Debacle in the Caucasus
Aug 12th, 2008 by MESH
From Malik Mufti
Georgia’s attempt to gain control of South Ossetia by force on August 8 was ill-considered for several reasons. First, it led to a punishing Russian counter-attack that has crippled Georgia’s military capability. Second, it reduced to virtually nil Georgia’s chances of restoring its sovereignty over South Ossetia and the other breakaway region of Abkhazia for the foreseeable future—both because of the enhanced Russian presence in both territories, and because Tbilisi’s resort to force confirmed the fears of the Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples about Georgian chauvinism. (During a similar offensive against Abkhazia in August 1992, Georgian officials threatened that the Abkhazian nation might be “left without descendants” and that “we can easily and completely destroy [their] genetic stock.”) Third, it dealt a grievous blow to Georgia’s chances of joining NATO—again probably for the foreseeable future—because neither the Europeans nor the Americans will want to risk involvement in armed conflict with Russia.
Nevertheless, because of the region’s critical energy reserves and pipeline networks, because of the fact that the Caucasus has reverted to its 19th-century status as a front line between the Islamic and Orthodox worlds—a front line that will help define global politics in the coming century—and because of the need to contain Russia’s increasingly aggressive neo-colonialist aspirations more generally, the United States cannot afford the temptation to disengage.
Effective American engagement, however, will require more than maintaining a robust political and security presence in Georgia so that its sovereignty is not further compromised. The central challenge in the Caucasus—on both sides of the Russian Federation’s borders—is how to address the suppressed but deeply held and often conflicting nationalist aspirations of the multitudes of peoples living there. This will require reaffirming one traditional tenet of U.S. foreign policy, and reconsidering another. The principle that needs to be upheld is genuine political liberalization, so that minority groups feel less compelled to take up arms or turn to Russia for help. The principle that needs to be reconsidered is the commitment to the territorial integrity of existing states. Its mechanical application is simply unrealistic given prevailing conditions in the Near East, as already evidenced by the U.S. recognition of Kosovo’s independence, and by the proliferation of similar entities throughout the region.
If Georgia can be induced to renounce aggressive chauvinism definitively in its dealings with other national groups, then the prospect of good-neighborly relations with the Ossetians, Abkhazians and others may materialize—perhaps even within some kind of confederal or commonwealth framework. At the very least, it will present the peoples of the Caucasus with an attractive alternative to what Russia has to offer. Such a challenge to the repressive political and territorial status quo would put Moscow on the defensive, with profound implications far beyond the Caucasus.
Comments are limited to MESH members and invitees.
2 Responses to “Debacle in the Caucasus”
Posts+Comments
Posts+Comments
Posts+Comments
Posts+Comments
In reading Malik Mufti’s post, I was somewhat taken aback by the implications of his statement that “because of the fact that the Caucasus has reverted to its 19th-century status as a front line between the Islamic and Orthodox worlds—a front line that will help define global politics in the coming century—and because of the need to contain Russia’s increasingly aggressive neo-colonialist aspirations more generally, the United States cannot afford the temptation to disengage.”
Although the religious aspect of the clash is clearly not Mufti’s main point—a point, by the way, with which I entirely agree—the notion that religion has anything to do with the recent turmoil in the Caucasus is simply wrong. What has been going on in Russia and Georgia is nothing more than ethnic nationalism and neo-imperialism. Both nations are largely Christian and the South Ossetians are Christians as well. The Abkhaz are a mix of religions (largely Muslim and Christian) and most do not practice their faith on a daily basis.
There is no denying the fact that Georgia and Georgians are terribly chauvinistic and nationalistic in their relations with non-Georgian minorities. To be Georgian in Georgia indeed means to be ethnically Georgian and, to a large extent, Christian. Why I say to “a large extent” is that there are Muslim Georgians—the Ajars—but they are accepted as bona fide Georgians, in spite of their religious tradition. They have coexisted peacefully with their Christian brethren and seem likely to do so into the future. Although there was a move for greater independence among some Ajars in the 1990s, it was advanced in economic, not religious terms; which explains why the autonomy struggle there ended without bloodshed.
If we consider the broader region, the claim that there is a clash of Islam with Orthodox Christianity is not only misleading but potentially dangerous. Although the Russian government would like the world to believe that Islamic jihadists are running wild in the Caucasus—and it has in large measure been successful to date—there is little actual evidence of this. Making such claims only misconstrues what is happening, which is nothing more or less than Woodrow Wilson’s good old-fashioned principle of national self-determination running up against the UN Charter’s codified principle of state sovereignty and inviolability of borders. Attributing these sporadic but consistent episodes of violence in the Caucasus over the last two decades to a clash of faiths misconstrues what is actually happening on the ground, and merely enhances Russia’s broader agenda of successfully positioning itself as “defender of Western civilization”—and by doing so justifying any sort of brutality imaginable—instead of the more mundane, vulgar, but accurate “ethno-centric hegemon” it traditionally has been and wishes to become again.
Monica Duffy Toft is a member of MESH.
Malik Mufti raises a number of important points in his post; I’d like to comment on some of them. Interested readers can find a fuller analysis of mine written at the beginning of the war at the website of the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination (LISD) at Princeton University (here). Some of my thoughts below follow from it.
The title of Malik’s post is most apt. What has transpired is indeed a “debacle.” I would emphasize that this is a debacle for American foreign policy, not just for Georgia. Moscow exploited what it saw as an exquisite opportunity to deliver a striking rebuff to U.S. ambitions in Eurasia and avenge U.S. diplomacy’s dismissal of Russian interests and concerns related to the Balkans and NATO expansion. For reasons that I touch on in the LISD piece linked above, the loss of Georgia in 1991 stung Russia’s elites for both strategic and emotional reasons.
The way that Georgia then became such a close partner of the United States—to the point that this tiny country, with incomplete democratic institutions and security challenges of its own, had become a candidate for NATO membership and had deployed the third-largest contingent to the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq—raised alarm bells in Moscow. Rankling Russian sensitivities was the unpolished comportment of the Georgian President, Mikheil Saakashvili. The Western media presented Saakashvili as the embodiment of the American-sponsored future of Eurasia: young and dynamic and innately liberal and democratic. Yet regional audiences could see that Saakashvili’s youth and dynamism amounted to impetuousness and his idea of democracy could shade into demagoguery.
Moscow understood very well both that Saakashvili could be provoked and that Washington—being overstretched and preoccupied with a range of problems more pressing than Georgia, such as a fragile Iraq, a worsening insurgency in Afghanistan, the prospect of a nuclear Iran, and a shrinking economy to name just a few—would be unwilling to support Georgia with anything more than lame rhetoric. Moscow then set about baiting Saakashvili and obtained the desired result: the saccharine hero of the Rose Revolution dropped his liberal-democratic pretenses and lashed out at the Ossetians with bombs and shells, seeking not dialogue but to impose his will by force of arms. With its “peacekeepers” now under fire, Moscow could, to its intense satisfaction, demonstrate to the region the hollowness of the American project in Eurasia by invading Georgia with impunity.
The result is an extraordinary embarrassment for the United States. The American military has been reduced to ferrying Georgian troops deployed in Iraq back to defend their homeland while American officials stand aside uttering bromides. Georgia had been one of the world’s few fervently pro-American countries, and their naming of the road from Tbilisi’s airport in honor of George W. Bush was more than pro-forma. The fact that Saakashvili’s own stupidity and rashness triggered the Russian assault will do little, I expect, to ease feelings of betrayal and exploitation that are now building among the Georgians. More to the point, the Russian action puts others in the region on notice that cozying up to the United States is no guarantee of security.
The fact that steady Russian provocations preceded Georgia’s attack upon South Ossetia does nothing to absolve the architects of the Georgian and American foreign policies of the charge of gross malpractice of statesmanship. To the contrary, Moscow had been sending warnings for a long time, and yet still managed to catch Georgia and the United States off-guard. The Bush foreign policy team has bungled miserably.
What remains now is for a future U.S. presidential administration to draw some lessons. Saakashvili’s rash attack and Putin’s calculated aggression complement each other to remind us that international relations remain suffused with violence and the threat of violence, even at the level of states.
To John McCain: America can’t fight everyone everywhere. It is imperative now to review America’s commitments and draw up clear priorities as to what constitutes U.S. interests and what does not, and ensure that U.S. rhetoric is commensurate with U.S. capabilities.
To Barack Obama: don’t delude yourself into thinking that because you are not George W. Bush, the world will engage you in earnest dialogue. The forces of anti-Americanism are deeper than distaste for George Bush, and will seek to exploit America’s vulnerabilities. Indeed, you can be certain that some will attempt to turn your desire for dialogue against you.
That advice is, of course, basic textbook stuff, yet the words coming from the candidates in reaction to this war suggest they could use it.
Malik is right to note Ossetian and Abkhazian fears of the Georgians. While it would be wrong to describe tensions between the Ossetians and Abkhaz and the Georgians as immutable “ancient hatreds,” the fact is that the current conflicts have a history, and erupted not during the break-up of the Soviet Union but during the disintegration of the Russian Empire in 1917. That today’s Russian Federation has, not entirely unlike Bolshevik Russia, exploited those tensions to weaken Georgia does not take away from the reality that the idea of Georgian rule was highly unpopular in Abkhazia and Ossetia.
In contrast to the way Russia manipulated these ethnic cleavages, the United States let itself get sucked into them. Whereas Washington began supporting Georgia and marketing it as a regional beacon of freedom and democracy with the expectation that the emergence of a liberal democratic culture inside Georgia would eventually dissolve ethnic tensions, Tbilisi instead used American support to try to compel Ossetia to recognize its rule. Similar dynamics unfold around the world all the time. The United States backs “forces of democracy” in a given region, and those on the ground in that region perceive Washington’s language as a smokescreen for conventional, even cynical, partisan intervention.
Such an outcome is often unavoidable, but a real problem arises when Americans begin to interpret regional dynamics and conflicts through the prism of their own rhetoric. The American media made a great deal out of the Rose Revolution, portraying it along with Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, and the Kifayeh movement in Egypt as part of a youth-led global groundswell toward liberal democracy. Those movements have largely faded, but today Washington finds itself struggling against its own rhetoric when it refuses to engage with Hamas.
Two final points. I would add nuance to Malik’s statement that “the central challenge in the Caucasus… is how to address the suppressed but deeply held and often conflicting nationalist aspirations of the multitudes of peoples living there.” While ethnic pride is universal throughout the people of the Caucasus, plenty of them recognize that in such an ethnically diverse region the nation-state model is a recipe for disaster and that their best interests are served by foregoing nationalist projects. Precisely for that reason (and some others) Russia is not quite as vulnerable in the North Caucasus as some think (though that region with its young and growing population will be troublesome for some time).
Lastly, in the wake of this war, I am extremely skeptical of any possibility of rapprochement between the Georgians and the Abkhazians and Ossetians for the short to medium term, (unless it would to be under Russia’s aegis, which is still difficult to imagine). The Georgians see the Abkhaz and Ossetians as complicit in treachery, and that is among the offenses most difficult to forgive or forget.
Michael Reynolds is a member of MESH.
MESH Pointer: See the later MESH thread, Russia and the Middle East.