Laurence Broers, Associate Fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House, argues that “Western engagements in the South Caucasus remain quite diffuse, tactical, ad hoc, and reactive.” He delivered a speech at a conference on “The South Caucasus: Trends and prospects in the context of the war in Ukraine,” organized by the Caucasus Institute in Yerevan on March 20, 2024.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has put the South Caucasus back on the map, as it were, of Western policymaking. But alongside the opportunities that have presented, we’ve also seen significant limits to Western influence in the region. Western engagements in the South Caucasus remain quite diffuse, tactical, ad hoc, and reactive. And this is not surprising given the region’s longer-term de-prioritization in Western capitals. Western, especially American, interests in the region, have often been derivative of more vital interests elsewhere. And in recent years, regional policies were effectively downgraded to customized bilateral approaches.
In 2020, the second Karabakh war provided a starkly negative audit of Western influence and coherence in the South Caucasus. Multilateral frameworks embodying the liberal post-Cold War order collapsed as regional powers Turkey and Russia decided outcomes. And this has resulted in a new saliency to bilateral relations between individual Western and South Caucasus states and a divergence between a Euro-Atlantic core, which is itself internally differentiated, and nominal allies who do not wear their Western alliance hats in the South Caucasus or Black Sea area. So in terms of specific impacts that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, I’d like to highlight three trends.
Three trends
The first is that Euro-Atlantic actors find themselves in open and direct competition with a declining but still capable Russia in a theater of secondary strategic interest. So competition over outcomes in the South Caucasus has become more explicit, more zero-sum, less implicit. And this is a situation that has put pressure on compartmentalization with Russia, as strategies seeking to seal off or firewall certain issues and arenas from wider tensions in the relationship. And some of the most visible symbols of compartmentalization, namely the OSCE Minsk Group, no longer exist.
Second, Russian-Western polarity and competition has been tempered by the growing roles of other actors in the region. The geographies in the South Caucasus have been changing for some time now, and we see a much greater salience and presence of Middle Eastern actors in the region, in particular. So we can’t really talk about South Caucasus geopolitics in terms of just a Russian-Western divide or binary. Russian-Western competition no longer defines the horizons of possible geopolitical trajectories, as other actors and factors have become more significant. And what you see in the region today is a series of nested strategic triangles that limit and constrain the overarching dynamics.
Thirdly, the Ukraine war has allowed for greater agency amongst the regional states, which are all in different ways engaged in balancing strategies and hedging strategies, seeking advantage, or at least to minimize disadvantage, from both the West and Russia. And this is what you might call the opportunism of liminality, the opportunism of existing in the margins. So in the margins of this wider confrontation, the regional states have all sought to maximize their room for maneuver at a time of great power distraction. And this has taken different forms.
In Azerbaijan, we’ve seen militarization, we’ve seen authoritarian renewal. President Ilham Aliyev has secured his power until at least 2031. He has a new brand of nationalist legitimacy. And he has been downgrading relationships with Western partners.
In Armenia, we’ve seen democratic renewal, Russian divestment, and efforts towards both upgraded relationships and partnerships with Western actors and multi-alignment beyond a Russian-Western divide.
And in Georgia, we’ve seen a very ambiguous situation, or a kind of intentional ambiguity, flowing from nominal commitments to European integration, combining with experimentation with authoritarian practices. So experimentation with authoritarian learning, most obviously, of course, in the aborted efforts to adopt a “foreign agents” law last year. So this is a kind of a hedging strategy led by the political elite that is nevertheless at odds with popular sentiments in the country.
So three points can be made about all of these trends. While we do see radical changes, we also see a lot of continuity. All of these trends are not new. They preceded the Ukraine war, but they have been amplified and given new scope, a new lease of life, by the war in Ukraine. So we have continuity and amplification of pre-existing trends.
Secondly, these trends are fracturing the South Caucasus, because they’re taking South Caucasus states in different directions. They identify different horizons, different models.
And the third observation is that this divergence illustrates the limits to a regional policy. Some local actors want less of the West, some actors want more, and some want some of what the West has to offer, but not the whole package.
So how have Western actors responded to this very challenging context? We see a very uneven balance sheet. There has, on the one hand, been a growing tension between interests and norms in Western actors’ understanding of their role in the South Caucasus, particularly for the European Union as a multilateral entity that foregrounds normative harmonization as a key element of its relationship with neighboring regions. Interests have prevailed over normative considerations in some reactive policymaking, making policy on the hoof, in the heat of the moment, such as the gas supply extension deal signed with Azerbaijan in July 2022. We also see a more geopolitical approach to enlargement in awarding Georgia candidate status in December of last year.
There has also been an uneven record of expansions by Euro-Atlantic actors into new roles. Alongside expanding its role as an energy consumer, the European Union in particular has sought to expand into both existing and new roles. It stepped up into a mediation role between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but was humiliated alongside the United States and Russia in September of last year.
Azerbaijan’s military operation was a vigorous assertion of compartmentalization in that country’s relations with Euro-Atlantic partners. The EU has also expanded its security presence by mobilizing a second monitoring mission in the region, in an unusual show of policy, speed, and agility. And as of December, the EU has posited the possibility of its own geopolitical expansion into the region through the possibility of Georgia’s accession. So these expansions have been hit and miss. They show both the possibilities and the limits to Western influence, the ability to act and convert opportunities and mobilize in sometimes quite surprisingly quick ways, yet at the same time, the absence of an underlying strategy. Overall, we see a kind of default to the prior, customized approach to the region’s states.
And this is to a considerable extent a reflection of this region’s realities. Any regional policy in the South Caucasus has to compartmentalize and to customize. But customization also derives from a lack of strategic clarity over what Euro-Atlantic goals in this region actually are. The South Caucasus, with its protracted conflicts, its fractured geopolitics, and its elite society splits, defies coherent regional strategizing.
Four challenges devising a regional strategy
And I want to highlight four particular challenges to devising a regional strategy. The first is that there are alternatives to the West and everything that goes with it. In a world of democratic backsliding, there is greater pressure than ever before for norms not to constrain relationships that meet other needs. The challenge is how to assert the value of norms in a crowded marketplace, where local actors can, so to speak, go elsewhere.
A second challenge is that there is no big idea around which a regional strategy can be based. The nearest thing we have is the much-discussed connectivity, which for the EU means the Global Gateway, and the potentials of the Middle Corridor. While connectivity scenarios seem to promise a long-term role for Euro-Atlantic actors as a kind of technical-financial partner in macro-infrastructure, any values-based and sustainability-based approach to connectivity is going to meet with local resistance when it challenges local power configurations. And I think we should be very wary of the ways in which all of the peacebuilding discussion has been channeled into connectivity, as if connectivity is this de-politicizing, win-win context for all, that connectivity does rely on norms on sustainability. It’s not a way of circumventing that problematic politics.
The third challenge is that any regional strategy needs to deal with exceptionalism, whether that means exceptional spaces, such as Abkhazia and the South Ossetia or Tskhinvali region, or whether this means regime types that are openly hostile to liberal democracy.
And finally, bridging popular and elite perceptions of Western influence and linkages is a significant challenge. Popular trust in the European Union in Georgia and in Armenia, at least until September 2023, was higher than for any other international institution, with 79% of Georgians in favor of EU membership in autumn of last year. So the challenge is to bring and to keep elites on board with Europeanization in a region where political succession is thought about and handled in a very different way.
So for all of the change that we see in the last two years, we also see a lot of continuity in the South Caucasus. The region continues to be a fractured one that remains geopolitically undetermined and resistant to both foreign policy autonomy for its constituent actors and to stable hegemony under any outside power. In a recursive pattern, the South Caucasus has again assumed policy relevance because of events elsewhere, rather than because Western actors have clear and defined goals which they are prioritizing. A missing element is a clear vision or strategy for the region, as opposed to tactical policymaking derivative of interests elsewhere. So this might seem overall like a rather pessimistic outlook. But I think a pragmatic outlook that is cognizant of the limitations and possibilities for Western influence is better than the presumptive hegemony that characterized Western outlooks on the region in the 1990s and early 2000s. And it’s also the case, of course, that the rival, anti-Western project in illiberal regionalization also faces both similar and different problems.
