Turning to the fourth traditional variable of RSCT, amity/enmity, previous chapters provide a detailed roadmap for its operationalisation. The central question here is where to situate Southern Caucasia within the typologies first suggested in chapter 2 and methodologically elaborated in chapter 5. To recap, these ideal-types were linked to a number of macro- and micro- characteristics, included in table 2 (p. 106). So how can one characterise this region in terms of amity/enmity‟s macro-perspective aspects, thus defined? As foreshadowed by the gloomy modern historical overview of chapter 1, from a macro-viewpoint at least, it would make sense to classify the Southern Caucasus as a revisionist conflict formation. In terms of military competition, there is a raft of unresolved (frozen) armed conflicts throughout the region, all of which erupted in
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the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR47. The situation in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which violently broke away from Georgia in a series of conflagrations between 1991 and 1994, „thawed‟ towards open warfare as recently as in August 2008, resulting in their becoming de-facto protectorates of Russia. Armenia and Azerbaijan fought one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Former Soviet Union in 1991-1994, causing over 20,000 deaths on both sides and well over a million refugees and IDPs (De Waal, 2003, p. 285). While peace talks have been ongoing under the auspices of the OSCE Minsk Group, a final settlement seems particularly elusive, and, as is clear from the preceding discussion on polarity, all sides in the region are apparently locked in a particularly intense and costly arms race.
Crucially, the conflicts in the Southern Caucasus are not ordinary conflicts over competing interests; they are the result of the mutual non-recognition of several regional units – an essential characteristic of a revisionist conflict formation – grounded in fundamentally incompatible interpretations of history. Georgia (along with almost all states except Russia) naturally doesn‟t recognise either Abkhazia or South Ossetia, while these Russian protectorates do not in any way accept the legitimacy of Georgia‟s claims over their territory. Armenia‟s government does not recognise the inclusion of Nagorno-Karabakh into Azerbaijan; in fact, since 1991, it has carefully avoided any legal act that could be interpreted as even an implicit recognition of its Eastern neighbour‟s territorial integrity (Potier, 2001, p. 84). As shall be seen in later, discursive chapters, the mutual non-recognition of units is well-grounded in nationalist ideas that pervade all societies in the region, and that, in different ways, imply the illegitimacy of „significant others‟, sometimes in quite extreme ways.
Until the beginning of the 20th century, populations in the Southern Caucasus were quite intermingled; the region can certainly be compared to the Balkans in that respect.
Today‟s borders were demarcated in the 1920s, and solutions were often imposed by the authorities in Moscow, who routinely ignored ethnic composition or demography as a decisive factor in their „adjudications‟ in an effort to facilitate control over the region‟s nationalities (S. T. Hunter, 2006, p. 112). Thus, the disputed territories of Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh – the latter populated by an Armenian majority of 94.4%
according to the 1926 Soviet census (Yamskov, 1991, p. 344) – were awarded to Azerbaijan in 1921, while the area of Zangezur was assigned to Armenia, under circumstances that remain contested by both parties (Potier, 2001, pp. 2-5). All these territories had been the site of fierce fighting, ethnic cleansing and massacres in the short period of independence immediately following WWI, and neither Armenians nor
47 See also map in Front Matter.
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Azeris were to accept these decisions as final. Similar problems had existed in South Ossetia and Abkhazia during the brief period of Georgian independence; Soviet nationalities‟ policy served to further construct primordialist and highly territorialised national identities for these „titular‟ ethnic groups, laying the groundwork for today‟s disputes (Cornell, 2002a; Suny, 2001).
On the Armenian side, there was continued bitterness over the inclusion of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan, long before the Azeri-Armenian conflict became internationalised in the 1990s. Disputes over Nagorno-Karabakh (and Nakhichevan) emerged within the Soviet Union as early as in the 1960s, when the Karabakh Armenians protested Azeri rule through a petition to Nikita Khrushchev, and the communist leadership of the Armenian S.S.R. was extensively purged for having allowed nationalist demonstrations in the streets of Yerevan (Croissant, 1998, p. 20;
Dekmejian, 1968, pp. 512-520; Potier, 2001, pp. 5-6). The conflict finally (re-)erupted in earnest in 1988, when the Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh, supported by massive demonstrations of their ethnic kin in Armenia, made use of Gorbachev‟s policy of Glasnost to demand the attachment of the autonomous oblast to Armenia. After anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan and the expulsion of the Azeri minority from the Republic of Armenia, the situation soon spun out of Moscow‟s control, and when
„overlay‟ was removed and both republics gained independence, in 1991, what had been a low-level internal conflict became an intense and particularly cruel, zero-sum international war between two parties with radically differing interpretations of history (De Waal, 2003; Rieff, 1997).
The situation was somewhat different in Georgia, whose territorial integrity is recognised by both its de jure Southern Caucasian neighbours. Although the country has a minor border issue with Azerbaijan, centred on the cave monastery of David Gareji (Abbasov & Akhvlediani, 2007), it does seem to be well on its way towards resolution, and is largely overshadowed by the two countries‟ broader strategic relationship. Relations with Armenia are less straightforward, but only slightly so. In 1919, independent Georgia had fought a short border war with Armenia over the disputed provinces of Lori and Javakheti (Hovannisian, 2005, pp. 104-105). The Soviets drew the current border between the two republics in 1921, awarding Lori to Armenia and Javakheti (still 90% Armenian-populated) to Georgia, a situation that is accepted by both sides today on an intergovernmental level. Mindful of their dependence on Georgia as a transit route, successive governments in Yerevan have worked to lessen the frequent tensions between Tbilisi and its Armenian minority,
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despite irredentist claims by nationalist groups in Armenia (Wheatley, 2004, pp. 30-31).
Notwithstanding the region‟s economic and cultural isolation48 within Georgia, demands for autonomy and federalism by some groups within Javakheti do not enjoy official support across the border (Minasian, 2006).
While Georgia has – relatively speaking at least – good relations with both its recognised Southern Caucasian neighbours, it is nevertheless entangled in highly conflictual relations with the two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
This ties into Georgia‟s predicament as a fragmented state, and the close entanglement of Russia in its interactions with these separatist entities and de facto Russian protectorates, which will be discussed in greater detail below, in the sections dealing with state incoherence and GPP. For now, relating to the present subject of amity/enmity, suffice it to say that the fundamental relationship between these entities and their de-jure metropolitan state is one of non-recognition, de-legitimisation, and open conflict, complementing the macro-perspective characterisation of the Southern Caucasus as a revisionist conflict formation.
Despite limited and as yet largely unrealised plans for security co-operation between Georgia and Azerbaijan (within the context of GUAM49) (Allison, 2004), and various vague and as yet improbable proposals by Western scholars and regional leaders for a Caucasian stability pact (Celac, Emerson, & Tocci, 2000; Emerson & Tocci, 2001; The Economist, 2008b), the dominant relationships within the region remain fundamentally distrustful and lack any formal security regime. Macro-level interactions are characterised by intense military competition – at times culminating in open conflict – and by the lack of mutual recognition between several of its constituent elements. This characterisation of the Southern Caucasus as a revisionist conflict formation will be reinforced at the micro-level through the complex web of mutual securitisations that pervade the Southern Caucasus. Before moving on, however, two more factors would have to be dealt with from a macro-perspective: state incoherence and great power penetration. It is to the former of these two that I now turn.
48 Javakheti remains one of Georgia‟s poorest and most isolated regions (Wheatley, 2004). Until its closure in 2007, a Russian military base was the area‟s largest employer; locals moreover preferred using the Armenian or Russian currencies over the Georgian Lari. Javakheti‟s Armenians are also
overwhelmingly Russian speakers, adding to suspicions of pro-Russian sympathies, and isolating them further from Georgian mainstream society. Since the 2003 Rose Revolution, there have been attempts to address these issues, with limited success.
49 A regional grouping of four former Soviet states (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova, set up in 1997 in an as yet unsuccessful attempt to balance the Russian Federation (Allison, 2004, pp. 475-477).
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