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#27 - JRL 2008-165 - JRL Home
From: "Rein Mullerson, Rein" <rein.mullerson@kcl.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008
Subject: Caucasus wars

Rein Mullerson
Professor of International Law
King's College, London

The Caucasian conflicts in the light of the emerging geo-political confrontation

‘It is not a battle of good against evil. It’s a war between forces that are fighting for the balance of power, and, when that type of battle begins, it lasts longer than others – because Allah is on both sides’ (Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist).

Rein Müllerson[1]

It may well be that 8/8/8 will signify not only the opening date of the Beijing Olympics but more importantly a crucial milestone in the evolution of international society not less significant that the collapse of the Soviet Union or the fall of the Berlin Wall and certainly overshadowing 9/11. What is emerging may not necessarily be a new Cold War but it seems quite certain that the world will not speak with one voice on most important security matters and the role of various international organisations will have to change dramatically. While the dragon is still quietly and wisely gaining strength and enjoying its 8/8/8 triumph, it has been the bear surrounded by hunters and their hunting dogs that has shown its teeth and claws.

In order to understand not only what has just happened or what is still going on in the Caucuses it is necessary to look not so much into the ancient and even not so ancient history – though it may help too, but to see the region and its ongoing conflicts in a wider context of the new geo-political struggle for the future of world order, including access to energy resources. In any case, only such an approach may show whether there are any more or less permanent and more or less satisfactory solutions to the conflicts in the Caucuses. What is certain is that no quick fix is possible, and even in the case of an improbable scenario of all external powers, including Washington, Brussels and Moscow, sincerely agreeing on a best way to proceed, the grievances, perceptions and misperceptions of those closely, personally and emotionally involved will not allow in the foreseeable future for any outcome that would be equally acceptable for all.

Although the proximate causes of the conflicts lie in the history of the region and are related to the policies of Joseph Stalin and Zviad Gamsakhurdia (the first President of the post-Soviet Georgia) the most important factor in today’s situation is that the external actors (first of all Washington and Moscow) have their conflicting global and regional interests and they are, using legal terminology, acting as principals while Georgian, Abkhazian and Ossetian leaders have to be seen as their agents, though often having their own agendas and even trying to manipulate the principals. Sometimes indeed the tail may wag the dog though only on secondary matters and usually when the dog itself doesn’t very much mind to be wagged. President Micheil Saakashvili of Georgia, maybe inadvertently, in one of his TV presentations revealed that it was not Georgia and its territorial integrity what was at stake. It is not a war of Russia with Georgia but with the West, he claimed. In a way, it is so. However, this also means that in the Caucasus it is the West that is at war against Russia.

If immediately after 9/11 quite a few American and other Western leaders may have sincerely believed that it was Islamist extremism and terrorism that constituted the most serious security challenge to the West as well as to the rest, today such perceptions belong to a great extent to the past. However, already in 1998 a RAND report ‘Sources of Conflict in the 21st Century’ prepared by Zalmey Khalilzad (now the US Ambassador to the UN) and Ian Lesser predicted four scenarios – the Great Game, the Clash of Civilizations, the Coming Anarchy and the End of History.[2] The authors, considering the last two scenarios less probable than the first two, seemed to favour the Great Game theory that would pitch the West, and first of all Washington, against China and Russia in a new Great Power Game, instead of seeing the Islamic threat as the most serious challenge to the United States. 9/11 may have changed these priorities, but only for a while.

In that respect an article by Robert Kagan in The Times[3] a year ago, and especially its title ‘Forget the Islamic threat, the coming battle will be between autocratic nations like Russia and China and the rest’, is most indicative. The title expresses particularly well the dilemma: whether nations, which have different social and political systems and cultures, will, notwithstanding their differences, work closely together in the face of common threats such as global warming, the shortage of energy resources, proliferation of WMD and terrorism or will they let differences in their domestic arrangements dominate their mutual relations. Robert Kagan, who wrote that ‘the future is more likely to be dominated by the ideological struggle among the great powers than by the effort of radical Islamists to restore an imagined past of piety’, advised that the US ‘should join with other democracies to erect new international institutions that both reflect and enhance their shared principles and goals – perhaps a new league of democratic states to hold regular meetings and consultations on the issues of the day’.[4] Kagan may have well been right that such a configuration of world politics hangs on the horizon, but such a new division of the world into hostile camps, if this is indeed what is now happening, is coming to fruition to a great extent due to the policies of those who follow Kagan’s recipes.

Laurence Jarvik, in an incisive article, mainly devoted to the role of Western NGOs in Central Asia[5], makes some insightful comments about the two most probable scenarios sketched by Khalilzad and Lesser. He believes that the interests of the United States and the international community as a whole would be better served if Washington, instead of encouraging forces (including some NGOs) that undermine the stability of states, whose domestic arrangements do not correspond to a liberal-democratic criteria, rather helped such states in their capacity-building. Undermining the stability of states in the hope of making them allies in a new Great Power Game against the likes of China or Russia would create new hotspots of instability and terrorism. One may agree with Michael Scheuer that ‘the Bush administration’s Cold War trait of preferring to fight and defeat nation-states immeasurably strengthened the much more dangerous transnational threat posed by the Sunni Islamists’.[6]

The matter is not that China and Russia are authoritarian and therefore don't behave like Western democracies. Pinochet's Chile followed Washington's advise quite closely. The matter is that China and Russia, like rising India and potentially also Brazil or some other emerging centre of power, refuse to become assimilated into an existing international power structures in terms over which their have no or have only little say. They may become 'responsible stakeholders', using the words of the former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, in the international community, if not in their own terms (also mission impossible, of course), then at least in terms that will be negotiated between more or less equal partners. Richard Sakwa, a British Russia expert, wrote this spring that ‘a type of constrained adaptation [of Russia] to the international system emerged in which the strategic direction was clear – integration without accession (although in the long term accession is not excluded) – but the pace and forms of integration would remain of Russia’s discretion’.[7] Instead of the term ‘accession’ I would use the term ‘assimilation’. Russia, like China, in contradistinction to smaller Eastern and Central European countries that are indeed trying to become, if sometimes only in appearance, more similar to Western liberal democracies, refuses to be assimilated into the existing system. Yeltsin’s Russia prompted by Western advisers tried such assimilatory policies but with rather disastrous consequences for its people. The matter is that what works, say, in the case of small states of Eastern and Central Europe may be completely alien for bigger countries with much bigger problems. Moreover, unfortunately, as Professor Sakwa observes ‘the international system today does not have a mechanism for integration of rising great powers’[8], whose terms of integration have to be negotiated, not dictated from Washington or Brussels. If China has used a much wiser and effective startegy of quiet resistence to the efforts of assimilation (be it over Tibet, Darfur, exchange rate of the renminbi or freedom of expression), Russia on the contrary is making too much noise over important as well as not so important issues. Partly such different reactions to the outside world may be due to national characteristics but partly they are also due to the fact that Russian and Western interests have come into starker conflict than Chinese and Western interests, though there is no doubt who will be (or already is) the main competitor of the West.

Having failed to integrate Russia by assimilating it, i.e. transforming it into a liberal-democratic market state that would follow the Washington consensus and join the American led liberal world order (a naïve and doomed to failure endevour, in any case), Washington and its closest allies, especially those geographically closest to Russia, are trying to contain Russia by expanding Nato to Georgia and Ukraine, planning to erect ballisitic missile defences close to Russia's borders and vying with Russia over the meanderings of energy pipelines.

In these great (or rather mean) games of geopolitics not only the Abkhasians, Georgians, Ossetians but also the Ukrainians and some other small nations are mainly pawns whose lives and well-being can be sacrificed for the sake of a future political world order. These games are not about democracy in the Caucuses, about sovereignty or territorail integrity of Georgia (remember the territorial integrity of Serbia over Kosovo), as the American leaders claim, neither are they about the 'responsibility to protect' South Ossetians, as the Russians assert, though many of those making such claims may be quite sincere since a line between deception and self-deception is often quite fine. This observation is as true today as it was in the 1920s and it has to be addressed to all the major players involved in the Caucasian conflicts.

I understand why one of the finest musicians of this century Valery Gergiev gave a concernt on the ruins of Tskhinvali destroyed by the Georgians. It was not because he is a friend of Putin; it was because he is an Ossetian. I understand why Eduard Shevardnadze condemned Russia for its invasion of Georgia and supported Shaakashvili or a popular (not less popular in Russia than in Georgia) Georgian actor and singer Vahktang Kikabidze sees faults only in Russia’s policies. He is a Georgian. Not because he is a friend of Shaakashvili. This is especially true in the case of Shevardnadze, who was deposed by Saakashvili as President of Georgia. Ernest Gellner wrote that ‘the political effectiveness of national sentiment would be much impaired if nationalists had as fine a sensibility to the wrongs committed by their nation as they have to those committed against it’.[9] Unfortunately, there aren't enough people who are be free of such tribal mentality; often it takes a lot of intellectual effort, courage and emotional maturity to see the other side of the story. However, for those who aren't so personally and emotionally involved it is necessary to listen to both sides, including people such as Gergiev and Shevardnadze, without taking at face value what they are trying to tell or sell you.

Matters such as democracy, human rights, even sovereignty and territorial integrity matter but they can be promoted or protected not by repeating them as mantras when accusing one’s opponents or adversaries of violating these values. In today’s world, more than during calmer or more stable times, these values can be upheld by revealing what is behind actions of those who is some circumstances seem to support these values while in different circumstances not only neglect but outrightly suppress them. The Kremlin didn't rush to protect Kosovo Albanians when they were suppressed by the Serbs. The White House didn't care about the territorial integrity of Serbia. On the contrary, Washington was behind the manipulative administration of the province that led to its de facto independence that, contrary to international law, was rashly recognised by quite a few Western governments. Moscow wouldn't have such an understanding of the independence strive the Abkhasians and Ossetians if Tbilisi were its friend and not an aspiring Nato member-state.

Washington wouldn't have cared more about democracy in Georgia than in Papua New Guinea hadn't it been strategically so close to the resurging Russia. Moreover, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline by-passing Russia meanders through the Georgian territory. Russia doesn't support Ossetians against Georgians because they valiantly fought against Nazi invaders. So did the Georgians. Kremlin's interest in the Ossetians and Abkhasians is mainly instrumental. Shortsighted and rash policies of the first Georgian President Zviad Gamsakhurdia who used the slogan ‘Georgia for Georgians’ and the current one Micheil Saakashvili towards these break-away territories gave Russia an opportunity that serious players of geopolitical games rarely fail to miss. Unfortunately, these small nations are used in global power games.

It is clear that neither Russian nor Nato leaders accept such an analysis. The first are full of sacred indignation that their motives are considered even remotly similar to those of the perfidious Anglo-Saxons while the latter resent being compared with treacherous heritors of Joseph Stalin (in both Georgia and Russia there are indeed too many people who revere the dictator). However, without such a Machiavellian approach we act in an Hobbesian world as if it were in a Lockean one. Robert Kagan, in his latest article in the Wall Street Journal[10], recognising that we still live and in the foreseeable future will live in the world that was so well analysed by Hans Morgethau where 'nations consistantly persue interests defined as power', makes an admirable intellectual summersault by claiming that, differently from what Morgenthau wrote, Western democracies and especially the United States bring morality into international politics and that ideology and regime type matter. Yes, they do matter, especially if we speak of Western European so-called post-modern or post-Westphalian international relations, but caution is in order. Sir Christopher Meyer not only more thruthfully follows the realist tradition but is more honest as well when he writes that he 'would bet a sackful of roubles that Russian foreign policy would not be one jot different if it were a fully functioning democracy of the kind that we appear keen to spread around the globe’.[11]

Mature liberal-democracies haven't, so far at least, indeed fought each other, but they, and especially Washington[12], have used force against the rest more often than anybody else. Not always have been such uses of force in accordance with international law or morality. Already in the 1920’s Carl Schmitt rather incisively wrote: ‘When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it is not a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. … The concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism. Here one can be reminded of a somewhat modified expression of Proudhon’s: whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat’. [13]

What kind of steps in the Caucuses may be expected depends to a great extent on what kind of the world the major powers, especially Washington, would prefer. If Washington believes that Russia cannot be a reliable partner for the West and therefore needs to be contained then Georgia as well as Ukraine should be granted Nato membership as quickly as realistically possible. Expelling Russia from G8, closing the prospect for WTO membership as well as othe measures may be useful. Europe is too dependent on Russia's oil and gas for meaningful economic sanctions to be realistically considered. In such a case Russia would probably de jure include the Georgian break-away territories into Russia and would try to stoke unrest in pro-Russian parts of Ukraine. The future of the Crimean peninsular will also become a serious bone of contention and I wouldn't bet that Russia would vacate its fleet from Sevastopol when in 2017 the 20 year lease expires. Ukrainian Nato membership will certainly precipitate a crisis over the Crimean peninsular and especially Sevastopol.

If, on the contrary, the West, including the US, believes that Russia, notwithstanding its inability and unwillingness to follow the Washington consensus and despite of its assertiveness in defending its economic and security interests, may be useful or sometimes even indispensible partner in resolving global concerns such as religiously motivated terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, global warming or energy and food shortages, then a different approach is needed. Of course, politicians never recognise that they are taking U-turns even if they are turning back from a precipice. However, that is what is needed to avoid further unpredictable escalation of the conflict in the region as well as tension in the wold as a whole. First, all the sides have to tone down the rhetoric. Then small practical steps may be beneficial. Unfortunately, by officially recognising independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia Russia responded in kind and acted as rashly as those Western states which recognised Kosovo thereby further opening the Pandora’s box of territorial disputes. Recognising independence of these two territories the Kremlin made, in my opinion, two big mistakes. First, due to these recognitions Moscow cannot expect support from those states, which otherwise would have understood or even welcomed Russia’s grandstand against Nato. China, India and the host of other states are extremely nervous about any encouragement their minorities may have for independence claims. Vacuous claims by some politicians that certain acts, like recognition of Kosovo or Abkhazia and South Ossetia, are completely different cases and don’t create precedents are as wrong in the Caucasus as they were in the Balkans. Differences, or parallels for that matter, are in the eye of the beholder. The tepid support given to Russia at the recent summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) only proves that, if any proof was needed. Secondly, having recognised these entities the Kremlin has played its trump cards. It would have been in Russia’s interest to keep these cards close to the chest to threaten to use them never actually throwing them on the table. It may, of course, all sound rather Machiavellian but it is not only better but much more honest assessment of the situation than believing in the crocodile tears the Kremlin is shedding over the plight of the Ossetians and Abkhazians or Washington over the fate of the Georgians or Ukrainians.

Russia’s steps have to be reciprocated by the West. Of course, Nato cannot immediately revert its policy of enlargement to Georgia and Ukraine. However, putting brakes on this process instead of precipitating it would be wise. I hope, Russia understands that it doesn't need these break-away republics; what it needs is friendly Georgia. However, such Georgia can evolve only if Washington ceases to use this country for the purpose of encirclement and containment of Russia. In facing global challenges Russia, even one that pursues her own interests, which sometimes inevitably differ from Western preferences, is much more important partner for the West than Georgia. This is especially true if the global 'war on terror' were indeed one of the most crucial issues. Georgia, or Ukraine for that matter, are more important partners than Russia only if Russia is seen as an enemy (or at least a potential one) and not as a partner (at least a potential one). This in no way means that the West has to sacrifice these, or other small, states for the sake of the partnership with Russia. These nations would only benefit from cooperative relationships between Russia and Western democracies as well as from their own cooperation with both Russia and the West. Forcing or encouraging smaller Russian neighbours to take sides – you are either with us or against us – is policy that is highly detrimental for such states. Moreover, it doesn't matter whether this is Russia who too actively supports so-called pro-Russian politicians or the West sponsors pro-Western leaders. In any case, those are peoples who suffer even if their leaders may flourish.

As one of the concrete immidiate measures, Georgia should be persuaded to sign non-use of force agreements with its break-away territories. Later other cooperative steps may be possible. If Georgia would ever regain its break-away territories it would be only through establishing lasting friendly relations with Russia. It will not happen soon. Therefore, patience is needed. Here, once again, one may learn more from the Chinese rather than from the Georgians, Russians or Americans.

As a professor of international law I may be expected to evaluate the situation in the light of international law. I could do that but why squander my or reader's precious time. Those directly involved in the Caucasian conflicts as well as those who support or strongly sypmpathise with one or the other side are using terminology of international law such as aggression, occupation, genocide, racial discrimination, territorial integrity, peace enforcement, humanitarian mission, sanctity of treaties without any constraint, with such a gusto, with such self-righteous indignation, with such self-confidence of people who seem to know what they are talking about that not only journalists but even poets would envy them. In such a situation, in my humble expert opinion, a task of an international lawyer may be to try to lift the abusive veil of legal terminology in order to have a glimpse on interests it is meant to conceal. Only lifting the veil of deception and self-deception is it possible to revert the dangerous trend towards a new super-power confrontation for which, differently from the old one, ideological grounds are lacking and differences of pragmatic interests are not necessarily weightier than common threats and challenges.

Notes

[1] Professor of International Law, King’s College, London

[2] Z. Khalilzad, I. Lesser, Sources of Conflict in the 21st Century: Regional Futures and U.S. Strategy, Santa Monica, RAND Project Air Force. 1998, pp. 216-29.

[3] R. Kagan, ‘Forget the Islamic threat, the coming battle will be between autocratic nations like Russia and China and the rest’, The Times, 2 September 2007.

[4] Ibid.

[5] L. Jarvik,'NGOs: 'A New Class' in International Relations', Orbis. Journal of World Affairs, 2007, Vol. 51, No.2, pp. 217-38.

[6] M. Scheuer, Marching Towards Hell. America and Islam after Iraq, Free Press, 2008, p. 125.

[7] R. Sakwa, ‘”New Cold War” or twenty year’s crisis? Russia and International politics’, International Affairs (Chatham House), 84:2, 2008, p. 266.

[8] Ibid., p. 264.

[9] E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Basil Blackwell, 1983, p. 2.

[10] R. Kagan, 'The Power Play', The Wall Street Journal, 30 August, p. W 1.

[11] C. Meyer, 'A Return to 1815 is the way forward for Europe, The Times, 3 September 2008.

[12] See, e.g., S. Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Time Books, 2006.

[13] C. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press, 1995, p. 54.