Re-thinking Citizenship in the South Caucasus

Abstract

This essay presents research results from a Max Planck Research Group project in which six researchers examined the three components of Marshall's concept of citizenship in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. The essay compares these components with other approaches to citizenship, arguing that processes such as migration, the stricter enforcement of borders and the introduction of new global players and markets to the region allow citizenship concepts to be played against one another.

Notes

¹See for instance the works on citizenship and urban movements (Holston 1999), civil society organisations (Hann & Dunn 1996), transnational processes of European extension (Ruegg 2006) and globalisation (Ong 1999).

²Marshall does somewhat specify and elaborate the idea of the ‘civilized life’ when he focuses on the development of social welfare in the twentieth century and the state-guaranteed minimum: ‘[T]here is a general enrichment of the concrete substance of civilised life, a general reduction of risk and insecurity, an equalization between the more and the less fortunate at all levels’ (Marshall 1998, p. 108). He remains critical, however, concerning the debate about what the ‘guaranteed minimum’ should be, and asks ‘whether … there are natural limits to the contemporary drive towards greater social and economic equality’ (Marshall 1998, p. 108).

³Turner points to the differences between the American and British debates concerning the growth of social rights and notes that different cultural issues were involved, as well as ‘unintended consequences of modern warfare’, i.e. that war, in addition to strengthening market forces, stimulated a national self-critique that led to calls for social change and equality, especially in Britain (Turner 2001, p. 191).

⁴Especially, as Turner (2001, p. 190) indicates, those instances in which transnational processes demand that citizens interact not only with their own states in a passive way, but take action beyond the states in which they happen to be living.

⁵In an inaugural lecture at the University of Cambridge in 2000 (subsequently published in the British Journal of Sociology—see Turner 2001), Bryan Turner argues that the Marshallian paradigm of social citizenship has been eroded ‘because the social and economic conditions that supported postwar British welfare consensus have been transformed by economic and technological change’ (2001, p. 189). Turner argues that economic and technological changes have deeply affected the social identity of citizens, whom in the past could be classified as ‘worker-citizens, warrior-citizens and parent-citizens’ (Turner 2001, p. 189). These identities are no longer the basis for claiming rights from the state because technological and economic changes have also changed the character of rights, such that it is now more appropriate to talk of environmental, aboriginal and cultural citizenship principles.

⁶A total of 17% of the surveyed households had at least one migrant abroad, and 10% of the households had a migrant within Georgia, mostly in the capital city, Tbilisi.

⁷See also Mataradze (2011).

⁸The contested public space of claiming land, territory and history in this border region was very present in the Turkish media in September 2010. On 19 September, a religious ceremony, led by the Armenian Church in Turkey, was held in the ancient restored Armenian Church on the island of Ahtamar in the province of Van (see www.radikal.com.tr, 19 September 2010, accessed 19 September 2010). This was seen in general as a step towards reconciliation with Turkey's Armenian history. In response, the Turkish right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi) declared a week after this much-publicised ceremony that it intended to commemorate the arrival of Seljuk Turks and their conquest of Anatolia by holding Muslim prayer ceremonies on Friday 1 October in the ruins of the ancient Ani Armenian monastery complex in the border province of Kars (see: www.radikal.com.tr, 28 September 2010, accessed 28 September 2010). Land continues to be territory, hence historically contextualised and contested (see also Yalçın-Heckmann et al. 2003).

⁹For a similar discussion of difficulties in border crossing for social and economic reasons between two other post-Soviet states, see Reeves (2007). Reeves (2009) further explores post-socialist border regimes and discusses the impact on states of representational politics for managing border regimes in Central Asia, particularly between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, where the states’ territoriality, ethnicity and sovereignty are constructed and implemented differently at different scales of the polity and society.

¹⁰See the report by Radio Free Europe's broadcasting station in Azerbaijani, ‘Ucuz pazarlıq üçün Gürcüstana’, Azadlıq Radiosu, 20 May 2010, available at: www.azadliq.org/content/article/2048090.html, accessed 20 May 2010). The reporter observes that Azerbaijani citizens from Ağstafa go to the bazaar in Tbilisi in order to buy cheaper products, but when they want to bring them across the border the Azerbaijani customs officers do not allow the goods in. The reporter notes that this does not necessarily follow any Azerbaijani customs laws, but rather is a practice aimed at protecting internal trade monopolies. Similar arbitrary practices seem to rule in the southern Azerbaijani—Iranian border town of Astara as well (see ‘Verilişlr, “Kişmiş, hurma monopoliyası”’, Azadlıq Radiosu, 5 September 2011, available at: http://www.azadliq.org/content/article/24317946.html, accessed 5 September 2011).

¹¹See Ong (1999); Kideckel (2009).

¹²Here I am using Stephen Gudeman's concept of trade cascading into the ‘realm of mutuality’ (of social relations, which he also calls ‘the base’), which ‘embodies values, such as equity, equality, age, gender, position and merit’ (Gudeman 2008, p. 14), and to which I add kinship solidarity and familism.

¹³This is what Mitchell (1991) has called the ‘state-effect’. As a petty trader in the bazaar in Ağstafa commented in our conversation, ‘Azerbaijan is probably the only state in the world with a monopoly over trade in bananas!’ (author's field notes).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lale Yalçin-Heckmann

Various versions of this essay were presented at conferences in Birmingham, Philadelphia and Berlin. I would like to thank the participants of all these meetings, as well as the anonymous reviewers of this essay, for their useful comments. The shortcomings remain, as usual, mine alone. The research results presented here reflect the work of the research group Caucasian Boundaries and Citizenship from Below at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. The researchers Milena Baghdasaryan, Florian Mühlfried, Teona Mataradze, H. Neşe Özgen and the author worked together between 2006 and 2009 and were later joined by Nino Aivazishvili. I would like to thank them all for allowing me to refer to their partly unpublished but forthcoming work, and the Max Planck Institute for generously supporting the research.