Welcome! or welcome back, to Springtime of Nations. With another week comes another worthy struggle for self determination and a push against the centralizing power of the state.

Today we turn our focus from Africa to Asia, and the recently concluded conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Thousands of people have died over the course of a month of intense fighting between the two nations over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Nagorno-Karabakh is recognized by most countries as within the borders of Azerbaijan, but most of the region was controlled by an Armenian backed breakaway state called Artsakh. How did this happen, and what should libertarians think about the conflict and its Russian-brokered resolution? First we must turn the clock back 100 years or so.
In 1918, after the fall of the Russian Empire, the two newly independent states of Armenia and Azerbaijan fought a small war over border disputes in the midst of the Russian Civil War. Armenians had recently experienced a genocide by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, and refugees from modern day Turkey were flooding into Armenia. By 1920, the larger war had turned in favor of the Bolsheviks, who were able to occupy both nations and brokered a peace between their new subjects. One of the regions, Nagorno-Karabakh, was to be within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, but with the majority Armenian population there to be given significant autonomy. Peace, enforced by Soviet guns, lasted until 1988 when mass marches culminated in the autonomous soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh declaring itself under the jurisdiction of the Armenian SSR, which was rejected by the USSR government. With the Soviet Union central government rotting from the inside at the time, they had little ability to stop the Nagorno-Karabakh promptly ignoring their diktats and formally uniting with Armenia. The Azeris and Armenians plunged into war in 1989.
Azerbaijan is a much larger country than Armenia, and was also supported clandestinely by Turkey during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, which lasted from 1989 to 1994. Turkey sent fanatical Pan-Turanist Grey Wolves fighters who believed that Azerbaijan, among many other central Asian countries, are part of a Greater Turkish Homeland. The miracle of Armenia being able to defend their ally which declared itself the Artsakh Republic was partially due to a brilliant Ukranian-born General, Anatoly Zinevich, who became a lover of Armenia during his time stationed there as an army commander before the dissolution of the USSR and spent the rest of his life in his newfound country, dying in 2000 as a celebrated hero of Armenia not unlike Lord Byron was a British-born hero of Greece.
The 2020 outbreak of war was precipitated by border skirmishes that snowballed into a full blown offensive by Azerbaijan to retake the region, this time not only with Turkish assistance (especially in drones) but long term support of Israel and the United States, not only as an ally in the “war on terror” but a strategic oil supplier that bypasses Russia. Armenian forces have unfortunately attacked civilian centers during the war, further turning international opinion against them.  This time the luck of the Armenians did not hold, and Russian peacekeepers have been placed in parts of Artsakh while painful territorial concessions are finalized, stripping Artsakh of the majority of its territory and most of the strategically important points needed for defense against further incursions. The independence of Artsakh is now a dead letter.
Prior to the war, Artsakh was controlled by an Armenian nationalist party, Free Homeland. Not exactly a libertarian organization, although Freedom House did rank Artsakh higher than both Armenia and Azerbaijan in civil and political freedoms. Artsakh has relied a great deal on Armenian support for its existence, and maintains a desire to rejoin the Homeland of Armenia proper. This is different from our previous entries in this series, who want full independence, so what should we think of this desire for union with another state? Is this against the principles of decentralization? Not at all, as the basis of our support for secession in the first place is in the increase of consent of the governed as a stepping stone for even greater decentralization in the future. The Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh should have a right to join another state and leave another, and all similar political entities should have an equivalent freedom of association. Nations joining and leaving other nations voluntarily is far more ideal than the current Westphalian norm wherein international borders are sacrosanct, to never be increased or decreased (except by larger and larger supranational organizations such as the EU). Next week we will be discussing the Kosovo region in the Balkans, to stay tuned be sure to like and subscribe. May a Thousand flowers bloom!