IDENTITIES, IDEOLOGIES AND INSTITUTIONS IDENTITIES, IDEOLOGIES AND INSTITUTIONS A DECADE OF INSIGHT INTO THE CAUCASUS 2001-2011 CAUCASUS INSTITUTE • 2011 UDC 32.001 IDENTITIES, IDEOLOGIES AND INSTITUTIONS. A Decade of Insight into the Caucasus: 2001-2011. – Alexander Iskandaryan (Ed.) – Yerevan: Caucasus Institute, 2011. – 232 p. A strip of land situated between the Mediterranean and the Black Seas, the post-Soviet Caucasus embarked on a painful identity quest at the turn of the third millennium. This – still ongoing – quest involves several daunt- ing choices: between Moscow, Washington and Brussels, between oil and democratic values, and between feudal realities and revolutionary ideals. Throughout the last decade, the Yerevan-based Caucasus Institute has been conducting in-depth research of the conflicting and often subtle trends in the regions’ politics. This volume contains a selection of research papers published by the Caucasus Institute since 2001 in Armenian, Russian and English, which best represent the challenges faced by this varied region at this crucial stage of development. Edited by Alexander Iskandaryan Copy editing by Richard Giragosian and Nina Iskandaryan Translations by Aghassi Harutyunyan, Irina Stepanova and Nina Iskandaryan Cover design by Matit, www.matit.am Layout by Collage, www.collage.am ISBN 978-99941-2-583-8 © 2011 by the Caucasus Institute This volume was published with the support of the Think Tank Fund of Open Society Foundations and the Heinrich Boell Foundation Papers included in this volume reflect the personal opinions of the authors and not those of the Caucasus Institute, its sponsors or any other organizations including ones with which the authors are or were affiliated. 5 CONTENTS PREFACE . 7 THE SOUTH CAUCASUS: BECOMING A REGION OR TRYING NOT TO BE ONE? by Alexander Iskandaryan . 9 BETWEEN THE SOUTH CAUCASUS AND THE BLACK SEA, OR BETWEEN MOSCOW, WASHINGTON AND BRUSSELS? GEORGIA’S CHOICES by Ivlian Haindrava . 16 FEUDAL DEMOCRACY OR DEMOCRATIC FEUDALISM: ARMENIA IN 2008 by Suren Zolyan . 32 THE LIKELIHOOD OF THE UNLIKELY: DEMOCRACY IN AZERBAIJAN AT THE TURN OF THE 21ST CENTURY by Rahman Badalov . 48 ELITES AND KICK-BACKS: A SKETCH FROM THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS IN 2008 by Sergei Arutyunov . 68 OIL AND DEMOCRATIC VALUES: AZERBAIJAN’S EXPERIENCE by Toghrul Juvarly . 75 IMPORTED POLITICS: DIASPORA POLITICAL PARTIES IN ARMENIA’S DOMESTIC LANDSCAPE by Eduard Melkonian . 79 REVOLUTIONARY IDEALS: POLITICAL DISCOURSES IN THE SOUTH CAUCASUS by Alexander Iskandaryan . 89 ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE BORDERLAND: THE CASE OF AZERBAIJAN by Tadeusz Swietochowski . 98 MOVING IN SEVERAL DIRECTIONS AT ONCE: RELIGION IN GEORGIA IN THE 21ST CENTURY by Ivlian Haindrava . .114 THE ISLAMIC FAITH IN THE NORTHERN CAUCASUS: A NEW TREND OR A FLASHBACK? by Alexander Iskandaryan . .131 ARMENIA IN KARABAKH, KARABAKH IN ARMENIA: LIVING WITH A CONFLICT by Sergey Minasyan . .142 PRECEDENTS AND PROSPECTS: THE DE-FACTO STATES OF THE SOUTH CAUCASUS IN 2008 by David Petrosyan . .153 PUTTING THE “COLOR REVOLUTIONS” BEHIND OR WELCOME BACK, FLASHMAN(?): WESTERN POLICIES TOWARDS THE SOUTH CAUCASUS IN 2007 by Vladimir D. Shkolnikov . .166 6 ARMENIA-TURKEY: DIVIDED BY HISTORY, UNITED BY GEOGRAPHY by Alexander Iskandaryan . .180 NOT A SINGLE STEP AHEAD: TURKEY AND THE SOUTH CAUCASUS IN 2009 by Mitat Çelikpala . .194 DRIFTING APART? THE WEST AND SOUTH CAUCASUS IN 2009 by Vladimir D. Shkolnikov . .212 ABOUT THE CAUCASUS INSTITUTE . .227 OTHER CI PUBLICATIONS IN ENGLISH . .228 7 PREFACE The Caucasus Institute will be ten years old in spring 2012. Founded in 2002 in Yere- van as the Caucasus Media Institute, and renamed to simply the “Caucasus Institute” in 2008 to reflect its broadening scope of activity, it has invested a decade of effort into understanding the changing role of politics, society and media in the Caucasus. Among the many volumes and papers we have published over the years, a special place is held by our Caucasus Yearbooks – collections of research papers based on the Annual Caucasus Conference that we have held in Yerevan, Armenia every spring since 2004. Although our contributors come from all over the former Soviet Union and throughout the West, we mostly publish in Russian in order to reach the chiefly post- Soviet community of experts on the Caucasus. For the benefit of English-speaking readers, we have decided to compile a collection of what we consider to be some of the most insightful and original research papers that we have previously published in various languages; some of them were written by our in-house scholars and some commissioned from local and international experts. Many of the papers in this volume were written a few years back, and the fact that most of the assessments they contain still apply, and many of the predictions have come true, sometimes with a vengeance, is full testimony to their scholarly and practi- cal value. Apart from their quality, the papers have been selected in a way to offer readers who have only some basic knowledge about the Caucasus a holistic representation of the region’s challenges and trends. For experts on the Caucasus, this volume offers original visions, thoroughly collected and systematized facts, and new paradigms that can be used for analyzing this and other developing parts of the world. We are most grateful to the authors of the papers included in this volume. We would also like to thank the book’s editors, translators and designers, and all of our staff who organized the translation and production. Special thanks go to Richard Giragosian for language editing and advice that helped us make the volume more reader-friendly. We are extremely grateful to the Think Tank Fund of Open Society Foundations and the South Caucasus Bureau of the Heinrich Böll Foundation for the financial sup- port that made this publication possible. Alexander Iskandaryan Director, Caucasus Institute Yerevan, December 2011 9 THE SOUTH CAUCASUS: BECOMING A REGION OR TRYING NOT TO BE ONE?1 By Alexander Iskandaryan2 The South Caucasus is a relatively small region situated between the Black and Caspian Sees, bordering on Russia, Turkey and Iran. The area of the South Cauca- sus is smaller than that of the United Kingdom, and its population is roughly that of the Netherlands. An isthmus connecting Russia to the Near East and Central Asia to Europe, it has strategic significance for the development of a large and im- portant region lying on the intersection between South-Eastern Europe and the larger Near East. To understand current developments in the South Caucasus, it is useful to look at the genesis of this region. The notion of the South Caucasus as a cohesive region with more or less clearly defined borders originated fairly recently. Up until the 19th century, parts of the region belonged to the Persian and Ottoman Empires, or to feudalized principalities and kingdoms located between the two empires. People living in the region did not realize they had anything in common, and there was no such thing as a “Caucasian identity.” Numerous religious, local and ethno-linguistic identities coexisted and overlapped. A person could identify as a Persian-speaking resident of Shemakha belonging to the Armenian Apostolic Church, or a Georgian- speaking Sunni Muslim resident in Adjaria and subject of the Turkish Sultan. Even the educated people of the time had no idea about living in a common region. In the early 19th century, the region was annexed by the Russian Empire as a result of several waves of Russian-Turkish and Russian-Persian wars. A name was needed to refer to the new lands in administrative papers. The new name, “Transcaucasia” or “Transcaucasus,” was a very natural coinage for parts of the Russian Empire lying on the other side of the Caucasus Mountain Range. After a while, the lands known as the Transcaucasus began to be perceived as a unified region by internal as well as ex- ternal actors. By its very name, the new region had a natural boundary on the north: the Caucasus Mountains. In the beginning, it did not have a southern boundary. It was the border of the Russian Empire, and later that of the Soviet Union, that be- 1 Th is paper was originally published by the Caucasus Institute in 2008 as: Iskandaryan, Alex- ander. “South Caucasus between Isolation and Integration: Genesis and Prospects.” Th e Caucasus Neighborhood: Turkey and the South Caucasus. – Yerevan: CI, 2008. – Pp.7-13. 2 Th e author has been the director of the Yerevan-based Caucasus Institute since 2005. 10 Alexander Iskandaryan came the southern border of the Transcaucasus. The border changed several times as a result of wars and political developments. Thus, from the 1870s until the 1920s, the Transcaucasus included three regions – Kars, Ardahan and Surmalu – that were at that time in the Russian Empire but have since been parts of Turkey. However, most of the territory of the Transcaucasus – the part of the Russian Empire south of the Caucasus Mountains – gradually merged into a whole by means of economy, transportation routes and cultural policies, and became a unified region. A common education system, common legislation, increasingly widespread use of Russian as the regional lingua franca (interethnic communication language), a road network connecting the region to the centre of the Empire, the state borders on the south, and an emerging common market – all this made people living in the Transcaucasus gradually lose their connections to former parent countries such as Persia or Turkey, and identify themselves with the new region. Their obvious cultural and geographical dissimilarity to Central Russia led to the emergence of a super-ethnic cross-cultural identity of “Caucasians” who began to see themselves as a separate group within the Empire. After the USSR was established in the 1920s, this identity became even stronger because the southern borders were locked, and neighbouring Turkey became as inaccessible for people in the Transcaucasus as geo- graphically distant countries like, say, Sweden, for example.