The Armenian Experience

From Ancient Times to Independence

Gaïdz Minassian

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786725615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Génocide et crimes de guerre

Armenian national identity has long been associated with what has come to be known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Immersing the reader in the history, culture and politics of Armenia – from its foundations as the ancient kingdom of Urartu to the modern-day Republic – Gaïdz Minassian moves past the massacres embedded in the Armenian psyche to position the nation within contemporary global politics. An in-depth study of history and memory, The Armenian Experience examines the characteristics and sentiments of a national identity that spans the globe. Armenia lies in the heart of the Caucasus and once had an empire – under the rule of Tigranes the Great in the first century BC – that stretched from the Caspian to the Mediterranean seas. Beginning with an overview of Armenia's historic position at the crossroads between Rome and Persia, Minassian details invasions from antiquity to modern times by Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Persians and Russians right up to its Soviet experience, and drawing on Armenia's post-Soviet conflict with Azerbaijan in its attempts to reunify with the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. This book questions an Armenian self-identity dominated by its past and instead looks towards the future. Gaïdz Minassian emphasises the need to recognise that the Armenian story began well before the Genocide 1915, and continues as an on-going modern narrative.

Part I

History and Memory: The Logics of Domination

Armenians have long experienced a condition of dominated people which structures them collectively and prevents any process of territorialization and empowerment of one field as regards the other. Therefore, Armenian monism is based on an undifferentiated sum of religious, political, cultural, social and economic elements which forms a unified and homogeneous whole controlled by national elites who hold most of the capital. Understanding the Armenian experience of domination, whether in the case of sovereignty or not requires the use of holistic rather than individualistic approaches. Indeed, from antiquity to the present day, the individual has, in the essentially traditional Armenian model, systematically disappeared behind the collective, with the possible exception of rare examples from Armenian diasporas implanted in Western societies based on democracy and human rights. This community–individual relationship is fundamental to understanding the Armenian issue because it refers to the question of modernity and individualism in political development.

Three types of domination have been exerted on the Armenians from the origins to the present day. There is no political power without land mediation. The first type of domination is therefore international: on the one hand, because as a human group, Armenians have never really been able to apprehend their territory as an instrument for defining and delimiting their political community; on the other hand, because from an early stage Armenia, as a territorial entity, emerged in an intense geopolitical environment where rivalries between powers were sometimes beneficial, but often fatal; hence the idea of a buffer, elastic, Armenia evolved subject to the circumstances of its neighbouring powers and the strategies of their central authorities. Armenia is also under politico-religious domination. As religion and politics are two inseparable categories embodied by the Church and the system of dynasts, the two main national institutions, the formation of an autonomous space for politics is off to a bad start because, from the beginning, the concepts of State and City in the Greek sense have been foreign to Armenians. These fabrication defects naturally result in major socio-political pathologies which are still rampant today. Finally, Armenia is under socio-economic domination. The Armenians have long evolved under the burden of a traditional tripartite society and Russian and Ottoman imperial systems that have shaped their identity and slowed down the establishment of a modern society and an autonomous strategy for the players.

Collectively, the Armenians are aware of the weight of this three-way domination. In an effort to break away from it, the Armenians have structured their thinking around a dynamic of emancipation, referred to as Haitadism, a true paradigm of a national sociology pairing liberty and security. Based on a structural–functionalist approach, this integration system relies on its own values, norms, identities and players to find its place in the international system. Built on this constructivist logic, Haitadism incorporates the whole of the social sciences into its transformation process and its ideological corpus is based on the mobilizing ideologies of its time to free the Armenians from any form of domination. Haitadism involves territoriality and extra-territoriality and also the memory–history duo in its system. It draws, from external systems, the resources needed to develop or transform it according to its needs; in return, it supplies its products. This system relies on the rule of ‘hayababanoum’ which means preserving, unifying and consolidating the Armenian being, its territory, its nation. This is a fragile balance which must be constantly stabilized and is why it is defined, in theory, as the only political system capable of structuring the Armenians as a political community to bring them together around a common destiny. However, given the scattering of Armenians throughout the world and the sporadic sovereignties that characterize them, Haitadism, due to its anteriority to the State, is fragmented into several development models – an atomized system incapable of integrating itself fully into a unitary legal and political framework. This validates the idea that such a system creates severely dysfunctional, often acute, almost incurable phases, inasmuch as it constantly wavers between ethnic foundations and national aspirations, restraint and openness, emancipation and hegemony. Thus, built on regular layers and having suffered multiple failures, as well as contradictions and intrinsic deformities, what was initially regarded as a mode of structural regulation for the Armenians has finally been transformed into a logic of Armenian domination. A source of emancipation from international, political, religious and social domination in the beginning, Haitadism has organized, in its turn, into a system of domination.

1

International Domination

Armenia embraces the plateau that separates the Black Sea from Mesopotamia from north to south and from west to east, Asia Minor from the Lesser Caucasus. As a people, Armenians have lived through many major world crises and are one of the few ancient peoples to retain their original name. At the crossroads of world rivalries, Armenia has often assumed the role of buffer zone and has emerged as a space of neutrality, expected to prevent conflicts between hostile powers. Yet Armenia has not always held this position as an intermediate space in the regional balance of power and, more often than not, has had that status thrust upon it. A buffer state is the object of various intellectual constructions: a place in which to seek refuge, a corridor or springboard. But throughout its long history, the fate of the Armenian buffer state has been to remain unspoken and uncertain.

This uncertainty partly explains the plurality of the legal status of Armenia, a diversity that has made its political development unique. Following the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, rivalries between the powers laid the foundations of an international system that brought to the fore a series of diplomatic issues known as the Eastern question. While Armenia was always part of that question, as the vicissitudes of the international system evolved since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a specifically Armenian Question arose. In this sense, Armenia belongs to the family of nations whose emancipation marks the history of nineteenth-century Europe – nations such as Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Cyprus and others. Armenia became, in essence, a multilateral issue, that is to say one whose resolution involves several powers at the same time and interests that are sometimes complementary and more often divergent. Since the rebirth of the Armenian state in 1991, the Armenian Question has retained this multilateral character, becoming an international subject following the whim of progress in globalization, the evolution of law in the field of prevention and repression of genocide and developments in the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute.

Yet Armenia did not get off to a good start. Just as the international system was preparing to address the contemporary dimension of the Armenian Question following the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–1878, European peace treaties signed after the First World War were poised to bury it with the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Thus, between 1915 and 1923 the Armenian people went through three major tests: a physical extermination and massacre of 1.5 million during the genocide of 1915; political extermination with the 1920 Bolshevik collectivization of the independent Republic of Armenia, which ended any pretence of state sovereignty; and diplomatic extermination produced by the removal of any reference to Armenia or Armenians at the 1923 signing of the Treaty of Lausanne between the European powers and the young Turkish Republic of Mustafa Kemal.

Could Armenians have avoided this historical debacle? Were they in a position to modify the power contest, the basis of the international system? Must one necessarily impute responsibility to foreign powers, especially to Turks, Russians and, to a lesser extent, Europeans? Revisiting these events is a difficult but indispensable exercise to better master the socio-historical process. Among other things, it offers new insights into the strategic orientations of contemporary Armenian elites and the state of their political thinking.

In 1991, after seven decades of Soviet dictatorship, Armenia once again found its place on the international scene on an equal footing with other sovereign nations in a post-bipolar order. The fall of the Soviet Union provided the opportunity for emergence of several sovereign states, including Armenia. The Armenian Question has never been so studied and universalized as it has since the restoration of Armenian sovereignty. This does not mean that Armenians acted on a principle of universality or even that they freed themselves from the domination of the international system. On the contrary, the international system is increasingly integrated and continues to exert pressure on the Armenian state to obtain, if not the removal of the Armenian Question from the international agenda, at the very least its attenuation. In other words, if the international community is willing to welcome Armenia as a state, does it not also invite Armenia to leave the Armenian Question on the doorstep of the world order?

An ‘internalized territory’

According to the French sociologist Bertrand Badie: ‘A territory is not a statistic, it is a construct.’ ‘Its use as an instrument of political action corresponds to a history, a set of inventions; its social role does not derive from an imperative, but from a more conditional mode.’¹ Territory then, has meaning only within a framework of domination by a people who occupy it as a structured political community. As already stated, due to its geographical location Armenia has more often constituted a buffer zone between rival powers than a structured political community. In early antiquity, Urartu was dominated by the Sumerians and the Assyrians. In classical antiquity, Armenia separated Rome from Persia. Later, in medieval times, the Kingdom of Armenia served as a buffer between Byzantium and the Persians, then as a buffer for the Arabs and finally, for the Seljuk Turks. Even beyond historical Armenia, in the Kingdom of Cilicia, Armenians were caught between Byzantium and the Ottoman Turks. Finally, in the twentieth century, the Republic of Armenia emerged somewhere between the Turks and Russians towards the end of the First World War. Such consistent historical turmoil transformed the Armenian space into a permanent theatre of war. According to some theorists, Armenia was built up through armed conflict, either because the Armenian character was warlike or because the people had become inured to conflict. The buffer space itself becomes the frontier. Such populations must adapt themselves to survive as intermediary groups between rival powers. This geopolitical peculiarity not only makes it difficult for mediating peoples to think of their own long-term survival, but it also provokes a relative detachment from any institutional form of space, leading to challenges with the social integration process. Political relations thus become all the more biased as the state itself disappears from the scene. This happens to such an extent that the very notion of the state and therefore of politics, becomes inappropriate. Can one speak of a ‘territory’ when a space lacks social integration and visible institutions and is characterized by shifting contours? As a former French ambassador to Constantinople, Paul Cambon, wrote in 1894: ‘Where does Armenia begin and where does it end?’² We should not forget that the term ‘territory’ represents a real political and legal institution attached to the concept of the state. In the case of Armenia, which before 1991 did not constitute a sovereign state, it is better to speak of ‘land’ or ‘soil’ or, as Armenians say, yerkir (meaning country as land or soil). Therefore, until recent years, the principle of territoriality and its corollary ‘borders’, had never been integrated into Armenian political history.

The interstate system, whose logic dominated this part of the world for centuries, deprives Armenia of a legal culture specific to international law. The name Armenia did not appear in any official document before the bilateral Treaty of Batum, signed on 4 June 1918 between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Armenia and not until two years later, with the multilateral Treaty of Sèvres (1920), did the word ‘Armenia’ take its place on the international stage. Here again, the advance was short lived, since the treaty was never ratified. It would be another 71 years before Armenia would fully join the international system, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the proclamation of independence in 1991.

There are, of course, other stateless peoples without experience of international law – the Kurds, for example. Thus, during the course of its history, Armenia has experienced 12 legal conditions, from the highest degree of sovereignty to the total absence of any mention of Armenia.

To understand why Armenians have such a strong attachment to their national identity one must go back to the Kingdom of Urartu. This has given ‘Armenia much more than a geographical identity or a certain level of material culture: it made possible the internalization of a country and its landscapes, a mental appropriation of a ...