Sometimes I wonder whether a combination of mild climate and beautiful mountains necessarily begets mindless ethnic warfare. From the Balkans, to the Caucasus, to the Hindukush, to Jammu and Kashmir, stunning mountain landscapes seem to be unusually fertile grounds for particularly vicious warfare among peoples who should have more commonalities than differences. Of course, it is true that in premodern times mountain ranges created pockets of people geographically separated from each other, in deep valleys, unreachable in winter, who then developed their own cultural identities, even languages. But often, they were not separated well enough not to occasionally invite a violent raid from their neighbors one valley over, or worse, not separated enough not to sometimes intermarry and totally confuse the ethnic geography. It is also true that most mountain ranges are natural boundaries between large plains that have historically hosted large powerful empires, thus leaving the various smaller mountain tribes in a contentious buffer zone at the mercy of conflicting ambitious regional hegemons.
But then there is the exception:
Switzerland, which - with the exception of a period of Napoleonic occupation - has continuously existed for over seven hundred years as a multiethnic, multilingual and multi-confessional patrician confederation. If Switzerland is the only long-standing multiethnic mountain state that has for centuries avoided the seemingly inevitable fate of bloody internecine warfare, one wonders why it is that the West so often attempts to impose an American or Western European model of democracy in such conflict zones instead of trying a Swiss model? Clearly, the Swiss have figured out something about multiethnic coexistence that the rest of the world hasn't. Moreover, the Western nation-state concept carries with it some seriously lethal historical baggage that is becoming increasingly problematic. The central problem with the Western conception of the nation-state is that it evolved out of feudal empires and continues to propagate an international legal order more appropriate to interactions among feudal lords than representative democratic administrations.
Earlier this summer, I was in Münster, Germany, for my sister's wedding. Münster just so happens to be the site of the signing of the
Treaty of Westphalia. The city hall, where the treaty was signed, has been meticulously restored from the rubble of World War II and can be visited for a nominal admission price. The wood paneling in the Treaty Hall is original and was carefully saved before the Royal Air Force levelled the town. Apart from ending decades of bloody warfare among Catholics and Protestants across the European continent, the Treaty of Westphalia is responsible for enshrining two international legal concepts that continue to wreak havoc today. The first is that the treaty reconfirmed the earlier
Treaty of Augsburg, which created the doctrine of
cuius regio, eius religio - "whose reign, that religion", or "in the Prince's land, the Prince's religion". It essentially allowed any feudal lord to impose his faith on the people within his realm. With or without reference to Augsburg or Westphalia, this concept, combined with the patchwork feudal geography of the Old World, is largely responsible for the evolution of different religious and ethnic identities among otherwise proximate peoples, frictions between which continue to inspire violent conflict today, even if
cuius regio, eius religio has largely been replaced with freedom of worship.
The second concept enshrined by the Treaty of Westphalia is the concept of "national sovereignty" that endures to the present. The concept hasn't really changed much: within a country's recognized international boundaries, the sovereign ruler has absolute control without foreign interference. The difference, of course, is that at the signing in Münster the present sovereigns were all feudal lords or their emissaries. When the USA and France became the first democracies to emerge from feudal backgrounds, both created a powerful executive branch united in a single person (Switzerland, by contrast, has a seven-member Federal Council as its executive branch). This person was given constitutional powers similar to those of a king: to represent the country abroad and fight wars, if need be.
In an age of powerful feudal neighbors led with single-minded purpose by absolute rulers, an executive branch unified in a single person, able to react quickly to military challenges from feudal competitors, was presumably essential to national survival. As democracy advanced to more and more countries, however, national sovereignty and the unified executive become more and more problematic. For one, the combined powers of the unified executive office become an irresistible attraction for persons with insatiable ambition and can lead to such anti-democratic aberrations as witnessed in the Third Reich. Secondly, there is that intractable question of what constitutes "the people" that is supposed to have sovereign power in a democracy?
Enter Wilsonianism to confuse things even more. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to put American power behind an idealistic commitment to national self-determination. But even when Wilson pronounced his Fourteen Points at Versailles, it was clear that his concept of self-determination applied only to nations recently invaded during World War I, but not, for example, to French and British colonies outside Europe, let alone old medieval countries, such as Scotland, long ago incorporated into larger modern nation-states. With the establishment of the United Nations, national sovereignty, inviolability of territorial borders and the right to self-determniation became codified in the most ambitious international legal charter to date. But even the UN Charter skirts the issue of defining the central operative terms of these all-important principles: What is a "nation" that can exercise that right to self-determination? Who is a proper representative of a "sovereign" state? What borders are legitimate?
This is the central legal schizophrenia that makes the present international regime totally useless for resolving ethnic separatist warfare: the right to self-determination of peoples simply cannot coexist with the concept of inviolability of borders and national sovereignty. Precisely because concepts of ethnicity and nationality are malleable terms that evolve over time and cannot be pinned down, and because most modern nation-states harbor some minorities that at some point could decide to secede, international politics has been reluctant to address these conflicting legal atavisms surviving from the Treaty of Westphalia. Instead, the world has been hobbling along from conflict to conflict on an ad-hoc basis that only creates bad precedents ripe for exploitation by ruthless opportunists.
The latest victims of this international legal inconsistency are the Georgians, Ossetitans and Abkhazians. The present Georgian conflict would not be possible without these legal contradictions. What's more, it has been vastly complicated and intensified by the shortsighted and inconsistent behavior of the West in other recent attempts at resolving ethnic conflicts. In the case of Yugoslavia, territorial integrity was sacrificed for the sake of the right to self-determination of Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians and Bosnians. But then, in the case of Bosnia and Croatia, territorial integrity was upheld against Serbian (and at one time Croatian) separatist claims of independent self-determination. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the West insists on maintaining the territorial integrity of each state, but then, earlier this year, the West again sacrificed the territorial integrity of Serbia to grant self-determination to the Kosovar Albanians and carve out an independent Kosovar state.
If that parade of inconsistencies makes you worry about what, if anything, is left of the concepts of territorial integrity and national self-determination, rest assured that national sovereignty isn't faring any better. The US and its NATO allies threw national sovereignty out the window when, in 1999, they decided to intervene militarily against what was then still the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, in order to presumably save Kosovar Albanians against impending genocide at the hands of Milosevic's henchmen. The UN eventually acquiesced to this technical violation of its founding Charter. The concept of national sovereignty finally became a total joke when George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq returned the world system to a regime of 'might makes right'.
For the current Russian intervention in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the 1999 humanitarian intervention against Yugoslavia and the recognition of an independent Kosovo earlier this year are the main legal model. This is evident in the meticulous preparations the Russians made for the tactical trap that Mikheil Saakashvili walked straight into. Vladimir Putin's move, a while back, of giving Russian passports to all Abkhazians and South Ossetians who asked, was only a thinly veiled Trojan horse. It was specifically designed to permit Russia to invoke Article 51 of the UN Charter to intervene in Georgia in defense of its own "citizens" anytime it perceived a threat from the Georgian government.
What is amazing about the Russian intervention is not that it occurred - Russia has been obsessed with sabotaging Georgia's sovereignty for over fifteen years, at least, and this particular assault was planned long in advance - what is truly amazing is the colossal stupidity of the Saakhashvili regime in confronting the Russian threat. In light of the very long Russian policy of keeping the Caucasus in a restive state of subservience, it is mind-boggling how naive and shortsighted Saakashvili has been in steering his country. But we are getting ahead of things.
First, let's review the recent history of Georgian-Russian relations. The Georgian quest for independence in the wake of Soviet disintegration in 1989 was not without severe bloodletting. On April 9, 1989, Soviet troops brutally massacred unarmed demonstrators using bayonets, sharpened shovels and chemical weapons. Out of the independence struggle, Zviat Gamsakhurdia - a bona fide anti-Soviet dissident, but also an incredibly vain nationalist with a massive Oedipal complex (his father Konstantine is considered one of the greatest Georgian poets) - emerged as the first elected president of the newly independent country. Although Gamsakhurdia's ultimate downfall was engineered in Moscow, the country's main problems stem largely from his destructive autocratic reign.
It is one of the tragedies of some post-Communist countries that their first rulers often came from the ranks of nationalist anti-Communist dissidents. As nationalists, these individuals were often ill-equipped to acknowledge and celebrate the multi-ethnic heritage of their countries. Doing so could have prevented the internecine warfare that in most cases caused a loss of precisely the territorial integrity these nationalists wanted to conserve. It was the same with Gamsakhurdia. With his calls of "Georgia for the Georgians" - a silly idea in a country of 5 million, of which only 3.5 million were ethnic Georgians - and the revocation of partial autonomy for South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Adjara, he quickly alienated the Abkhaz, Ossetian, Armenian and Adjar minorities and created a wide opening for Russian manipulation down the line. But more immediately, Gamsakhurdia, the ex-dissident, threatened to unravel old Nomenklatura power networks within Georgia. The old elite soon started to see Gamsakhurdia as a problem and Moscow as an ally in eliminating him.
Originally, one of Gamsakhurdia's pillars of support was a monastic fascist warrior clique known as the "Mkhedrioni" (knights). These thugs harrassed the Ossetian and Abkhaz populations and often engaged in skirmishes with separatist militias. Yet, it was precisely these fascist warriors that turned against Gamsakhurdia in 1991, when Moscow helped organize a coup against the president, principally by supplying Gamsakhurdia's opponents with weapons (despite an official stance of non-interference in the internal affairs of Russia's neighbors). Suddenly, the opposition was well armed while the followers of the sitting president were running out of ammunition. After a few weeks of street fighting, Gamsakhurdia was chased into exile in Chechnya and ultimately died of a bullet to his head under mysterious circumstances.
Gamasakhurdia's successor was none other than Eduard Shevardnadse. Better known in the West as the last Soviet foreign minister under Gorbachev, Shevardnadse also happened to have been regional KGB director in Georgia - in other words the very man who was responsible for Gamsakhurdia's imprisonment during his Soviet dissident years. The old Nomenklatura was back in power. But even Shevardnadse was soon to feel the limits of how far the ex-KGB marionette masters in the Kremlin allowed him to move. It is unclear who exactly was in charge of anything in particular during the disorganized years of Boris Yeltsin's reign in Moscow. But post-Soviet Russian interference in independent Georgia appears to have originated with a hardline faction of ex-KGB officers within the Kremlin, most probably including Putin and his acolytes. Their objective upon Shevardnadse's ascent to power was to ensure that Georgia signed the accession treaty to the CIS and agreed to a permanent stationing of Russian troops on Georgian soil.
To this end, Moscow destabilized Georgia by engineering a conflict in Abkhazia. The Mkhedironi and other nationalist Georgian militias were instigated to start skirmishes with their Abkhaz counterparts, the violent intensity of which threatened to break into all-out armed conflict, thus forcing Shevardnadse to intervene. When Georgian troops marched on the Abkhaz capital Sukhumi, they found themselves confronted with a sophisticated Abkhaz army, including aircraft, helicopters, heavy artillery, even naval support. Overnight, Moscow had armed the Abkhaz (who at that time constituted only 17% of the population within their territory) with the latest weaponry, leaving the Georgians outgunned. What's more, Moscow helped organize a volunteer Mujahideen regiment from the other Muslim areas of the Caucasus to assist their Abkhaz brethren in what was billed as a fight for an Abkhaz independence that never came.
(In one of the many ironies of history, the most celebrated commander of one of these Mujahiddeen units was none other than the Chechen
Shamil Bassayev. Like Shevardnadse, he too would soon see the unreliability of Moscow's support. When the Chechens demanded independence from Russia, Yeltsin turned his guns on Grozny. But Russia soon earned the blowback for arming the Chechen Mujahideen when they were convenient pawns in a fight to control Georgia. Bassayev became a leading front-line commander of the Chechen militias, successfully inflicting massive losses on the Russians in the Battle of Grozny and later rising to infamy for orchestrating suicide bombings against Russian installations, as well as the notorious 2002 Moscow and 2004 Beslan hostage crises. He was killed by Russian special forces in 2006.)
Humbled by the military catastrophe in Abkhazia, Shevardnadse signed the CIS treaty and agreed to a stationing of Russian troops, while the Abkhaz had effectively cleansed Abkhazia of Georgians. Through deft political maneuvering Shevardnadse managed to disarm the Mkhedrioni and other militias, thereby temporarily defusing one of Moscow's main avenues for making a mess. But Moscow was soon to punish Shevardnadse for yet another major transgression, which is at the root of the present conflict. In the summer of 1995, Shevardnadse signed a contract with major American oil companies regarding the construction of the Trans-Caucasian oil pipeline. Originally, the pipeline was meant to go across Russian territory in Chechnya. But due to the political instability in Chechnya and thanks to Shevardnadse's deft maneuvering, the pipeline was now contracted to go from Baku via Tblissi to the Georgian port of Gori and the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Shevardnadse nearly paid with his life for this insolence. The ink on the agreement had barely dried when, in August 1995, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt, undoubtedly planned in Moscow.
It is astounding in light of this recent history alone, that Mikheil Saakashvili was not more circumspect in his dealings with Moscow or more careful in confronting South Ossetia. Saakashvili's election in the wake of the 2003 "Rose Revolution" was widely hailed in the West as an advance of democracy. And, indeed, it marked at least a significant weakening, if not an end, of the old Georgian Nomenklatura. But Saakashvili is not the squeaky clean democrat that the Western media like to portray. Saakashvili is not above sending thugs to intimidate independent media outlets or proclaiming a state of emergency to crack down on dissidents. Earlier this year,
he committed the very act for which the Rose Revolution deposed his predecessor. In this January's elections, it appears that Saakashvili manipulated the vote at least to such an extent as to avoid a runoff against his strongest contender. The European reluctance to support Saakashvili is in part due to their greater awareness of his, shall we say, "inconsistent" record as a genuine democrat.
In the case of Shevardnadse's failed military adventure in Abkhazia there was at least an element of surprise. Shevardnadse could not have known that the numerically insignificant Abkhaz had overnight been armed by the Russians and had recruited support from their Muslim neighbors.
Saakashvili's blunder is far more severe. The script for Moscow's intervention was practically out in public for everyone to read. Small nations tend to have a
vastly overinflated idea of their importance in the international order generally, and of their importance as allies to specific great powers. This tendency, combined with Saakashvili's own huge ego, certainly contributed to some of his miscalculations. But to think that during a US election year, with the ongoing dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, perceived present threats from Iran and Afghanistan, instability in Pakistan and a continuing background terror threat Georgia would figure significantly enough in the Western security perception that the US or NATO would support Georgia against a Russian aggression was downright delusional.
Undoubtedly, Moscow played a major role in stoking conflict by using South Ossetian militias to provoke the Georgian military. And certainly the columns of Russian tanks in Gori and Poti bring back troubling memories from Prague and elsewhere. But the telegenic Cold War imagery in and of itself does not guarantee international support. Putin correctly calculated that the West would not risk military confrontation with Russia over Georgia. Indeed, chief among the sceptics' objections to an admission of Georgia to NATO was that it had only tenuous control over its border areas and could potentially get NATO involved in a war with Russia.
While the sceptics may see their views vindicated by recent events, it is actually Putin who is the tragic figure in this sorry spectacle. The entire psychological impetus behind his neo-tsarist/imperialist ambitions stems from the humiliation he perceived while observing the disintegration of the old Russian empire at the hands of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Like the classical tragic hero who has been foretold a fate that he cannot accept, Putin has thrown all of his energies towards forestalling any further encroachment of NATO onto Russia's traditional spehere of influence. Yet, the more he he tries, the more he tiwsts the arms of his neighbors, the more he bludgeons them with Russia's military might, the more he accelerates the centrifugal forces that push Russia's former Soviet satellites away from Moscow and toward the EU or China. Already, Poland and the Czech Republic have accelerated previously stalled agreements with the US regarding the stationing of anti-ballistic missile defense installations.
Putin - and I keep saying Putin because Medvedev evidently lacks any agency of his own - is firmly a man of yesterday. Make that the day before yesterday. The clicque that runs Russia has been so deeply brainwashed to serve a paranoid Stalinist empire that its rulers are unable to see the present world for what it is. Yet, the new Russia is not exactly an evil empire. At least not in Stalinist terms. Its nastiness is more in the style of the evil bitch from
'Dynasty', using her oil wealth to stab competitors in the back and avenge perceived cases of past humiliation. It would be fatally wrong for the West to interpret the standoff over Georgia as the beginning of a new Cold War. Such a route would be
a dead end for both the West and Russia. It overinflates Russia's importance and distracts both Russia and the West from the real challenges.
At a time when even the Arab Emirates have realized that crude oil is a finite resource and that their economies urgently need to be diversified, Russia's economy is a distinctly anachronistic one-trick pony. Russia's present strategic weight derives solely from its ability to turn off the heat in Europe in winter. But that is a temporary plateau. Putin and his circle have not planned ahead for the coming age of renewable energy sources. Europe will become more and more independent of Russia, both in energy terms (
Denmark is already), as well as politically. Indeed, the manner in which Russia dealt with Georgia will only accelerate this trend. But while Russia obsesses about imaginary European threats from yesteryear, China is advancing unimpeded. The juxtaposition of the immaculately choreographed Olympic Games in a postmodern Beijing with the imprecise, brutal assault on Tskhinvali and Gori could not have been more poignant.
The main challenge for the West now is to figure out what exactly its long term strategy towards Russia should be. It was one of the grave Western failures of the post-Soviet period to miss the opportunity to redefine NATO in an inclusive manner that left an open door for Russia, rather than leaving a structure that basically invited Russia's old satellites to defect but explicitly kept Russsia itself out. It will be difficult to reformulate policies with a congenitally paranoid Putin/Medvedev regime. But it must be done urgently. But a candidate who advocates kicking Russia out of the G-8 is certainly the
wrong person for the job.
In any case, the Georgian disaster will only further muddle the state of international law. It is a tragedy that the US opposed the re-election of Boutros Boutros-Ghali as Secertary-General of the United Nations. As part of his
Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali advocated for the establishment of a standing UN intervention force that could be automatically deployed to international hotspots without having to go through the cumbersome appropriations and authorizations process currently needed for UN observer missions. He also advocated recalibrating the international legal regime to make it more responsive in addressing intra-state conflics, which all secessionist movements in their initial stages are.
As long as the world cannot agree to see the positive value of limiting national sovereignty for the sake of providing tangible legal protection for minorities within sovereign states, it will always be the first impulse of any oppressed group to push for independence and international recognition. For, under the current legal regime, only sovereignty can provide legal rights against foreign aggressors. As long as that is the case, groups will find it in their interest to stress differences with their neighbors rather than similarities. Demagoguery, identity politics, revanchism and fascism will continue to find receptive audiences in conflict zones. There is at present no systemic incentive for cooperation and maintaining the integrity of amulti-ethnic state. And as long as nation-states remain domains chcarcterized by the identity politics of ethnic membership, the impulses towards violence will remain strong. The threat of ethnic warfare will continue to hover over our heads like Damocles's sword.
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