ON THE FAR SHORES of the Black Sea, just south of the Caucasus mountains, mounting tensions between the Kremlin and tiny Georgia seem to have gotten out of hand.
Russian military intelligence officers were arrested in Tbilisi last week for espionage, which in that part of the world means trying to destabilize the Georgian government. At a meeting of NATO Defense Ministers in Slovenia, Russian Defense Minister Ivanov berated the attendees for arming Georgia as part of a plan to use military force to expel Russian troops from Georgian territory. And President Putin compared the actions of Georgia’s young president, Misha Saakashvili, with Lavrenti Beria, who ran the murderous NKVD under Joseph Stalin. In Washington, few can remember the last time there was this much venom in Russian foreign policy. With the assassination of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow over the weekend, the situation looks as though it could get even worse.
There several things the rolling crisis in the South Caucasus is not. The talk of war south of the Caucasus has nothing to do with the instability of the northern Caucasus. Georgia has nothing in common with Ingushetia or Dagestan, and the potential for violence in the separatist regions of Georgia is not related to the continuing brutality of Russian forces in Chechnya. The brutalized and now radicalized Islamic peoples of the North Caucasus rarely cross the mountains to the south and then, only to shelter their families and children from bombardment or the winter cold. Due to centuries of tolerance, Georgia and its neighbors, Azerbaijan and Armenia, are largely immune from religious fundamentalism, if not from the crippling hangover of their Soviet occupation.
The crisis in Georgia is also not the return of the civil wars that tore apart the South Caucasus after the collapse of the Soviet Union and left frozen conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, on the border of Georgia and Russia, and in Nagorno-Karabakh, on the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan. These were wars of Soviet succession which were brought about by the understandable, but often misguided, attempts of peoples to reverse the forced deportations of Stalin and to redraw the borders of their ancient communities along religious and ethnic lines.
The political conflict which is occurring today is a consequence of the efforts of the local, democratically-elected leaders to end the region’s frozen conflicts and to build sovereign states, with both territorial integrity and a future in European institutions and markets. It is the pressure on Russia to withdraw its troops, which continue to militarize the region, and the rising attraction of Europe and the United States to the fragile democracies, which has engendered in Russia a fear of the loss of its illusory empire.
Throughout Putin’s second term as president, a war of the soft powers of Russia and the West has been raging along the northern shore of the Black Sea, rocking the capitals of Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia. On one side of this competition lies the Kremlin, which hopes to re-impose a hegemonic system, reminiscent of its 19th century empire, where “democracy” is managed, the economies of surrounding state are dominated by Kremlin-run monopolies, and political associations are muffled within the Commonwealth of Independent States. The West has an opposing, and to the small states of the Black Sea, far more attractive alternative of self-determining democracy, free market economy, and equality within Euro-Atlantic institutions, such as the WTO, the European Union and NATO.
It does not take an intelligence service to figure out that a petro-autocracy based in Moscow is unlikely to win a competition of political ideas, markets, and influence in its former colonies, if closer relations with Europe and the United States remains the alternative choice. The Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine made this abundantly clear, particularly to President Putin who was shocked by the rapidity of the rise of pro-European Governments in post-Soviet space. To an elite overly familiar with historical inevitability, Russia must have seemed on the brink of the second, humiliating defeat in one generation.
Unless, of course, Russia was prepared to use its gas and oil industry as an energy weapon, to run off the troublesome Western NGO’s, to remilitarize the frozen conflicts, and to send out the goons from the reconstituted security services to silence a journalist from time to time. And this is precisely what is happening today in the Transnistrian region of Moldova, the Abkhaz region of Georgia, and soon in the Crimea of Ukraine. Sadly, the Caucasus has become the new Balkans, a forgotten region of Europe where an old, hostile empire chafes against less powerful peoples and where wars can start but, once started, never end.
And, therein, lies the problem for Europe and the United States. If left unattended, Russia’s bullying will devolve into brutality and the competition of the soft powers of Moscow and Europe will degrade into something more militarized and dangerous. At a minimum, the region will become isolated and economic development will cease. Defense budgets will continue to climb and the fragmentation of politics and infant democracies will accelerate. On the current course, within months the South Caucasus could begin to replicate the appalling condition of the Western Balkans at the beginning of the last decade.
Inevitably, Europe and the United States will be forced to do the same things they did in the Balkans–with great reluctance–at the end of the 1990s. First, they will have to agree to pool their resources and work together. Then, they will have to tell the bullying power to pack up and go home. And, finally, they will have to pile into the region with all manner of civic and economic projects aimed at strengthening the Caucasus democracies and building closer relations with Europe.
Sooner will be far less costly than later.
Bruce P. Jackson is the president of the Project on Transitional Democracies, an international NGO working in the Balkans and the former Soviet Union.
