In 2012–2013, the South Caucasus underwent a 12-month period of elections that started with the Georgian parliamentary elections on 1 October 2012, which saw the victory of the ‘Georgian Dream’ coalition of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, and ended with the Georgian presidential election on 27 October 2013. Between the Georgian elections, Armenia re-elected President Serzh Sargsyan to a second term on 18 February 2013, and Ilham Aliyev was confirmed as president of Azerbaijan for a third term on 9 October 2013. While Georgia witnessed the first democratic non-violent change of power in the former Soviet Union in October 2012, the political landscapes in Armenia and Azerbaijan have been characterized by continuity.
Twenty-five years have passed since the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and each of the three South Caucasian republics has gone its own way in terms of political transformation. The model that each of them has developed raises questions about the similarities and differences that one can observe between the three neighbours. Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are all characterized by various shortcomings in terms of democratization, but they are not at the same stage. In the last 10 years, under Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia has undergone a rapid and to some extent brutal modernization process, characterized by a battle against petty corruption, harsh liberalization reforms, and the will to set up a strong and functioning state. However, these reforms were often in contradiction with the process of democratization, thus putting Georgia at the stage of a regime in transition. Armenia and Azerbaijan have followed different paths. Armenia is still characterized by larger shortcomings in terms of political openness and pluralism, which the state authorities tend to justify by the need to stay united during a state of war with Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan is the least advanced of the three in terms of democratization. Freedom House classifies it as a consolidated authoritarian regime. Over more than 20 years, the Azerbaijani regime managed to control the whole political and economic landscape, not leaving a single oppositional force to raise its voice and allowing only marginal voices within civil society.
These marked differences in terms of political process may allow one to question the very notion of the South Caucasus as a region. Indeed, if one goes beyond mere geographical proximity and some shared history, do these states still have elements in common? Economic trade is non-existent between Armenia and Azerbaijan due to the unresolved Karabakh territorial conflict, but it is also very scarce between Armenia and Georgia, who favour larger entities for their imports and exports. Migration flows between Georgia and its two Caucasian neighbours are very limited and thus tend to reduce business and cultural exchanges between the three republics. The decline of the Russian language as a lingua franca in the region also contributes to the fact that the three republics are drifting away from each other. On top of that, the recent issue of the customs union with Russia vs. association agreement with the European Union has shown that each country is moving (or forced to move) in rather different directions. Of course, some elements still unite the region. As former Soviet republics, they are still under the influence, whether they like it or not, of Russia. And on a political and societal level, one still observes similarities between Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan: among other things, a tendency to personalize power, a political culture based on confrontation rather than compromise, a tendency to rely on personal networks and informal structures as a way to escape formal structures.
The present special issueFootnote1 aims to present the similarities and divergences that have developed over the years. The issue shows that despite the evident growing differences between the three South Caucasian republics, various topics are still relevant for the whole region, even when escaping the usual topics of conflicts, oil and gas, or the role of the great powers. Here, we mean issues such as the influence of religion on political behaviour, the development of civil society or the role of kinship networks. These topics are significant for the region because they strongly affect social and political developments. The relevance of these research topics for the region is also reflected from a methodological perspective, as many scholars dealing with the region tend to approach their topics from a comparative perspective covering all the three republics. The present issue is not an exception, as four out of seven papers compare at least two of the South Caucasian republics. This special issue aims to present innovative research conducted on the region, from both local and external junior scholars. The variety of topics, approaches and disciplines illustrates the richness of the research conducted on the region.
The paper by Bidzina Lebanidze, from a purely political science perspective, tries to assess the role of the international environment on the process of democratic transition in the post-Soviet South Caucasus states. Using the linkage and leverage theoretical model of Levitsky and Way, Bidzina Lebanizde highlights the fact that the scholarship on democratization tends to ignore, or at least to downplay, the role of negative external aspects in the democratization process – the so-called counter-hegemonic forces.
Andrea Filetti also addresses a topic that is significant in the three republics, namely, the issue of religion and its influence on political behaviour and culture. In his contribution, he questions the classical assumption about the role of religion in the determination of democratic values. Comparing the influences of religiousness on political attitudes and behaviour in Georgia and Azerbaijan, he shows that the situation is more complicated than most theories would like to expose, as ‘religion may play diverse roles in different contexts depending on how people perceive it within the broader conceptualization of modernity’ (p.219).
No less significant is the issue of civil society, which is addressed in two papers (Yevgenya Paturyan and Valentina Gevorgyan, and Huseyn Aliyev), but from different perspectives. Yevgenya Paturyan and Valentina Gevorgyan approach the issue of civil society from the perspective of trust and volunteering, showing that the expected link between the level of democratization and the level of trust in NGOs proves absent in the case of the South Caucasus. They also show that despite slight variances, volunteering remains rather low in the three countries, even among the younger generations.
Using a different analysis, Huseyn Aliyev questions the issue of low membership in civil society organizations in the South Caucasus, thus wondering if kinship networks affect civil participation. Following Howard and Putnam, one could hypothesize that high bonding social capital as a result of strong kinship ties, which are prevalent in the South Caucasus, combined with low bridging social capital, hamper participation in public life. However, Huseyn Aliyev shows that ‘the prevalence of kinship networks does not significantly affect popular attitudes towards organized civil society and the reliance on kinship structures is not seen as substitute for membership in formal civil society’ (p. 263).
The level of democratization can also be addressed from the perspective of media openness, as presented by Tatevik Sargsyan. In her paper, Tatevik Sargsyan questions the role of online media as opposed to traditional print and broadcast media in Armenia, trying to see the extent to which internet and online media have contributed to a better environment in terms of free expression among journalists, and whether it has reduced self-censorship among journalists. The paper shows that online media have created broad opportunities for expression as long as the content does not raise sensitive issues. Tatevik Sargsyan shows, however, that the opportunities allowed by the authorities are explained by the limited impact of online media on the general public, which explains the limited level of censorship that is exerted.
The last two papers, by Evgenia Jane Kitaevich and Lela Chakhaia et al., are Georgia-specific, although the topics themselves are relevant for the whole region. Jane Kitaevich deals with the issue of education reforms and memory politics in Georgia, thus criticizing approaches that treat a state as ‘the main source of preference formation for a particular collective memory narrative’ (p. 321). She argues that collective memories are much more splintered and individualistic and that in the case of memory politics, it is the role of teachers, whom she divides into four ideal types, to shape the vision that the polity has of the nation and of statehood.
Lela Chakhaia et al.’s paper approaches an issue that has been largely unresearched in post-Soviet Georgia, namely, the educational choices of Georgian youth and the factors that lead some schoolchildren with specific socio-economic backgrounds to drop out of school. The authors, basing their paper on over 4500 hours of interviews, show that factors such as limited funding for university tuition fees, limited availability for vocational training or ‘low expected probability of success on high school graduation exams’ prompt many schoolchildren from modest socio-economic backgrounds to drop out, thus reinforcing social and educational inequalities within Georgian society.
This special issue shows that the South Caucasus, either taken as a whole or each republic taken separately, still faces major political and social challenges that will only be overcome through a reform process. The path to full democratic standards is still a long way away; it is hampered by territorial conflicts and by economic hardships, but especially by a political elite that is mainly interested in the monopolization of power rather than a strong civil society, a free media landscape or an open political platform.
Notes on contributors
Nicolas Hayoz is associate professor in political sciences at the University of Fribourg and director of the Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN).
Denis Dafflon is PhD student in political sciences at the University of Fribourg and scientific coordinator of the Academic Swiss Caucasus Net (ASCN).
Notes
1. The special issue is based on papers (except for the one by Huseyn Aliyev) presented at the 3rd ASCN Annual Conference, entitled Political Transformation and Social Change in the South Caucasus: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in Perspective (Tbilisi, June 21–22 2013).