HISTORY WAKING UP IN THE CAUCASUS

by Duns Scotus

Right now we have a war brewing in the Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan. There is a tendency to see this in terms of a "Clash of Civilizations" (Christian vs. Muslim) but Samuel P. Huntington doesn’t travel as well as most Neocons think he does. For example, Christian Armenia is close to Iran, while Azerbaijan is quite pally with Georgia, etc. 

What we have here instead is a messy inter-ethnic and odd-bedfellows conflict caused by lazily drawn borders, one of the many by-products of post-Imperialism, in this case Soviet post-imperialism.

The problem in its precise details is that when the Soviet Union collapsed, a large part of the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan was an "autonomous" Armenian region called Nagorno-Karabakh, which had no wish to be blended into the rest of Azerbaijan. Even worse, this region was an island in an Azerbaijani sea, that is until a bit of effective fighting by the Armenians created a solid enclave with secure communications to Armenia. 

This conflict then became frozen, as the main powers in the region worked to cool things down. There was already too much else going on in the region, so this seemed like a good idea. But the result of this was that no-one was happy—the Armenian position continued to lack international legitimacy, while the Azerbaijanis clearly wanted a big chuck of their land back, including Nagorno-Karabakh.

This left a geopolitical fault line that could be easily reactivated to stir up conflict, not just between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but also between the major regional powers that found themselves involved, namely Turkey, Russia, and Iran. There are suspicions among some that the Americans may be using this old conflict simply to stir up trouble for its rivals. Also, as long as things remained so unresolved and unstable, there was the possibility of conflict just breaking out without any outside help.

But what is the nub of the problem? 

Some might say it is just petty nationalism, and that is true to a certain extent. But petty nationalism is merely an undeveloped and retarded type of nationalism. 

In this case, we should also focus on the retarding agent—the imperialism that has held sway over this region for millennia. This is what is at the root of all the conflicts and flash points in the Caucasus, the refusal of invading Empires—Ottoman, Romanov, Qajar, and Soviet—to allow the local ethnicities to "work out" realistic and stable boundaries.

Europe too once had its share of unworkable boundaries, but through what we can characterize as a "progressive historical process" of war and diplomacy, these were gradually smoothed down and refined to the point where friction, if not overcome, was at least greatly minimized. Armenia and Azerbaijan, under the control of alien empires, were never allowed to catch up on this process. 

Now, we live in an era where the traditional processes of history are problematic. Borders can no longer be shaped and refined by war and diplomacy conducted by gentlemen, as was the case in Europe between the Westphalian system and the World Wars. Instead, the modern pattern is the regressive one of mass immigration, deraciation, superstate agglomeration, alienation and ghettoization—the world that the "advanced" West is heading towards. 

This modern pattern is a poor fit for countries like Armenia and Azerbaijan, which have been denied national development by imperialism, and which are more keen to define themselves as new nations than to fall into the pit of globalism with the rest of us. 

In the long-discredited "post-history world" of Francis Fukuyama, history, it seems, has an odd habit of sticking around. 

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