M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, University of Toronto Press, Toronto,
1962.
has great potential for self-destruction—it accelerates powerful migration flows that add to the world’s ethnic patchiness; 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.
Ethic migration may even lead to suc-cession.18 This can be observed in some of the European countries and Russia (according to certain sources today, the Chinese comprise 50 percent of the local population in the Russian Far East).19 The relatively fast changes in the ethnic structures of states and regions (which may cause more ethnopolitical threats) are mainly brought about by the increasingly globalized demographic processes among the host ethnic groups.
If the ethnopolitical component continues to gain weight in social life, it may, in the near future, cause unacceptably deep fragmentation of practically all multiethnic states. The present system of international relations will tumble down; ethnopolitical conflicts will be triggered in all corners of the world, some of them developing into interstate or even regional wars. There is any number of warnings about “disintegration of the world’s homogeneity” and “disrupted ethnicity;” some authors say: “In the age of globalization, ethnonational minorities will grow more aggressive because of threatened ethnic specifics and vague prospects.”20
There is another, no less important, aspect of the same problem: the national states will play less important roles in the world under the pressure of globalization. Their foundations will be undermined in many respects: the transnational economy will deprive national borders of their economic meaning; state sovereignty will shrink because at least some of the states will transfer part of their sovereign rights to supranational institutions; information and communication technologies will easily cross state borders, thus leading to “a world without information borders;” while much more active transnational migration and deepening pluralism among cultures and ethnicities will undermine the states still further.
According to certain Western scholars (Yale H. Ferguson and Richard W. Mansbach among others), the present motion toward globalization undermines the states and the system of states.21 In other words, even though it still exists, the nation is becoming irrelevant. The closer we move toward the global integral whole, the closer we come to the end of geography (the state-national division of the world).22
At the same time, the historical prospects for national states look pretty optimistic. “It is too early to dismiss national states as the main subjects of international relations. They form a mega-community with respect to their aims and interests.”23 There is a multitude of diverse factors responsible
18 A term introduced by Lev Gumilev in his theory of anthropogenesis to describe the process of abnormally fast change in a territory’s ethnic composition.
19 See: T. Regent, “Problemy regulirovania migratsionnykh processov,” Migratsia, No. 4, 1997; S. Panarin, “Bezopas-nost i etnicheskaia migratsia v Rossii,” Pro et Contra, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1998; Migratsionnaia situatsia v Rossii i stranakh SNG, Moscow, 1999.
20 R.G. Abdullatipov, Etnopolitologia, Piter Publishers, St. Petersburg, 2004, pp. 239-240.
21 See: A.I. Utkin, “Geostruktura XXI veka,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 1 September,2000.
22 See: R. O’Brien, Global Financial Integration. The End of Geography, Pinter Publishers, London, 1992, p. 5.
23 V.B. Kuvaldin, “Globalizatsia—svetloe budushchee chelovechestva?” Nezavisimaia gazeta—stsenarii, 11 October, 2000.
for the degree to which any country negatively responds to globalization. It seems that those who say, “The less competent a state, the more likely it is to dissolve into component parts or be unable to adapt to transnational developments. Challenges at home and abroad test the mettle of states,”24 are absolutely right.
The Caucasus: from the “Realm of Ethnic Policy” to the “Realm of Globalization?”
This question is of strategic importance for the region. When dealing with the region’s specific problems, local politicians face a daily dilemma: they must either rely on the universal values declared at the international level, or offer the “local audience” ethnopolitical slogans.
On the whole, the fact that ethnopolitical formulas dominate in the Caucasus can be amply explained by the natural-geographical determination of the local multiethnic structures, the weak economic component of the region’s sociopolitical development, the absence, until the 19th-20th centuries, of historically deep-rooted centralized states or strong supra-national territorial-state units, etc.
The above suggests that the ethnopolitical processes in the Caucasus, and in the majority of Central Eurasian states for that matter, should have passed, and are passing, through certain stages to ultimately reach a level of socioeconomic and political development approved by the world community. This stage-by-stage ethnopolitical development fits perfectly into the “socially compressed time” globalization has offered them. For this reason, we can describe the evolution of ethnonation-alism (so far dominant) into plebiscitary nationalism as objectively necessary, which offers democratic tools to be used to achieve ethnic compromises and ethnic cooperation.
We should not confuse two absolutely different processes: the formation and consolidation of contemporary nations and ethnic groups in the Caucasus and the related political phenomena, on the one hand, and ethnic domination achieved through coercion, ethnic cleansing, deportations, and annexations, on the other.
Ethnopolitical self-determination and its forms are where the two trends meet. It should be said that absolutization of the national state as the only possible form of statehood is not merely erroneous from the scholarly point of view—it is a dangerous political position fraught with crimes against humanity. To justify this approach, both the academic and the political community say that today the earth is home for up to 5,000 nationalities scattered over about 200 countries. This means that there are potentially 5,000 different ethnic cultures, mentalities, ways of life, and behavioral patterns. Obviously, not all these peoples live in their own states: such fragmentation would have undermined the world order. The desire of some peoples to have more than one country is equally dangerous.
We can safely say that this issue (a fairly painful one for the nationalities that “came too late” to create a state) is of critical importance for those who want to understand the ethnopolitical and interstate relations in the Caucasus.
Irrespective of personal political and ethnic loyalties and emotions, we should admit that as long as nations, national development, and national issues remain on the agenda, the self-determination issue in one form or another will survive. Donald Horowitz of the United States pointed out that national self-determination “is a problem rather than an answer. Any number of arguments can be found
24 K.N. Waltz, “Globalization and American Power,” The National Interest, Spring 2000, Vol. 59.
against emphasizing national self-determination in favor of mutual compromises.”25 And while developing these arguments, several more reasons “against” can be found.
• First, the thesis of self-determination of a nation or a small ethnic group in a multiethnic state26 should not necessarily be supported by ethnic extremism, separatism, or secession. There are many different civilized forms: recognition of the right to internal self-determination, cultural autonomy, free development of the national spiritual values and language, following ethnic rites, historico-religious traditions, etc.
Stability and prosperity suffer if national self-determination is promoted by uncivilized methods. Gidon Gottlieb of the United States has pointed out that efforts to resolve the problem of separatism by dividing states lead to nothing but growing instability.27 We all know that, unfortunately, the slogans of moving away from separatism to more civilized forms of ethnic politics (regional autonomies of various types, political and administrative decentralization, etc.) obviously have not yet been recognized in the Caucasus. When looking for the roots, the researcher (who will discover the political, economic, and ethnosocial factors) will inevitably intrude into the very complicated sphere of political and ethnic psychology, in which hostile ethnic attitudes, prejudices, and fears are born.28
• Second, there is a considerable number of fairly large ethnic minorities in the Caucasian countries with a so-called “external status,” which means that they form titular nations in the neighboring states. This applies to the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh (Azerbaijan) and Samtskhe-Javakhetia (Georgia), the Azeri of Kvemo-Kartli (Georgia) and, very provisionally, the Ossets of South Ossetia (Georgia). The central authorities of these states may fear (with or without good reason) that international actors, geopolitical centers of power, or patron-states in which these nationalities are titular might try to defend the ethnic minorities, to use them in their aggressive policies, or even go as far as annexing the territory populated by an ethnic minority.
In this situation any state with such “ethnic potential” should forestall unwelcome developments by acting in the interests of its national security and in full conformity with regional relations. If the measures do not produce the desired effect, or if foreign actors disregard the international regulations (the notorious double standards), small ethnic groups may call for outside assistance. In this case, the initial apprehensions prove correct: it turns out that ethnic groups are disloyal to the state. The mechanism of “realized prophesies” comes into play, while rival states seek and acquire support in “gateway states”29 among the separatist-minded ethnic minorities.
• Third, the practical experience of the numerous conflict zones in the Caucasus (Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia, Ossetia, Chechnia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia) has proven beyond a doubt that the ethnic issue is being actively used, together with “national liberation” slogans, the aggressive defense of rights, etc., to pro-
25 See: D. Horowitz, Irredentism, Separatism and Nationalism (quoted from: V.A. Tishkov, “Vstupitel’naia statia (Introduction),” Bulletin No. 4 of the International Project “Uregulirovanie etnicheskikh konfliktov v postsovetskikh gosu-datstvakh,” Moscow, 1995, p. 16).
26 About 90 percent of the countries can be described as multiethnic; those countries in which ethnonational minorities comprise less than 5 percent are considered monoethnic. There are no more than 20 such states in the world.
27 See: G. Gottlieb, Nations against State. A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty, New York, 1993, p. 53.
28 See: D. Horowitz has identified several ethno-psychological states: fear of subjugation, fear of disappearance or assimilation, worries and prejudices that breed hostility (see: D. Horowitz, “Teoria mezhetnicheskikh konfliktov,” Etnos i politika: An Anthology, URAO Publishers, Moscow, 2000, pp. 232-233).
29 “Gateway states” means small advantageously located states with transition economies; the term belongs to Saul B. Cohen of the United States.
mote the status-related interests of the elites,30 frequently intertwined with the interests of the local mafia groups and clans. Thomas de Waal has pointed out to two important factors that interfere with the restoration of the Caucasus. The first is the local system in which power belongs to the local cartels or feudal lords pursuing their own short-term goals, such as continued domination at the local level. They are probably aware, writes de Waal, that in the long term they could profit more from regional cooperation, but they are too engrossed in current developments to stop and look around. The second factor is the Kara-bakh conflict.31
In this context, any minimum concessions in the sphere of language and culture and opening of national universities trigger further escalation. The ethnic elites, deliberately or otherwise, are leading the process into an impossible situation that will require radical measures to extricate itself.
Here is another important issue. Political writings and the mass consciousness are showing that they fail to grasp the fundamental difference between the formation of nation-ethnic groups and the formation of national states. They are close, interdependent, and mutually complementary phenomena under present conditions; however, a line can and should be drawn between them. Globalization is rapidly changing the historical types of sociocultural (nation, ethnos) and political (nation-state) communities. R. Abdullatipov of Russia has written: “In the 19th and even 20th centuries, the nation-state more likely than not meant the domination of one nation and the dissolution of all others for the sake of statehood. .. .The nation-state of the 21st century is a closely knit and equal entity of equally dignified ethnic nations united into a single political community with a common sociopolitical destiny.”32
Can this be realized in the Caucasus?
Globalization in the Caucasus: Hopes or Fears?
Political science and practical politics have long been of the pessimistic opinion that ethnically pluralistic communities do not create fertile soil for democracy.33 Since it is commonly accepted that only contemporary democracies are immune to wars, there is no shortage of pessimistic forecasts for the Caucasus.34 We have to admit that globalization might revive the old ethnopolitical problems and even create new ones. In this context, we can expect three possible threats to come to the fore.
1. The Domino Effect. We all know that during so-called peaceful periods, frozen and latent ethnic contradictions do not die out—they continue accumulating their destructive potential. The very fragile “neither war nor peace” state that we can observe in the Cauca-
30 See: V.A. Tishkov, “Zabyt o natsii (postnatsionalisticheskoe ponimanie natsionalizma),” Voprosy filosofii, No. 3, 1998, pp. 3-27.
31 See: “Kak razreshit konflikty na Kavkaze?”
32 R.G. Abdullatipov, Etnopolitologia, pp. 104-105.
33 See: A. Rabushka, K. Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability, Merrill, Columbus, Ohio, 1972, p. 186.
34 The GW Center for the Study of Globalization [http://gstudynet.com/gwcsg]; the Global Scenario Group [http:// www.gsg.org]; the Center for Strategic and International Studies [http://www.globalization101.org]; the Global Policy Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace [www.carnegieendowment.org/programs/global] have come up with the most interesting methodological results and scenarios of global prospects.
sus may be upturned by several methods, the most probable of them being another attempt by the national minorities to set up independent states. The ethnopolitical processes in the Caucasus are interdependent to a very high degree. An escalated conflict in one country may start a domino effect in its neighbors, where such developments look impossible: in monoethnic Armenia, or in Azerbaijan where the ethnopolitical situation is strictly controlled.
There are no limits to the possible involvement of neighbors in the seats of ethnic tension in other countries; the reasons vary from geopolitical to economic, or may be due to the division of resources. B. Coppieters believes that in the post-Soviet era ethnic relations became politicized and involved in the security sphere for one of these reasons; ethnic issues that used to belong to domestic and interstate relations were elevated to the level of national security issues, thus making their compromise settlement next to impos-
sible.35
2. The Nesting Doll. This threat will arrive on the heels of the domino effect to add to the tension and create a new level of ethnopolitical activity. In fact the nesting doll threat might prove lethal for Georgia as the most vulnerable South Caucasian state. If independent states do appear in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, so far the two most serious seats of separatism, the Armenians in the southern part of Central Georgia (7.5 percent of the country’s total population) and the Azeri from Central Georgia’s southern and southeastern areas (6.5 percent), as well as the Avars in the Kvareli District and the Kistin Chechens of the Akhmeti District, may start pressing for independence.36 This will weaken central power and aggravate the situation in Ajaria and Mingrelia, causing the republic’s further fragmentation. At the same time, it can be surmised that the parade of sovereignties will not stop at that. Each of the new states will be pestered by ethnopolitical collisions caused by the administrative and ethnic borders, which rarely (or never) coincide: the state ethnos will be forced to keep new domestic and external opponents in check. The principle of self-determination, if consistently realized in Abkhazia, will be fraught with a split into at least two sub-regions: the Muslim in Gudauta and Christian in Ochamchira. Reality might prove to be even more complicated: the Gagra and Gul’rypsh districts are the homes of compact Armenian communities; Mingrels and Georgians live in the Gali District, and Svans live in the Kodori Gorge; there is also the Georgian refugee problem.
3. “Big Bang” or a “Big Caucasian War.” If the above threats became real, this threat might become an even less welcome reality. The expert community has already warned us about possible “five Karabakhs,” the Lebanization and Balkanization of the Caucasus, a total war of “all against all.” Some of the warnings (such as the Caucasus developing into the seat of another world war) can be ignored, while most of the rest proceed from the very real processes shaking the region. Indeed, the fact (no matter how hypothetical) of Chechnia’s independence or reunification of Ossetia is a powerful factor that might set the military-political division of the Caucasian ethnopolitical expanse into motion, including not only the seven North Caucasian autonomies of the Russian Federation, but also the Central Caucasian states, as well as Turkey, Iran, and probably other actors.
Will the Caucasian nations manage to climb out of the quagmire of internal strife and mutual suspicion? There is no straightforward answer to this question, but the road to positive results lies
35 See: B. Coppieters, “The Politicization and Securitization of Ethnicity: The Case of the Southern Caucasus,” Civ-
il War, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2001, pp. 75, 91.
36 Data supplied by Polietnicheskaia Gruzia: XX vek, Published by the Open Society-Georgia Foundation, Tbilisi, 2004, pp. 361-362.
through joint involvement in global economic, cultural, communication, energy, and other similar projects. They might stem fragmentation and reintegrate the Caucasus in a relatively painless and effective way. On the other hand, there is the rich experience of the Western multiethnic and multicultural democracies. For example, the slogan “the Cabinet should look like America” realized in the United States since the 1990s presupposes a power structure dedicated to common national interests, which should, at the same time, reflect the nation’s diverse nature while remaining absolutely competent.
In the Caucasus, the power-ethnicity balance and the distribution of peremptory powers according to the principles of multiethnic democracy cannot be achieved today. At the same time, no analysis of the ethnopolitical processes in the context of globalization should be limited to conflict-generating factors and processes (the right to self-determination included). From the theoretical and especially practical points of view, it is much more productive to concentrate on the means and methods for preventing such processes and creating new transnational multiethnic units. This approach is much more understandable: globalization is weaving a communication web of mutual dependencies and mutual penetrations not only, and not so much, among national states as beyond their borders and barriers. It unites all ethnic identities into a global entity at a new civilizational level. Indeed, many scenarios of the future of ethnic groups obviously indicate that the factors and determinants forming nations and their specific features will weaken together with the principle of ethnic self-determination, especially its extreme manifestations.
Today, the globalization challenges and requirements have formulated a dilemma for practically all nations with or without states: either preservation of ethnic identity in its historical form or a quest for a new formula of harmonious ethnosocial content. In the near future the choice will become even more urgent: the current world development trends clearly indicate that this choice will determine people’s historical destinies and their organic incorporation into the global civilization.
When analyzing the interdependence between the ethnopolitical processes in the Caucasus and globalization, we should keep in mind that the region has not yet been completely affected with globalization. The globalization ranking compiled by A.T. Kearney, together with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, mentions none of the Caucasian states, even among the outsiders.37 Frederick Starr of the U.S. offered a pertinent comment: it is important, said he, for the states with conflicts on their territories not to lose themselves in the globalization process. The first elements of genuine globalization will come when conflicts become a thing of the past.38
Obviously, in this respect, too, globalization, on the one hand, offers unique possibilities for real self-organization of national life according to the principles of civil solidarity and social partnership. On the other, it helps to remove political and ethnic mythologemes in the course of realizing real (not imaginary) ethnopolitical and ethnocultural requirements.
C o n c l u s i o n
So far, certain trends typical of the contemporary world have nothing in common with the eth-nopolitical situation in the Caucasus, or with the strategic aims of the key actors on this “playing field” (Z. Brzezinski). To some extent the situation contradicts such trends. This can be said about
37 The project took account of data for 62 countries with 88 percent of the global population and over 91 percent of world economy (see: A.T. Kearney, Foreign Policy Globalization Index 2006, available at [www.atkearney.com/main]).
38 See: F. Starr, “Posle togo, kak na Kavkaze budut ustraneny sushchestvuiushchie conflikty, budet zalozhena os-nova nastoiashchey globalizatsii,” Trend Information Agency, Azerbaijan, 15 September, 2006.
some of my own conclusions as well. This is because there is an objective contradiction between the mounting ethnic regionalization and very much needed political and economic integration in the context of globalization.
Regrettably, a compromise between the opposing sides on the right to self-determination and on other no less burning ethnopolitical issues is hardly possible. Hypertrophied forms of political ethni-cization resulted in a situation where the minimum demands of one side far exceed the maximum concessions of the other side. Irresponsible politicians shifted the issues to the sphere of armed struggle, in which criticism with “weapons in hand” replaced “the weapon of criticism.”
If the region fails to develop large-scale integration projects and fails to switch to a multicultural model of ethnic policy according to the demands of globalization across the board, these contradictions will sooner or later rekindle open ethnic confrontations. The ethnocratic features of statehood (that is, actual and theoretical privileges of the titular nations) might be downplayed to a great extent, if the local countries are resolved to apply the principles of concession democracy to ethnopolitical problems. This type of democracy will help to maintain economic and political stability and order; it should be based, among other things, on readjusted national relations in the context of democracy and on Caucasian realities.
We have seen that the vague future of the old forms of statehood and national development gaining momentum in the 21st century will inevitably create a new format of ethnopolitical processes and will intensify the quest for alternative ethnopolitical formulae which, it seems, will repeatedly return the world, and the Caucasus as its part, to the very painful reality of establishing a new global order.
Namig ALIEV
Doctor of Law (Baku, Azerbaijan).
ARMENIAN-AZERBAIJANI NAGORNO-KARABAKH CONFLICT IN THE CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL LAW
Abstract
This article deals with the international legal aspects of the Armeni-an-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In reference to this conflict, the author examines such burning questions of modern international law as the princi-
ple of territorial integrity of states and the right of peoples to self-determination, makes assessment of this conflict from the angle of international law, and considers various state-legal aspects of its settlement.
