CC BY
31
Kenan ALLAKHVERDIEV
Ph.D. (Philos.), associate professor at the Department of Political Science and Political Administration,
Academy of State Administration under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan (Baku, Azerbaijan).
THE CAUCASIAN STATES: ETHNIC AND CONFESSIONAL FACTOR OF NATIONAL SECURITY
Abstract
The author investigates the phenomenon of ethnic and confessional affiliation that plays a special (positive or negative) role in the highly conflict-prone contexts of the post-Soviet transition states’ national security. He analyz-
es the phenomenon’s genesis and dual nature as well as its ability to breed social-political conflicts of a special type and their destabilizing and stabilizing impact on the contemporary security systems.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
At all times academics and politicians have found it hard to agree on the nature of interrelations between religion and politics and among their products: traditional and political cultures, values, and institutions. In the past, debates developed into armed clashes: witness the Wars of Religion in France (16th-century); the Reformation in Germany, the Reconquista in Spain (15th-century); the Ottoman-Safavid wars (16th-17th centuries), etc.
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Later, the religious factor retained its social and political weight in the countries’ socioeconomic1 development and domestic policies,2 when it came to “conveniently” dividing the country into administrative-territorial units3 or to securing geopolitical aims.4
At the turn of the 21st century, when the archaic forms of imperial confrontations had finally become the thing of the past, there came the epoch of globalization with its own advantages, paradoxes, and challenges. The upsurge of ethnic activity throughout the world, mushrooming nation-states based on this matrix, and the imperative nature of the values of ethnopolitical development are among such challenges. In other words, globalization created ethnopolitics as its antinomy.5
Despite the wealth of political-religious, academic, and publicist writings devoted to the problem of the coexistence of religion and ethnopolitics under the new conditions, this field still abounds in lacunae and brims with unanswered questions.
Here I have addressed three of the most topical of them:
■ Is it right to speak about the interrelation between “ethnic group” and “religion” (confession) as a qualitatively new category—ethnoconfessionalism?
■ Is it scientifically correct to identify the so-called ethnoconfessional conflicts as a special type or do they belong to the category of ethnopolitical conflicts?
■ What place in the “ethnopolitics-security” formula belongs to the confessional factor; are the recently relatively identified types of security (“religious” and “ethnoconfessional”) rooted in the scholarly and meaningful context or are they none other than mythologemes?
These questions are especially pertinent for the transition states, that is, for all the Soviet-suc-cessor states, the Caucasian states included. The still unfolding ethnosocial and nation-state processes and the difficulties inevitably encountered during democratic development create tension when combined with the political, ethnic, and confessional problems. This, in turn, creates an entanglement of threats with higher than normal conflict-prone potential when it comes to these states’ ethnopolitical and, on the whole, national security. I shall seek answers to the above questions in this context.
Ethnoconfessionality: Is it an Ethnic or Religious Phenomenon?
I shall first concretize the basic concepts to be used in the article. Academics and publicist writers alike have accepted that “religion” and “confession” (“religious” and “confessional”) are two interchangeable categories. On my part I believe that these two equivalent concepts differ when it comes to their psycho-linguistic and ethnopolitical contents.
1 Max Weber believed that capitalism in England, the Netherlands, and Germany developed rapidly thanks to the Protestantism that had struck root in these countries (see: M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Routledge, London, 1987).
2 This trend was especially evident in Western Europe in the early 20th century where many of the political parties were based on the religious affiliation of its members.
3 This was typical of all empires, especially of the British and Russian.
4 For example, Russia actively used the “need to defend Christians” in the Balkans as a geopolitical pretext, which was also present in the so-called Eastern Question in the 19th-early 20th centuries.
5 The “Globalization and ethnicization are two sides of one coin” dilemma is discussed in my article “Globalization and Ethnic Policy in the Caucasus: Between the Beetle and the Block” that appeared in The Caucasus & Globalization journal, No. 1 (2), 2007.
To confirm the above let us look at what contemporary dictionaries say.
“Religion (Lat. religio—piety, object of worship, cultic object) is a philosophy and perception of the world as well as corresponding conduct and specific (cultic) actions based on faith in God (or gods) and the supernatural.”6 “Confession (Lat. confessio) is denomination (faith). With the emergence of various Protestant trends the term was applied to religious communities (churches) related by common doctrines as well as the ‘symbolic books’ that registered these doctrines (for example, the Augsburg Confession, and others).”7
While religion is a specific form of generalized philosophical mastering and assessment of reality and the basis on which public conscience and social conduct are built, confession helps people make a more or less conscious choice of religious model (one of the world confessions and their trends) and corresponding religious technologies (cults, rites, and prescriptions).
This problem has a subjective side to it: each student of religion deals with basically extrascien-tific matter and has to bring together in his mind the truths of reason and the truths of the faith. Elmir Kuliev from Azerbaijan has pointed out: “As for the studies of those who remain ‘outside religious world outlook,’ they cannot be unbiased and objective. When we deal with any religion, Islam or Christianity, the position of an outside observer is impossible: religious convictions demand that everyone either accept or reject them.”8
There is another aspect of the same problem related to the essential description of ethnicity and confessionality, their shared or different features and their inner interconnection. The wide variety of interpretations of these two phenomena notwithstanding, their fundamental criteria reveal aspects suggestive of their inner nature.
The immanent properties of ethnicity and confessionality are best seen in tabulated form.
The table below supplies enough material for the following: ethnicity and confessionality do not negate one another but rather are mutually complementary: the negative and positive processes as well as integration and disintegration are, on the whole, mutually balancing. At the same time, since it is next to impossible to identify the exact mechanisms of interaction between the immanent features of both ethnicity and confessionality (this should be treated separately), we should concentrate on identifying the contact zones of this interaction as a much more promising exercise. A new social-anthropogenic reality, a blend of ethnicity and confessionality—ethnoconfessionality—appears where interaction takes place.
The following mechanisms can be identified as its key structural-functional elements:
■ Structuralization of ethnic groups through consolidation of those living in adjacent territories into a larger ethnic entity of a higher typological order on the basis of local variants of shared moral principles;
■ Ethnonational implementation of religion. Russian authors T. Mastiugina and L. Perepelkin have the following to say in this respect: “The world religions ... are of a supra-national, international nature, yet each of the world confessions, Christianity in the first place, contains a multitude of denominations to play the role of national (or, rather, quasi-national) religion (Anglicanism in Great Britain, Baptism in the United States, and Shi‘a Islam in Iran);”9
■ Method of translation of confessional content into ethnic forms, for example, religious-moral prescriptions into prescriptions of social stereotypes and symbolic environment;
■ A mechanism of integration used to construct new systemic components of the ethnic group’s social life:
6 [http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc1p/40598].
7 [http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc1p/23942].
8 Koran. Perevod smyslov i kommentarii Kulieva E.R., OAO Sharg-Garb, Baku, 2006, p. 6.
9 T.M. Mastiugina, L.S. Perepelkin, Etnologia. Narody Rossii: istoria i sovremennoepolozhenie, Moscow, 1997, p. 15.
Table 1
Comparison of the Immanent Properties of Ethnicity and Confessionality
Criterion Description Ethnicity Confessionality
Key descriptions Inborn qualities (primordialism); symbolic milieu; system of stereotypes Historically determined
Genesis In the majority of cases is vague and debatable As a rule, historically anchored to the relatively exact time of emergence and development stages
Objective Substantial basis for national statehood Substantial basis for confessional civilization
Subjective Justification of domination of any specific confession on a given territory The reason why scattered ethnic groups should be united into an ethnosocial community
Type of culture Traditionally instrumentalist Traditional
Type of interconnection Historical form of realization of confessionality Historical method of preserving ethnicity
Acmatic phase Increases the social distance between it and other ethnic groups Shortens the social distance between it and other ethnic groups
Homeostatic phase At the large group level, decline of ethnicity turns into a process of ethnic transformations when the changes of individual ethnic components (language, culture, conscience, etc.) bring about a change in ethnic self-awareness and self-identity At the large group level, decline of confessionality is evolutionary because the changes do not affect confessional self-identification
Basic values Ethnocultural, political Civilizational, common to mankind
Aim Nation-state World confession
Change of the selfidentification type Practical constancy of self-identification Potential possibility of change in confessions on the basis of their sociocultural relevance
—a single system of social (ethnic) and civilizational (confessional) solidarity and identity;
—a single system of collective (ethnic) and civilizational (confessional) ideas about one’s own social group and its place in contemporary realities;
—a single system of social-state coercion and religious-moral sanctions, authority.
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There is another aspect of the problem, which is theoretical-methodological in nature: the concept “ethnoconfessional” is used in various contexts: an ethnoconfessional system,10 ethnoconfes-sional democracy,11 etc. So far, scholarly definitions of the very phenomenon of ethnoconfessionality have been poorly elaborated.
Here is my contribution to these efforts: ethnoconfessionality is a special type of social identity caused by confessionality and ethnicity developing together in historical contexts and expressed in various forms of socio-psychological perception of their identity.
This definition reflects the specific features of confessional-ethnic reality in the Soviet-succes-sor states at the transition stage when public conscience has become firmly convinced that individual ethnicity is identified through its confessional affiliation and vice versa.
It is much more important to identify the place of ethnoconfessionality in the ethnopolitical processes going on in the Caucasian states. The paradigm espoused above suggests the following important aspects.
1. Most of the ethnic groups living in the Caucasus (both titular and smaller ones) have not yet completed the process of their ethnonational development. Ethnoconfessionality brings the completion of this process closer—its very nature overcomes ethnotribalism and subethnic clans, that is, stimulates ethnic consolidation.
2. The Caucasus’ polyethnic nature (with the exception of Armenia, which deliberately became monoethnic) has made the task of transforming the “coexistence” of the previously relatively independent small ethnic groups into a new form of their ethnosocial cohesion into a single nation within each of the states while preserving their ethnocultural diversity. This complex ethnoblending process (ethnic fusion, to borrow the ethnologists’ favorite term) largely depends on the degree to which ethnoconfessional forms are developed.
3. In most of the polyethnic transition states (in the Caucasus, as well as elsewhere) ethnoconfessionality became a pragmatic ideal and political basis for all sorts of constructs of the national idea, national ideology, and national ideal (the idea of Russia-ism or the ideology of Azerbaijan-ism). It is very important to find an answer to the question: To what extent is this social ideal “national” and to what extent is the national ideal “social” if the development of ethnic groups (nations) is reduced to movement toward an ideal (aim or ideological program)? I believe that ethnoconfessionality, a universal accumulator of the nation’s historically developing ethnic, social, and spiritual experience can be taken as a measuring rod.
It should be said here that the level of a society’s ethnoconfessionality is not a constant—it is determined by the state of its ethnopolitical and religious spheres. An analysis of the dramatic events of the late 1980s-early 1990s that took place in the Caucasus demonstrated that ethnoconfessionality develops through two stages.
■ At the first stage, which I call “ethnopolitical confessionality,” the ethnopolitical component of ethnoconfessionality was the most required element in the context of the mounting centrifugal trends when the population should have been politically mobilized. This means that ethnic elites, ethnic political parties based on “national-liberation” and “religious” rhetoric, and armed monoethnic units designed to fight against people of other confessions, etc. were formed at a fast pace.
10 See: M.N. Layoun, Wedded to the Land?: Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis, Duke University Press, Berkeley, 2001, p. 199.
11 See: “How Could Something So Right Go So Wrong?” The Collapse of Lebanon’s Ethnoconfessional Democracy,” in: A Way Prepared: Essays on Islamic Culture in Honor of RichardBayly Winder, ed. by F. Kazemi, R.D. McChes-ney, New York University Press, New York, 1988, pp. 216- 240.
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■ The second stage, which began in the late 20th-early 21st century when the sovereign Caucasian states had already achieved partial stabilization, moved the task of internal consolidation and modernization to the frontline with the confessional element of ethnoconfessionality coming to the fore (“confessional ethnopolitics”). Religious hierarchs become actively involved in the efforts to bring national peace and harmony to the region; the declared and actual growth of confessional tolerance, the desire to integrate into the world community on the basis of common civilizational values, etc.
This suggests the following conclusion: the ethnicity-confessionality dilemma used in the title of this section cannot be resolved in favor of one of the parts. The realities of the transition states, in the Caucasus and elsewhere, demonstrate that ethnoconfessionality is one of the indicators of the level of diffusion of the politically most important public spheres: ethnic and confessional. When this integral form of social life goes beyond certain threshold indicators the researcher can point out that new types of conflicts—ethnoconfessional—have come into being. In actual fact, however, the gap between the possibility of ethnoconfessional conflicts and their emergence in sociopolitical realities is wide enough.
Ethnoconfessional Conflicts: Myth or Reality?
Samuel Huntington’s well-known forecast that in the future conflicts would take the form of a “clash of civilizations”12 spurred on by religious differences stirred up no mean enthusiasm in the academic community. Many of its members rushed to prove that such clashes were a reality rather than possibility. Political scientists and publicist writers have peppered their works with “ethnopoliti-cal and ethnoconfessional conflicts” without going to their real roots. For example, the authors of the fundamental work Konflikty na Vostoke. Etnicheskie i konfessional’nye (Ethnic and Confessional Conflicts in the East) did not bother to study in depth the phenomenon of ethnoconfessional conflicts as an object of special scrutiny even in the opening chapter, which is of a theoretical-methodological nature, entitled “Etnokonfessional’nye konflikty sovremennosti i podkhody k ikh uregulirovaniu” (Ethnoconfessional Conflicts of Our Days and Possible Approaches to their Settlement). The authors, in fact, limited themselves to analyzing the religious (confessional) factor, thus treating the ethnoconfessional conflicts as a type of ethnopolitical conflict.13 The same can be said about other monographs, textbooks, methodological programs, and teaching aids.14
The Hindu-Muslim (Indian-Pakistani) conflict and the conflict between the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland are frequently used as an example of ethnoconfessional conflicts of recent history; the Greek-Turkish conflict on Cyprus (1974) and the Balkan conflict of the 1990s-early 21st century are mentioned much less frequently. Driven by political motivations some authors tend to describe the post-Soviet conflicts as religious. This is done in relation to the conflict between Armenians and Azeris over Nagorno-Karabakh, the conflict in Chechnia in the Russian Federation, etc. More than that: the political elites of post-Soviet states are watching, with mounting anx-
12 See: S.P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Touchstone Books, New York, 1998.
13 See: Konflikty na Vostoke. Etnicheskie i konfessional’nye, ed by Prof. A.D. Voskresenskiy, Aspekt Press, Moscow, 2008.
14 See: Etnosy i konfessii na Vostoke: konflikty i vzaimodeystvie, MGIMO Press, Moscow, 2005; Sovremennye proble-my ethnokul’turnykh i konfessional’nykh otnosheniy. Programma distsipliny, Authored and compiled by E.M. Travina, St. Petersburg, 2007; Etnokonfessional’nye konflikty na Vostoke. Programma kursa, Authored and compiled by M.A. Sapro-nova, Institute of Oriental Studies, RAS, Moscow, 2003, etc.
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iety, the potential seats of what they describe as ethnoconfessional conflicts in their territories. For example, Western and Russian analysts widely discussed what Vladimir Putin said in his interview to a correspondent of The Guardian: “When the Soviet Union fell apart numerous ethnic and confessional conflicts flared up in its former territory. We have up to 2 thousand potential conflicts of this sort. If we remain passive they will ignite.”15
It seems that here different concepts are being wrongly classified as belonging to the same category. The conflicts between the Hindus and the Muslims of British India that reached its peak in 1947 can be described as a confessional conflict because two different confessional communities were involved in it: ethnogenesis had not yet been completed there by that time. Their common religious-confessional identity was the catalyst for integrating the multitudinous nationalities of India and Pakistan. On the other hand, the conflict in Northern Ireland cannot be described as a confessional one in the true sense of the word since members of the same Western Christian confession who merely belonged to its different (Catholic and Protestant) interpretations were involved. This and the fact that the local population was not clearly divided in the ethnic sense mean that this conflict should be described as innerconfessional rather than ethnoconfessional (between the English and the Irish and the Catholics and the Protestants) as is sometimes done.16
The role of the religious factor in conflicts across the post-Soviet expanse was minimal: ethno-social communities were the subjects of conflict relations. According to R. Silantiev of Russia, “the four major conflicts that emerged in the Caucasus in the last twenty years have several things in common. None of them started as a religious conflict, however the religious factor gradually gained weight.”17
It should be said that even when the author concentrates on certain specific features of ethno-confessional conflicts (the “explosive” beginning and development, unlimited use of force and means, total mobilization of resources, ethnic cleansing, hostage-taking, mutual mistrust, their protracted nature when the sides draw their diasporas into it, as well as the destructive results),18 they, in fact, turn out to be present in any more or less major ethnopolitical conflict.
This means that at historical turning points when clashes of interests in post-Soviet ethnic communities developed into conflicts, the people’s “defensive functions” took the form of nationalism and its institutions rather than religion.
Both the confessional and ethnopolitical conflicts share one common feature—they are motivated by status-related interests. The contradictions that rest on ethnoconfessionality, on the other hand, are cognitive by nature. This means that they are realized in a clash of ideas and do not change the status of the sides involved. This is primarily explained by the absence of the main criteria (the subjective and purposefulness) in any social conflict.
This makes it hard, if not impossible, to hypothesize purely ethnoconfessional conflicts in the absence of relevant facts. The fact that certain small ethnic groups (the Druses of Lebanon) are relatively independent in the ethnoconfessional sense does not mean that they are involved in an ethnoconfessional conflict. Most experts on foreign policy agree that the conflict in Lebanon, which has been smoldering for many years now, is part of a vaster geopolitical conflict in the Middle East.
This means that the thesis about the mounting ethnoconfessional conflicts in the 21st century is totally unfounded. The ethnic entities involved in any conflict in pursuit of political aims make the
15 Quoted from: P. Goble, “Vzgliad na Evraziu: chego bol’she vsego boitsia Putin,” Inopressa.ru, available at [http://www.inopressa.ru/washtimes/2004/10/05/11:28:00/evrazia].
16 See: A.A. Degtiarev, Osnovypoliticheskoy teorii, Moscow, 1998, p. 151.
17 R. Silantiev, “Religiozny faktor vo vneshnepoliticheskikh konfliktakh na Kavkaze,” in: Religia i konflikt, Collection of articles, ed. by A. Malashenko, S. Filatov, ROSSPEN—Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsyklopedia, Moscow, 2007, p. 149.
18 [http://orags.narod.ru/manuals/html/konf/konf22.htm].
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conflict ethnopolitical (ethnic); the confessional entities involved in a conflict allow it to be described as confessional. There is no convincing evidence that there is such category as an ethnoconfessional community that could have been involved in a conflict.
Upon closer scrutiny all so-called ethnoconfessional conflicts are, in the final analysis, reduced to one of two large real types of conflict: ethnopolitical and confessional.
Ethnoconfessionality and Security in the 21st Century
The above is directly related to the question of the place of ethnoconfessional factors in the national security system. Academically it is counterproductive to break down the security concept into new, and fairly unjustified, types, including so-called religious and ethnoconfessional security. A. Alekseevskiy, for example, failed to define this concept in his work on the religious security problem. 19 Those authors who define religious security reduce it either to open protectionism of the dominant confession20 or to repulsing geopolitical threats.21
The absence of a solid theoretical base is caused by the objective fact that a confessional community, as well as an ethnic community, realizes its nature (confessionality, ethnicity) through the key sphere of public life—the economy, politics, culture, etc. It is impossible to speak strongly in favor of the existence of religious security or ethnic security because they are not a unilinear phenomenon: there are confessional or ethnic communities, but there are no forms of aggregation or articulation of their interests.
Ethnoconfessional security is even more debatable. I have already written that the idea of ethnoconfessional community and correspondingly of ethnoconfessional conflicts is nothing but a myth. The key parameters of ethnic and confessional communities are tabulated below.
These ethnic and confessional communities have different basic parameters, but it cannot be denied that they are closely interconnected. Throughout history the confessional factor has remained an ethnic-forming factor (the Arabs, Eastern, and Southern Slavs) or an instrument used to prevent assimilation and protect ethnic identity (the Jews).
In the security context it is much more important to identify the blending of qualitative impulses where these two identities cross their borders. In real life this is reflected in the complicated ethnocon-fessional conditions in which people divided by such borders have to live:
—innerconfessional: Kurds (Sunnis, Shi‘a, Yezidi); Arabs of Yemen (Sunnis, Zaydi Shi‘a); Germans of the FRG, Dutch, Swiss (Catholics and Protestants), and others;
—interconfessional: the Bengalis (Hindu in the east and Muslims in the west); the Arabs of Lebanon (various trends of Christianity and Islam).
Similar phenomena in the post-Soviet transition states are strongly affected by the state and territorial division of nationalities. This, in turn, stimulates an ethnoconfessional impact on the national
* A. Alekseevskiy, Religioznaia bezopasnost Rossii: terminy i opredelenia, Moscow, Belgorod, 1997.
19
20 See: Entsiklopedia Novye religioznye organizatsii Rossii destruktivnogo, okkul’tnogo i neoiazycheskogo kharak-tera. Opredelenia i terminologia v problematike Religioznoy bezopasnosti, available at [http://www.stolica.narod.ru/defin/ index.htm].
21 This is directly indicated by the RF Conception of National Security: “Threats to the national security and interests of the Russian Federation in the border sphere are caused by the following: economic, demographic and cultural-religious expansion by neighboring states into the Russian Federation,” available at [http://www.russiaeurope.mid.ru// russiastrat2000.html].
Table 2
Ethnic and Confessional Communities Compared
Parameters Ethnic Community Confessional Community
Language Common language No common language
Self-name Ethnonym Common to the confession
Territory Territory on which the ethnos lives is especially important at the stage of its genesis There is no territory in the classical sense, there is a so-called canonical territory, that is, geography of dissemination of this confession
Culture Clearly expressed cultural unity Cultural unity is weakly expressed since the community is made up of ethnic groups that are distanced from each other
Identity Actual Conventional
Identity change Practically impossible apart from the case of “mimicry” Actual since a change of religion is caused, as a rule, by deeply rooted convictions
Composition Relatively homogenous, or including kindred ethnic groups Heterogeneous since apart from so-called national religions the community is based on wide ethnic geography
and regional security system. The specific vector of ethnoconfessional impact is the sum-total of the interactions among social-ethnic and religious-confessional institutions coupled with the institutional system’s purposeful efforts to regulate ethnonational and state-confessional relations. Below the factors are ranged according to their conflict potential (from weaker to stronger):
1. Ethnoconfessional tolerance—the state of society stemming from the low level of its ethni-cization and confessionality, which does not rule out, however, normal ethnic and confessional identities.
2. Ethnocentrism—high level of ethnicity combined with a relatively low level of confessionality. Discrimination in the form of demonstration of the superiority of the titular nation and passive intolerance pushes different ethnic and confessional communities to the social margins.
3. Religious fanaticism—high level of confessionality combined with a relatively low level of society’s ethnicity. It is rooted in its incompatibility with the dominating confessions of any other religion (in the transition states this may take the form of conflicts under the slogan of the purity of faith, etc.).
4. Ethnoconfessional intolerance—high level of ethnicization and radical confessionality which leads to aggressive incompatibility with other ethnic and confessional identities. When concentrated on one and the same object religious fanaticism and active ethnocentrism create the image of an enemy-nation and lead to national phobias. As a result, “aggressive nationalism, racism, chauvinism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism create ethnic, political and
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social tensions within and between States. They also undermine international stability and worldwide efforts to place universal human rights on a firm foundation.”22
This suggests two questions: What is the mechanism for translating the ethnoconfessional impact to the national security system? And what are the specifics of this process in the transition states of the Caucasus?
In relation to the former it should be said that the above four types of ethnoconfessional factors do not directly influence the national security system according to the following pattern: ethnoconfes-sionality-economic security, ethnoconfessionality-political security, etc. It is much more logical to surmise the existence of a segment in the national security system that would absorb, in a natural way, the main ethnoconfessional impulse.
Ethnopolitical security could play this role: within its framework the balance between the specific vector of ethnoconfessional impact (intolerance) and the set of national interests suggested by the context of ethnonational existence is achieved. This explains why the choice of interests (real and false, strategic and short-term, important and of secondary importance) as national directly depends on an ethnopolitical filter of sorts.
The waves of migration that reached Western Europe in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st centuries created new, hitherto unknown problems: greater ethnoconfessional distances and self-isolation of the newcomers. D. Dragunskiy of Russia has rightly written: “Immigration from the Third World countries creates new classes or ethnoclasses, to be more exact. It creates new proletarians not only in the context of the economy, but also because of their ethnic affiliation. The ethnoclasses are charged with new revolutionary vigor in which social demands are blended with ethnocultural and confessional.”23 In the final analysis, new Europe with its altered anthropogenic, ethnic, and cultural makeup might generate greater social and political tension in the region.
The ethnoconfessional factor in the form of a “new national question” is affecting, to an ever increasing degree, the European countries’ national security: they must largely revise their priorities and abandon the traditional ethnic policy based on the French model of assimilation and citizenship for multiculturalism.
Great Britain supplied an example of readjusted priorities when in the summer of 2002 the Cabinet invited the parliament to discuss a draft law on immigration and citizenship that suggested that the children of immigrants should be educated in special schools within immigrant centers rather than in ordinary British schools. Racial unrest forced the Cabinet to retreat, but the problem remained and would develop into an even worse headache.
As distinct from the European countries, ethnoconfessional factors are having a different impact on ethnopolitical security in the transition Caucasian states.
■ First, there is a much greater, compared with the developed democratic countries, role of the external factor in determining any specific ethnoconfessional vector in ethnopolitical security:
—In the case of Azerbaijan—political (20 percent of its territory is occupied, a fact that has produced about 1 million refugees and forced migrants) and geostrategic factors (participation in setting up international “communication corridors” and political alliances of the GUAM type);
22 Decision of the Rome Council Meeting of the CSCE: CSCE and New Europe—Our Security is Indivisible, available at [http://www.org/files/instruments/HRNi_EN_945.html].
23 D. Dragunskiy, “Demograficheskiy tuman i natsional’nye perspektivy,” in: Gosudarstvo i antropotok, available at [http://antropotok.archipelag.ru/text/a293.htm].
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—In the case of Armenia—retrospective (reviving the memory of the nation’s past as part of the Ottoman Empire) and geopolitical factors (implementation of plans to set up a so-called Greater Armenia by means of neighboring territories);
—In the case of Georgia—political (Russia as the main stumbling block on the road toward the country’s territorial integrity) and geostrategic factors (strategic partnership in setting up international “communication corridors” and political alliances together with a policy aimed at integrating into the Euro-Atlantic structures).
■ Second, a wide variety of ethnoconfessional models: in Armenia ethnoconfessional intolerance is coming to the fore as the dominant trend; Georgia is moving toward ethnocen-trism; Azerbaijan is displaying, to an ever increasing degree, signs of its ethnoconfessional tolerance.
Neither of the models is static. Azerbaijan is moving away from the ethnocentrism of the early 1990s to the ethnoconfessional tolerance of the early 21st century confirmed by Pope Benedict XVI who expressed his satisfaction with the level of national tolerance when visiting Azerbaijan in 2008.24
The highly controversial dynamics of ethnoconfessionality can be observed in the neighboring countries as well. According to Armenian experts on religious studies, in 2005 Armenia was still moving toward religious diversity,25 while in 2006 the Armenian Church became an exclusive institution.26 In 2007 Armenians were concerned with the fact that Amnesty International put the republic on the list of countries where discrimination for religious reasons was obvious.27 According to Zaza Piralishvili of Georgia “in 2005, the main events unfolded around freedom of conscience and the churches’ geocultural accommodation, two major issues that echoed in 2006. In 2007, the Orthodox Church fortified its position amid political aggravations; this pushed all the other developments in the religious sphere to the side.”28
■ Third, the competing ethnic elites are actively using ethnoconfessional factor as an instrument of struggle and mobilization or, at least, as a unifying symbol.
■ Fourth, ethnoconfessionality removed the distinctions between confessional and ethnopoliti-cal conflicts at an ever accelerating pace and brought to light the trends toward internationalization of regional and even local conflicts.
This means that the ethnoconfessional factor, which contributed to ethnopolitical security of the transition states, is evident on at least two planes:
—As “symbolic religious-political images” of the world, country, region, historical enemies, and allies, which the entities of the security network use to their advantage;
—As a method used to create a certain type of conflict.
24 See: Visita “ad limina apostolorum” dei vescovi del caucaso meridionale, 24 April 2008, available at [http:// 212.77.1.245/news_services/bulletin/news/22035.php?index=22035&po_date=24.04.2008&lang=en].
25 See: Priest V. Melikian, E. Mkrtchian, “Republic of Armenia. Religion,” in: Central Eurasia 2005, Analytical Annual, CA&CC Press, Sweden, 2006, p. 88.
26 The new version of the republic’s Constitution says that the Republic of Armenia “recognizes the exclusive historical mission of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church as a national church in the spiritual life ... of the people of Armenia” (Priest V. Melikian, E. Mkrtchian, “Republic of Armenia. Religion,” in: Central Eurasia 2006, Analytical Annual, CA&CC Press, Sweden, 2007, p. 56).
27 See: See: Priest V. Melikian, E. Mkrtchian, “Republic of Armenia. Religion,” in: Central Eurasia 2007, Analytical Annual, CA&CC Press, Sweden, 2008, pp. 60-61.
28 Z. Piralishvili, “Georgia. Religion,” in: Central Eurasia 2007, Analytical Annual, CA&CC Press, Sweden, 2008,
p. 128.
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The latter deserves special attention. In full accordance with the widely accepted typologization of conflicts as vertical and horizontal we can talk about:
■ Confessional (within confessions or between them) conflicts of a predominantly horizontal nature (confession against confession), even though the state might support one of the sides;
■ Ethnic (ethnopolitical) conflicts, which in the context of the predominantly polyethnic states, are mostly of a vertical nature (ethnic group-state opposition); ethnic confrontations within a federative state are not infrequent (horizontal conflicts).
As distinct from the above patterns the aggressive forms of ethnoconfessionality serve as fertile soil for the escalation of horizontal and vertical sociopolitical conflicts alike. Separatism, as the highest form of an integral conflict, could blow up the entire edifice of the contemporary world order.
Separatism as a highly varied phenomenon—it can be ethnic, religious, territorial, political, etc.—has always caused wars and conflicts that ended in changing the political map of the world. Separatism rooted in ethnoconfessionality leads to the most prolonged, bloodiest, and cruelest conflicts which the sides practically never agree to end for the simple reason that neither the “voice of blood” nor religion allow the sides to leave them in the past. The memory of them is bequeathed to new generations involved in the endless rotation of victories and defeats.
Separatism that springs into being on the basis of ethnoconfessional intolerance threatens national security, and ethnopolitical security as its part, to a much greater extent than the other types of separatism. Why? The post-Soviet history of the Caucasus has demonstrated that if ethnoconfessional intolerance dominates in a country, region, or area it will sooner or later create a distorting mirror of ethnopolitical realities in which the neighboring nations are seen as a deadly enemy without any right to continued existence, while their territories are declared to be an area of vital interests or even a “historical homeland.” The other side responds in kind, which leads to a clash of ethnoconfessional identities that over time develops into historical antagonisms.
It should be said that a positive ethnoconfessional impact on the security sphere is also possible, particularly in the form of tolerance. Its importance for the contemporary world and its role in ensuring security and stability have been registered in many international documents.29 This phenomenon, which is put in a nutshell in the Declaration of Principles on Tolerance the UNESCO General Conference adopted in 1995, is described as respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures; forms of self-expression and human individuality.30
Much has been written about the problem of tolerance, however, until recently, authors have concentrated on its religious or religious-political aspects.31 In fact, people did not become aware of the ethnoconfessional dimension of tolerance until the last quarter of the 20th century when several Mid-Eastern conflicts (on Cyprus, in Lebanon, the Kurdish problem, etc.) became too hot to be ignored. It was then that politicians, public and religious figures, and academics became aware of the need to promote the philosophy of tolerance and to create an efficient sys-
29 See: Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, available at [http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/d_intole.htm]; Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities, available at [http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/ d_minori.htm].
30 See: Declaration of Principles on Tolerance adopted by the UNESCO General Conference Resolution 5.61 on
16 November, 1995. Art 1 “Meaning of Tolerance”, available at [http://www.unesco.org/webworld/peace_library/ UNESCO/HRIGHTS/124-129.HTM].
31 See: J. Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, Transl. into English by H. Taylor, Iqnatius Press, San Francisco, 2004 is one of the latest works on the subject that attracted a lot of attention.
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tem needed to prevent or neutralize threats to security. In this context, “ethnoconfessional tolerance (as a factor of peace and security) becomes a phenomenon that reflects the nature of the interrelations and sociopolitical activity of political entities (including social, ethnic, and confessional groups, as well as individuals) expressed in their tolerance, mutual understanding and agreement that create the feeling that the individual, society, state, and region are protected against external and internal threats.”32
This means that in order to make ethnoconfessional tolerance part of the political and social life of the transition states it is not enough to merely investigate the factors that promote (or suppress) it and monitor ethnosocial intolerance and confessional tension. It is advisable to identify the priority trends leading to deactivation of the huge amounts of energy of social destruction trapped in nationalism, xenophobia, and religious radicalism and to put tolerance on an adequate legal and normative base.
C o n c l u s i o n
The above suggests the following answers to the questions formulated in the Introduction.
■ First, as distinct from the ethnic and confessional sphere, ethnoconfessionality is not an independent element of the nation’s existence. As a result of blending, in the course of history, of the ethnic and confessional spheres into a qualitatively new social-anthropogenic identity that created a socio-psychological background, ethnoconfessionality structuralizes the ethnic group through ethnonational implementation of its religion, transformation of the confessional content into ethnic forms, and creation of new systemic components of the ethnic group’s social life.
■ Second, due to its transborder nature ethnoconfessionality cannot be regarded as a direct cause of specific conflicts; it merely imparts its specifics to and creates development vectors of ethnopolitical conflicts.
■ Third, in the context of security (international, regional, and national) ethnoconfessionality may play either a positive or a negative role (the latter happens more much often). Within the favorable development trends ethnoconfessionality may contribute to the ethnopolitical security of the post-Soviet transition states by shaping, at all security levels and in all security entities, sociopsychological attitudes of tolerance. In a negative context defective ethnoconfessionality tends to create images of the “chosen” and “inferior” nation, thus pushing the ethnic elites and a large part of the ethnic groups toward aggressive actions. History has taught us that the never ending struggle against “enemy nations” waged under slogans of “freedom and security” of one’s own nation leads an intolerant society in the final analysis to the brink of the precipice of political tyranny, which deprives both freedom and security of any meaning.
32 M.M. Gajimirzaev, Etnokonfessional’naia tolerantnost kak factor obespechenia mira n bezopasnosti ta Severnom Kavkaze. Author’s Abstract of Ph.D. Thesis, Stavropol, 2003, p. 9.
