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A new Euro-Atlantic strategy for the Black Sea region The German Marshall Fund of the United States , 2004 |
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From the Near Abroad to the New Neighborhood… The South Caucasus on the Way to Europe. A few Connotations of the Black Sea Context. By Rouben Shugarian, The paradox of the South Caucasus/Black Sea present day regional identity is that less geography means more geo-politics. This is true not only in the context of general europeanization but also as far as the link to the Greater Middle East is concerned. Currently the region is going through phased europeanization, which is translated into and mirrored in each and every country’s foreign policy agenda. The mirror images of this joint Drang nach Westen are different in each particular case, as are the philosophy, the mind-set, the public policy and the pace of every country representing this part of the world. However, the long-term objective, prompted by the emerging challenges and the logic of the new millennium is the same for the South Caucasus countries and the Black Sea region at large,-a wider Europe of disappearing borders. What is phased europeanization, how is it translated into the region’s foreign policy agenda, and how can it help to shape the future regional identity? First and foremost, it is the political transfiguration of what was once called Trans-Caucasus into the South Caucasus. The paradox of the situation is that if the region were renamed into the Caucasus without any other geographical indicator, while its landscape would have been widened, its geopolitical semantics would have been narrowed and diminished to a predominantly Russian context. Therefore, this is the case when less is more, or when a smaller territory opens the doors and windows for wider globalization. Today in addition to the Russian connection the South Caucasus region has a clear-cut Iranian link, a Turkish dimension, as well as supra-regional links to the US, EU and the Greater Middle East. Were we to use a presently popular marine terminology describing the regional connections, we could talk about the three Seas, the Caspian, the Black and the Mediterranean, and a clearly-shaped Trans-Atlantic link. This is roughly the first phase of europeanization of the South Caucasus, when it is too early to speak about the new regional identity, and it would probably be more justified to use the term multiple geo-political idiosyncrasies. |
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