Suchergebnisse

When a mass movement broke out in 2013 against the corrupt government of Viktor Yanukovich in Ukraine, the United States and its West European allies mobilized to support it. The policy was justified by the Wilsonian logic of promoting democracy and celebrated as such by liberals. Realists for the most part agreed with the liberal argument regarding the motive of that support, but criticized it as delusional and argued that the subsequent civil war in Ukraine was the consequence of that policy. This is a puzzle, because five years prior to the Ukrainian events, a mass movement had rocked Armenia— another post-Soviet state. The West's attitude toward that movement, however, ranged from indifference to hostility, even though the Wilsonian motives for supporting that movement should have been stronger. The difference in the West's response resulted from the different positions of the two movements toward Russia: the Ukrainian movement was intensely hostile toward Russia, whereas the Armenian movement was not. In other words, where Wilsonianism dovetailed with a geopolitical motive, it was triggered; where it diverged, Wilsonianism remained dormant. This is not a deviation from the general pattern either. Contrary to the popular narrative, the West has supported democracy only when that support has been reinforced by material interests, and rarely, if ever, when it has posed a threat to such interests.

Despite its early promise, Armenia's transition to democracy has stalled. The literature on post-Communist transitions ascribes this outcome to the autocratic preferences of its first generation of leaders, and particularly the country's first president Levon Ter-Petrossian. I argue in this article that that literature depicts a profoundly distorted picture of the Armenian politics of the 1990s. The failure of Armenia's transition was primarily due to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the political processes it set in motion.

Destabilized multiethnic states and empires are environments that are highly susceptible to violent ethnonationalist conflict. Conflicts between states built on the ruins of such empires and their minorities are especially common. James Fearon has famously argued that these conflicts are the result of minorities' rational incentives to rebel, which in turn are the result of newly independent states' inability to guarantee that these minorities will not be discriminated against if they acquiesce to citizenship, as well as expectations that over time the balance of power will shift against minorities as states consolidate their institutions. States can, however, take steps to reassure their minorities. The puzzle is why they often fail to do so. In fact, states often adopt policies that confirm minorities' worst fears, pushing them toward rebellion. Such action may be precipitated by a state's belief that a minority is motivated by a separatist agenda rather than by the desire to have its concerns and grievances satisfactorily addressed. If secession is a minority's primary objective, then concessions intended to demobilize the minority will only make the state more vulnerable to future demands and separatist bids. The existence of third parties with incentives to support minority separatism exacerbates the problem. The violent and nonviolent minority disputes in post-Soviet Georgia illustrate these findings.

The breakups of Yugoslavia and the USSR, as well as the violent conflicts that took place on their ruins, spurred a large number of studies claiming that the ethnofederal designs of these states were at the root of these events. I argue that the ethnofederal designs of these states were themselves the consequences of prior nationalist mobilizations in the Russian empire and the Balkans. I also criticize this literature for using the wrong baseline of comparison for evaluating the performance of ethnofederal states, for selecting cases on the dependent variable, for ascribing to ethnofederalism what should be ascribed to other variables, and for relying on certain questionable assumptions about separatism.

Acknowledgment -- Contents -- Chapter 1: Foreword: The Struggle to Change the Logic of Armenia´s History -- Notes -- Chapter 2: The Early Challenges to the Traditional Narrative, 1989- 1991 -- 1 The Dangerous Scarecrow -- 2 How Should We Think About Our Relations with Our Neighbors? -- 3 The Most Important Guarantee of Armenia´s Independent Existence -- 4 Rejecting Fantasies and Normalizing Relations with Turkey -- 5 The Main Guarantee of Our Security Is Normalization of Relations with Neighbors -- Notes -- Chapter 3: Armenian-Turkish Relations After Independence and the Continued Struggle with the Traditional Narrative -- 1 The Obstacles on the Path of Normalization of Relations Between Armenia and Turkey -- 2 The High Point of Cooperation Between Armenia and Turkey -- 3 Responding to Accusations of Russophobia and Turkophilia -- 4 Inaugural Address to the ``Problems of Genocide´´ Conference -- 5 Why It Was a Mistake for Turkey Not to Normalize Relations with Armenia and Why ``National Ideology´´ Is a Bad Idea -- Notes -- Chapter 4: The Karabagh Conflict and the Future of Armenian Statehood -- 1 War or Peace? Time to Get Serious -- 1.1 The Object of the Debate -- 1.2 Some Misconceptions -- 1.3 Myths and Riddles -- 1.4 A Package or a Step-by-Step Solution? -- 1.5 Conspiracy Is Ruled Out -- 2 Debate with the Opponents Inside the Government Regarding the Need to Resolve the Karabagh Conflict -- Notes -- Chapter 5: Views on the Karabagh Conflict and the Armenian Turkish Relations Following the Return to Politics -- 1 The Current State of the Process to Resolve the Nagorno Karabagh Conflict -- 2 Reassessing the Legacy of the Genocide -- 3 ``Why Are Turks and Azeris Happy About the Prospect of Your Return to Politics?´´ -- 4 The Changed Geopolitical Reality Following the Russo-Georgian War of August 2008 -- Notes