Thomas de Waal: The Lightness of History in the Caucasus
[Thomas de Waal is a Senior Associate for the Caucasus at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.]
The south Caucasus is one of those places where people like to say that the “weight of history” lies heavily. Increasingly, I raise a dissenting voice. True, history lies all round you in this region, not least in its regular invocation by modern politicians. To name but one example: after his inauguration as president in January 2004, Mikheil Saakashvili chose to travel to the tomb of the man widely regarded as Georgia’s greatest king, David the Builder, who reigned from 1089-1125.
But the idea that the call of history determines and drives the people of this region into intractable conflict must not be taken at face value. And sometimes history is only as weighty as you allow it to be. The more you look into the Caucasian past, the more it fractures into a mosaic of different narratives, many of them ones of cooperation as well as conflict. If we take a more sceptical - even postmodern - view of the history of this region, we will be doing it a service.
I have been writing about the Caucasus for years but when I started in 2009 to research a short book about the region - which became The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010) - even I was surprised by how some of the historical facts I learned challenged many of today’s dominant political narratives. Three examples make the point.
First, in Russia’s wars of 1820s against the Ottomans, Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought side by side in the Tsarist army. At that historical juncture, the Shi’a-Sunni divide overrode any notions of Turkic brotherhood. Alexander Pushkin himself witnessed the “Karabakh regiment” composed of Azeri cavalry in action outside Kars, and wrote an admiring poem dedicated to one of its officers, Farhad-Bek. That should caution against making any instant assumption about an eternal Azerbaijani-Turkish alliance, which often fuel political attitudes over the Nagorny Karabakh conflict (and which the Armenian-Turkish normalisation process, albeit thus far unsuccessful, has also somewhat shaken)....
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The south Caucasus is one of those places where people like to say that the “weight of history” lies heavily. Increasingly, I raise a dissenting voice. True, history lies all round you in this region, not least in its regular invocation by modern politicians. To name but one example: after his inauguration as president in January 2004, Mikheil Saakashvili chose to travel to the tomb of the man widely regarded as Georgia’s greatest king, David the Builder, who reigned from 1089-1125.
But the idea that the call of history determines and drives the people of this region into intractable conflict must not be taken at face value. And sometimes history is only as weighty as you allow it to be. The more you look into the Caucasian past, the more it fractures into a mosaic of different narratives, many of them ones of cooperation as well as conflict. If we take a more sceptical - even postmodern - view of the history of this region, we will be doing it a service.
I have been writing about the Caucasus for years but when I started in 2009 to research a short book about the region - which became The Caucasus: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010) - even I was surprised by how some of the historical facts I learned challenged many of today’s dominant political narratives. Three examples make the point.
First, in Russia’s wars of 1820s against the Ottomans, Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought side by side in the Tsarist army. At that historical juncture, the Shi’a-Sunni divide overrode any notions of Turkic brotherhood. Alexander Pushkin himself witnessed the “Karabakh regiment” composed of Azeri cavalry in action outside Kars, and wrote an admiring poem dedicated to one of its officers, Farhad-Bek. That should caution against making any instant assumption about an eternal Azerbaijani-Turkish alliance, which often fuel political attitudes over the Nagorny Karabakh conflict (and which the Armenian-Turkish normalisation process, albeit thus far unsuccessful, has also somewhat shaken)....