Fear, Weakness and Power in the Post-Soviet South Caucasus

A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis

K. Oskanien, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kevork Oskanian

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137026750
• eBook ISBN: 9781137026767
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a multi-level analysis of international security in the South Caucasus. Using an expanded and adapted version of Regional Security Complex Theory, it studies both material conditions and discourses of insecurity in its assessment of the region's possible transition towards a more peaceable future.

1

Introduction

The Southern Caucasus as a Gordian knot

To call the Southern Caucasus ‘problematic’ is something of an understatement; sandwiched between the Caucasus mountain chain and the Middle East, and the Caspian and Black Seas, it stands out through its politically complex and conflictual nature. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, it has seen armed strife and political instability in all three of its main constituent states. Two de facto statelets – Abkhazia and South Ossetia – have split off from the Republic of Georgia in armed insurrections at the beginning of the 1990s, to be recognised by Moscow in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 Russian-Georgian war. Even before the actual disintegration of the Soviet Union, Armenia and Azerbaijan had started a bitter armed conflict over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh; it lasted till 1994, claimed an estimated 30,000 lives and its fundamental cause – the territory’s status – remains unresolved to this day. All three states have had their share of armed insurrections, palace coups, revolutions and assassinations. Standing at the crossroads of existing and potential energy routes of hydrocarbon-rich Central Asia, the South Caucasus’ strategic importance is furthermore difficult to over-estimate: Azerbaijan’s oil and gas reserves have, in particular, attracted the attention of Western energy companies, with their governments following in their wake – provoking varyingly irritated responses from the region’s traditional hegemon, Russia.

The region’s earlier history also suggests it has long been rife with phenomena that traditionally elicit the interest of students of International Security: hostile states, rebellious minorities and meddlesome great powers. The area saw several violent intra-state and inter-state conflagrations in the early 20th century, during periods without Russian overlay, underscoring the deeply inimical relations within it. It has historically functioned as a meeting point of empires, with Russia hegemonically dominant for most of the past two centuries, and other great powers regularly challenging its dominance, as during the 19th-century ‘Great Game’ (Hopkirk, 2001), immediately following the First World War (D. Kelly, 2000), and in the post-Soviet era. Finally, during the modern-day periods outside of formal Russian imperial or Soviet control – in 1918–1920 and after 1991 – its main constituent states have always been unstable. Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia were riven by violent intra-state conflict in 1918–1920, much as they are now; it seems, in other words, to be populated by ‘weak’ or, as I shall call them, ‘incoherent’ states.

The Southern Caucasus’ three recognised states first emerged in their modern forms following the fall of the Czarist Empire, in 1917, after a failed attempt by the three largest ethnic groups of the Southern Caucasus (Armenians, Azeris, Georgians) to create a unified state, the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (Hovannisian, 1997: 289–299; Swietochowski, 2004: 105–128). Its brief and fractious history illustrates the extent to which regional elites had, by that time, taken on the specific identities and interests of different ‘imagined communities’ (B. Anderson, 2006), identities that would only be reinforced in 1918–1921 with the emergence of the three ‘Democratic Republics’ of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Marked by massacre and war – an inevitable outcome of dramatically overlapping territorial claims and hopelessly mixed populations – this short period of history outside of direct Russian imperial rule now occupies pride of place in the nationalist narratives of all peoples of the Southern Caucasus as a focus of grievance and identity.

It is all too easy to claim, as much of Western reporting has done, that ‘ancient hatreds’ – bottled up during the decades of Soviet rule – effortlessly rose again in 1989. And, to be fair, much of the antagonism within the region is also constructed as ‘ancient’ by its indigenous nationalists. But if one goes back only slightly further in time, towards the middle of the 19th century, one finds a dramatically different picture of the place that reveals the contingent and far from inevitable nature of regional ethnic animosities. Early imperial Russian Transcaucasia was an area where centuries of Byzantine, Persian, Turkish influence and Russian dominance had created what one could conceivably call a unified socio-cultural space, where different ethnicities lived side by side in relative peace under a ‘pax Russica’ without the added ethno-territorially exclusive complications of modern nationalism. At the same time, this era of imperial control set the stage for what would happen in the early and late 20th centuries: the strife in 1918–1921 (and following 1989) was not based on anything ‘ancient’; it was the combined, socially constructed product of the processes of modernity and Russian imperialism that had affected the Southern Caucasus during the 19th century.¹

Ethnic nationalism only emerged in the second half of the 19th century, when it touched first the Armenians and Georgians, and subsequently the Azeris (Goldenberg, 1996: 23–30). The Russian imperial authorities had been instrumental in its emergence by privileging different ethnic groups at various times during their rule, the only constant being their discriminatory attitude towards their Muslim subjects. The combination of resulting socio-economic patterns, internal and external migrations, and modernisation created a potent, volatile situation in which nationalism could readily take root. In Georgia, Marxism mixed with Georgian antagonism against the local Armenian bourgeoisie to create a ‘national liberation movement based on class war’, driven by the local Mensheviks (Suny, 1996: 140). The longsimmering antagonisms between Armenians and Azeris broke into the open in 1905 (Swietochowski, 1996: 214–215) in spite of efforts by exasperated community leaders to contain the violence, and, after the fact, encourage reconciliation (Altstadt, 1992: 39–43), setting the stage for the brutal ethnic cleansings that would mark the Caucasus following the Cold War. It must be stressed, however, that 1905 was the first instance of large-scale ethnic conflict in the region: a distinctly modern date.

While these hatreds were, perhaps, not ancient, they have nevertheless demonstrated a remarkable persistence and resilience over time. The decades of Soviet propaganda that followed the Bolshevik takeover of the region – defining the three main ethnicities as ‘fraternal’ and celebrating a Southern Caucasian brotherhood of nations under Russian-Soviet tutelage – showed itself entirely ineffective. Quite on the contrary, several authors argue that the Soviet ‘titular nation’ system combined with rigid, primordialist historiography to reinforce rather than weaken ethnic allegiances within the USSR, and create ethnic consciousness where previously there was little, as arguably happened in Abkhazia and Ossetia (Cornell, 2001; Suny, 2001). In the Southern Caucasus, the situation was complicated by territorial changes and upgrades/downgrades in the status of various territories – including Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh – especially during the Stalinist period, which has led to not-too-unfounded charges of them having been deliberately designed to foment ethnic strife in the absence of Soviet power.

What is noteworthy about the earlier, very brief period of independence in 1918–1921 is the similarity between the regional flashpoints at that time and the sites of conflict seven decades later, in the post-Cold War period: wars and massacres between Armenians and Azeris (inside and beyond Nagorno-Karabakh), pro-Bolshevik uprisings by the Abkhaz and the Ossetians, a war between Georgia and Armenia over the contested provinces of Javakheti and Lori. When Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan attained their independence after 70 years of Soviet rule, the patterns of strife took on a familiar form, generating both inter- and intra-state conflicts and tensions centred around these very same territories. Baku and Yerevan were already involved in a de facto civil war before the formal implosion of the USSR, with Armenian fighters confronting Azeri troops in Karabakh from the autumn of 1991, although skirmishing and armed unrest had begun much earlier (De Waal, 2003; Rieff, 1997); independence ‘upgraded’ the conflict to a full-fledged international conflagration. Abkhazia and South Ossetia were at the same time moving beyond Tbilisi’s control, in the run-up to open armed conflict and extensive ethnic cleansing in 1991–1993 (Chervonnaia, 1994; Human Rights Watch, 1992; Potier, 2001). The end result has been a series of ‘frozen conflicts’ that have marked the region ever since the ‘hot’ phase of these conflagrations came to an end, pitting Armenia/Karabakh against Azerbaijan and Abkhazia/South Ossetia against Georgia (the latter becoming dramatically ‘unfrozen’ in 2008).

The South Caucasus has thus been a site for both inter- and intra-state conflict in the various periods of its modern history outside of imperial domination. Apart from persistently fractious inter-state enmities, its modern nationalisms seem to also have produced states that can all be described as weak and unstable. The intra-state troubles of the 1918–1920 and post-1991 period were previously noted; today, two of the recognised regional states – Azerbaijan, Georgia – have fragmented through the latter era’s separatist conflicts. All three states have moreover seen their share of political instability and strife in the post-Soviet years: civil wars, palace coups, colour revolutions and the at times deadly repression of opposition demonstrations. Georgia’s recent peaceful transition of power between government and opposition – with president Saakashvili conceding defeat to Bidzhina Ivanishvili’s ‘Georgian Dream’ coalition – was a very exceptional regional first.

Modern history also illustrates how great powers have, time and again, shaped the South Caucasus’ rivalries through either direct domination or simple interaction. As has already been pointed out, the region’s inclusion within the Russian and the Soviet empires played a crucial role in forming its various contemporary ethno-nationalisms. In the absence of Russian hegemony, the different constituent nations (and, later, states) of Transcaucasia looked towards outside powers for protection, in 1918–1921, as in the post-Cold War era. The 1918 Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic fell prey, among others, to the competing and incompatible great power preferences of the Georgians (Germany), Azeris (the Ottoman Empire) and Armenians (the Russians, the Allies, and later the United States). From 1918 to 1920, the three separate ‘Democratic Republics’ of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia then strove to enhance their relative positions through alliances with outside powers, with the British in particular often acting as an arbiter in disputes. As today, the interests of these outside powers were primarily focused on the oilfields in Baku.

Following the Cold War, the Southern Caucasus has similarly seen an ever-increasing involvement of great powers in its processes since the end of Soviet empire in 1991, and commensurately divergent alignments by the three constituent states, in addition to the unrecognised statelets. Moscow has always had a prominent presence (Baev, 1997), with military bases inherited from the USSR and, as is credibly alleged, involvement in the separatist conflicts that marked the region’s states in their first years of independence. Its economic involvement is considerable as well, in the strategic sectors of, especially, Armenia and, less straightforwardly, Georgia. With the 2008 war, it has to some extent also assured itself a position within the region through its de facto protectorates in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The United States and the European Union (EU) have meanwhile increased their regional presence, starting with the ‘Contract of the Century’ signed with Azerbaijan in 1994 (MacFarlane, 1999). Much of their involvement has centred on energy transportation routes for hydrocarbon reserves (like the already functional Baku–Tbilisi–Çeyhan oil pipeline and the proposed Nabucco gas pipeline). The United States moreover expanded into the military and political sectors by actively pushing for Georgia’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership, at least during the G.W. Bush presidency (D. Lynch, 2006: 51–54), before tempering its ambitions under the Obama administration. The EU’s regional involvement continues despite the organisation’s recent internal crises, having gone from benign neglect of the region’s states to their inclusion within the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) and Eastern Partnership programmes, with the possibility of Association Agreements being signed in the near future (European Commission, 2009d; MacFarlane, 2004). Turkey and Iran have also played roles shaping the region, if only as adjacent regional powers with important historical ties to it.

Persistent inter-state enmities, violent ethnic conflicts within weak and unstable states and the (often fractious) involvement of various great powers: the Southern Caucasus displays all these characteristics, and, as the preceding historical discussion suggests, all three have, in the past, interacted in various, complex ways. Capturing this complexity will be this monograph’s primary objective.² More specifically, I shall be considering how far a future transformation of the Southern Caucasus to a more peaceful state would be possible in the light of the interactions between the elements enumerated above. This line of questioning is not simply a matter of academic curiosity: the need for a thorough analysis of these complexities is made all the more urgent because of the continued impermeability of the region’s enmities to change, and its strategically important location between the Caspian’s hydrocarbon reserves and the West. The particular conceptual framework that I have chosen for the task at hand is Regional Security Complex Theory (RSCT). It already provides the analyst with some of the concepts – among others, amity/enmity, state weakness and great power penetration – that allow for a systematic and structured analysis that incorporates both material features (power and the like) and ideational elements (discourse). But as it stands, the theory will require some adaptation and expansion to be up to the task of specifically elucidating the interaction between these three factors.

RSCT is something of an awkward stepchild in the family tree of International Relations and International Security, embraced by neither orthodox neo-realists nor constructivists, yet claiming the parentage of both. Its ontological pluralism and epistemological eclecticism have combined with lack of detailed theorisation to leave it exposed to charges of state-centredness (Hoogensen, 2005) and incoherence (Acharya, 2007: 636; Taureck, 2005). Left in between two important paradigms of International Relations and International Security, it has nevertheless often been applied almost off the cuff: its prima facie utility to regionalists is quite obvious, despite the deficiencies pointed out by its detractors, deficiencies which are often filled-in ‘on-the-go’, as empiricists work out ad hoc methods of application that are based not really on thorough conceptual analysis but rather on a wide range of intuitive assumptions and intellectual leaps of logic.

One of this book’s aims will therefore be to provide an additional theoretical underpinning to RSCT by expanding three of its central concepts: amity/enmity, ‘state weakness’ and ‘great power penetration’ (GPP), concepts which up to now have most often than not been used intuitively, without much further systematic reflection on their actual internal workings within the wider theoretical framework. The following section will introduce RSCT by providing a genealogy of this conceptual framework, followed by an overview of the contemporary version of the theory, and an outline of the tweaks and expansions necessary for my analysis.

A genealogy of Regional Security Complex Theory

What is RSCT, where does it come from? The short answer would be to point to the first brief mention of its very central concept – the [Regional] Security Complex (RSC) – in the first edition of Barry Buzan’s People, State and Fear, the work that also introduces a systematically sector-based approach to International Security (Buzan, 1983: 105–115). There, a ‘security complex’ is defined as ‘a group of states whose primary security concerns link together sufficiently closely that their national securities cannot realistically be considered apart from one another’ (p. 106); the brief section then continues with a short sketch of several such security complexes in the then Cold War world.

RSCT proper was left undeveloped for a relatively long period after its initial introduction: the Cold War did not really lend itself to regional theories of (in)security, as International Relations and International Security were mostly conceptualised in systemic terms. Regions very much remained the purview of ‘area studies’ and those scholars concentrating on integrative processes. On the demand side, bipolarity and globalisation diverted theorists’ attention towards the systemic (or ‘global’), away from the regional. Regions were, as a rule, arbitrarily defined – if they were at all looked at – and theories focusing on regional interaction were virtually nonexistent. As Buzan himself described the situation immediately following the end of ‘bipolarity’:

[T]here is also an important set of security dynamics at the regional level, and this often gets lost or discounted. At that middle level, one finds only the hazy notions of regional balances of power and subsystems, or crude media references that use region to describe whatever location currently contains a newsworthy level of political turbulence.

(Buzan, 1991: 187)

The new post-Cold War world order presented itself as far more complex and regionalised than before, calling for theories that could grasp this new, clearly discernible reality, operating somewhere between the systemic and the domestic. Thus, in People, States and Fear’s second edition, Buzan (1991: 186–229) expanded this novel idea of RSCs further in a new, dedicated chapter on ‘regional security’, where ‘region-level subsystems’ are seen, first and foremost, as constituted by the increased security interaction and security interdependence that result from geographic proximity. At this stage, the definition of an ‘RSC’ was identical to the one provided in 1983 (p. 190), but Buzan did introduce the ideational ‘patterns of amity and enmity’ as the principal element that must be added to material power relations in conceptualising these sub-systems. While the overall framework still retained a strong neo-realist bias,³ cultural/historical factors entered the argument through the addition of ‘amity/enmity’ to Waltz’ three constants and variables – units, anarchy, polarity.

RSCT then went through something of a bifurcation. David Lake and Patrick Morgan (1997) presented a mainly material-positivist version of the theory in Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World. They advocated a comparative, multi-variate approach going beyond ‘security’ per se, with a strong positivist bias, apparent in their definition of RSCs, which, while echoing Buzan, eliminated the interpretivist/ideational element of ‘security concerns’: ‘a set of states continually affected by one or more security externalities that emanate from a distinct geographic area’ (p. 12). Lake and Morgan’s version of RSCT also blurred the boundaries between the systemic and regional levels, and the RSCs themselves – important in Buzan’s version – by allowing for overlaps in membership between both. States and great powers could thus simultaneously be members of several RSCs (sometimes quite distant ones in the case of great powers). The authors also replaced the ideational ‘amity/enmity’ variable of ‘Buzanian’ RSCT with the considerably more positivist ‘dominant patterns of security management’.

In the end, this version of the theory proved something of a dead end, partly because of lacunae pointed out by Buzan and Wæver (2003: 78–82) – lacunae that seemingly prevented it from having a major impact on empirical practice: among others, a diversion of focus away from security towards the political and the lack of clear delimitation between and within levels. On the other hand, theoretical developments opened up the possibility for the elaboration of the ideational aspects of the theory as initially proposed by Buzan: on the supply side, constructivist frameworks that were very much geared towards idealism and interpretivism had completed their migration from sociology into International Relations (IR). The emergence of the ‘Copenhagen School’ and the idea of ‘securitisation’ in preliminary works like Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (Wæver, Kelstrup, & Lemaitre, 1993) ultimately led to the first attempts at an explicitly ideational revision of RSCT provided in Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Buzan, Wæver, & De Wilde, 1998).

In this monograph – widely regarded as the Copenhagen School’s foundational text – Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde provide a basis for the theory as we know it today (pp. 1–20). They suggest that an explicitly social constructivist approach would be one way of moving from ‘classical’ to ‘revised’ RSCT, expanding the ideational aspects of the theory beyond the rather indefinite notions of amity/enmity or security interdependence towards the more specific, explicitly discursive phenomenon of securitisation: ‘an instance where an issue is presented as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure’ (pp. 23–24). As very specific Austinian speech acts, whereby societies defined their security or insecurity, securitisations now allow researchers to conceptualise the amity/enmity variable through a more or less consistent methodological tool. States and regions become friendlier or more hostile depending on the security discourses existing between them, whether or not they defined each other as threats to their particular ‘referent objects’ (material and ideational values to be protected from harm). Significantly, the introduction explicitly links RSCT to the rest of the volume, in effect making it an integral part of Securitisation Theory, as confirmed in the conclusion (pp. 195–213).

RSCT today

The contemporary, materially/ideationally hybrid version of RSCT received its first detailed, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Geopolitical Map of the Caucasus
• Timeline of Events in the South Caucasus (1988–2013)
• A Note on Transliteration and Toponymy
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• List of Interviewees
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Amity and Enmity in Its Regional Context
• 3. State Incoherence as Weakness, Instability and Failure
• 4. Great Powers and Their Regional Entanglements
• 5. A Macro-view of the Southern Caucasus
• 6. Discourses of Conflict in the Southern Caucasus
• 7. State Incoherence in Southern Caucasia
• 8. The Great Powers and the Southern Caucasus
• 9. The South Caucasus Regional Insecurity Complex
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index