Europe's Next Avoidable War

Nagorno-Karabakh

M. Kambeck, S. Ghazaryan, M. Kambeck, S. Ghazaryan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137030009
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An international and interdisciplinary group of experts shed light upon the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict today, how it evolved and likely scenarios. Taking into account a changed political landscape, including the EU's new foreign policy instruments, they also make concrete policy proposals to make war less likely.

Part I

Approaching the Conflict: The Internal Rationale

4

The Quintessential Conflict – A Cultural and Historical Analysis of Nagorno-Karabakh

Bernard Coulie

The motivations which underlie conflicts have long attracted the attention of analysts, political commentators, journalists and historians. Depending on the epoch, emphasis is laid on economic or social elements, on the control of trade routes, access to water or energy or on religious factors. This emphasis is often a mirror image of the fears of each historic period. As regards more ancient eras whose wars are related in literary form in great epics such as the Iliad, exploration of the economic and political realities behind the poetic fiction has become a much-prized field of study. It is known, for example, that the Trojan War was less motivated by the abduction of fair Helen than by the Greeks’ (and especially the Mycenaeans’) desire to control the trade route of the Dardanelles straits between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea by capturing the city of Troy. Recent conflicts are not immune to this process of revision, and the way in which such wars are sometimes related leads, at times, to a veritable rewriting of history which almost borders on mythical narrative.¹ History is complicated, or rather, people’s lives are complicated because history is, after all, what people think they know about their past or the way in which they would like to view it. This explains why the reasons for conflicts are almost always multiple and become entangled with economic and political issues, territorial claims, religious, cultural and linguistic antagonisms – not forgetting the inevitable assertion of some bloated egos. Besides, it is not unusual to see any of these aspects exploited by one or another of the parties involved.

When these conflicts occur in regions occupied by markedly distinct populations (distinct because they speak different languages, practise different religions, claim to represent different identities, assert different reference points and alliances), this complex combination of motives becomes increasingly rigid and the conflicts more inextricable. This is obviously what is happening today and has been happening for centuries in the Caucasus and more particularly in the South Caucasus.

The history of the South Caucasus, today comprising the three republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan and the surrounding territories dotted with entities which are more or less politically independent, has been turbulent and directly reflects those difficulties which have always beset the meeting of West and East, namely Europe and Asia.

In the South Caucasus, the Karabakh conflict is quintessential in that it confronts the observer with basic questions which exist more generally in today’s world. The answers to the Karabakh scenario transcend the boundaries of this small state because they potentially concern many other parts of the world, not least within Europe itself. These questions can be summed up as follows:

•When the weight of history is such a heavy burden, must solutions take history into consideration or brush it to one side?

•When the meeting of cultures creates problems, does the solution lie in each culture retreating from the other and focusing on itself?

•Lastly, is Europe distant solely in geographical terms or do other factors intervene?

History’s burden: when history becomes too heavy to bear

The South Caucasian region belonged to Mesopotamia, which is said to have been the cradle of civilisation, at least according to Western tradition. In antiquity, the region formed (not including the conquests of Alexander the Great) the easternmost spearhead of Greek and Roman cultures, just as it was the westernmost outpost of the Persian world. From then onwards, the South Caucasus remained the meeting place and scene of strife between Byzantium and the Persian world, and witnessed religious conflict in the Middle Ages, given the opposition between Christianity and Islam. These clashes reappeared as rivalries between Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Persia. Even today, the South Caucasian regions are lands under Russian, Turkish and Iranian influence, whereas the West is trying to play a role through the Eastern Partnership within the East Neighbourhood Policy of the European Union.

Throughout its history, the South Caucasus has always been the meeting place of political, cultural and religious antagonisms, a factor which explains its current fragmentation and instability and explains, too, why the Caucasus may well become the stage where the quest for world peace will play out – perhaps more so than the Middle East.

To grasp the Karabakh conflict, it must be set against the much broader backcloth of a place where great powers – even civilisations – meet and often confront one another. It is not a mere question of opposition between Karabakh and Azerbaijan, nor even between the latter and Armenia, nor between Russia and Turkey acting through small proxy states. These antagonisms are genuine and influence the conflict. But this conflict cannot be reduced or limited to any of these dimensions, because they embrace much wider phenomena which affect the entire modern world. There is unlikely to be a solution to the Karabakh conflict if it does not take this broader context into consideration.

This is not the place to narrate the history of the entire region² called, in turn, Utik, Artsakh, Khachen, Arran, Karabakh; each of these names reflects a period or a particular domination. It is correct to state that the history of Karabakh is directly linked to that of Armenia, to which it has always belonged, but that is not enough to explain the special destiny of this small territory. Two characteristics distinguish Karabakh from the rest of Armenia and enable us to understand the roots of today’s problems.

Firstly, Karabakh’s vicissitudes are those inherent to any border region because Karabakh has always formed the eastern extremity of Armenia and so has always been a place of passage and encounter.

Secondly, the region has for centuries enjoyed a fairly autonomous political system, distinct to the rest of Armenia; this relative autonomy, combined with its geographic features, bred a strong feeling of identity among its inhabitants. The territory’s political organisation is based on princely families going back to the origins of Armenia, and it was these families who led the resistance against the Arab occupantion in the ninth century, the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and their Turkmen successors, the Kara-Koyunlu and the Ak-Koyunlu, in the fifteenth century. When Karabakh was ruled by Safavid Persia, established in 1502, the traditional Armenian families maintained a degree of independence once again. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, these hereditary princes, the Meliks, were the only authority able to defend the Armenians from invaders and looters, to defend the faith and traditions, and to stand out, in the centuries which followed, as the initiators of the Armenian renewal.³ Reference to the era of the Melikdoms is essential if we want to understand Karabakh today.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Russian empire spread to the Caucasus; Karabakh was invaded in 1805 and annexed to the Russian empire by the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813. It was then that political decisions began to break the historic link which united Karabakh to the rest of Armenia. Karabakh was separated from Armenia in 1868 and became part of the new province of Elizavetpol, combining in a single administrative structure populations and territories as different as the eastern highlands of the provinces of Tiflis and Erevan and the steppes of the Baku regions. Thus, an arbitrary political decision flung together two completely different peoples on the same territory and in the same organised structure – Armenians and Tartars, Christians and Muslims, sedentary communities and nomads and semi-nomads, mountain people and people from the plains, farmers and pastoralists. The result could only be explosive, and it did indeed lead to the bloody clashes of 1905–06 between Armenians and Azeris. The subsequent incorporation of Karabakh into the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan ratified the borders fixed in the nineteenth century but did not resolve the conflicts.

Karabakh is a particularly eloquent example of the world’s frontier regions, meeting places of different peoples and cultures. These border zones provide the terrain – and therein lies their peculiarity – for confrontation between opposing political powers which impose their domination in their turn and most often exclusively so, that is by seeking to eliminate their adversary’s nationals. Karabakh, however, is a special case arising from the long tradition of autonomy, which was initiated and developed under the Armenian princely families and resulted in a strong sense of identity. The Armenians were not the only people on this territory, but their footprint was profound, and the Melikdoms legacy finds expression today in the Armenian claim.

The Karabakh question is also one of knowing how far conflict resolution should take history into account. If our point of reference is the situation in the twentieth century – we might call it the “Azeri solution” – the solution will be different to that echoing the days of the province of Elizavetpol, or to one based on more remote periods when the Meliks ruled the territory. We are not seeking to repeat history or to restore outdated situations but to realise that each actor in a conflict has its own points of reference, particularly those from the past. Each party identifies a moment in history deemed emblematic and creates the model of an ideal situation to which one must try to return. However, no negotiation is possible without first comprehending the other’s references.

When these references diverge, when history becomes such a heavy burden, and when history has been extensively used by each party in support of the cause, one should ideally be able to imagine solutions from a “clean sheet”, that is, solutions liberated from the past. But people are historical and cultural beings who never allow themselves to be reduced to rationality alone; and because they are historical and cultural beings, they are never entirely free from the past. That said, any solution must necessarily take the past into account.

Autonomy or disengagement?

One of the difficulties of recourse to the past lies in the fact that each party clings to its own version of history. When tensions between communities become increasingly strained, each community has a natural tendency to fall back on its own history. This approach is particularly visible in the revision of teaching curricula and altered communication policies. Education is a public service tool and is often used by the powers involved to promote certain ideas, even in advanced European democracies. Communication and the media may also shrink people’s horizons by not providing coverage of another community.⁴ Such reflexes, however natural they may be, engender ignorance of the other party, ignorance which becomes an obstacle to conflict resolution because it prevents the interlocutors from appreciating each other’s points of reference.

This disengagement dynamic rests on two main factors which are mutually reinforcing:

On the one hand, the emergence of nationalism in Europe gave birth to the idea of the nation state, and the global influence of Europe in the course of history generalised the concept well beyond the European continent. It is normal for a group to seek to form an identifiable togetherness and to give expression to this identity by various means, such as territory, language or religion or ethnic unity. This development fashioned Europe and it points to the positive aspect of nationalism, but its evolution has also been the source of conflicts and wars because any affirmation of identity is necessarily at the expense of the other: identity relies as much on the assertion of one’s character as on the capacity to recognise others as different. In other words, to identify oneself, one must be able to distinguish others from oneself, because they occupy another territory, speak another language or practise another religion. The margin between this distinction and exclusion is slender and often crossed. Thus, nationalism has often provided the seeds of wars which have bloodied Europe. This is the negative aspect of nationalism. With its qualities and faults, national affirmation is one of the dominant factors in the modern world: it is moreover the factor which makes the modern-day European project atypical and a real challenge.

On the other hand, since the second half of the twentieth century, the world has gone global. Globalisation and internationalisation are radically different. Internationalisation means making ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Approaching the Conflict: The Internal Rationale
• Part II  The International Community as Foreign Policy Actors in NK: The External Rationale
• Part III  Europes Next Avoidable War: The Peace Rationale
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index