France’s attempt to apply neocolonialism in South Caucasus failed
Analysis by Sergey Bogdan

ANALYTICS  09 October 2023 - 12:29

On October 6, the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia planned to meet in Granada, Spain. There were certain hopes for the meeting: after the dissolution of the separatist structures in Garabagh, the obstacles to normalisation of relations between the countries were noticeably reduced.

But a day before the event, the Azerbaijani leadership decided to refuse to participate in it. The reason was the two-faced policy of the French leadership and other Western politicians. Having tried to apply the methods of neocolonialism tested in other regions in the Caucasus, they were defeated. As a result, the next negotiations with Armenia will take place without Macron.

Manipulations of Armenian revanchists and their French friends

It must be said that the provocative resettlement of Armenians from Azerbaijan to Armenia last week made us wary about the prospects for the meeting in Granada. Western media, meanwhile, spread the narrative of Armenian revanchists about the “forceful expulsion of Armenians from Garabagh,” without bothering to explain what the violence consisted of and what the expulsion was.

“Independent media” is turning off critical thinking, following the sentiments of the establishment. Therefore, they were of little interest even in the results of the UN mission’s visit to the Azerbaijani Garabagh region on October 9 - after all, its staff “saw no damage to civilian public infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and residential buildings, as well as cultural and religious infrastructure... Our colleagues were amazed by the suddenness, with which the local population left their homes. Our colleagues have not received reports, either from the local population or from others, of violence against civilians since the last ceasefire.”

Sapienti sat, but the Western media ignored all this, preparing the ground for the anti-Azerbaijani intrigue in Granada. Initially, the meeting between Aliyev and Pashinyan in Granada was supposed to take place with the participation of France, Germany, the EU and Türkiye. The French leadership has long been claiming the role of mediator and moderator in negotiations between the Azerbaijani and Armenian sides. Moderation is possible only on the principles of neutrality. But Paris didn't hold back once again and this week French officials made a series of demonstrative gestures in support of the revanchist forces in Armenia. They began to push Germany towards the same course. The EU, represented by the President of the European Council Charles Michel, also could not, in these circumstances, oppose France, its key member state. In addition, Paris and Berlin decided to push Türkiye out of the meeting. All these manipulations by the Armenian revanchists and their French friends were successful because they were essentially playing “on their own field”: the meeting in Granada was supposed to take place within the framework of the III Summit of the European Political Community - a format designed by Paris for meetings at the highest level of the EU countries and other invitees states.

The Azerbaijani side could not come to terms with all this - the conspiracy was obvious. The organizers of the meeting were clearly trying to fraudulently revise its terms and create a preponderance of forces at the negotiating table against Azerbaijan. The idea was clear - first to lure the Azerbaijani delegation, supposedly to sign some kind of “landmark”, “conceptual” document - Pashinyan is still repeating his readiness to sign it. And then, taking advantage of the superiority of forces, replay the scheme for normalizing relations in the interests of the Armenian revanchists. There is no idealism or Christian solidarity here - it’s just that the revanchist circles in Armenia are ready to serve the interests of any imperialist powers - from the US to France and Russia, and they are happy to use voluntary assistants.

Agreeing to play in conditions where the dealer is openly playing along with the opposite side and trying to manipulate agreements, and at the table the balance of power is four to one in favour of your opponents is simply impossible. This kind of game needs to be broken from the very beginning. This is what President Aliyev did by refusing to fly to Granada. And he was not mistaken - this was demonstrated by the events of Thursday, when the European Parliament adopted a loud, but politically weak resolution demanding the introduction of sanctions against Azerbaijan.

France in search of the lost time of imperial greatness

However, everything was already clear before the European Parliament resolution. French officials did their best to show disinterest in constructive talks between Aliyev and Pashinyan in Granada. Last week, French Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu told France Info that the French had already "opened a defence mission in Armenia to maintain a daily dialogue with the Armenian army, to study their defence and security needs".

Reading this statement, I recall Lenin’s formulation “formally correct, but essentially a mockery.” Instead of supporting the peace process and normalization in the Caucasus through multilateral dialogue with all countries in the region and helping them build an inclusive model based on good neighbourliness, the French have done the exact opposite. Namely, they began to restore the country’s recently defeated army, which, in fact, brought the entire region to its current state, engaging in territorial expansion and keeping the lands of Azerbaijan under occupation for decades. Now Paris, amid demagogic speeches about saving Armenia and supporting democracy, is only strengthening the army of the same country, in which expansionist revanchist ideology is still widespread, and its supporters are strong in all government agencies. Why is Paris doing this? To revive conflicts in the South Caucasus and get in there as an imaginary saviour.

On October 3, French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, during her visit to Yerevan, directly announced the French side’s agreement to arm Armenia. She did not provide details, and this secrecy makes one suspect some kind of bluff, since there is no point in such secrecy, since the demonstration effect of arms deliveries often exceeds its real strategic value. In addition to ranting about arms sales, the French government has asked EU foreign and security policy chief Josep Borrell to expand and strengthen the EU's civilian police mission in Armenia.

And on October 4, French Senate President Gerard Larcher joined the chorus of French politicians accusing Azerbaijan of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” against the Armenians of Garabagh. He stated: “As for Armenia, I express my solidarity and wonder if we intend to sacrifice this country on the altar of an energy deal with Azerbaijan? We must show courage from time to time. We all must support Armenia and the Armenians of Nagorno-Garabagh. They were forced to leave the land that belonged to them. If this isn’t ethnic cleansing, I don’t know what is.”

Amidst humiliating defeats for Paris in its traditional sphere of influence - sub-Saharan Africa, the French political elite is trying to play superpower in the Caucasus. In the same interview with LeCornu, the catastrophic defeats of France in African countries are elegantly pushed behind the topic of Armenia. Not surprisingly, Yerevan gives the French such an opportunity, literally begging the empire that plundered half of Africa, the Caribbean and Indochina to finally take care of Armenia!

How will Pashinyan pay for Western weapons?

During a meeting with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan asked for money and complained that “Nagorno-Garabagh became a victim of ethnic cleansing, and, unfortunately, it was not possible to launch international mechanisms.” Indeed, the successes of the Armenian revanchists and their allies in mobilizing international support are quite limited. The same Colonna wanted to come to Yerevan together with her German colleague Annalena Baerbock, but even she decided not to rush to support French schemes.

And she's not the only one. With the exception of France, the revanchist elements of the Armenian establishment, in fact, cannot rely on anyone with confidence. The summit in Cordoba was yet another confirmation of this. The issues needed by the Armenian revanchists were practically not discussed at it - the participants concentrated on Ukraine. Pashinyan got into the spotlight mainly due to his conversation with Zelenskyy. A dubious result, considering that just the day before the Ukrainian president called his Azerbaijani counterpart and they talked about the importance of the principle of territorial integrity.

In general, Pashinyan has to make considerable efforts to attract the attention of the West. To do this, even in a crisis situation, he continued to sever ties with Moscow. In particular, on Tuesday the National Assembly of Armenia ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Earlier, on September 24, Pashinyan said that the ratification of the Rome Statute was a consequence of the fact that “the CSTO and the instruments of the Armenian-Russian strategic partnership are not enough to ensure external security.” Needless to say, how nervously Moscow reacts to everything related to the ICC after the court issued arrest warrants for the Russian president.

Pashinyan was in a hurry to ratify the Rome Statute before his voyage to Granada. After all, he has frankly weak cards in negotiations with the West. The latter has few stable interests in Armenia, but Armenia, especially Pashinyan’s supporters, have very high expectations from the West. Their implementation requires billions of money and many years of time. After all, we are talking about a country with collapsed government structures and an army, with destroyed infrastructure and a degrading economy, separated from the West by geographical conditions, and opposed to its largest neighbors. But all that the EU offered Pashinyan as a result of the summit was a measly 25 million euros.

And this is not surprising, since the collective West simply does not engage in charity. And luring him to Armenia is not so easy. That is why the current leadership of Armenia is proposing increasingly radical and demonstrative steps that create precedents that the West needs - by joining the ICC, discussing the shutdown of Russian TV channels, etc. By the way, Ratification of the Rome Statute of the ICC is generally one of the conditions for bringing Armenian law into compliance with EU requirements and developing relations with the EU towards an association agreement.

And this is an important detail in the context of other events of the week. The fact is that the ratification of the Statute took place against the backdrop of the Independence Forum, which met in Yerevan last Sunday to call on the government to withdraw from all integration structures associated with the Russian Federation and join the European Union. And the very next day, Pashinyan phoned the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to discuss the “forced resettlement of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh (Garabagh),” the regional situation and Armenia-EU cooperation. Pashinyan and Leyen agreed to continue negotiations at the summit of the European Political Community in Granada.

In the jungles of the South Caucasus

It is interesting to consider these negotiations in the general context. Currently, the European Union is leaning towards another expansion towards the Balkans and Ukraine. “EU will stretch from Luhansk to Lisbon,” Baerbock said on October 2. The final decision on the start of the process (so-called negotiations) on the inclusion of Ukraine will be made at the EU summit in Brussels in mid-December, and it will likely be positive. Some Balkan countries will be accepted along with it, but definitely not Türkiye.

The new expansion will clearly follow new rules - it is hardly possible to achieve compliance with the once-standard requirements from the new candidate countries: both because the gap is too large, and because it is politically impossible to put pressure on many of them (for example, on Ukraine, which is in a state of war ). This transformation of the approach to membership shows that what is important for the European Union, first of all, is not the compliance of the economy and government system of a particular country with certain specified requirements. If it were otherwise, Türkiye would have long been inside this union - just travel through the Eastern or even Southern European countries of the EU to understand how far the Turks have bypassed them.

But nobody is going to let Turks into the EU, and the new approach more openly shows what evil tongues have been saying for a long time - the EU can talk about liberalism and democracy all it wants, but the deep essence, the gut of its policy is far from openness and humanism. Not only has the EU not eradicated racism and hostility towards non-Christian peoples. These phenomena are now only reviving in it, as exemplified by the increasingly open hostility towards immigrants, which is becoming official. The ideological basis of the EU's expansion in the Caucasus also has its roots here. The myth of a Christian, democratic Armenia allows the ideas of the superiority of the "white, Christian, democratic West" to be developed elegantly and in line with the spirit of the times in a new geographical direction.

And no matter how much demagoguery we hear about human rights and democracy, real politics points precisely to such a racist worldview. However, sometimes Western politicians blurt out these ideas. Recently, the German Foreign Ministry caused a scandal by presenting Africa as a continent of animals. And a little later, the head of the EU foreign policy department, Josep Borrell, generally said: “Yes, Europe is a garden, we built a garden. Everything works... Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle can invade the garden.” Borrell then stressed that Western representatives must “go into the jungle.”

The problem is that the South Caucasus and its countries have never become partners for either the West or Russia. For the West it is a jungle, for Russia it is a state that has become estranged from it. The actions of the Azerbaijani government at the Granada summit are a step towards breaking these imperialist schemes and making the world players realise that they will not be able to manipulate the countries of the region, as they are quite capable of solving their problems themselves.

And it worked out. First, on October 5, Macron was forced to announce that he did not support sanctions against Azerbaijan. And on October 6, it became known that the next meeting of the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia would take place at the end of the month in Brussels with the mediation of only the head of the European Council Charles Michel - without Macron. The risky gamble between revanchist elements in the Armenian establishment and their Western friends failed. Azerbaijan has once again shown that there is no need to be afraid of the menacing roar of superpowers; they very often really turn out to be just paper tigers.

Caliber.Az