The complexity of the national identity issue for the people of the South Caucasus is conditioned by the contradictions in the interpretation of the ancestral heritage of the states inhabiting the territory of the region. These contradictory arguments stem from the historical circumstances that were characterized by the deliberate rewriting of history by Soviet politics, as well as inter-country tensions. In particular, the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has had a variety of manifestations, including historical, geographical, ethnic, as well as national identity-based. Indeed, the issue of Caucasian Albanians and their relation to Armenians and Azerbaijanis has been at the center of the dispute between the two countries during and after the Soviet era.
Caucasian Albania was an ancient state that gave its origin to the contemporary people inhabiting the Caucasus. According to Dudwick (1990), Caucasian Albania was a large state that obtained the territories between “Lake Sevan and the Caspian Sea, and between the Arax River and the Caucasus Range” (p. 378). Consequently, the people called Caucasian Albanians were the ones who inhabited these territories with their ancestors living in this region as well. These people were of the Christian religion; the ancient state of Caucasian Albania was “Christianized sometime in the fourth century” (Dudwick, 1990, p. 378). Thus, these people are historically connected with the people who live today in Azerbaijan and Armenia.
However, despite the seeming ease of identifying the heirs of the Caucasian Albanian ethnicity according to the territorial principle, the tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the Nagorno-Karabakh territories complicate the issue. Indeed, the core of the historical dispute over the Caucasian Albanian question was predetermined by the rivalry between Armenia and Azerbaijan that has been persistent during the Soviet Union period and in the post-soviet era when the Nagorno-Karabakh war continued. As stated by Garagozov (2012), the international disputes between Azerbaijan and Armenia did not merely originate internally but were encouraged by the central branches of power of the Soviet Union. Such an approach was used by the Soviet regime to ignite and manipulate the national identity question. Moreover, Dudwick (1990) states that ethnographers of the Soviet period did not merely use the historical dispute around Caucasian Albanians for nation-building but manipulated it to express local interests.
The claims made by Armenians were based on the assumption that Caucasian Albanians inhabited the majority of their territories; thus, their heritage should belong to Armenia. However, Azerbaijanis had a more congruent argument supported by the Christian religion that both Albanians and Azerbaijanis share, as well as the ethnic and cultural artifacts that can be found on the territory of Azerbaijan (Dudwick, 1990). The manipulations of the historians and ethnographers researching the identity-related issue behind the Caucasian Albanians’ heritage signifies that the scholarly sphere in the Soviet Union has been corrupted by artificial reasons (Dudwick, 1990). The historical facts have been rewritten and reinterpreted to serve the political discourses igniting the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Reference List
Dudwick, N. (1990) ‘The case of the Caucasian Albanians: ethnohistory and ethnic politics’, Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique, 31(2-3), pp. 377-383.
Garagozov, R. R. (2012) ‘Azerbaijani history and nationalism in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods: challenges and dilemmas’, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict, 5(2), pp. 136-142.
King, C. (2008) The ghost of freedom: a history of the Caucasus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kucera, J. (2017) Where Europe begins, or where it ends?Slate.
O Beachain, D., and Coene, F. (2014) Go West: Georgia’s European identity and its role in domestic politics and foreign policy objectives. Nationalities Papers, 42 (6), pp. 923-941.