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Abstract
Despite its early promise, Armenia’s transition to democracy has stalled. The literature on post-Communist transitions ascribes this outcome to the autocratic preferences of its first generation of leaders, and particularly the country’s first president Levon Ter-Petrossian. I argue in this article that that literature depicts a profoundly distorted picture of the Armenian politics of the 1990s. The failure of Armenia’s transition was primarily due to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the political processes it set in motion.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Rachel Goshgarian for her comments and editorial help.
Notes
1 See the reports of the observation missions of the Office of the Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) of the Organization of the Security and Cooperation in Europe available at http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/armenia.
2 See the reports on Armenia by the Human Rights Watch, available at: https://www.hrw.org/publications?keyword=&date%5Bvalue%5D%5Byear%5D=&country%5B%5D=9581.
3 Pan-Turkism or pan-Turanism was the doctrine of unifying all Turkic speaking groups under the banner of the Ottoman Empire. It became popular among Turkish nationalists in the early twentieth century (Lewis Citation1968, 343–352). Many Armenians consider this doctrine incompatible with the continued existence of an Armenian population in the Caucasus. Some also insist that the Armenian Genocide was the consequence of this doctrine.
4 Armenians comprised more than 90% of Karabagh’s population in 1921, but only 67% in 1988.
5 The statement is a response to a speech about the threat of pan-Turanism delivered in the Supreme Soviet by Zory Balayan, who was a prominent old-school nationalist (for both Balayan’s speech and the Karabagh Committee’s response, see Libaridian Citation1991, 151–156).
6 The Armenian Cause is the ideology of achieving recognition of the Armenian genocide by Turkey and compensation for that crime. It also envisions restoration of Armenian sovereignty over historic Armenia, much of which is in modern-day Turkey. This ideology went hand in hand with the traditional nationalist narrative.
7 A question arises as to why the conflict escalated if the Armenian government was willing to make compromises. The answer is that Azerbaijan adopted a position that was equivalent to demanding capitulation, then militarized the conflict in 1991–1992. For accounts corroborating this claim, see Melander (Citation2001, 69–70) and de Waal (Citation2003, chapter 8).
8 The Armenian economy was particularly heavily industrialized and tied to the Soviet defense industry.
9 The word can be translated as “protectors of the country.”
10 In the same article where he spoke about the proposal to remove Ter-Petrossian from office temporarily, Siradeghyan described the Interior Ministry as a counterweight to “ambitions of the thousands of officers of two victorious armies” (that is, the armies of Armenia and Karabagh), and criticized the bosses of the ANM for failing to see it. With his removal, the merging of the Interior and National Security Ministry, and the appointment of Serge Sargsyan, that counterweight was gone. See Harutyunyan, “The Coup Was Going to Take Place in the Spring of 1995.”
11 The very constitutionality of Kocharyan’s candidacy was a problem, as the Armenian constitution demanded that a candidate for the presidency must have been a resident of Armenia for the past 10 years.
12 Demirchyan became the chairman of the National Assembly and Vazgen Sargsyan became the prime minister.
13 The Armenian constitution imposes a limit of two consecutive terms on the president, which meant Kocharyan was not eligible to run. It is a minor consolation that, unlike many other authoritarian leaders in the post-Soviet space, Kocharyan did not try to change the constitution to do away with that limit.
14 For some recent examples, see Herszenhorn (Citation2015) and Mulcare (Citation2015). A Google search for “Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis” identifies 623 items.
15 This was true of other highly industrialized and urbanized parts of the Soviet Union as well. As Moshe Lewin (Citation1995, 63) correctly and elegantly points out, the Soviet Union “began with the bulk of society being composed of a rather primitive, not very dynamic peasantry, facing an action-oriented bureaucratic state, and ended with a complex urban society, pushing for change, facing a stagnating bureaucratic state – quite a turnover!” See also Suny (Citation1993).
16 The claims by Levitsky and Way, and Fisher that the West failed to exercise its leverage over Ter-Petrossian because it was blind to his autocratic nature is puzzling. As I have already pointed out, Ter-Petrossian and his administration were heavily and unfairly criticized for persecuting the opposition for “manipulating elections” and putting restrictions on the media. As Levitsky and Way report, the USA also reduced Armenia’s foreign aid following the 1996 elections. There have also been allegations, which unfortunately have triggered no interest among Western journalists, that the USA deliberately undermined Ter-Petrossian. Gerard Libaridian (Citation2014) has claimed that the American ambassador to Armenia actively and inappropriately supported the opposition during the presidential campaign of 1996, which emboldened the opposition to engage in violence. Libaridian has also claimed that a senior US diplomat expressed enthusiasm about Kocharyan replacing Ter-Petrossian during a private conversation with him in 1998, saying that Ter-Petrossian was too weak to deliver a solution on Karabagh, while Kocharyan was more likely to succeed given his credibility as a hardliner.
17 This argument is corroborated by the fact that articles criticizing Ter-Petrossian’s ostensibly autocratic nature began appearing in the American media before the events that later became the empirical backbone of the “Ter-Petrossian, the autocrat” narrative. See, for example, “Armenia: Presidential Hegemony” (Citation1994) and LeVine (Citation1995).
18 Bonn International Center for Conversion ranks Armenia as the fourth most militarized state in the world. See http://gmi.bicc.de/uploads/pdf/GMI_Daten_2013_e.pdf.
19 It is a firm conviction of Ter-Petrossian’s that peace with neighbors is not only a desirable end in itself, but a prerequisite for democratic development. See Ter-Petrossian (Citation2018).