Book Review: The Armenian experience: From ancient times to independence

This is a reprint from an earlier publication. To cite the original article: Artyom Tonoyan (2024): The Armenian experience: From ancient times to independence, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 65(8), 998–1000. https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2022.2122529

The Armenian experience: From ancient times to independence by Gaïdz Minassian (translated by Peter Gillespie), London and New York, I.B., Tauris, 2020, 288 pp., £63.00 (hardback), ISBN: 9781788312240; £20.69 (paperback), ISBN: 9780755600748; £16.55 (Ebook), ISBN: 9781786725615; £16.55 (Ebook PDF), ISBN: 9781786735614

In more ways than one, the French historian and political scientist Gaidz Minassian has written a groundbreaking work. His painstakingly researched work on the longue durée of the “Armenian experience” throughout history is a valuable, solid, and major contribution to the study of Armenian political history, a topic that has been of little interest to the general readers and academics alike outside the scope of the burgeoning field of Armenian studies. However, with the growing geopolitical significance of the South Caucasus, which after centuries of Russian domination has become the unfortunate new battleground of clashing and adversarial great power interests, the need for comprehensive and comprehensible works on the individual countries that make up the region has now become more than apparent. It is precisely this context that renders Minassian’s contribution both timely and important. One of the best works on the topic in recent memory, Minassian’s work is a welcome endeavor seeking to bring “peripheral histories” to the West having stripped them off abecedarian clichés and the trappings of exoticism and orientalism that accompanied, or even characterized, the writings of scholars and historians of generations past.

Composed of a total of 12 chapters, the book is divided into (an almost equal) four parts, investigating and analyzing the Armenian historic, sociopolitical, sociocultural experience(s) and familiar historical events within a (loosely defined) political science framework and reinterpreting them in light of their current relevance for the Armenian political life, both in the diaspora and the Republic. In this regard, the book possesses a certain teleological modus, (not necessarily a bad thing), but at times feels like a didactic work addressed primarily to Armenian readers (and political elites) as a sort of a grim catalog of missed opportunities and of lessons not learned.

Be that as it may, Minassian’s innovative conceptual approaches to these familiar events and personages are quite refreshing, setting it apart from other works in the genre. Although the book is organized along a chronological catena, it is neither a simple chronology nor a straightforward Gibbonian narrative history. If the reader hopes to find such narration, he or she will be disappointed.

The book is, then, a historically informed and a “holistic” political study of a nation which finds itself in a constant struggle for survival. A struggle that owes as much to Armenia’s inclement political geography as it does to a chronic lack of political and diplomatic acumen among the people leading it. Reading the book one cannot escape the nagging sense that a desert sojourn meant to last 40 years has lasted 40 centuries instead. An experientia perennis that could very well have been avoided.

In the early chapters of that book that make up Part I, the author is not interested the emergence of the Armenians from the hazy mists of history, but is rather interested in the understanding of the vicissitudes of Armenian political experience(s) (mostly of domination) and unpacking of the structural causes undergirding “socio-political pathologies” (9) and the “intrinsic deformities” (10) that continue unabated in Armenian political life as a result of the former. It is a fundamental task and to his credit Minassian makes his case with some deftness, in the processes undercutting a slew of perdurable Armenian nationalist shibboleths.

If in the Part I of the book Minassian looks at Armenian history and political experience as a rigid chain of dominations – international, religious, and socioeconomic, that shaped the trajectory of Armenia’s development from the ancient times to Late Middle Ages to the late modern period, in Part II, entitled Attempts to Change the Course of History, Minassian sets out to discuss the various attempts to overthrow these dominations by the emergent sociopolitical, sociocultural, literary, and revolutionary movements. All these movements, separately and in sum, were essentially attempts to revive Armenian social and political consciousness, reaffirm a vibrant commitment to cultural production despite (or even because of) adverse conditions, and reclaim agency on behalf of the nation. A national liberation movement writ large, the “common denominator” of these movements was “the need to create an autonomous space for politics, the (re)construction of the nation and the fight against injustice” (93). The occasional successes that followed would be ultimately overshadowed by the calamity of the 1915 genocide, dispossession, and exile. Although the establishment of Soviet Armenia made sure that an Armenian remnant would survive on parts of its ancestral homeland, it unleashed powerful forces of identity fracture and fragmentation, most significantly in the diaspora. As Minassian demonstrates, the autonomous space for politics failed to materialize in the way imagined by its original aspirants. It would, however, return to the agenda in the waning years of the Soviet Union with the emergence of the Karabakh Movement and the reemergence of an independent Armenia characterized by its reentry into history as an agent in charge of its own destiny.

Part III of the book entitled The Power of Memory is centered largely on a discussion of the social-psychological and political effects of the Armenian Genocide and its industrialized denial by Turkey on Armenian diaspora communities and in Armenia proper. Discussed here are the efforts of the Armenian diaspora organizations and individuals to combat the centrifugal forces of assimilation and acculturation in their respective host countries and striving to preserve the Armenian language, identity, and culture, the guiding principle of the cultural and political movements of the era being “To forget is to betray” (131). The result of these efforts was only episodically successful, and not because they were mishandled but because they were largely misguided, being structurally and conceptually unsound. This structural unsoundness and fragility, however, was not just the province of the diaspora but of the newly independent Armenian state as well. This latter, unaware as it were of a historic opportunity for a capable statebuilding with a strong civil society at its core, would instead opt for authoritarianism and corruption as a substitute for sound policy, with emigration and social injustice being their most tangible outcomes. They also would pave the way to the so called Velvet Revolution, an attempt to upend the legacy of corruption and injustice, but which (as we now know, and which the author didn’t at the time of his writing), would itself pave the way for Armenia’s political destabilization and the disaster of the 2020 war with Azerbaijan.

If the first three parts of the book were descriptive and diagnostic, analyzing the causes and symptoms of Armenian political structural fragility, Part IV of the book, entitled Beyond the Genocide, takes a more prescriptive approach. Aside from advocating a paradigm shift and a break from the burden(s) of the past (a break but not forgetting), which have in a way hampered Armenia’s political progress and adaptation to the realities of “our post-modern world” (171), Minassian ties Armenia’s future with its ability to democratize state institutions, empower civil society, lay foundations for a “rational model of a state” (180), (jettisoning clientelism and patrimonialism), and adopt a new model for its relations with the diaspora. Important components of the move forward will be the reestablishment of relations with Turkey, (latter’s genocide-denial notwithstanding), and the issue of the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh: arguably the two of the biggest challenges facing Armenia’s foreign policy. Whether the Republic of Armenia and its diaspora are able to find “a new paradigm of identity, one that goes beyond the memory of genocide but which is also rooted in the common heritage to promote the individual rights of the Armenians” (241) remains to be seen. But that they can no longer afford the lackadaisical attitude, given all that has transpired since the publication of this important book, is more than apparent.

In the beginning of the review, I stated emphatically that Minassian has written a  groundbreaking work. What I did not say is that he has also written a very “French” work, for lack of a better term. Weaving through social psychology to sociology to political science to history to geopolitical analysis it is an erudite work but a veritable disciplinary bricolage that at times can be taxing. Furthermore, the book is peppered with neologisms that just do not work (e.g. Haidatism, khorenism, etc.), or accomplish little if they are meant to provide conceptual clarifications. Despite these small bothers, Minassian’s work is laden with enough ideas (and useful detours) that provide plentiful food for thought on contemporary debates on Armenian identity and the Armenian experience in a fast-changing world. A must read!