Friday, October 8 2021 15:50

ArmInfo.The idea of concessions on Karabakh arose in the Armenian political discourse from the moment of the definition of political identity, the construction of a state  in Armenia by this very Karabakh. Sergey Markedonov, the leading  researcher at the Euro-Atlantic Security Center of the MGIMO  Institute for International Studies, expressed this opinion at the  international "Caucasus in the 21st Century" conference organized by  the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan.  "In my opinion, the concessions  on Karabakh are far from the result of the events of 2020, it all  started much earlier.

In November 2020, we witnessed not only a radical breakdown of the  status quo from 1994 in the Karabakh conflict as a result of the  military defeat of Armenia. It became clear that this whole situation  was largely the result of many years of processes concerning the  state and political identity of post-Soviet Armenia, "he said.  In  this much broader context, Markedonov considers it obvious the issue  of the extent to which Nagorno-Karabakh remains the central element  of Armenian political and state identity today. To understand the  degree of readiness of the Armenian society to fight for Karabakh,  whether it considers it a priority, the future foreign policy  positioning of Armenia, in the analyst's opinion, it is necessary to  turn to the events of 30 years ago, having analyzed the situation in  the last years of the USSR.

In this light, Markedonov stressed that it was Karabakh that played a  mobilizing role in Armenia's struggle for independence. That is an  external factor, given that it was not formally part of the Armenian  SSR. In other words, it was Miatsum that awakened the Armenians'  striving for independence. After that, this movement quickly became  overgrown with anti-Sovietism, which largely predetermined the  formation of the Armenian national-state project.

Accordingly, giving this largely internal problem a foreign policy  character.  The analyst noted that the first serious intellectual  dispute on the issue of the price of Karabakh for Armenia took place  in 1997 in the form of the publication of the then underestimated,  famous article by Levon Ter-Petrosyan.  Even then, the first  president of Armenia clearly formulated that it is possible to defend  the Armenian identity, but it is extremely difficult, given that the  price is quite costly: regional isolation, economic lag, unilateral  foreign policy dependence, etc. But in 1998, the idea of possible  compromises on honorable terms was rejected. "In the future, we saw  the instrumentalization of the Karabakh factor - Karabakh now began  to associate with the retention of power in Armenia by the Karabakh  clan. This became an extremely important moment in the absolutization  of the value of Karabakh in the minds of the masses. The situation  became even worse in March 2008 as a result of rumors that mass riots  in Yerevan were suppressed by the Karabakh military, etc. As a  result, the idea of Karabakh in Armenia began to form as a burden  that impedes its development, "he said. Thus, the situation that had  developed by 2020, according to the analyst, was not only related to  Nikol Pashinyan's position. Noting the readiness of society to  transgress the country's leader in the past, Markedonov recalled that  in 2020 there was no powerful surge in the volunteer movement in  Armenia. Which allows us to speak about the fatigue of the Armenian  society from the Karabakh conflict. And the events of November 2020  should be appropriately characterized as a consequence of this  fatigue.