Peter Rutland, Professor of Government (Wesleyan University), associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
Do you believe that the United States in particular and the world as a whole are paying enough attention to the South Caucasus region?
I would say no, it’s a region that’s been off the radar screen for quite a while now. I think you can even trace it back to the Iraq war, so 6-7 years. It has been gradually fading from US priorities.
But some politicians and experts say that this region is not really that interesting. In fact, its importance is being exaggerated. Do you agree with that?
We saw what happened with the Georgian war in 2008. That was a serious crisis not just for Georgia, but also with the threat of other countries getting involved. It was caused, among other things, by the passivity of the US towards the region, the failure to pay attention to what was happening in the region, because the US was doing things but wasn’t thinking through what it was doing. So the lack of discussion about the region led to the crisis in Georgia in 2008. And as soon as the crisis was resolved, again US policy slipped back to not paying much attention to the region. So I think any conflicts there are a serious ongoing source of instability for the whole region and the international community.
You’ve traveled the South Caucasus and know the region very well. Do you believe that cultural differences impede dialogue between the republics of the South Caucasus?
The question of cultural differences is quite tricky, because as people in the region themselves often admit, the cultures in many respects are quite similar. These people have been living together for hundreds of years, have many similarities in their social values and so on. I think it is a good thing in the sense of the potential for mutual understanding in there. But they have these huge political differences that have produced very cruel conflicts and suffering in the last 20 years, which have really imbedded a lot of mutual hostility and mistrust. So I don’t think the problem is cultural, I think the problem is, in particular, in the paths that these countries took during the break-up of the Soviet Union and the inability of their leaders or the international community to get them off that path. So they are kind of trapped by the political direction which they set out upon in the complex situation of the early 1990s.
What country of the South Caucasus, to your mind, is nowadays the leader of the region or could become such a leader?
I don’t think any of them are in a position to be a leader in the sense of solving the problems on their own or dominating the other countries. Azerbaijan obviously is the one with the strongest, most rapidly growing economy. That’s one aspect. But Georgia has much stronger support from the West. So those two countries can kind of balance each other out in their different attributes. Armenia, I think, is the weakest player of the three in terms of not being very democratic, not being a very strong economy, getting some support from the West, some support from Russia.
Do you believe that one of the reasons for instability in the region is the fact that the world community is acting really slowly on the Nagorno-Karabkh conflict?
Yes, it’s a very difficult conflict to resolve. People have been trying for twenty years. I can’t remember now how many peace initiatives there have been, how many times the presidents were brought together to meet, and then again just recently once more. So it’s not that nobody is trying, it is simply that the minimum conditions of the two sides (three sides if you want to count Karabakh as a separate player), are just too far apart. And nobody seems to be able to figure out how to close the gap. So it’s true that the international community hasn’t been doing very much, but on the other hand, I don’t see any easy solution. So I can’t really blame them for not being more proactive.
