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law and division of power will be institutionalized quickly to ensure that the winning majority will not try once again to use its advantage against the losers. Institutional and discourse settings should be developed to promote more cooperative rational political behavior at all levels of the political system.
C o n c l u s i o n: Bringing Society Back
Georgian experience has demonstrated that freedom cannot be sustained without solidarity, and democracy cannot be promoted from the outside. Even when granted by historical circumstances, freedom and democracy depend on the power of society acting in their defense. Strengthening society may not be a realistic goal if considered in the short time perspective. For the last 20 years, the legacies of atomization and anomie were the most difficult problem to overcome in establishing a civil society. However this process of society-building is underway. It started in a new fashion about two years ago when a new wave of the pro-democracy movement began. This direction was somehow enhanced, rather than weakened, by the absence of external promotion. In contrast to the previous wave of democratization, those who opt for democracy and freedom now feel that they have no external “referee” to whom they can complain, as was the case before. Institutionally, in the absence of an external “referee,” competitive games with positive outcomes become impossible. This time, civil society is developing on its own, which may take longer, but may yield surer results. The fate of freedom and democracy in Georgia is still unclear, but the new trend of development is becoming more and more salient.
Kenan ALLAHVERDIEV
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).
AZERBAIJAN: STRATEGY OF ETHNOPOLITICAL SECURITY IN THE MODERNIZATION CONTEXT
Abstract
The author takes an in-depth look at the top priorities in the ethnopolitical sphere of national security, namely the field in which ethnopolitical processes and security
problems overlap to form a “borderline” zone. He convincingly ties together these priorities and the tasks of national importance the country faces in the wider modernization context.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
I n t r o d u c t i o n
I have already substantiated1 the thesis that the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh and the conflict over it should be strictly separated:
■ The Nagorno-Karabakh problem should be regarded as a geopolitical problem created first by Russia and, subsequently, by other actors of world politics seeking sustainable geostrategic control over the Greater Caucasian-Caspian Region, a gateway of sorts to the Middle East;
■ The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is rooted in an ethnopo-litical matrix; today, as in the past, it remains a trigger for many global geopolitical and geo-economic processes:
—it contributed to the Soviet Union’s disintegration;
—as an axis area, it might plunge practically all the regional states into war. The Daily Telegraph offered a historical analogy: “Nagorno-Karabakh is the Schleswig-Holstein question of today”2 (in the past, three wars were waged for the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein);
—as one of the key zones, it might contribute to the geopolitical struggle for the zones of influence within the so-called New Big Game.
It should be said that today the academic and analytical communities are concentrating on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The issue, the regional and worldwide importance of which is obvious, has already been discussed at numerous bilateral and multilateral conferences; and many intermediary missions have already tried their hand at its settlement. What is suggested looks very much like palliatives: the conflict is mostly discussed outside the entire context of the factors of and threats to ethnopolitical security and is divorced from the country’s national strategy.
This means that Azerbaijan’s political science and practice should offer a set of measures designed to neutralize the threats and sources of danger in order to achieve a climate of national harmony and tolerance in society and the state and create conditions conducive to the free development of all the nationalities living in the republic.
This brings us to the stage at which we should formulate scientifically substantiated strategic priorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The choice, however, should be systemic, which means that a heap of disjointed and internally unconnected values and tasks, no matter how correct and important, will be absolutely useless. The task goes much deeper: each and every priority of state policy (separately and taken all together) should be correlated with the country’s strategic course aimed at modernization.
A strong economic base, which will help to gradually adjust mass consciousness and the national-cultural layer to democratic values, can be described as the conceptual core of modernization; the country should be transformed into an active entity of international relations.3
There are three large groups of priorities—geopolitical, geo-economic, and ethnocultural— identified in the strategy of ethnopolitical security seen through the prism of modernization.
1 See: K. Allahverdiev, “The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict in the Context of Retrospective Ethno-Geopolitics,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 1 (55), 2009; K. Allahverdiev, “How the Karabakh Conflict Fits the New Great Game Context,” The Caucasus & Globalization, Issue 2-3, Vol. 3, 2009.
2 [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-views/6633842/Nagorno-Karabakh-danger-in-the-Caucasus.html].
3 See: R. Mekhtiev, “The Strategy of the Future: Modernization,” State Governance: Theory and Practice, No. 1 (21), 2008, p. 156 (in Azeri).
The Geopolitical Priorities
The geopolitical priorities of the strategy of ethnopolitical security of Azerbaijan include:
■ Returning the occupied territories by diplomatic and military-political means.
■ Identifying the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh within the Azerbaijan state system and abolishing Nakhchivan’s exclave status.
■ Keeping foreign bases and troops away from the republic’s territory, while its political cooperation should remain limited to the already functioning military-political blocs (NATO and CSTO); the state’s military potential should be built up along with a course aimed at demilitarization of the Caucasus and the Caspian.
■ Reaching a final decision on the status of the Caspian, which should be demilitarized to become a nuclear-free zone.
■ Rejecting, as a matter of principle, all versions of geopolitical exchanges “Karabakh for the Caspian,” “Karabakh for Southern Azerbaijan,” “Karabakh for Georgian territories,” etc.
■ Consistently democratizing social life and its ethnopolitical sphere.
■ Consistently and actively upgrading the status of the compact ethnic groups in all states of the region; this should be combined with confidence-building measures to prevent revision of their sovereignty and territorial integrity.
■ Initiating a viable system of regional security and cooperation (an Organization for Security and Cooperation in the Caucasus, for example), which in the long run and under favorable circumstances could be transformed into an integration alliance, a Caucasian Union.
The above fits the foreign policy strategy which President Ilham Aliev has described as follows: “A stronger international position and maximum protection of Azerbaijan’s national interests are two major goals of our foreign policy.”4 Both tasks belong to the Nagorno-Karabakh set of problems, which should be interpreted within the context of a fundamentally important statement by the head of the Azerbaijani state: “The territorial integrity of Azerbaijan has never been a subject of discussion. The territorial integrity of Azerbaijan must be restored. The occupying troops must be withdrawn from all the occupied lands and Azerbaijan’s citizens must return there. All supply lines must be open. Azerbaijanis must return to Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenians and Azerbaijanis must live in conditions ensuring a high level of autonomy. The future, which may happen either tomorrow or in a hundred years or may never happen, will show the nature of this status.”5
It seems that the future broad autonomy of Nagorno-Karabakh should not be an isolated act: it should become an element of a set of measures and means designed to oppose the ethnopolitical threats. The exclave nature of the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, as one of the most important issues, must be dealt with, while the forms, legal formats, and territorial aspects of a future solution remain unclear. However, one thing is absolutely clear: the decisions on the future corridors between Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, on the one hand, and Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, on the other, should be made simultaneously within a common political and legal field.
This is another aspect which Azerbaijani experts tend to ignore when passions run high and which Michael Günther, Professor of Political Science at Tennessee Technological University, deemed necessary to point out: “In view of Armenia’s geographic location time plays into the hands
4 [http://www.day.az/news/politics/200494.html], 20 March, 2010.
5 [http://www.news.az/articles/11936].
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of Azerbaijan... It should not ‘turn away’ from the Minsk process and should not ignore other possibilities. There have already been cases when time and changing international situations were enough to resolve problems very similar to that of Karabakh.”6
The problem of regional integration structures calls for patience: we should always bear in mind that the expert community expected too much of GUAM, a fact graphically reflected in the Special Issue of the Central Asia and the Caucasus journal called GUAM: From a Tactical Alliance to Strategic Partnership1 and by the international conference on Basic Principles for Settlement of the Conflicts in the Territories of the GUAM States (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova) held in Baku on 15-16 April, 2008 on the eve of the August 2008 events.
The Geo-economic Priorities
The geo-economic priorities of Azerbaijan’s ethnopolitical security strategy are:
■ Taking due account of the ethnopolitical aspects of national security every time the country is involved in regional economic projects designed to ensure international energy security.
■ Promoting effective economic reintegration of the liberated Azerbaijani territories to ensure economic involvement of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.
■ Offering an attractive model for Azerbaijan’s economy; higher rankings of economic freedom, business climate, innovative nature, etc.
■ Encouraging the economic reintegration of Nagorno-Karabakh.
■ Ensuring active involvement of Azerbaijan’s capital in economic projects in neighboring regional states.
■ Providing economic support to the “new regionalism strategy”—a Single Economic Space (SES) of the Caucasian Region, Customs Union, Unified Energy System, and coordinated tariff and banking policies, etc.
There are two important problems—reintegration of the liberated territories and fresh approaches to regional cooperation in the Caucasus—which should be treated as priorities of the utmost importance.
Large-scale preparations are underway to deal with the first group of priorities: the newly-liberated territories will present a set of multidimensional problems: mine clearing, restoration of the transport and social infrastructure, as well as of everyday services, etc.
So far, the second set of priorities is dominated by historical-geographic ideas based on similar natural conditions, histories, and cultures produced by the academic and political interpretations of regional cooperation in the Caucasus. Today, however, globalization and the emerging new world order, which coincide with the gradual disintegration of the old economic and cultural development types in the Caucasian states, have created a need for new economic-geographical complexes. They reject the local-territorial economic type; the ties in the new complexes are very complicated and sometimes fairly vague. The emerging complexes (of various types, energy and transport, among others) serve as the economic cornerstones of the globalization era.
In full accordance with the Marxist dictum that the basis determines the superstructure, the increasingly exterritorial economies of the Soviet-successor states will give rise to transterritorial forms
6 [http://www.day.az/news/politics/199015.html], 13 March, 2010.
1 See: GUAM: From a Tactical Alliance to Strategic Partnership, Special Issue of Central Asia and the Caucasus,
No. 3-4, 2008.
Volume 4 Issue 1-2 2010
of power. These new political and economic forms, the results of self-structuring, will inevitably rotate around a “region-forming core.” The analytical community has agreed that this role might belong to Azerbaijan, which means that the logic of globalization has invested Azerbaijan, as the uncontested regional leader, with the historic mission of formulating and implementing truly ambitious integration projects.
Ethnocultural Priorities
The following can be described as the ethnocultural priorities of the republic’s strategy of ethnopolitical security:
■ A civilizational mission;
■ A national ideology or national idea;
■ An ethnocultural identity;
■ Ethnopolitical and ethnoconfessional stability;
■ A civilian nation;
■ Ethnocultural reintegration of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh;
■ Humanitarian aid to Azerbaijan’s ethnic areas in the neighboring states on the principles of non-interference in internal affairs, de-politicization, transparency, and openly declared aims in the “new regionalism” context.
Azerbaijan’s civilizational mission was one of the pillars of the ideological content of the country’s course toward modernization, two others being a national ideology and identity.
1. The civilizational mission. The logic of globalization has already drawn Azerbaijan, the generally recognized leader of the Caucasian region, into a competition of civilizational attractions. Its civilizational mission is manifested in two ways:
■ as an objective trend in the form of Azerbaijan’s stabilizing mission in the region without which development and sustainability of the other national economies are hardly possible;
■ as an aim of the country’s modernization designed to strengthen its international status and promote regional integration. Today, fragmentation of national states has already exhausted itself in many respects; a “new wave” of large viable macro-regional structures in all corners of the world is mounting to replace the fragmentation trends. This means that Azerbaijan needs efficient mechanisms to cope with the new trend.
2. The national ideology. Nikita Moiseyev said the following about the role of the national idea of society: “Any nation will find it hard to survive without national ideas and a more or less clear picture of its future, nor will it be able to preserve its national culture. Society and the nation will become vulnerable.”8 R. Mekhtiev has supplied a detailed description of Azerbaijan’s national ideology: “A national idea as the central element of the modernization of Azerbaijani society will be an important element of the new political culture which is taking shape in Azerbaijan. The philosophy of Azerbaijan-ism, which combines the idea and the ideology, is identified, as an immutable conception of the development of the state and the nation, with the sociopolitical and economic modernization of the republic. Very much like the cultural-historical layer of national development, it identifies the main routes and trends of
8 N.N. Moiseyev, “Rossia na pereputie,” Sotsialno-gumanitarnye znania, No. 4, 1999, pp. 173-174.
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strategic development and is reflected in the immutable nature of the national language, the priority of national culture, and the importance of national values. Taken together, it embodies the entire complex of the national ideological model, which has taken into account the country’s changing role on the regional and global scene.”9
Azerbaijani society has not yet arrived at a consolidated position: “Today,” writes Prof. Rauf Husseinov, “there is no and cannot be any systemic base for a national idea-ide-ology-policy in the Republic of Azerbaijan.”10 Political scientist Rovshan Husseinov has offered an alternative, and highly illustrative, opinion: “We still lack the most important thing. I have in mind a national idea with which the state should arm itself and which should be realized across the country in the form of a clear program. I think that reinstatement of the occupied Azerbaijani lands should become the strongest stimulus for uniting the people.”11
A national ideology as a synthesis of logically interconnected national-ethnic ideas helps a nation (ethnic group) to recognize its social-ethnic community as a single organism and an entity of rational-axiological and emotional-perceptible descriptions. National ideology, as a result of systematization and generalization of the national interests performed by the political elite, serves as the foundation of self-determination of all the people in sociopolitical and spiritual life. In this context, several transformational vectors are possible, while the genetic basis of the national ideology (its basic ideas, postulates, and values) remains immutable:
—the ethnic component of a national ideology may become absolute either as nationalism or as so-called macro-nationalism (the positive and negative aspects of which are covered in the classical works by Louis Leo Snyder Global Micro-Nationalisms: Autonomy of Independence11 and Macro-Nationalisms: A History of the Pan-Movements13;
—the sociopolitical component may prevail in a national ideology when individual national-ethnic ideas are integrated into the political ideology of a single state system, that is, when a national ideology is transformed into state ideology as an instrument for realizing the interests of the entire polyethnic nation.
Ethnonational ideologies as a continuation of instrumental (mobilizing) and motivational functions of ethnicity in the Soviet successor-states have already exhausted their potential. Today, a national-state ideology is a means through which the national ideal is attained; an instrument for scoring economic and political goals; a criteria of their compatibility with ethnosocial interests. This is applied to an efficient state able to formulate its longterm perspectives; it is not a ship of which Seneca said, “For those who do not know which harbor they want to reach, no wind is favorable.”
3. Identity problems. From the very first day of its independence, Azerbaijani society has been trying to answer the question: “Who are we?” The wide range of opinions formulated within the academic community and outside it can be reduced to two basic theses:
9 R. Mekhtiev, “Modernization: An Immutable Agenda,” State Governance: Theory and Practice, No. 2 (22), 2008, p. 141.
10 R. Husseinov, “Secessionist Movements in Azerbaijan,” available at [http://ethnoglobus.com/index.php?l=ru& m=news&id=224], 29 January, 2010.
11 R. Husseinov, “Azerbaijan Needs a National Idea,” available at [http://www.nedelya.az/articlen.php?catno= 0100014#1], 17 October, 2008.
12 See: L. Snyder, Global Micro-Nationalisms: Autonomy or Independence, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut-London, England, 1982.
13 See: L. Snyder, Macro-Nationalisms. A History of the Pan-Movements, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut-London, England, 1984.
—we are Turks and “the national idea of Azerbaijan cannot be formulated unless we restore its time-tested self-name ‘Turks’ of the titular nation.”14
—we are Azerbaijanis and “in the conditions of global transformations, it is highly important to preserve our national image, traditions, language, history, and the sociocultural background of the Azerbaijani people. A nation which fails to grasp the full meaning of its history and culture is not ready to embark on the road of development.”15
It seems that the academic and practical value of these discussions is nil; in the final analysis, both (fairly widely accepted) models of ethnosocial identity—the ethnocentric (uncritical preferential treatment of an ethnic group and individual self-identification with it) and ethno-dominating (which prefers one ethnicity over others) created no modernization-related advantages.
It is much more important to concentrate on the parameters and innovation content of national development, which will help us to escape social and cultural degradation and marginalization of the nation, on the one hand, and fit into the global world and find a niche of our own in it, on the other. Those nations that enjoy the tradition of ethnocultural and religious tolerance stand a much better chance of self-identification; this explains why the developing Azerbaijani state system deliberately relied on the traditions of tolerance. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, put this in a nutshell: “.many countries hold forth about their tolerance; this is an excellent political gimmick, yet genuine tolerance remains outside the reach of many. Your country is an exception: little is said about tolerance, yet it is a national feature of your people. Tolerance in Azerbaijan is an inexhaustible category.”16
President Ilham Aliev deemed it necessary to point to the inborn ethnoconfessional tolerance of the people of Azerbaijan: “Azerbaijan has never known and, I am sure, will never know national and ethnic conflicts and confrontations. In our country, all nationalities and the followers of all religions live as one family. They are actively working for the sake of Azerbaijan and, as its worthy citizens, contribute to its allround development. Azerbaijan has become a center of dialog between religions and civilizations.”17
The Key Trends
To sum up, I can say that the set of priorities of the country’s ethnopolitical security points to certain key trends of its development in the context of the country’s changing global and regional status.
■ First, the steadily widening geopolitical and geostrategic component of the republic’s ethno-political security which rotates around the most burning issues: the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict; normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations; the status of the Caspian; interconnection of military and oil-and-gas diplomacy; Nabucco and the projects aimed at creating a regional security system for the Caucasus. These issues are intertwined into a knot of ethnop-olitical complementarity and geostrategic pragmatism.
■ Second, the Georgia-Russia war of 2008 has demonstrated that the ethnopolitical conflicts across the post-Soviet expanse, and in the Caucasus as its part, can no longer be described as internal and belonging solely to “the Center-the separatist region” sphere; they are emerging as external conflicts between states. When applied to the Caucasian geostructure, this spells the relative nature of the political and state structure: the nations remain a constant, while the borders between them become a variable. The vows and promises of the key international actors
14 F. Alekperli, “Natsionalnaia ideología Azerbaidzhana,” Zerkalo, 8 August, 2009.
15 R. Mekhtiev, “Modernization: An Immutable Agenda,” p. 133.
16 “Baku—odin iz nemnogokh gorodov, gde ia svobodno mogu khodit v kipe,” Nedelia, 22 August, 2008.
17 [http://www.1news.az/politics/20091107125524031.html], 7 November, 2009.
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that the Kosovo experience will never develop into a precedent to be applied in the Caucasus notwithstanding, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s thesis about “Balkanization of the Caucasus” has not yet been removed from the agenda. The leaders of Azerbaijan and the public fear, with good reason, that the republic’s borders are in danger—those who nurture these plans should know that other variants (related to Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Turkey, and even Russia) are not excluded.
Third, the analytical community has already registered an ebb of the “wave of ethnicity” and the emergence of another, ethnoconfessional, wave. Applied to Azerbaijan, this means that the axiological-normative and ideological aspects of ethnopolitical security will come to the fore to be realized by means of the strategic course aimed at the country’s economic, political, and technological modernization expected to create a successful social and ethnic model of a polyethnic society attractive to all.
Fourth, in the context of the New Big Game, the Greater Middle East, the Caucasian Chessboard, and other geopolitical projects, the Republic of Azerbaijan should switch to a combinatorial strategy of its national security as a whole, and of ethnopolitical security in particular.
Fifth, the emerging regional geopolitical realities make it possible to add vigor to Azerbaijan’s ethnopolitical strategy. The nearly 20-year history of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has shown that it looks different when seen from outside the country (from the West) or inside it. In the West, the “oil for land” formula sounds very much like a “commodity for commodity” deal and is unsuitable for strategic moves. Azerbaijan’s stronger sovereignty and its political, economic, and military might make it possible to convert the old formula into a new one: “energy security of the West in exchange for ethnopolitical security of Azerbaijan;” this has moved the old formula into a qualitatively new system of coordinates, i.e. “value for value.”
C o n c l u s i o n
This analysis of the ethnopolitical security priorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan has demonstrated that they are determined not only by the nature and configuration of the main threats, but also by the integrated approach to the national development strategy. This format of national-state development and the security system is not related to the “external challenge-internal response” formula, but is shaped within the policy of historical responsibility for the formulation and realization of the country’s real, rather than imagined, interests; it is geared at the best possible opportunities conducive to the best possible results and sustainable development of the region. This places Azerbaijan’s ethnopolitical security structure in a class of its own: it differs radically from the dissipative nature of similar systems in neighboring countries. Unlike Azerbaijan, which relies on its internal strength and the primordial nature of its ethnic and confessional characteristics, its neighbors preserve their stability by relying on certain destructive principles: clerical radicalism in Iran; ethnocracy in Georgia; and national-chauvinism in Armenia.
In the first decade of the 21st century, Azerbaijan, which has already developed into a “region-state” (to borrow a term from Kenichi Ohmae)18 and is a driving force behind globalization, is pulling the other national territories of the Caucasian region behind it. This is a great responsibility and should be underpinned by a well-substantiated integral strategy.
18 See: K. Ohmae, The Next Global Stage: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World, Wharton School Publishing, 2005.
