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law and division of power will be institutionalized quickly to ensure that the winning majority willnot try once again to use its advantage against the losers. Institutional and discourse settings should bedeveloped to promote more cooperative rational political behavior at all levels of the political system.

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Georgian experience has demonstrated that freedom cannot be sustained without solidarity, anddemocracy cannot be promoted from the outside. Even when granted by historical circumstances, free-dom and democracy depend on the power of society acting in their defense. Strengthening society maynot be a realistic goal if considered in the short time perspective. For the last 20 years, the legacies ofatomization and anomie were the most difficult problem to overcome in establishing a civil society.However this process of society-building is underway. It started in a new fashion about two years agowhen a new wave of the pro-democracy movement began. This direction was somehow enhanced, rath-er than weakened, by the absence of external promotion. In contrast to the previous wave of democrati-zation, those who opt for democracy and freedom now feel that they have no external “referee” to whomthey can complain, as was the case before. Institutionally, in the absence of an external “referee,” com-petitive games with positive outcomes become impossible. This time, civil society is developing on itsown, which may take longer, but may yield surer results. The fate of freedom and democracy in Georgiais still unclear, but the new trend of development is becoming more and more salient.

<������//��9����9

Ph.D. (Philos.), Associate Professorat the Department of Political Science and

Political Administration, Academy of State Administration underthe President of the Republic of Azerbaijan

(Baku, Azerbaijan).

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�he author takes an in-depth look at thetop priorities in the ethnopolitical sphereof national security, namely the field in

which ethnopolitical processes and security

problems overlap to form a “borderline” zone.He convincingly ties together these prioritiesand the tasks of national importance the coun-try faces in the wider modernization context.

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I have already substantiated1 the thesis that the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh and the conflictover it should be strictly separated:

� The Nagorno-Karabakh problem should be regarded as a geopolitical problem created firstby Russia and, subsequently, by other actors of world politics seeking sustainable geostrate-gic control over the Greater Caucasian-Caspian Region, a gateway of sorts to the MiddleEast;

� The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is rooted in an ethnopo-litical matrix; today, as in the past, it remains a trigger for many global geopolitical and geo-economic processes:

—it contributed to the Soviet Union’s disintegration;

—as an axis area, it might plunge practically all the regional states into war. The Daily Tel-egraph offered a historical analogy: “Nagorno-Karabakh is the Schleswig-Holstein ques-tion of today”2 (in the past, three wars were waged for the duchies of Schleswig and Hol-stein);

—as one of the key zones, it might contribute to the geopolitical struggle for the zones ofinfluence within the so-called New Big Game.

It should be said that today the academic and analytical communities are concentrating on theNagorno-Karabakh conflict. The issue, the regional and worldwide importance of which is obvious,has already been discussed at numerous bilateral and multilateral conferences; and many intermedi-ary missions have already tried their hand at its settlement. What is suggested looks very much likepalliatives: the conflict is mostly discussed outside the entire context of the factors of and threats toethnopolitical security and is divorced from the country’s national strategy.

This means that Azerbaijan’s political science and practice should offer a set of measures de-signed to neutralize the threats and sources of danger in order to achieve a climate of national harmo-ny and tolerance in society and the state and create conditions conducive to the free development ofall the nationalities living in the republic.

This brings us to the stage at which we should formulate scientifically substantiated strategicpriorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan. The choice, however, should be systemic, which means thata heap of disjointed and internally unconnected values and tasks, no matter how correct and impor-tant, will be absolutely useless. The task goes much deeper: each and every priority of state policy(separately and taken all together) should be correlated with the country’s strategic course aimed atmodernization.

A strong economic base, which will help to gradually adjust mass consciousness and the nation-al-cultural layer to democratic values, can be described as the conceptual core of modernization; thecountry should be transformed into an active entity of international relations.3

There are three large groups of priorities—geopolitical, geo-economic, and ethnocultural—identified in the strategy of ethnopolitical security seen through the prism of modernization.

1 See: K. Allahverdiev, “The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict in the Context of Retrospective Ethno-Geopolitics,” Cen-tral Asia and the Caucasus, No. 1 (55), 2009; K. Allahverdiev, “How the Karabakh Conflict Fits the New Great GameContext,” The Caucasus & Globalization, Issue 2-3, Vol. 3, 2009.

2 [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-views/6633842/Nagorno-Karabakh-danger-in-the-Caucasus.html].3 See: R. Mekhtiev, “The Strategy of the Future: Modernization,” State Governance: Theory and Practice, No. 1 (21),

2008, p. 156 (in Azeri).

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The geopolitical priorities of the strategy of ethnopolitical security of Azerbaijan include:

� Returning the occupied territories by diplomatic and military-political means.

� Identifying the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh within the Azerbaijan state system andabolishing Nakhchivan’s exclave status.

� Keeping foreign bases and troops away from the republic’s territory, while its political coop-eration should remain limited to the already functioning military-political blocs (NATO andCSTO); the state’s military potential should be built up along with a course aimed at demil-itarization of the Caucasus and the Caspian.

� Reaching a final decision on the status of the Caspian, which should be demilitarized to be-come a nuclear-free zone.

� Rejecting, as a matter of principle, all versions of geopolitical exchanges “Karabakh for theCaspian,” “Karabakh for Southern Azerbaijan,” “Karabakh for Georgian territories,” etc.

� Consistently democratizing social life and its ethnopolitical sphere.

� Consistently and actively upgrading the status of the compact ethnic groups in all states of theregion; this should be combined with confidence-building measures to prevent revision oftheir sovereignty and territorial integrity.

� Initiating a viable system of regional security and cooperation (an Organization for Securityand Cooperation in the Caucasus, for example), which in the long run and under favorablecircumstances could be transformed into an integration alliance, a Caucasian Union.

The above fits the foreign policy strategy which President Ilham Aliev has described as follows:“A stronger international position and maximum protection of Azerbaijan’s national interests are twomajor goals of our foreign policy.”4 Both tasks belong to the Nagorno-Karabakh set of problems,which should be interpreted within the context of a fundamentally important statement by the head ofthe Azerbaijani state: “The territorial integrity of Azerbaijan has never been a subject of discussion.The territorial integrity of Azerbaijan must be restored. The occupying troops must be withdrawnfrom all the occupied lands and Azerbaijan’s citizens must return there. All supply lines must be open.Azerbaijanis must return to Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenians and Azerbaijanis must live in condi-tions ensuring a high level of autonomy. The future, which may happen either tomorrow or in a hun-dred years or may never happen, will show the nature of this status.”5

It seems that the future broad autonomy of Nagorno-Karabakh should not be an isolated act: itshould become an element of a set of measures and means designed to oppose the ethnopoliticalthreats. The exclave nature of the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, as one of the most importantissues, must be dealt with, while the forms, legal formats, and territorial aspects of a future solutionremain unclear. However, one thing is absolutely clear: the decisions on the future corridors betweenArmenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, on the one hand, and Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, on the other,should be made simultaneously within a common political and legal field.

This is another aspect which Azerbaijani experts tend to ignore when passions run high andwhich Michael Günther, Professor of Political Science at Tennessee Technological University,deemed necessary to point out: “In view of Armenia’s geographic location time plays into the hands

4 [http://www.day.az/news/politics/200494.html], 20 March, 2010.5 [http://www.news.az/articles/11936].

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of Azerbaijan… It should not ‘turn away’ from the Minsk process and should not ignore other possi-bilities. There have already been cases when time and changing international situations were enoughto resolve problems very similar to that of Karabakh.”6

The problem of regional integration structures calls for patience: we should always bear in mindthat the expert community expected too much of GUAM, a fact graphically reflected in the SpecialIssue of the Central Asia and the Caucasus journal called GUAM: From a Tactical Alliance to Stra-tegic Partnership7 and by the international conference on Basic Principles for Settlement of the Con-flicts in the Territories of the GUAM States (Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Moldova) held in Baku on15-16 April, 2008 on the eve of the August 2008 events.

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The geo-economic priorities of Azerbaijan’s ethnopolitical security strategy are:

� Taking due account of the ethnopolitical aspects of national security every time the countryis involved in regional economic projects designed to ensure international energy security.

� Promoting effective economic reintegration of the liberated Azerbaijani territories to ensureeconomic involvement of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh.

� Offering an attractive model for Azerbaijan’s economy; higher rankings of economic free-dom, business climate, innovative nature, etc.

� Encouraging the economic reintegration of Nagorno-Karabakh.

� Ensuring active involvement of Azerbaijan’s capital in economic projects in neighboring re-gional states.

� Providing economic support to the “new regionalism strategy”—a Single Economic Space(SES) of the Caucasian Region, Customs Union, Unified Energy System, and coordinatedtariff and banking policies, etc.

There are two important problems—reintegration of the liberated territories and fresh approach-es to regional cooperation in the Caucasus—which should be treated as priorities of the utmost impor-tance.

Large-scale preparations are underway to deal with the first group of priorities: the newly-liber-ated territories will present a set of multidimensional problems: mine clearing, restoration of thetransport and social infrastructure, as well as of everyday services, etc.

So far, the second set of priorities is dominated by historical-geographic ideas based on similarnatural conditions, histories, and cultures produced by the academic and political interpretations ofregional cooperation in the Caucasus. Today, however, globalization and the emerging new worldorder, which coincide with the gradual disintegration of the old economic and cultural developmenttypes in the Caucasian states, have created a need for new economic-geographical complexes. Theyreject the local-territorial economic type; the ties in the new complexes are very complicated andsometimes fairly vague. The emerging complexes (of various types, energy and transport, among oth-ers) serve as the economic cornerstones of the globalization era.

In full accordance with the Marxist dictum that the basis determines the superstructure, the in-creasingly exterritorial economies of the Soviet-successor states will give rise to transterritorial forms

6 [http://www.day.az/news/politics/199015.html], 13 March, 2010.7 See: GUAM: From a Tactical Alliance to Strategic Partnership, Special Issue of Central Asia and the Caucasus,

No. 3-4, 2008.

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of power. These new political and economic forms, the results of self-structuring, will inevitably ro-tate around a “region-forming core.” The analytical community has agreed that this role might belongto Azerbaijan, which means that the logic of globalization has invested Azerbaijan, as the uncontestedregional leader, with the historic mission of formulating and implementing truly ambitious integra-tion projects.

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The following can be described as the ethnocultural priorities of the republic’s strategy ofethnopolitical security:

� A civilizational mission;

� A national ideology or national idea;

� An ethnocultural identity;

� Ethnopolitical and ethnoconfessional stability;

� A civilian nation;

� Ethnocultural reintegration of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh;

� Humanitarian aid to Azerbaijan’s ethnic areas in the neighboring states on the principles ofnon-interference in internal affairs, de-politicization, transparency, and openly declared aimsin the “new regionalism” context.

Azerbaijan’s civilizational mission was one of the pillars of the ideological content of the coun-try’s course toward modernization, two others being a national ideology and identity.

1. The civilizational mission. The logic of globalization has already drawn Azerbaijan, the gen-erally recognized leader of the Caucasian region, into a competition of civilizational attrac-tions. Its civilizational mission is manifested in two ways:

� as an objective trend in the form of Azerbaijan’s stabilizing mission in the region withoutwhich development and sustainability of the other national economies are hardly possible;

� as an aim of the country’s modernization designed to strengthen its international statusand promote regional integration. Today, fragmentation of national states has already ex-hausted itself in many respects; a “new wave” of large viable macro-regional structures inall corners of the world is mounting to replace the fragmentation trends. This means thatAzerbaijan needs efficient mechanisms to cope with the new trend.

2. The national ideology. Nikita Moiseyev said the following about the role of the national ideaof society: “Any nation will find it hard to survive without national ideas and a more or lessclear picture of its future, nor will it be able to preserve its national culture. Society and thenation will become vulnerable.”8 R. Mekhtiev has supplied a detailed description of Azerbai-jan’s national ideology: “A national idea as the central element of the modernization of Azer-baijani society will be an important element of the new political culture which is taking shapein Azerbaijan… The philosophy of Azerbaijan-ism, which combines the idea and the ideol-ogy, is identified, as an immutable conception of the development of the state and the nation,with the sociopolitical and economic modernization of the republic. Very much like the cul-tural-historical layer of national development, it identifies the main routes and trends of

8 N.N. Moiseyev, “Rossia na pereputie,” Sotsialno-gumanitarnye znania, No. 4, 1999, pp. 173-174.

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strategic development and is reflected in the immutable nature of the national language, thepriority of national culture, and the importance of national values. Taken together, it embod-ies the entire complex of the national ideological model, which has taken into account thecountry’s changing role on the regional and global scene.”9

Azerbaijani society has not yet arrived at a consolidated position: “Today,” writesProf. Rauf Husseinov, “there is no and cannot be any systemic base for a national idea-ide-ology-policy in the Republic of Azerbaijan.”10 Political scientist Rovshan Husseinov hasoffered an alternative, and highly illustrative, opinion: “We still lack the most importantthing. I have in mind a national idea with which the state should arm itself and whichshould be realized across the country in the form of a clear program. I think that reinstate-ment of the occupied Azerbaijani lands should become the strongest stimulus for unitingthe people.”11

A national ideology as a synthesis of logically interconnected national-ethnic ideashelps a nation (ethnic group) to recognize its social-ethnic community as a single organismand an entity of rational-axiological and emotional-perceptible descriptions. National ideol-ogy, as a result of systematization and generalization of the national interests performed bythe political elite, serves as the foundation of self-determination of all the people in sociopo-litical and spiritual life. In this context, several transformational vectors are possible, whilethe genetic basis of the national ideology (its basic ideas, postulates, and values) remainsimmutable:

—the ethnic component of a national ideology may become absolute either as nationalism oras so-called macro-nationalism (the positive and negative aspects of which are covered inthe classical works by Louis Leo Snyder Global Micro-Nationalisms: Autonomy of Inde-pendence12 and Macro-Nationalisms: A History of the Pan-Movements13;

—the sociopolitical component may prevail in a national ideology when individual national-ethnic ideas are integrated into the political ideology of a single state system, that is, whena national ideology is transformed into state ideology as an instrument for realizing theinterests of the entire polyethnic nation.

Ethnonational ideologies as a continuation of instrumental (mobilizing) and motiva-tional functions of ethnicity in the Soviet successor-states have already exhausted their po-tential. Today, a national-state ideology is a means through which the national ideal is at-tained; an instrument for scoring economic and political goals; a criteria of their compatibil-ity with ethnosocial interests. This is applied to an efficient state able to formulate its long-term perspectives; it is not a ship of which Seneca said, “For those who do not know whichharbor they want to reach, no wind is favorable.”

3. Identity problems. From the very first day of its independence, Azerbaijani society has beentrying to answer the question: “Who are we?” The wide range of opinions formulated withinthe academic community and outside it can be reduced to two basic theses:

9 R. Mekhtiev, “Modernization: An Immutable Agenda,” State Governance: Theory and Practice, No. 2 (22),2008, p. 141.

10 R. Husseinov, “Secessionist Movements in Azerbaijan,” available at [http://ethnoglobus.com/index.php?l=ru&m=news&id=224], 29 January, 2010.

11 R. Husseinov, “Azerbaijan Needs a National Idea,” available at [http://www.nedelya.az/articlen.php?catno=0100014#1], 17 October, 2008.

12 See: L. Snyder, Global Micro-Nationalisms: Autonomy or Independence, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecti-cut-London, England, 1982.

13 See: L. Snyder, Macro-Nationalisms. A History of the Pan-Movements, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecti-cut-London, England, 1984.

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—we are Turks and “the national idea of Azerbaijan cannot be formulated unless we restoreits time-tested self-name ‘Turks’ of the titular nation.”14

—we are Azerbaijanis and “in the conditions of global transformations, it is highly importantto preserve our national image, traditions, language, history, and the sociocultural back-ground of the Azerbaijani people… A nation which fails to grasp the full meaning of itshistory and culture is not ready to embark on the road of development.”15

It seems that the academic and practical value of these discussions is nil; in the final analysis,both (fairly widely accepted) models of ethnosocial identity—the ethnocentric (uncritical preferentialtreatment of an ethnic group and individual self-identification with it) and ethno-dominating (whichprefers one ethnicity over others) created no modernization-related advantages.

It is much more important to concentrate on the parameters and innovation content of nationaldevelopment, which will help us to escape social and cultural degradation and marginalization of thenation, on the one hand, and fit into the global world and find a niche of our own in it, on the other.Those nations that enjoy the tradition of ethnocultural and religious tolerance stand a much betterchance of self-identification; this explains why the developing Azerbaijani state system deliberatelyrelied on the traditions of tolerance. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wie-senthal Center, put this in a nutshell: “…many countries hold forth about their tolerance; this is anexcellent political gimmick, yet genuine tolerance remains outside the reach of many. Your country isan exception: little is said about tolerance, yet it is a national feature of your people… Tolerance inAzerbaijan is an inexhaustible category.”16

President Ilham Aliev deemed it necessary to point to the inborn ethnoconfessional tolerance of thepeople of Azerbaijan: “Azerbaijan has never known and, I am sure, will never know national and ethnicconflicts and confrontations. In our country, all nationalities and the followers of all religions live as onefamily. They are actively working for the sake of Azerbaijan and, as its worthy citizens, contribute to its all-round development… Azerbaijan has become a center of dialog between religions and civilizations.”17

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To sum up, I can say that the set of priorities of the country’s ethnopolitical security points to cer-tain key trends of its development in the context of the country’s changing global and regional status.

� First, the steadily widening geopolitical and geostrategic component of the republic’s ethno-political security which rotates around the most burning issues: the Nagorno-Karabakh con-flict; normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations; the status of the Caspian; interconnec-tion of military and oil-and-gas diplomacy; Nabucco and the projects aimed at creating a re-gional security system for the Caucasus. These issues are intertwined into a knot of ethnop-olitical complementarity and geostrategic pragmatism.

� Second, the Georgia-Russia war of 2008 has demonstrated that the ethnopolitical conflictsacross the post-Soviet expanse, and in the Caucasus as its part, can no longer be described asinternal and belonging solely to “the Center-the separatist region” sphere; they are emerging asexternal conflicts between states. When applied to the Caucasian geostructure, this spells therelative nature of the political and state structure: the nations remain a constant, while the bor-ders between them become a variable. The vows and promises of the key international actors

14 F. Alekperli, “Natsionalnaia ideologia Azerbaidzhana,” Zerkalo, 8 August, 2009.15 R. Mekhtiev, “Modernization: An Immutable Agenda,” p. 133.16 “Baku—odin iz nemnogokh gorodov, gde ia svobodno mogu khodit v kipe,” Nedelia, 22 August, 2008.17 [http://www.1news.az/politics/20091107125524031.html], 7 November, 2009.

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that the Kosovo experience will never develop into a precedent to be applied in the Caucasusnotwithstanding, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s thesis about “Balkanization of the Caucasus” has not yetbeen removed from the agenda. The leaders of Azerbaijan and the public fear, with good reason,that the republic’s borders are in danger—those who nurture these plans should know that othervariants (related to Armenia, Georgia, Iran, Turkey, and even Russia) are not excluded.

� Third, the analytical community has already registered an ebb of the “wave of ethnicity” andthe emergence of another, ethnoconfessional, wave. Applied to Azerbaijan, this means thatthe axiological-normative and ideological aspects of ethnopolitical security will come to thefore to be realized by means of the strategic course aimed at the country’s economic, politi-cal, and technological modernization expected to create a successful social and ethnic modelof a polyethnic society attractive to all.

� Fourth, in the context of the New Big Game, the Greater Middle East, the Caucasian Chess-board, and other geopolitical projects, the Republic of Azerbaijan should switch to a combina-torial strategy of its national security as a whole, and of ethnopolitical security in particular.

� Fifth, the emerging regional geopolitical realities make it possible to add vigor to Azerbaijan’sethnopolitical strategy. The nearly 20-year history of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict hasshown that it looks different when seen from outside the country (from the West) or inside it. Inthe West, the “oil for land” formula sounds very much like a “commodity for commodity” dealand is unsuitable for strategic moves. Azerbaijan’s stronger sovereignty and its political, eco-nomic, and military might make it possible to convert the old formula into a new one: “energysecurity of the West in exchange for ethnopolitical security of Azerbaijan;” this has moved theold formula into a qualitatively new system of coordinates, i.e. “value for value.”

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This analysis of the ethnopolitical security priorities of the Republic of Azerbaijan has demonstratedthat they are determined not only by the nature and configuration of the main threats, but also by the inte-grated approach to the national development strategy. This format of national-state development and thesecurity system is not related to the “external challenge-internal response” formula, but is shaped within thepolicy of historical responsibility for the formulation and realization of the country’s real, rather than im-agined, interests; it is geared at the best possible opportunities conducive to the best possible results andsustainable development of the region. This places Azerbaijan’s ethnopolitical security structure in a classof its own: it differs radically from the dissipative nature of similar systems in neighboring countries. Un-like Azerbaijan, which relies on its internal strength and the primordial nature of its ethnic and confessionalcharacteristics, its neighbors preserve their stability by relying on certain destructive principles: clericalradicalism in Iran; ethnocracy in Georgia; and national-chauvinism in Armenia.

In the first decade of the 21st century, Azerbaijan, which has already developed into a “region-state” (to borrow a term from Kenichi Ohmae)18 and is a driving force behind globalization, is pullingthe other national territories of the Caucasian region behind it. This is a great responsibility andshould be underpinned by a well-substantiated integral strategy.

18 See: K. Ohmae, The Next Global Stage: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World, WhartonSchool Publishing, 2005.