Interview with Helge Blakkisrud, Visiting Scholar, Institute for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
Q: There is an opinion that the West after the war between Russia and Georgia recognize already that the CIS as the area of Russia’s influence. Do you believe with this?
A: No, the West will not officially accept the concept of exclusive spheres of interests in the post-Soviet area.
Q: Is competition between Russia and the West in the post-soviet area the good for regional countries because it breaks Russia’s monopoly or it makes more difficult the settlement of regional problems?
A: I would warn against depicting this as a ‘zero sum game’: what is ‘won’ by the West is not necessarily ‘lost’ by Russia. Such an understanding is frequently implicit in Russian foreign policy, but should not form the basis for our understanding of the processes currently taking place in the post-Soviet area. In addition, it is misleading to depict ‘the West’ as a unitary actor. The West is a conglomerate of different states and organizations pursuing different agendas. This is also the case in its approach to the post-Soviet space. To take but one example, one can look at the internal discussions in NATO about Georgian membership in this organization.
Q: Do you think that the Karabagh settlement problem is the matter of near or far future?
A: No, I do not see any quick solutions to the stalemate surrounding the future status of Nagorno-Karabakh. The (partial) international recognition of Kosovo caused some expectations about breaking the long-lasting stalemates in the so-called frozen conflicts in Eurasia (besides Nagorno-Karabakh, these include South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria), but this window of opportunity was closed by the 2008 war in Georgia. Currently, both Baku and Stepanakert base their strategy on an understanding of time working in their favor. As times goes by, Azerbaijani authorities are getting less worried about the Kosovo precedent being replicated in the South Caucasus and thus less willing to consider a compromise, whereas the authorities in Stepanakert believe that the longer they hold on to their de facto independence, the harder it will be for Azerbaijani authorities to reintegrate the territory.
Q: Why the international community is not paying much attention to this conflict?
A: The 1994 ceasefire transformed the Karabakh war into a frozen conflict. Whereas the Minsk process so far has not produced concrete results, this process is still going on. And in the meantime the international community clearly favors status quo. The conflict has also been overshadowed by other, more pressing conflicts, such as the wars in Chechnya and Georgia.
Q: Do you think real a new war between Azerbaijan and Armenia as it was between Georgia and Russia in 2008?
A: I hope the war in Georgia, which in the end resulted in Tbilisi losing any immediate hope of reintegrating the breakaway regions, has demonstrated that a military approach to solving the so-called frozen conflicts may easily backfire.
News.Az
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