2002 Caspian Sea Regional Policy Symposium Presentation Summary

IREX Caspian Region Policy Symposium Presentation Executive Summary

Michael A. Reynolds
Graduate Student
History/Near Eastern Studies
Princeton University

Introduction

Given the other symposium presentations' sharp focus on specific policy relevant questions, I have decided to expand the content of my presentation beyond the subject of the Ottoman advance into the Caucasus to encompass other areas of my historical research that can yield suggestions on how to formulate US policy toward the region today. After presenting a brief overview of my research, I will discuss in greater depth those aspects that are of specific interest to and have potential utility for policy makers.

Historical research is by its nature limited in its ability to generate specific policy proposals, and one must always be cautious when trying to apply "lessons of the past" (as someone put it, "History does not repeat itself, historians do"). Nonetheless, knowledge of history can alert us to the need to identify and rethink the assumptions that guide our current policies. This is particularly true for the Caspian region, since as Americans we know next to nothing about its history and lack the sources that could provide us with a guide to that history. Moreover, the period of my research, 1908 to 1921, parallels the current situation around the Caucasus and Caspian in a number of important respects.

For my dissertation I conducted archival research at the Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archives in Istanbul (the main archive for Ottoman history, the Basbakanlik arsivi), the archives of the Turkish General Staff in Ankara (Askeri ve Strateji Etüdleri Bakanligi), the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskii Imperii), the Russian State Military History Archive (Rossisskii Gosudarstvennyi Voenno-Istoricheskii Arkhiv), and the Russian State Military Archive (Rossiisksii Gosudarstvennyi Voennyi Arkhiv) in Moscow. In addition I conducted research at several libraries in Turkey and Russia. I would like to express my gratitude to IREX for funding my research in Russia. Below follow some general suggestions for policy makers that I have derived from my research:

1. Be wary of attaching political significance to religious and ethnic identities. Institutions and their objectives should be the primary subjects of analysis. Analyses of events in the Caspian region typically make a point of noting the religious and ethnic identities of the actors involved as if these identities had great explanatory power in and of themselves. Such an approach often obscures important regional dynamics (e.g. The Islamic Republic of Iran's support for Russia vis-à-vis Chechnya and its pursuit of good relations with Armenia at Azerbaijan's expense; Georgia's conflict with the "Muslim" "Abkhaz" who are usually not Muslim and often not Abkhaz; Dagestan's hostility toward Chechnya, etc.).

A similar reliance upon these identities has greatly distorted our understanding of the region's past. For example, virtually all existing accounts of the Ottoman advance into the Caucasus in 1917-1918 explain it as a product of the ideologies of Panturkism and Panislam, and correspondingly posit the Ottoman goals as being the expansion of their holdings into the Turkic and Muslim regions of the Russian Empire. The evidence for this interpretation is thin to non-existent. A closer examination of the open diplomatic record, the military campaigns, documents of the Ottoman Army and other Ottoman institutions, Russian intelligence and consular reports, and of the Ottoman press reveals that traditional concepts of great power politics drove Ottoman policies. Far from seeking lost imperial grandeur in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Ottomans sought to exploit revolutionary Russia's turmoil to establish independent buffer states against Russian power in the North and South Caucasus. The prospects for an independent Ukraine, regarded as essential for the containment of Russian power, worried the Ottomans far more than did the status of Bukhara or the Volga Tatars. While Ottoman attempts to mobilize Muslim North Caucasians and Iranian Kurds against Russia are known, albeit not much studied, Ottoman use of Ukrainian, Georgian, and Armenian revolutionaries is overlooked or wholly unknown.

The focus on ethnic and religious identity has similarly skewed analyses of Imperial Russian policies. Tsarist Russia expended considerable resources and efforts to cultivate ties with and mobilize the Muslim Kurds of Anatolia. The Russian government funded, armed, and incited Kurdish tribes to revolt against the Young Turk government in Istanbul, which they regarded as dangerously pro-Armenian, in the expectation that the Kurds would turn on their Armenian rivals and thereby justify a Russian "humanitarian intervention" in Eastern Anatolia that would enable Russia to annex the region despite opposition from the other great powers. In both the Ottoman and Russian cases mentioned, it was the goals of institutional actors, not religious or ethnic identities, that drove policy.

2. Do not mistake the enunciation of democratic values as the product of internally generated democratic aspirations and institutions, as it more likely reflects conformity to international norms supported and enforced first and foremost by US power.

The emphasis on ethnic identity has been attractive to historians of Turkey and scholars of Turkish nationalism because it explains the emergence of the Turkish Republic in a manner that conforms to the dominant theories of nationalism. These theories conceptualize nationalism as a phenomenon that develops gradually at the level of society, caused or assisted by the rise of industrialization, the spread of literacy, or the efforts of influential intellectuals. The Turkish example also has conveniently served to confirm the assumed universal and inevitable nature of nationalism. The inability, however, of such theories to explain the establishment of a nationalist regime in a country that was overwhelmingly illiterate and rural is one obvious indicator of the need to rethink the origins of Turkish nationalism.

My research leads me to argue that the origins of Turkish nationalism cannot be sought in Turkish/Ottoman society or even among the Ottoman elite. Rather, the Kemalists' adoption of a nationalist ideology was a direct response to the imperatives of the international order. Beginning with the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, the European great powers had made a state's ethnic homogeneity a primary criterion for legitimacy. A state's multiethnic character was a standing invitation for exploitation and partition by outside powers. The establishment of a nationalist regime, along with the abolition of the Caliphate, the existence of which unsettled the Imperial European states that possessed Muslim colonies, ensured the Turkish Republic's conformity to and legitimacy in the international order.

Similarly, the former Soviet republics' sudden formal adoption of democratic principles and norms should not be regarded as the inevitable product of the spread at the grass roots of democratic values and aspirations, as flattering and reassuring as it may be. It is instead in large measure a response to the incentives of a US dominated international order.

3. Policies based on the assumption of a fundamental hostility among the peoples of the Caspian region toward Russia will fail. The prism through which most analysts of the former Soviet Union view the region is one of long-standing national aspirations suppressed by Russian domination. According to this prism, the essence of both the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union was that of the "prison house of nations", to borrow Lenin's phrase. Consequently, American has not only a self-interested but also a moral duty to support the non-Russian republics resist Russian domination, and can rely on the non-Russians' hostility toward Russia as a source of support to for US policies and goals. Many have regarded Chechnya as a prototype for the sort of challenge that non-Russian constituent republics would, sooner or later, inevitably pose to Moscow's rule. The Great Russians' loss of the ability or will to oppress non-Russians meant that, finally, history in Eurasia would assume its proper course and the non-Russians would assert their rightful independence. And if this time around the Russians have to suffer some injustices, so be it - after so much oppression it is only natural that for scores to be settled.

The portrayals of the Russian Revolution as a failed attempt of the non-Russians at national liberation and of the collapse of the Soviet Union as the triumph of those nations provide a historiographical basis for this view. A more attentive view to history reveals the clear limits of such an analysis. Aside from the important question of how the Russian Empire actually expanded and whether or not the empire only pushed into outside areas or whether it was sometimes pulled, the collapse of the Russian Empire reveals, in the Caucasus at least, non-Russians were greatly ambivalent about Russia and far from implacably hostile. The elites of both the Transcaucasian Federation (the grouping of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) and of the North Caucasian Republic (encompassing primarily Dagestan and Chechnya but also Circassia and Abkhazia) favored not independence but merely greater autonomy within a democratic Russian Federation. Far from reviling the Russians merely as their colonial oppressors, these leaders also saw Russia as the source of the knowledge and culture that would enable their own societies to prosper. This is not to say that there were not Caucasians who did despise the Russians as imperialist overlords, but rather that these were not the only or even the most important voices.

Local divisions and rivalries also have often proved to be sources of support for a Russian presence. In the revolutionary North Caucasus, often portrayed as a region unified by Islamic antipathy toward Russia, local rivalries such as between Avars and Chechens, Nogais and Dargins etc. both sapped the mountaineers' ability to resist the Bolsheviks and led significant numbers to support the Bolshevik conquest. The recognition of the Russians as a guarantor of stability is not a new one in the Caucasus.

4. The Caspian region is a classic example of a borderland, and as such, its inhabitants are necessarily skeptical about great power altruism and not averse to manipulating outside powers for their own ends. Situated between Russia, Turkey, and Iran, the Caucasus has had extensive experience with great power intervention. The discovery of oil in Azerbaijan and advances in mobility and logistics brought Germany and Britain to the region in the twentieth century. Because the Caucasus is a borderland, the states of the Caucasus, and the outside powers that pursue their interests there, must grapple with some unusual problems. Foremost among them is that the distinctions between internal administration and diplomacy, the divisions between domestic and foreign policies, are blurred. Examples abound: Georgia's problems with the Pankisi Gorge or Abkhazia, Russia's Chechen problem, and Armenia's and Azerbaijan's problem with Karabakh (or Karabakh's problem with them).

This aspect of the Caucasus offers a tempting tool for quickly gaining leverage over the region's states (as the examples of Russian support for Abkhazia or American rhetoric in support of Chechnya may suggest). But it is an aspect of the Caucasus that can easily lead to the outside power's manipulation by an internal party. The example of Tsarist Russia's use of the Kurds and humanitarian intervention has been mentioned. Here it should be mentioned that the Kurds were not passive pawns, but that many Kurdish leaders eagerly sought Russian intervention as a way to preserve their tribal privileges against a centralizing Ottoman state.

5. The Establishment of an unofficial Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Committee was an important step. Efforts in this area should be encouraged, but the process cannot be forced. Normalizing relations between Turkey and Armenia would be an important and beneficial development not only for those two states, but also for the security and prosperity of the region as a whole. Among the benefits it would yield are lowering of tension which would aid the resolution of the dispute over Karabakh, the economic rehabilitation of Armenia and Turkish Anatolia through trade and commerce, and the simplification of transportation projects including pipelines for Caspian oil and gas. It would also yield two particular benefits for the United States - the diminishment of Russian and Iranian influence in Armenia and the region.

Here, paradoxically, my earlier observations on the exaggerated estimations of nationalism as a force in the first quarter of the last century cannot be a source of optimism. The ideology of nationalism has found an institutional manifestation among Turks and Armenians, and the project of critical re-examination of nationalist identities will be resisted by those institutions that depend on those identities.

Neither side is prepared to examine thoroughly their 'own' actions or to understand what, behind simple malice, might have motivated the other for better or for worse. The Armenian diaspora has far too much invested in the charge of the 'Turks' as willful perpetrators of genocide against an innocent Armenian people to accept anything but a complete Turkish capitulation. And to expect an investigation into Armenian atrocities perpetrated against Ottoman Kurds and other Muslims in Anatolia and the Caucasus verges on the fantastic. The Turkish government, while potentially more flexible on the narrow topic of historical relations with Armenia and Armenians, would likely not be willing to risk the expansion of such an investigation into other areas of the birth of the Turkish republic, such as the role of Islam, the place of the Kurds, Laz, Circassians, and other minorities. Nor, incidentally, can it be guaranteed that Europe or the US would unreservedly favor or benefit from an open re-examination of Turkish history. Moreover, the issues of Turkey's EU bid and the status of Cyprus hold the real potential to strengthen, not weaken, a defensive and defiant Turkish nationalism if they are not resolved delicately - a tall order to fill.