Grigory Afanasyan
Expert
Stepanakert
When a big country is about to collapse, not only the newly created, but also all, large and small constituent countries, are trying to escape. The fear drives them far off the maternal nucleus, meanwhile the latter gets rid of the needless ballast with pleasure. When a big ship sinks, the only one slogan is save yourself as you can, enabling people to escape from the ruins of the destroyed statehood that produced huge energy, not sparing anybody or anything.
The citizens of post-Soviet republics have fully suffered all these negative phenomena. Development of the nationalism, aimed at preservation of the broken down and outdated statehood, to the contrary, had a negative impact on the people from other ethnic groups, provoking wars and clashes. As a boomerang it got back, estranging people from each other, destroying states and breaking peace between them.
The latent conflicts in the post-Soviet space are ready to flare up and cause a huge conflagration. The Azerbaijani, Georgian and Moldavian republics are still unable to recognize Nagorny Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria as a reality, although the states are different, and the time is different as well.
It is, certainly, a moral aspect of the state entities; meanwhile the innate aspect is hidden in the persistent “territorial integrity.” The energy of thinking, lying within the metropolitan states and aimed at the solution of the new with old ways, is counter-productive. So there is no surprise that the concepts of the self-determination and territorial integrity, not opposing to each other, in their unity compose the truth of the newly formed states.
In the Soviet period Armenia developed “planned-and-dynamically,” living on the subsidies from the Center, and it is still going on like that now by inertia. The disintegration of the country, transition to the new levels of relations between the state and its citizens has taken out of the depths of the consciousness the ideas of property and freedom of individual. Free citizens, burdened with old, obsolete things and heavily inertial, determined the free status of the Republic. The country, its citizens, not habituated to the new economic conditions, understood and took the markets relations according to their ordinary consciousness. The moral losses, the common stressed conditions of the people, caused by the collapse of the state were combined with the huge earthquake that devastated many cities and regions of the republic.
Many states and people helped Armenia in rehabilitation of the destroyed economy. The war that Azerbaijan unleashed against the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic aggravated the situation. The country, having passed through some spiral of development, now faces the choice: the Eurasian Union or the European integration.
As a matter of fact there is no choice here: both are nothing but a European integration with a Eurasian vector of development. In this sense, Armenia will have to do much work much within itself and outside: with its neighbors, Azerbaijan and Georgia. The leaders of these republics keep pulling the blanket on themselves and crying out for the “territorial integrity,” are ready to unleash wars, but they forget or do not want to speak about the fact that the material wealth that they have got also belongs to us: Armenians, including Karabakhians, Abkhazians, South-Ossetians, Transnistrians, Russians, who have contributed their own labor to the formation and creation of the given republics.
The Eurasian Union, declaring the equality of large and small states, provides Nagorny Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria the possibility to join this entity, also reserving the right to secede. But the question is whether, are the states ready to accept the newly formed republics in the Eurasian Union? In the visible future – no, as far as they are in the stage of establishment themselves.
The first touchstone in the early 1990s was Karabakh, and the fate of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics depended on the solution of its problem. But, alas, in those conditions under the authoritarian government and impossibility of the free will of the people, the country collapsed: it could not be otherwise. Now the problem works in the reverse direction, i.e. as a necessity of the revival of a new union.
Now the task is more complicated: Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria are coming along with Karabakh. At the same time, the former Soviet republics are at a stage of development and transition from the authoritarian manner of governance to normal, democratic ways, letting us see a flickering light in the end of the long tunnel of transformations.
Now the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic is not a touchstone, but a philosopher’s stone for the future union, stimulated by the economic crisis in this inter-dependent world. It is true that all are striving toward Europe, but at the same time the European civilization is going to Eurasia, this vast space.
The temporary non-recognition of the new states, the blockade of their communications stimulate moral-spiritual crises. The first wave of the Karabakh movement has been followed by the second one: “the Arab spring.” The next one – European is following it, and the American, Eurasian are about to start. So the moral and spiritual revival and development of the states, their birth and renovation are in progress now.
When we consider the Eurasian space, we see the colossal transformations, developing in this region of the planet. Actually, there is a unification of the states of all parts of the world into a common information-technological space with appropriate changes in the political and economic fields. The global energy problem of the mankind has put forward new tasks that can be tackled only through joint efforts.
The possibility of using the rich natural resources makes the European countries moving to the east in the direction of the renovated Russia, possessing colossal energy potential and becoming one of the centers of the new world.
This is a movement of the countries and peoples in the appropriate mutually beneficial directions: stability and prosperity. One of the problems of the Eurasian Union is to solve the priority task: preservation of peace between countries and peoples. The disintegration of a big state already supposes its unification, but on some new principles and approaches, turned toward the human being, his/ her dignity, protection of the main human rights, freedom of individual and freedom of property.
