“Victimization discourse in Armenia: The history and its impact on the Armenian foreign policy” By Gayane Baghdasaryan Submitted to Central European University Department of International Relations and European Studies n o Word Count: 15,032 cti e oll C D T In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts e U E C Supervisor: Professor Michael Merlingen Budapest, Hungary 2015 Abstract There is a growing interest in linkage between identity and foreign policy outcomes through the notion of collective memory within the IR. Most studies on collective memory focus on how special representations of particular chronological and historical settings shape identity which, in turn, induces particular policy choices. This assumption can be best fit in the field of IR through the Constructivist approaches stating that ideas are socially constructed in the identity of a state and influence state’s policy choices. At the same time, the advocates of poststructuralist approaches highlight the importance of discourse and contend that identity cannot exist independently of the discursive practices mobilized by a state in articulating and implementing foreign policy. Moreover, they argue that not only identities shape foreign policy, but also foreign policy produces and reproduces identities through particular discursive practices which, in turn, articulate and intertwine ideas and material factors in a way they became indivisible. Drawing on the poststructuralist assumptions about the interaction between identity and foreign policy, this research seeks to analyze how victimization discourse in Armenia based on memory and historical representations of systematic massacres and atrocities of Armenian population perpetrated by Ottoman Empire and culminated in the Armenian Genocide in 1915, not only has defined and influenced the country’s foreign policy implementations, but also has been produced and reproduced by foreign policy of Armenia over the last 20 years. To illustrate this argument, I will employ the victimization discourse in analyzing Armenia’s external relations with its neighbour Turkey and strategically important Russia which are of crucial n importance for Armenia. o cti e oll C D T e U E C i Acknowledgments I would like to thank Professor Michael Merlingen for his help and advice during the thesis writing process. Next I would also like to say thank you to Zsuzsanna Toth for her comments and corrections. I would like to express my deep appreciation to my family and my friend Marta who accompanied and inspired me. n o cti e oll C D T e U E C ii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 1 Context to the victimization discourse in Armenian foreign policy ......................................................... 3 The research purpose ................................................................................................................................ 4 Limitations ................................................................................................................................................ 6 Chapter outline .......................................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1 Literature review and methodology ............................................................................................. 9 1.1Literature review .................................................................................................................................. 9 1.2 Methodology ......................................................................................................................................... 13 Chapter 2 The identity of victimhood in Armenian consciousness ............................................................ 15 2.1. Theoretical framework ..................................................................................................................... 15 2.2. Framing Armenian identity of victimhood ...................................................................................... 18 2.3 Explaining trauma ............................................................................................................................. 19 Chapter 3 Situating Armenian-Turkish relations in the victimization discourse ..................................... 26 3.1 Armenian-Turkish relations before 2009 ......................................................................................... 26 3.2 New start ........................................................................................................................................... 31 3.2.1 Domestic contradiction .............................................................................................................. 35 3.2.2 Further deliberations ................................................................................................................. 37 3.3 Unacceptable circumstances ............................................................................................................ 39 3.3.1 Deadlock .................................................................................................................................... 41 Chapter 4 Armenian-Turkish relations ....................................................................................................... 45 n o cti 4.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 45 e oll C 4.2 The dual discourse portraying Russia .............................................................................................. 46 D T e 4.3 “And, and” or “one end” ................................................................................................................... 48 U E Conclusion .................................................................................................................................................. 52 C iii Introduction It is often claimed that we are living through a “memory boom”, a time in which the past plays an unprecedented role in shaping the present. Identity and identity formation are significantly embedded in history and memory. Anthony Smith puts the point succinctly: “one might almost say: no memory, no identity; no identity, no nation”.1 However, this orientation to the past is a recent phenomenon. It started only in the late 1980s and developed fully in the 1990s.2 At the same time, after the world witnessed many dark pages of human history in the 20th century, the scholarship began to focus on the notion of traumatic collective memory which eventually became a category of social analysis.3 In particular, these collective memories of a traumatic event appeared to play a crucial role in national identity and influenced the process of identity formation during and in the aftermath of war or catastrophe.4 One can argue that the recent interest around memory is concentrated on the discursive construction of the memory which is inevitably social. The focus on memory in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, history and politics is largely aimed at analyzing how memory manifests itself in contemporary societies. From this perspective, much work has been done on memory preoccupies with remembrance, commemoration on the one hand, and testimony, on witness and survivor literature on the other, all of which highlight memory as a social practice.5 cti e oll C D T e U E C 1 Smith, A. D. National Identity, (London; New York: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 3. 2 Ibid. 3 Halbwach M, Coser A.L. On Collective Memory, (University of Chicago press, 1992) p. 22 4 Weedon C. and Jordan G. ‘Collective memory: theory and politics ‘ Social Semiotics Vol.22, Issue 2, 2012, p. 144 5 Edkins J. Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Nora P. ‘between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’ University of Colombia Press, No. 26, Spring 1989, pp7-24 1 In this context, it is argued that remembering is intensely political as much as struggle for memory is a part of the fight for political change.6 Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its former constituent republics faced a challenge of building independent statehood. In doing so, it was important for newly independent countries to develop and accommodate their foreign policy dimensions within the notions of national interests and state-building.7 For this reason, among others Armenia began to reassess its national identity through the construction and reconstruction of the historical representations. In this respect, Armenia, which deprived of its last independent statehood in 1375 and managed to build its first republic on Eastern Armenia in 1918, had no experience with statehood and saw the new era as a decisive moment to reclaim what was lost grounded on the historical narrative of victimhood and national struggle. The Armenian massacres in Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century known as the Armenian Genocide of 1915 became what Libaridian calls an “equaliser of identity.”8 In 1915 the world witnessed the first genocide of the century, the mass murder of Armenians in Ottoman Empire. In few months, almost one- and-a-half million Armenians were killed and the rest of the population was forcibly expelled, most of them southward towards Syria. It caused mass displacement and the loss of a huge part of the homeland and instantly became the most significant factor in Armenian identity in the twentieth century.9 The memory of these dramatic events combined with Armenians’ continuous n o cti e struggle for recognition, as well as Turkish consistent denial came to construct Armenian identity oll C D which has been the core of Armenian foreign policy over the last 20 years. T e U E C 6 Edkins 2003, p. 16 7 Libaridian G.J, The Challenge of Statehood : Armenian Political Thinking since Independence, 1st ed., Human Rights & Democracy (Watertown, Mass.: Blue Crane Books, 1999). Gerard Libaridian (1981) cited in Panossian R. ‘The past as Nation: Three Dimensions of Armenian identity’ 8 Geopolitics, (2002) p. 133. 9 Panossian R. ‘The past as Nation: Three Dimensions of Armenian identity’ Geopolitics, (2002) p. 136. 2 Context to the victimization discourse in Armenian foreign policy Armenia is a small landlocked country situated in South Caucasus. Since ancient times it has been on the “crossroads” of East and West, North and South and thus continuously posed serous challenges to its security. By the end of the fourteenth century, the last Armenian kingdom had collapsed, and the Armenia had fallen under foreign subjugation. Since the seventeenth century most of the country came under the Turkish rule, and Eastern Armenia, which came first under Persian and then in 1828 under Russian dominion. In the last days of the Ottoman Empire and during the Bolshevik revolution Armenia could regain its statehood in the small part of Eastern Armenia in 1918. 10 However, the revived Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk used the disunity of Allied and re-established Tukish control of Anatolia and re-started the offense against the Armenian state in 1920. While Bolsheviks left Armenians to bleed alone, Turks soon took advantage over the ill-prepared Armenian army and graped the lion share of the republic reducing it to the barren, landlocked lands of the current Armenia. As a result of Bolshevik-Kemalist concert and subsequent Bolshevik pressure Aremnia was incopoated into the Soviet Union in 1921. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union Armenia re-established its independent state in 1991. The economic needs and security concerns came to dominate the country’s foreign n o cti policy agenda. As a small landlocked country Armenia declared its path towards the strong e oll C D statehood while not having clear perception on its national interests and subsequent foreign T e U E policy. On the one hand being engaged in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with the neighboring C Azerbaijan, and on the other hand possessing complicated historical legacies with regards to its 10 Bloxhem Donald The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians, (Oxford University Press 2005) p.7. 3 external relations, put the country in a serious foreign policy dilemma. While the first ruling elite of Armenia affirmed its willingness to establish relations with Turkey “without preconditions” which turned to be nothing else than compromising everything in favor of economic benefits, starting from the issue of the genocide, the second and incumbent government brought the genocide recognition on the foreign policy priority and adopted so-called policy of “complementary”, including attempt to establishing relations with Turkey, in order to compromise the lack of policy choices imposed by the memory of the genocide and the imperative of security preservation embed in the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh. Meanwhile, in contrast to the first elite, considering Russia as a threat to the Armenian sovereignty within the frameworks of its old-fashioned policy of Imperialism, which could be eliminated only through the normalization of relations with Turkey, the successor governments perceived relations with Russia as the imperative of the time deriving from vital security needs of the Armenian Republic. While, as it would be argued later, in both cases the Armenian- Turkish relation were directly or indirectly conditioned on Armenia’s foreign policy towards Russia. The research purpose on cti e oll Many victimized people are looking for apologies. Acknowledgement, compensation, C D T e reconciliation-these are but some of the goals persecuted groups seek as they grapple with their U E C histories.11 Indeed, the last three decades have witnessed a vast and global increase in attention devoted to such concerns by world leaders, international institutions, scholars, and Assmann A. ‘Memory, Individual and collective’, in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, 11 edited by Robert E. Goodin, Charles Tilly (OUP Oxford, 2008), p. 217. 4 practitioners.12 These actors have engaged in debates and have initiated policies that surfaced the significant influence of collective memory. However the impact of collective memory in international politics has not received the systematic attention in either the academy or the policy arena. Despite the fact that it is difficult to find a country or region where working through a traumatic past and bringing perpetrators of human rights abuses to justice have not come to the fore. At the same time, while the majority of work done on collective memory of victimhood is focused on the relationship between a victim and a perpetrator in the context of pursuing justice and recovery, there is less attention on the impact of collective traumatic memory on the polarization of foreign policy choices deriving from the vital need to articulate and rearticulate national identity. To ignore the role of historical narratives in the formation and maintenance of national identity is to ignore an important component of collective identity. The processes of national redefinition through reinterpretation, rediscovery or creation of historical narratives are inherently political.13 The primary goal of this research is aimed at giving an inward look at the foreign policy choices of Armenia in such crucial external dimensions as Armenian-Turkish and Armenian- Russian relations. There are several reasons for this. First, little attention has been given to the examination of Armenian foreign policy independent on its engagement in regional geopolitics. n o cti e Second, there is a prevailing approach to analyze the Armenian foreign policy based on its oll C D security concerns and geopolitical consideration. In turn this leads to the gap in analyzing the T e U E C foreign policy of Armenian based on its interconnection with a particular national identity within discursive practices. 12Ibid p. 210. 13 Edkins 2003, p. 15. 5 The present research examines the foreign policy of Armenia since its independence from the Soviet Union focusing on the key events that have recently taken place in the external political dimensions of the country. In turn, it is assumed that these events appeared to have a decisive role in the future external orientation of Armenia. In this respect, foreign policy is considered as a complex set of the state’s external relations aimed at safeguarding what is perceived to be its national interest. It is argued that the re-articulation of historical narratives based on the commemoration of the Armenian genocide has played a critical role in processes of national redefinition in Armenia which brings the national interest and national survival at the core of Armenia’s relation with the outside world. It is not new that the issue of the Armenian Genocide is a crucial element of Armenian- Turkish relations, and that Armenian security concerns and geopolitical situation push Armenia towards Russia. However, there is a blurred understanding of what place the memory of the genocide has in the Armenian consciousness overall, and in its security concerns, in particular. This study is aimed not only presenting the discursive connection between the past and present within Armenia, but, what is more important, the role of the victimhood identity in the current Armenian perceptions about national security and foreign policy. on Limitations cti e oll C D T First, this research is limited by analyzing Armenian foreign policy driven by solely e U E C domestic consideration over its relations with Turkey and Russia. While accepting the importance of the external factors and the policy intentions of Turkey and Russia itself, it is not our aim to include mutual perceptions. Second, although it gives an overview of the previous 6