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MYTHS AND REALITIES OF THE SOUTH CAUCASIAN SYSTEM OF REGIONAL SECURITYGiulshen PASHAEVA
Giulshen Pashaeva, Ph.D. (Philos.), Director, Center of Conflict Studies (Baku, Azerbaijan).
Today, many of the countries that are claiming world or, at least, regional domination cannot afford ignoring the Southern Caucasus, the Eurasian Balkans, as Zbigniew Brzezinski called it. Oil and gas in the Caspian, future oil and gas pipelines as well as plans to revive the so-called Great Silk Road as a major transportation route may create political and economic dividends.
A sober look at the region and its prospects calls for a settlement of the ethnopolitical and territorial conflicts, the Karabakh confrontation being the most important among them. It should be taken into account when the idea of the South Caucasian regional security system is being discussed.
General ConsiderationsInternational forums of all sorts, the media and the academic community are fond of talking about the possible routes the Southern Caucasus can take to be integrated into the world community. It should be noted that any such discussion should look carefully at the processes now underway in the region.
First, in the post-Cold War and the post-Soviet era the West was confronted with a wave of violence in the post-Soviet states and Yugoslavia it had never expected. Political scientists and the media in the West have obviously lost their bearings in the mess. They are cautious and subjective when writing about all the sides in all conflicts. Quite often this stand is dictated by corresponding diasporas outside the region rather than by objective information about the countries and nations involved: at the early stages the readers in the West were unable to distinguish them.
During the twelve years of the Karabakh conflict we have been witnessing a dual standards approach and a gradual shift in the Western assessments of the stormy events. At first, Western Europe and the United States showed no interest in the conflict or, at best, demonstrated a biased approach. Gradually, as the resources of energy fuels in the region have been developed and the situation changed because of the proposed international West-East transport corridor they have moved to more pragmatic positions and have taken a closer look at the region’s geostrategic and geo-economic parameters.
Second, the new independent South Caucasian states are classical small states where their sizes and population numerical strengths are concerned. They lived under pressure from the center (czarist Russia and the Soviet Union) far too long and developed political and civilian infantilism. Some of these countries have preserved their dependence on their large regional neighbors—the situation Russia, the former “elder brother,” is skillfully exploiting. This created new small entities which complicates, to a great extent, the relations among the new South Caucasian states. Nagorny Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia are geographical dwarfs; their existence is not justified by political or………………..
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