How does Aliyev differ from Saakashvili?

Georgy Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively to Vestnik Kavkaza

The speech in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe by President Aliyev provoked sincere interest among Georgian experts for several reasons. http://vestnikkavkaza.net/news/politics/56836.html

First of all, the style, the topic and the tone of the speech of Azerbaijani leader radically differed from the way this tribune was used by the ex-president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili. “Note that President Aliyev spoke about concrete problems of his country, about Nagorno-Karabakh and the conflict with Armenia and his generalizations about the right of nations to self-determination and its inapplicability in this case proceeded from a vital interest in the conflict's resolution,” the analyst of the information portal GHN David Avalishvili told VK. “Now let's compare it to the speeches of Saakashvili in PACE and the European Parliament. There was nothing concrete, only general words about a “third wave of European liberation”, the use of the “velvet revolutions” for the post-Soviet countries, “new Berlin walls” and other signs of Cold War discourse and the old opposition between Moscow and Western capitals.

The expert also stressed Aliyev's thought that the right of nations to self-determination is not universal and even dangerous: “Saakashvili would never say this, simply because the concept of self determination is a western idea, although everyone who fought against Georgia in the last 25 years did this under the flag of self-determination”. For Saakashvili, any conceptual critique of the West was impossible, but it is possible for Aliyev. “This is why Azerbaijan and its elites over the same period kept a greater field for manoeuvre in foreign policy than Georgia,” the expert concluded.

We could add that President Saakashvili never criticized the decision of the USA and the western countries to recognize the independence of Kosovo on the basis of the right to self-determination, although this precedent was really dangerous for Georgia. This showed how narrow the “field of manoeuvre" was of the pro-Western Georgian elites. And it was not only connected to Saakashvili - this paradigm was established with the Georgian elites before he came to power.

The case of Kosovo, of which Tbilisi never disapproved, turned out to be a dangerous precedent for Georgia itself and its former republics – Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And although the Western friends told Saakashvili that “Kosovo is a very specific case”, it did not save the situation because it still was a precedent.

Either there is a precedent or not. And all the claims about the “specific case” do not matter. In fact, the Western leaders wanted and still want to hide an important tendency: the case of Kosovo was a consequence of the self-determination concept. But the problem is that sometimes the West considers this concept useful from the point of view of its geopolitical interests, and sometimes unprofitable and dangerous. This is where the “double standards” come from.

The precedent has an energy of its own. The priority of the right to self-determination over the right to territorial integrity - or rather statehood itself, because Heydar Aliyev once noted that territorial integrity is “not a geographical but a state-legal concept” - inevitably cause destructive processes in “greater Europe”, including states where it contradicts the geopolitical interests of the West. For instance, in Crimea.