Source: ABC Radio's Saturday Extra
Geraldine Doogue: Well I think there are parts of the world which are almost seen as hopeless cases in terms of policy and peace -- places riven with ancient conflicts and unresolvable ethnic rivalries. I mean the Balkans is often described like this, if you think about it. And when it's talked about at all, so is the Caucasus, the region including Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Well my next guest on Saturday Extra is an authority on this region. Over the past two decades he's written extensively on and from the region. And he says that read properly, history in fact tells a very different story, one which undermines the assumption that the Caucasus is destined to intractable conflict. So it's really a sort of 'reader beware' I think, story.
Thomas de Waal (Tom I think he likes to be called) is Senior Associate in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, specialising in the south Caucasus region. And he joins me now from Washington DC. Welcome to Saturday Extra.
Thomas de Waal: Very good to be with you.
Geraldine Doogue: Where is this area? I had to get out the map, I'll be honest.
Thomas de Waal: Well we're talking about the area between the Black and Caspian Seas, south of Russia, north of Iran, north-east of Turkey, so it's very much the lands in between, which is both the kind of the plus and the minus, the joy and the sorrow of this place that it's kind of nobody's backyard, but everyone's a bit interested in it.
Geraldine Doogue: Yes, and increasingly isolated, you make the point in your writing.
Thomas de Waal: Well that's right, on the edge of Europe, a place of great beauty and fantastic mountains. I love travelling there but obviously a place which politically has historically many difficulties, a place of enormous ethnic variety. You mentioned the Balkans, well the Balkans really does seem rather simple by comparison with the Caucasus. A place of the greatest linguistic variety on earth, and of course a place with many conflicts. But as I argue in my writing, a place which we shouldn't condemn to conflict, a place which also has a long history of co-operation and ethnic harmony, as well as conflict.
Geraldine Doogue: Well indeed. You say that outsiders need to take a more sceptical, even post-modern view of the history of this region. What do you mean?
Thomas de Waal: Well what I mean by that is that there are some bits of the world which we think are condemned to some sort of dark history of perpetual conflict, but take the case of the war in south Ossetia in August, 2008 which was obviously one of the gravest crises between Russia and the West in the last 20 years. When you look on the ground, the people there, the Georgians and the Ossetians actually get along pretty well, though a strong history of inter-marriage, lots of trade. There were actually ethnic Georgians in the South Ossetian city of Tskhinvali when the Georgian attack began in August, 2008. So what that tells us is that actually if these locals were only left to their own devices, or it was up to them, they could actually sort out much of their conflicts. It's when it gets wrapped into wider geopolitical issues, geopolitical rivalries, that the problems start. That the Ossetians look to Moscow for protection; the Georgians to Washington, and a local dispute in the Caucasus ended up in a conflict, in a war, and with Washington and Moscow at one point looking down the barrel of a gun at each other. But we shouldn't blame the locals for this. We should blame the way that the locals look for alliances, which is natural, and the way that outsiders sometimes treat regions like this as kind of geopolitical playgrounds, which is very unhelpful for the locals.
Geraldine Doogue: So this long sweep of recorded history and the frequent reference to it by modern politicians, I mean it must make it rather difficult to approach issues from a pragmatic standpoint, and this is a region, you point out to me, where the Pontic Greeks for instance, trace their roots back to the visit of Jason and his Argonauts to the Black Sea.
Thomas de Waal: Well this is one of the other problems here. You have Georgians and Armenians here who do rivalry over archaeology -- many jokes about taking things out of the ground which are 10,000 years old and the Georgians as it's a Georgian piece of pottery and the Armenians say it's an Armenian piece of pottery and suddenly a lot of looking back in this part of the world. It's also...
Geraldine Doogue: So its history as a burden really?
Thomas de Waal: History can be a burden if you look at it that way. Obviously history is a source of pride; history, another one reason to be proud of this region is that the world's earliest recorded wine manufacture was in this region then, digging up ceramic jars and wine pips, fermented wine pips many thousands of years old on the soil of Georgia, and Armenia. I do believe that it's not so much history itself, as the way it's constructed in the 20th century, the way people were encouraged to be nations which in turn encouraged them to be nationalist, and not see points of contact with their neighbours. It's very much a 20th century phenomenon, and some people have joked that if you want to look at the roots of these conflicts, look back into the mists of the 20th century.
Geraldine Doogue: Yes, so in a way you're saying that these are political narratives that are really contesting for primacy, rather than ordinary people's cultural stories. I just wonder if this is the case, does it make you more, or less hopeful about a stable and peaceful future?
Thomas de Waal: Well I think the problem is that these are narratives which are quite well entrenched, and these are narratives which are also politically useful for the leaders of these countries, looking at Georgians or Armenians and Azerbaijanis. It's a way of exerting domestic political control to play the patriotic card and talk about 'the other side, the enemy, it's a way of mobilising people, it's a way of marginalising your opposition. So in that sense, the problem they have of conflicts and the problem they have of democratisation go hand in hand. And unfortunately, because it's no-one's backyard in the Balkans, Europe now, because after shamefully ignoring the problems of the Balkans for too long, they've actually decided they couldn't ignore it. This is a European project, we have to move forward. No-one decided we're taking the Caucasus in hard in the way Europe does with the Balkans.
Geraldine Doogue: You know, you're quite interesting. There's a very interesting website called Five Books, where interviewees are invited to nominate five books which pertain to their particular areas, it's fascinating actually. I was alerted to it just this week. And you've nominated in terms of trying to analyse this fearfully difficult area, Dr Seuss's The Butter Battle Book. Why?
Thomas de Waal: Well if I remember rightly, that's about the Gooks and the Zooks who are almost identical but who start putting up a wall and start a conflict with one another, and they don't actually remember what the conflict is about, but it somehow usefully helps to find their identity that they're enemies with one another. I think Dr Seuss wrote that during the Cold War, and it was a kind of Cold War metaphor, but I think it should be compulsory reading for children in places like the Caucasus and the Balkans where they're brought up to be told that the Other Side is the implacable enemy.
Geraldine Doogue: And you say it exemplifies Freud's theory of the narcissism of minor difference. Develop that for us, please.
Thomas de Waal: Well absolutely. I mean the point being that I go to places like Armenia and Azerbaijan, they have far more in common with each other than they do with someone like me, and yet the existence of someone else who has a slightly different narrative, but in many ways is the same, is much more of a threat to their own political narrative and to their own political project, than someone like me who comes from far away. So the minor differences in that sense are much more threatening than the major difference.
Geraldine Doogue: Well it's probably quite true in the Middle East, too, in many ways, isn't it. It also leads to some of these amazing irrational, it would seem, from this perspective, people who get the blame, like the US gets drawn in as you make the point, for all sorts of violence that's extremely localised.
Thomas de Waal: Well yes, although I wouldn't say that the US is entirely blameless. There are many people in this town do like to have fashionable projects, and some people have identified particularly under the Bush Administration, Georgia as a fashionable project as the not Russia, the democratisation project, and in doing so I think they put a far too heavy a burden on Georgia, which is a small country struggling with lots of problems. We're told it was far more progressive and democratic than it was at that point, and in turn, encouraged the Georgians to believe in a US alliance, which was in fact far weaker than they thought it was. And that was, I'm afraid, a major contributing factor to the war with Russia in 2008.
Geraldine Doogue: And Georgia's keen to join NATO isn't it. And Russia's very keen for it not to. And you suggest that it might be wiser for Georgia to take the Finland approach, that is, move towards Europe through economic means rather than by military alliance. Do you think that is possible?
Thomas de Waal: Well NATO membership for Georgia is very much off the agenda. As you know, NATO membership is a consensus issue, lots of European nations are rather sceptical about it. And Georgia has two bits of its territory Abkhazia and South Ossetia which have been outside its control for almost 20 years which look to Russia. And it really does seem very much the cart before the horse to be looking at joining NATO before you've resolved those conflicts. So I would argue that Georgia is better served by having a less confrontational attitude with Russia and looking - Finland is quite a good model, and looking towards growing economically and becoming a more stable country because of its economic growth, rather than through membership of some kind of military alliance.
Geraldine Doogue: And look finally, some people might be listening and saying, Well it is, it's not on the front pages at the moment, sort of why should we care, because it is highly complex. But it's going to be from I think 2014, the Russians are staging the Winter Olympics at -- is it Sochi? Is that the correct pronunciation.
Thomas de Waal: It's in Sochi, that's right on the Black Sea.
Geraldine Doogue: And then of course they've secured the World Cup - we're very, very alive to all this in Australia at the moment because we lost out for the 2022 bid. Is this Winter Olympics going to be something that rises above all this and unifies people which sport of course can do? Can you imagine it being a new narrative that might emerge?
Thomas de Waal: I think it could cut both ways. I think it could be a point in which Russia and Georgia for example start to work together and bury their differences or the opposite could happen and it could, if Russia and Georgia had not moved any closer at that point, Georgia could start trying to be disruptive, calling for boycotts. So I think it's something that we should watch quite closely. And another thing we should watch quite closely not all of us, but those of us who have a passing interest even in this part of the world, is the threat of a new war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. They've had a cease-fire since 1994 but that conflict is very much unresolved and Azerbaijan is now building up its military at quite an alarming rate and making noises about a new war, and that would be a complete disaster for this region were that to happen.
Geraldine Doogue: Well thank you very much indeed Thomas de Waal for joining us.
Thomas de Waal: Very glad to be with you.
Geraldine Doogue: Thomas de Waal, bringing some light onto an area that I think for a lot of us is quite exotic and hard to understand -- Senior Associate in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. His most recent book is Caucasus: an Introduction published this year by Oxford University Press. And we'll put a link on the Saturday Extra website to his open democracy article The Lightness of History in the Caucasus.