Azerbaijani national project and statehood throughout history
The topic of the implementation of infrastructure, transport and energy projects in the Caspian region is becoming increasingly relevant in international affairs. The rise in interest has to do with the cessation of political and economic relations between Europe and Russia and the reorientation of trade flows from China to Europe from transit through Russian territory to alternative routes. This has given new impetus to efforts aimed at deepening the diplomatic dialogue between Europe and the United States on the one hand, and the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia on the other, developing the Middle Corridor infrastructure initiative to expand cargo flows through Türkiye, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, searching for additional oil and gas supplies, as well as critical mineral deposits in the Caspian region.
The Republic of Azerbaijan is the country that is of central importance in these efforts. Azerbaijan, together with Georgia and Armenia, serves as the gateway for transport flows on their way to Central Asia from Europe through Türkiye and the Caspian Sea, possesses an oil and gas pipeline system that supplies hydrocarbons to Europe and other international market destinations, and directly borders three of the five countries with the largest natural gas reserves in the world. Azerbaijan’s experience in successfully implementing large-scale projects with foreign participation after the dissolution of the USSR, namely the projects that develop, produce and transport the oil and gas reserves situated in this country, can help identify the driving and restraining factors in the expected implementation of new long-term, capital-intensive projects in the South Caucasus and Central Asia region.
These important attributes, particularly valuable in the current geopolitical environment, place Azerbaijan in both an advantageous and precarious position as a “small state”, remote from the West, simultaneously bordering Russia and Iran, that acquired independence in 1991. This article represents a first step toward understanding the dynamics in the region, where economic cooperation heavily depends on the foreign policy environment. It sets the stage by providing an overview of the different forms of the Azerbaijani national project realized throughout history. The proposed approach allows to identify various configurations of the balance of power involving regional and extra-regional actors that took place in the past and to better understand how to ensure the stable functioning of trade flows and long-term investment projects, the implementation of which requires a durable equilibrium in the contemporary foreign policy context.
The regional duopoly of the Persian and Ottoman Empires.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the territories populated by Azerbaijanis – both in the South Caucasus, where the state of Azerbaijan is located, and in the northern regions of Iran – had already been part of the Persian Empire for several centuries.
In the preceding 16th–18th centuries, the Persian and Ottoman empires were two great powers that dominated the region, waging numerous wars for control of territories along the contact line between the two empires in eastern Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. The duopoly of the two rival empires left no room for the creation of an independent and strong state in Azerbaijan that would not be the object of this rivalry. As a result, the socio-political project of the Azerbaijanis, a people of predominantly Turkic origin, was realized within the framework of the Persian Empire, either in the form of provinces or as vassal states, depending on the level of centralization of Persia and the intensity of its geopolitical competition with the Ottomans at a given historical period.
The adoption of the Twelver Shiism and the presence of a large population living across a significant and often contested territory, gave the Azerbaijanis sufficient leverage to enter in the system of governance of the Persian Empire. This, in turn, motivated the Azerbaijanis to pursue the objective of strengthening the Persian state. The search for co-optation contributed to the strengthening of the presence of representatives of Azerbaijani origin in the state and military apparatus, right up until the rise to power of the Qajar royal dynasty (1779–1925), which came from the eponymous tribe of Azerbaijani Oghuz Turks.
The Russian and British Empires in the Caspian Region.
The early 19th century was characterized by the expansion of the influence of European great powers in the Middle East region. While the Ottoman Empire was weakened by a series of conflicts in the Mediterranean, the Balkans and Eastern Europe, the Russian Empire began to put pressure on Persia from the north and the British Empire from the south.
The Persian Empire suffered major defeats in two Russo-Persian wars. In accordance with the Gulistan (1813) and Turkmenchay (1828) treaties, the territory inhabited by Azerbaijanis was divided: the Russian Empire incorporated the South Caucasus, including the northern Azerbaijani-populated provinces of the Persian Empire, which correspond to the territory of today’s state of Azerbaijan.
In the Russian Empire, which had Orthodox Christianity as its official faith, the Azerbaijanis, along with other Muslim populations, constituted a religious minority.
The administrative-territorial division of the Russian state did not provide for the conferral of political autonomy to governorates, including in the new governorates and oblasts created in the South Caucasus region.
The military and economic decline of the Persian Empire led to the weakening of the ruling Qajar dynasty, which fell under the influence of the British Empire.
The importance of the Azerbaijani factor in the Persian Empire declined due to the reduction in the size of the Azerbaijani population and the territory it occupied within the remaining borders of Iran.
As the influence of the Russian and British empires continued to expand throughout the remainder of the 19th century, the two rival great powers created a new duopoly that replaced the previous Ottoman and Persian control in a region that will be at the forefront of the Petroleum Age.
In the 1880s, the Paris branch of the de Rothschild banking conglomerate and the Swedish-born Nobel brothers received concessions for oil exploration and production in the Azerbaijani provinces of Russia. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Azerbaijani provinces of the Russian Empire would become one of the most important oil-producing regions in the world, along with the Standard Oil Company’s production in the United States.
In 1901, the Qajar Persia awarded the D’Arcy Concession to the British Empire granting rights to the exclusive development of Iran’s oil resources. The concession made possible the creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which discovered a major new source of oil supply near the Persian Gulf coast, allowing the Royal Navy to transition from coal to oil on the eve of World War I.
The issue of access to oil resources has firmly become a decisive factor determining the political future of Azerbaijan and the Caspian region.
Azerbaijan’s attempt to create an independent state.
The competition between the great powers of Europe, which further intensified at the beginning of the 20th century and gradually led to World War I, marked the emergence of new players in the Middle East and Caspian arena.
In 1907, the Russian and British Empires signed the Anglo-Russian Convention in St. Petersburg, ending their rivalry in Iran and Central Asia. The treaty divided the Persian Empire into spheres of influence, placing northern Iran under Russia’s and southern provinces under Britain’s control. As a result, all Azerbaijani territories, both in the Caucasus and in Northern Iran, for e brief period of time came under the tutelage of the Russian Empire.
The purpose was to maintain the Russian-British duopoly and outmaneuver a new, strong competitor in the region – the German Empire, which had allied itself with the Ottomans. The latter had by then been driven out of the Caucasus by Russia and Britain. The alliance envisaged granting Germany rights to explore and extract oil in Mesopotamia (Iraq), as well as connecting Berlin with Baghdad via rail and road infrastructure.
The intense competition between several great powers against the backdrop of World War I created the preconditions for the emergence of an independent state in Azerbaijan:
In 1917, the Russian Empire, weakened by World War I, disintegrated as a result of the Revolution. The Bolshevik government signed the Brest Peace Treaty, which ended Russia’s participation in the war with the Central Powers, and ceded control of the South Caucasus.
The independence movement in Azerbaijan first supported the establishment of the Transcaucasian State in January 1918, which included Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and thus had access to the Black Sea. After the dissolution of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic at the initiative of Georgia and Armenia, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was created in May 1918, signing a military assistance treaty with the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire invaded the South Caucasus, supported by Imperial Germany in the first half of 1918. Each of the two allies wanted to extend their influence into the region and secure access to Baku’s oil resources by supporting the newly independent states.
The British Empire – concerned about the threat to its military-political presence and control over the oil resources in the Middle East, as well as the more distant prospects of the Central Powers taking control of the Caspian Sea and opening the way to further expansion into Central Asia and possibly British India – first sided with the Russian anti-revolutionary, and then with the Soviet forces.
The emergence of Azerbaijan as an independent state also raised concerns in Qajar’s Persia, where suspicions arose that the use of historical name of Iran’s northwestern province was part of a plan to separate the province of Tabriz from Iran and create a pan-Turkic entity stretching from Central Asia to Europe.
The window of opportunity for an independent Azerbaijan closed after the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic ceased to exist two days prior to the Red Army entering Baku in April 1920. The fact that Azerbaijan was the main oil-producing region of the Russian Empire contributed to the decision to incorporate it in Soviet Russia.
In 1921, the Soviets signed a Treaty of Friendship with Persia, granting both states exclusive and equal navigation rights in the Caspian Sea, and the Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement, which effectively recognized Soviet Russia and ushered in a period of active foreign trade. In exchange, the Soviets renounced their claims to Iran’s northern provinces.
Thus, the pre-World War I duopoly was restored.
Azerbaijan and the Caspian Region in the USSR.
The next stage of great power confrontation in the region coincided with World War II.
In Iran, after the overthrow of the Qajar dynasty in 1925, Shah Reza Pahlavi came to power, proclaiming Persian identity as the central element of state ideology and promoting a policy of Iranization at the expense of the Azerbaijani-language instruction in schools, appointment of ethnic Persians to key positions in the Azerbaijani-populated provinces. Meanwhile, the border with Soviet Azerbaijan was kept closed.
In 1931, the Shah unilaterally cancelled the D’Arcy Concession awarded to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In the subsequent years, Reza Shah’s Iran pursued a policy of diversifying its foreign relations, which led to Germany becoming its main trading partner and included a rapprochement with Türkiye at the expense of Great Britain and the Soviet Union.
In early 1940, when Britain was already at war with Germany in North Africa, Iran’s oil industry processed around 10 mln. tons of oil in 1940, making a decisive contribution to the war effort. Reza Shah declared neutrality at the start of World War II, but denied British and Soviet requests to remove foreign specialists employed in the oil industry. In August 1941, the USSR and Great Britain, with US support, occupied Iran, forcing Reza Shah to abdicate.
The Axis Powers carried out large-scale offensive operations against the Allied Powers during World War II on several fronts in order to seize oil resources in the Middle East, and their attempts to capture Baku did not cease until 1943.
The USSR created the Soviet-backed People’s Republic of Azerbaijan and the Kurdish People’s Republic in northern Iran, while Great Britain tried to create an autonomous Khuzistan. Soviet, US and British troops withdrew from Iran in 1946. Iran remained an ally of the West in the new bipolar Cold War confrontation with the USSR until the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Importantly, the Turkish Republic maintained a policy of neutrality throughout World War II. There was no ethno-nationalist or pan-Turkic independence movement in Azerbaijan. Throughout World War II, Azerbaijan accounted for more than 70% of oil production in the USSR (Lydolph and Shabad, 1960, 468). The brief period of statehood in 1918-1920, allowed Azerbaijan to establish limited sovereignty within the USSR that it did not possess in the Russian Empire, in the form of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic.
The individual Soviet republics ceded their powers over foreign policy, finance, trade and transportation to the central USSR government but otherwise were able to create fully formed structures of executive and representative state power, had political representation in the Soviet central bureaucracy, were part of the military and security apparatus of the USSR.
Azerbaijanis were no longer a religious minority – the Soviet ideology was equality of peoples, atheism, communism, along with existence of national republics – the religious Shiite factor became less pronounced – a fact that deepened the differences between Soviet and Iranian Azerbaijani-populated territories.
The policies employed by the USSR to avert the return of ethno-nationalism in Azerbaijan included the creation of the Armenian-populated Autonomous Region of Nagorno-Karabakh in 1923, and the practice of appointing professional personnel of different ethnicities to positions of varying levels of responsibility.
Azerbaijan’s enormous importance in the Soviet economy continued until the 1960s, when its oil production began to decline and vast new reserves were discovered in the Siberian and Yamal regions in Russia and Central Asia. In 1990, Azerbaijan accounted for 2% of crude oil and 1% of natural gas production in the Soviet Union (BP, 2013).
In the late 1970s, Iran’s Azerbaijani provinces played a key role in the protests that led to the fall of the Shah’s regime. Following the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran emphasized the religious principle of resolving interethnic differences, incorporating representatives of Azerbaijani descent in the highest echelons of state power, and thereby weakening nationalist and autonomist sentiments.
With the end of the Cold War and the disaggregation of the USSR in 1991, a number of new independent small states emerged on the world stage, the Republic of Azerbaijan being one of them. More than three decades later, Azerbaijan remains an independent, stable nation-state that has managed, over time, to increase its political autonomy in the international system.
Conclusions.
The review presented in this article showed that the duopoly control of the great powers in the Caspian region, which could have included strategic rivalry or potential collusion between the two major powers or two coalitions of allies, did not create favorable conditions for the emergence of an independent state in Azerbaijan.
This rule held true both during the dominance of great powers located in the region itself, and after the arrival of European great powers in the Caspian region, as well as during the global bipolar confrontation of the Cold War.
Periods of intense competition between several great powers — such as World War I and II — created the preconditions for independence.
Azerbaijan came close to achieving independence during World War I, as the attempt to redefine the balance of power in the South Caucasus was carried out by a major world power, Germany, along with an important regional ally, the Ottoman Empire. The Russian Empire was already losing the war. Azerbaijan (as well as Georgia and Armenia) had no institutional role in the Russian Empire. Iran was too weak to play an active role in these events.
This set of factors was absent during World War II, as was the potential for Azerbaijan’s independence.
In both instances, the existential nature of great power rivalry in this strategic region and Azerbaijan’s alliance with one of the warring parties meant that its independence was either short-lived or completely unattainable.
The end of the Cold War provided another, albeit less conflictual, opportunity for independence, and Azerbaijan’s policies in the post-Soviet period have differed significantly from these historical examples and will be discussed in subsequent articles.
photo: Aykhan Zayedzadeh – CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=97617220
