By Vestnik Kavkaza
The South Caucasus and the Middle East are similar in many aspects. And developments in the Arab world, Turkey, Iran, and Israel influence the Transcaucasia to some extent. 2013 was eventful, and the events could damage a balance of forces in the Middle East and the Caucasus.
According to Vitaly Naumkin, director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, “the South Caucasus lives in its own coordinate system, and each state is engaged in the solution to its own problems. They are very peculiar. Armenia today has some priorities related mostly, of course, to the development, the definition of foreign policy orientation. We know that Armenia has made its choice not in favor of Europe but in favor of the [Moscow-led] Customs Union. It was a difficult choice, given that a large part of the population supports pro-European, pro-Western parties, pro-Western tendencies. There is still the problem of unresolved conflicts.”
“Georgia is undergoing a painful process,” Naumkin says. “And it is good that this painful process of revising Saakashvili’s heritage includes a slow normalization of ties between Russia and Georgia.”
As for Azerbaijan, Naumkin says that it “is a very fast-growing state in the economic sense, which is very closely monitoring what is happening in the Middle East and includes jihadists in the number of threats to its security. As for Azerbaijan, contrary to the views of those who do not know the situation, this is a state where there are Sunni Muslims, where there are jihadist groups, and on the other hand, a state that is very wary of the Shia influence of Iran, the political influence of Iran, which now in order to restrain this influence has started very close cooperation with Israel, including on the military-technical sphere.”
In general, the director of the Institute of Oriental Studies thinks that the Middle East situation somehow greatly affects the internal processes in the South Caucasus: “There are some troubles there that maybe reflect the Arab Spring, but they are very limited.”
As for the Middle East, Naumkin express a view that the situation of instability, unpredictability, lack of control and the crisis of nation-states continued in 2013. Now people often talk about the crisis of the Sykes-Picot system which was defined in 1916 by a secret pact between the UK, France, Russia, and later Italy on dividing zones of interests in the Middle East. However, Naumkin thinks this is not quite the correct expression, because the Sykes-Picot system and actually the division of the Middle East are not actually the point, but those nation-states that became the basis of the world order many decades ago in the Middle East were born due to the colonial powers. “We consider the boundary between them final and stable, and these states are developing in those borders, they developed, as well as the societies which today exist as national communities, which have their sovereignty, their identity, and this identity is growing, but yet, as we can tell, this system has seriously ruptured. And this rupture is not only in the Middle East, it may concern the whole world. In other regions of the world, it also can be seen obviously but in the Middle East, perhaps, this process is most noticeable.”
Naumkin doesn’t exclude a reconsideration of borders in the Middle East: “Perhaps, some states will collapse, and some new ones will be created, and perhaps there will be some unexpected association. And we see that such processes are possible in principle. If they are possible in Europe, why can’t we assume that this also holds true in the Middle East? I would not want anyone to question the current system of states which exists here. But the obvious crisis that is happening here is an obvious break-up of the existing order, instability and even unmanageability, and many states today poorly control the territory for which they are responsible. I am afraid that such a challenge to states and the world order today was born here. Everyone reacts differently to this challenge. This concerns all states in the region, we're not just talking about the Arab world, and there are at least three non-Arab states in the Middle East – Turkey, Iran and Israel, so we are talking about all the states. And everywhere there are various challenges. There is a very serious worsening in bilateral relations, including inter-ethnic and inter-faith ties, as well as the relations within religious communities.”
