RSVP Register here. Find the summary of this event here. Is Kazakhstan a European state? The large Central Asian country stretches across the boundary between Europe and Asia. However, in recent years, Kazakhstan has signed an enhanced partnership and cooperation agreement with the EU, and made a bid for membership in the OECD.
Domestically, Kazakhstan has embarked on a major agenda of political and economic reform, including far-reaching constitutional amendments that increase the division of powers among state institutions. Are Europeans willing to take the steps needed to anchor Kazakhstan in European institutions? Is Kazakhstan ready to implement the necessary reforms? Read it here. Now, I think what is interesting in this that the two powers interpreted as very differently in the two countries that we are talking about.
Armenia interpreted this as a positive sign that would enable them to maintain their territorial occupation of Azerbaijani territory and extended into the future, and I think they were particularly buried by two factors. The first was Kosovo and the second was Crimea.
Kosovo was important because Kosovo was an anomaly if you will in the sense that you had two Albanian states created in the Balkans. Traditionally, the principle of self-determination has always held that a people has a right to a state, not that a certain people may have a right to several different states, which is why a national minority was not traditionally accorded the right to self-determination reaching up to the level of independent statehood. This is a precedent for us.
Now, there are Armenian parliamentary resolutions, dating back to the Soviet era, which incorporate Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia. There are Armenian soldiers in Karabakh and there are Karabakh parliamentarians in the Armenian parliament, but Armenia always said that this is not annexation. We support them politically, but this is not annexation.
I think there was a big miscalculation on the side of Armenia, and this is going to be a recurrent theme in my in my comments here, that I think they miscalculated many things, but a very important one was the implications of the weakening of international norms and institutions because what it really meant was also that Azerbaijan was held back from applying a military solution to the conflict precisely because of these international institutions and norms.
And the moment they weakened, it also meant that the deterrence on Azerbaijan of applying a military solution also weakened. So that is on the global level. And I think this relates to both the rule of Turkey and Russia. Now, Turkey has always been pro-Azerbaijan, partly for ethnic and cultural reasons. Azerbaijani is a very closely related language. I was educated in Turkey as you mentioned, which enables me to understand Azerbaijani without even having studied the language.
With a little bit of study, you can have very easy access to the language. This cultural linguistic proximity always made the Turkish public very pro-Azerbaijan. The protocols as they were called would have opened the border and created diplomatic relations, which they have not had, and pro-Azerbaijani public opinion essentially killed that deal about ten years ago.
What changed is that Turkey now is much more unchained from the NATO alliance and the restrictions they might have put on Turkey by that.
And I think there are elements of this that Armenia unwittingly contributed to. It was the corollary of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. It is something that gets Turks animated if you will. It was never implemented, but it remains on paper.
And I think this was a very important factor in leading Turkey to transition from a from a support to Azerbaijan to an active military support of an Azerbaijani effort to restore territorial integrity. And I think it to a certain point boils down to a misunderstanding of Turkish domestic politics. This is an issue I could go into in great detail, but I will not. I will just mention that in the past five years Mr. They drink vodka. They might even eat pork.
You cannot really trust them. The traditional, Turkish, Islamist position has been much more interested in the Arabs of the Middle East, which they feel are real Muslims compared to those Soviet people, whereas the Turkish nationalists put much more priority on the Turkic, linguistic, ethnic element and therefore are much more pro-Azerbaijani.
So there are some of us who have been identifying for a while that Turkey has been shifting from an Islamist to a more nationalist position, but I think the Armenian side clearly did not see this coming and did not understand the implications of trying to raise issues that were very important to the Turkish nationalist forces. Then there is a Russia factor and the Russia factor is very important because of the role Russia has played in this conflict, especially because the Armenian side has for at least twenty-eight years built their position on a very simple Faustian bargain you could say, and the bargain really has to do with the bargain between independence and control over Karabakh.
And the Russians have basically put it to both Armenians and Azerbaijanis: you cannot really have both. You can have Karabakh, but then you will be under Russian tutelage and follow Russian foreign policy priorities or you can be independent and not have Karabakh.
And because the Armenians won the war it was easy for them to choose to remain, to retain control over Karabakh and compromise on the issue of their independence, which we can see, for example, through the positions they have taken on international affairs, voting with Russia in the most controversial U. Security Council and U. Armenia usually does because that has been part of their foreign policy bargain.
Now, part of the reason for that is that Armenia, of course, has a very, very difficult history to say the least. And if you talk to Armenians, they view the victory in the s as the first military victory in a thousand years.
This is a theme that will keep coming up, which makes it very difficult for them to so to speak back down on it. Azerbaijan, because they lost the war it was also easier in a way to conceptualize it differently and to say independence is more important. We will focus on maintaining our independence, and even though the Russians sometimes come to them and say, what if you join the Eurasian Economic Union? If you change your foreign policy, we may make sure to resolve the Karabakh conflict in a way that would be acceptable to you.
And I would say that what has changed and this was a situation for a very long time what really changed is I think the Russian perspective on the two countries, where it seems to me that they began to take the Armenian side for granted because of the level of economic control over Armenia, Russian ownership of the gas transmission lines in Armenia, ownership of the nuclear power plant, and so on and so forth, and the fact that Armenia is rather isolated.
Russians felt increasingly that, you know what, we can broaden out and, again, coming back to the point I made earlier about looking at a map and which country is the most significant geo-strategically, it is clearly Azerbaijan. It is larger, it has resources, it is the only one that controls the east-west corridor across from the Black Sea to the Caspian, and it has been very clear that Mr. Putin has felt that he can also begin to draw Azerbaijan into Russian institutions. Particularly because of its rather authoritarian political system, Azerbaijan has had problems in its relationship with the United States and Europe because of allegations over its human rights situation and so on.
This was particularly a problem during the Obama administration and this meant that Russia actually started selling weapons to Azerbaijan as well as Armenia. This should have I think been an alarm bell started ringing in for the Armenians. Now, the Armenians mainly got their weapons for more or less for free and the Azerbaijanis had to pay world market prices, which they did because they had oil and they they could get basically the same type of armaments the Armenians had, plus they could acquire high-level technologically sophisticated weaponry from Israel and from Turkey.
And in , we had a brief episode of a flare-up of this conflict, which was the first time that Azerbaijan actually retook some of the occupied territories, and Russia really did not do much about it. There was a renewed ceasefire, but to me this also showed that, again, alarm bells should have started ringing in Armenia very loudly, that this reliance on Russia for their security, and actually not just for their security, but for their military conquest, was no longer a tenable proposition.
But instead, and this is when we go back down to the local level, the real thing that changed in this conflict — and what I mean to say by this I forgot to mention is that we see perhaps the most surprising element of what has happened in recent weeks is how Russia has really not reacted. Vladimir Putin has been very clear that as long as the fighting is going on on territory that is internationally-recognized as Azerbaijani territory, Russia will not intervene. And my personal opinion, understanding of this is that Russia is a retreating power, and a retreating power in a territory where there are some states that remain weak states, like Armenia, like Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, that are in need of outside support.
Meanwhile there are several countries that are beginning to become real states, that have influence on their own. You can call them regional middle-sized powers. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan fall into this category of states that have resources, that have an ability to build international opinion. Azerbaijan has done this very effectively through membership in the Non-Aligned Movement, which we all thought was dead but apparently is not, and this has meant that I think the Russians really understand that if they want to maintain influence over Azerbaijan, they cannot just use sticks, they have to use carrots as well, which means that they cannot just play the Armenian card in the Caucasus, it is not enough.
So that gets us to the final level of analysis if you will, which is the local level, which is the two countries, and I think this is where two major things happen. The Azerbaijani situation is that of a president that, as many of you would know, took power in an election after his father had been president. Heydar Aliyev was, of course, a Soviet Azerbaijani leader. He was then out of grace in the Gorbachev era. He came back to power after the military defeats in the early s and rebuilt the modern state of Azerbaijan.
And as he did this I think this also freed him from the restraints that these oligarchs had placed on him, and made him much more willing and able to use the military option in Karabakh. More importantly than that is what changed on the Armenian side.
As is well known, in there was a Velvet Revolution in Armenia, which brought Mr. Pashinyan, Nikol Pashinyan, into power, who is the current leader of Armenia. And what I find interesting and cannot fully explain is a shift that Mr. Pashinyan went through when he first came to power. It is interesting that Azerbaijan could have taken advantage of the internal turmoil in Armenia to make a military push. And then there was a summit in Dushanbe, I think of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where the two leaders met.
They had a fruitful interaction. There seemed to be a road towards peace, What happened then I cannot fully explain, but I can say what happened, not why, and by , the Armenian leadership went in a very assertive, even an aggressive direction rather than try to sue for peace if you will.
The Armenian side took a number of steps that I think brought us to where we are today. And the first of these was to reject the Madrid Principles of negotiations that had been in force since if not before, to demand that the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians be represented separately from Armenia at the peace talks. And simultaneously, Mr. Nobody really understood what he meant by all this, but what is clear is that they raised the stakes in the conflict.
He said that the new formula would be new wars for new territories. There were many other things, like Mr. Pashinyan sending his son to volunteer as a fighter in the occupied territories.
His wife, who in had started a movement called Women for Peace, suddenly this year dressed up in military fatigues, wearing Kalashnikov or carrying a Kalashnikov, and participating in military training for women. The Karabakh Armenians decided to move their parliament to the city of Shusha, which is the historically-Azerbaijani city in Nagorno-Karabakh.
All these things were major provocations that led the Azeri side to understand that or to conclude that negotiations were fruitless, the Armenians were not interested in negotiations, and the only way that they could change the situation on the ground was by military force. And unfortunately, here is where we get to the U. S side of the problem, which is twofold. Number one that the U. There is a wonderful and very, very well developed new U. The problem is that how do you get to Central Asia?
Otherwise this territory is surrounded by the likes of China, Russia, and Pakistan and Iran, which makes it not a very accessible route for the US to have influence. The influence for the U.
When Mr. Bolton was National Security Adviser, that was an exception. He traveled to the region. He tried to develop policy, but of course, he did not stay long enough to make it happen. And the other part of this is that I think passively if you know there is a strong Armenian lobby in the United States, but it is almost exclusively influential within the Democratic Party, and I think this had an effect on the timing of this war because I think when the flare-ups happened this summer, and we can discuss the length, but I do not think we can even conclude who started it.
It does not really matter who started it, but the Azerbaijanis at some point I think drew the conclusion that either we act now or there might be an eight-year Biden administration in which the Armenian lobby will be very strong and then we will have to wait another decade, not 30 years but 40 years before we can do something about this conflict because the implications of making a military move during a Biden administration would have been stronger.
Now, this is just pure speculation on my part, but knowing how the Azerbaijanis are aware of the role of the Armenian lobby in the United States, I think this must have played a role. So all taken together I think in my final analysis I have said for a long time that this conflict resembles the Israeli-Arab conflict or the Indian-Pakistani conflict in the sense of a conflict that just does not get resolved. It goes on for decade after decade. There are periods of cold peace. There are periods of hot war.
They get interspersed. You have smaller episodes. What happened in I compared with the Kargil operation on the Indian-Pakistani border in Kashmir in , a smaller military operation. So I think what we have right now is a major war. And I think at this point the odds that there will be a strong effort to bring about a lasting peace I would say is relatively remote given the fact that it is still a relatively contained conflict. If you do not do anything about it, it might not be a disaster.
We have enough to deal with at home with our polarization and election in the United States, the pandemic in europe, and so forth, so I would I would submit that it is very likely that we are going to see a refreeze at some point with a major advance on the part of Azerbaijan, but it will not finally resolve the conflict.
I think I should probably stop here. I think I probably talked for too long, but I will be glad to entertain any questions you might have. No, not at all, Dr.
Cornell, thank you very much. That background was very illuminating. You closed by saying that this might lead to a final solution, which is a rather chilling phrase that the Armenian Karabakh side would interpret as their elimination.
I know you did not mean that, I am just thinking of how the Armenians in either Armenia or Karabakh understand the Azerbaijani objectives. How do they understand those objectives and might it include the very dangers about which the Armenians would worry with the terrible history of a genocide that has affected them, particularly if I might just add, recent statements, saying that Turkey and Azerbaijan are two states but one nation?
Right, well, that statement, by the way, has an interesting history. It goes back to , but you are absolutely right and I think interestingly, about five days before this conflict re-erupted obviously, there had been skirmishes back in July we had we organized a virtual round-table like we are talking now, but a round table where we had an Armenian and Azerbaijani speakers. We endeavored to try to find sensible people on both sides, which we did and I think the major takeaway was how the rhetoric on the two sides was being misunderstood by the other side, which is, of course, a classic issue in this type of conflict.
But to your to your point I think this entire conflict cannot be dissociated from the tragic history of the Armenian nation and, in fact, of course, of the genocide back over years ago, which if you think about it for the Armenians, it is in a way understandable that they view the conflict with Azerbaijan in lenses colored by the experience of genocide, but at the same time the fact is that the genocide had nothing to do with the Caucasus.
It all happened in present-day Turkey, and for Azerbaijan the answer is wait a minute, we were not involved in that.
Why am I being punished and my people ethnically cleansed because you had a problem somewhere else? So there is a cognitive dissonance if you will by the way the Azerbaijanis perceive history and the way the Armenians perceive history. But to your question about how the Armenians perceive history, I think you are absolutely correct. The Armenians are now painting this first of all in a civilizational light, and they are also talking about it in directly referring to the history of genocide.
Now, the civilizational issue I very much think to some extent they believe it, to some extent this is a diplomatic ploy because they know it is one of the arguments that works in the West, but I think it is very clear that this conflict has very little if anything to do with with with religion. I wrote an article I think back in or something like that about religion and and the conflicts in the Caucasus, where I basically argued that this is the big, you could call it a refutation or you could call it the exception, to the Huntingtonian thesis of a clash of civilizations.
If you look at how different powers align, you find, for example, that Iran has always supported Armenia. This is a country that is supposed to support Muslims abroad, and this is even written in its constitution, but because there are more Azerbaijanis living in Iran than in the republic of Azerbaijan, the Iranians have always wanted to keep down Azerbaijan and have therefore supported Armenia. Israel has supported Azerbaijan on the other hand because it is a secular, Shia-majority state right on the Iranian doorstep, and also for the Israelis it is an access point to Central Asia, and it has been an important role.
All these former Soviet Muslim countries have been important in the Israeli ambition to establish functioning relations with non-Arab states, which has always been an important part of Israeli foreign policy and the fact that there is this trio of countries that always supported Azerbaijan from day one, which are Turkey, Pakistan, and Israel. Now, that might be the opinion of an outside observer, it might even be true, but from the Armenian position, I can sit here and analyze this as I have done, as essentially an Armenian overreach over the past twenty years over alliance and Russia misunderstanding of their counterparts, misunderstanding of the geopolitics and so forth, but from the Armenian position, very much they are seeing this as them being wiped out again in a historical land that they feel they are entitled to.
And we can go back and look at the size of Armenia, and the traditional size of the Armenian settlements does not add up. And I think the sad history of the past hundred years is that the way settlement patterns were in this part of the world was extremely poorly developed in order to create functioning nation states it is like a micro Bosnia, where Serbs and Croats and Bosnians were living all over the place, and you could not really develop three different states very easily without ethnic cleansing.
Similarly, if you look at eastern Anatolia all the way over to to the Caspian Sea, you see this broad settlement patterns where Armenians and Azerbaijanis are intermixed, and where if you look at the year , probably the largest concentrations of Armenians were in places like Tbilisi and Baku. Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, had an Armenian majority in , actually not in , but still it shows how the Armenian nation was one of the more unlucky ones to live in a world where suddenly the world was divided into coherent geographic nation states because that is not the way Armenians lived.
They lived spread out over a large territory, but for them this is very real and I take your point that from the Armenian perspective this is viewed in existential terms. If I just might interact with with one note or at least historical claim because you mentioned a large Armenian population in Baku in the early part of the 20th century, there are allegations that 20, of them were massacred in There were massacres on both sides, actually. I do not know about the numbers. I would have to go back and look, but essentially there at every point of weakening of Russian power in the twentieth century, there has been an upsurge in Armenian-Azerbaijani violence; , , , all three, and in there was first an attempt by the so-called Baku Commune, which was the sequel to the Paris Commune in which the Bolsheviks with a very strong Armenian ethnic presence basically ethnically cleansed part of Baku, and set up this idealist, communist government.
Then the Ottoman forces moved in a couple of months later and that led to a revenge ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Baku, so those things went both ways, absolutely. What really changed I think happened in the s.
Actually, just like Istanbul was not traditionally a very Turkish city, it had Greeks, it had Armenians, it had Kurds, it had Turks. It was not a homogeneous Turkish city. It was a Russian colonial city in many ways with large Russian and Armenian and also immigrant Iranian populations that fed the oil boom of the s. And it was really only in the middle of the twentieth century that ,just as happened in Turkey also in Azerbaijan, there was this migration from the rural areas outside in the provinces into the capital and that really turned Baku into a very heavily Azerbaijani city.
Now, it is interesting, I have met some Baku Armenians, and Baku Armenians largely were forced to flee back in Among the Baku Armenians there is this unstated or understated anger at the Karabakh Armenians because if you imagine that there had not been a conflict, who would have been the people who would have benefited most from the oil boom in Baku?
And whatever we said in the past twenty years, it would likely have been the most educated, the Armenians, who were the most educated. They held the professional positions. They spoke languages and so on. They did not get to experience that, unfortunately, and they were removed, and they now live elsewhere, but so this is a tragic history, of course, in so many ways.
As we know there have been three ceasefires arranged, two by Vladimir Putin and one brokered by the United States, all of them broken within hours of of their supposedly going into effect. You mentioned that this looks like an intractable conflict.
Now it seems though that Azerbaijan has the military wherewithal through its expenditure of large amounts of its oil and gas revenue on updating its military, the supply of state-of-the-art drones from Turkey and Israel that they may go go for broke because there is nothing inhibiting them other than Russia, which is saying if you go into Armenia, that might present a problem for us.
There are allegations that a a good number of Turkish troops that were in Azerbaijan for summer training did not leave, including drone operators.
One observes the highly sophisticated coordination between military, intelligence, drones, artillery fire, etc. You have mentioned that the Turkish military presence, according to your sources. Do you also see that at the present moment? There are really no inhibiting factors other than the Armenian military forces in Karabakh keeping the Azeris from rolling this thing up.
Very good questions. I think on the first one the Turkish-Azerbaijani military relationship has always been extremely opaque. You can see signs of it everywhere. You can look, for example, at where senior Azerbaijani officials have trained and so forth. Beyond that it is really a black box. I think it is safe to assume that there is a strong Turkish advisory element in this.
Why is Azerbaijan considered European and Kazakhstan not? Where are the real boundaries of Europe? Is Kazakhstan within its borders? Mikhail Gorbachev also made frequent references to it. But not everyone understood the concept — at least not in the same way. Take Kazakhstan in Central Asia. Europe has been extremely inconsistent in defining the principles behind its own borders. For example, the island of Cyprus is part of the continental shelf of Asia.
That is why in the United Nations, Cyprus is part of the Asian group.
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