main
The Eurasian Politician - Issue 4 (August 2001)
By: Anssi Kullberg, June 2001, Tartu
In early medieval times, an Arab explorer Ibn Fadlan sailed up the Idl River, and described the Eastern Slavs living there as "barbaric, dirty and stinking" creatures. The river in question was the Volga (by its Tatar and Finno-Ugric names Idel or Itil), and Ibn Fadlan was among the first to describe Russia to the "civilised world".
Supposedly the first Western European to visit Moscow and to describe this city literarily, was Ambrosio Contarini as late as in 1477. Another Italian, Marco Polo, had more than 150 years earlier, through the pen of his fellow POW Rustichello, described to the Europeans his travels in the late 1200s Caucasian and Central Asian countries and in China. Thank to Gutenberg, Marco Polo’s stories became widely distributed in Europe, although he was by no means the first in Europe to have visited the Silk Road world. There had been monks, missionaries and traders as far as in China before him.
The Caucasus and Central Asia had been "civilised" and also had solid cultural and economic contacts with the rest of Mediterranean Europe long before the "discovery" of Russia. Still many European minds are possessed with the idea that Russian colonial conquest of the Caucasus and Turkestan would have first time imported state and organised society to these regions.
However, for instance the ancient kingdoms of Georgia and Armenia belonged to the earliest Christian monarchies, and they prospered in Caucasia long before the birth of Russia. Tradeposts and trading cities along the coasts of the Black Sea and along the Silk Road were flourishing in the Middle Ages, and the region’s high quality products were traded to Europe by Venetian, Genuan, Tatar, Arab, Greek and other tradesmen. Dagestan and the Turkestan emirates were prospering as homes to Islamic scholarship and Persian poetry.
Professor Kaj Öhrnberg of the University of Helsinki described the gap of worldviews that prevailed – and to a large extent still prevails – on the different sides of the majestic Caucasus Mountains. Russians in the north did recognise dramatic romanticism in the south, like it can be read from the writings of the great Russian poets and authors, romanticising the Caucasus. However, even for them the Caucasians, Turks and Persians represented "the other"; infidel, wild and free enemy, who had to be conquered, vanquished and civilised by the Russian Empire.
Meanwhile, the Muslims of the south as well as the Christian Georgians saw a "Realm of Darkness" prevailing north from the Caucasus Mountains. In the dark, cold north, the inhabitants were violent, belligerent and drinking barbarians, alien invaders and "demonic crowds" threatening and destroying the Oriental civilisation and wisdom.
The romantic Silk Road connecting Europe with the Far East through the interior of Eurasia – Persia, Caucasia, Turkestan and Afghanistan – was still alive when a young Finnish colonel Gustaf Mannerheim (later to become a national hero of the Winter War and president of an independent nation) made his Central Asian expedition in 1906-1908, in the Russian czar’s military intelligence service. For most of today’s Europeans the images of Caucasia, Turkestan and Afghanistan are far from the romanticism of trade connecting cultures on the Silk Road. Our contemporary news reports are filled with wars and despair, and besides oil, we mainly hear about drugs and guns being traded there.
First the Russo-Turkish and Russo-Persian wars, then the expansion of Russian and Chinese colonial power to the lands of the Silk Road, and finally the emergence of two totalitarian communist empires, the Soviet Union and Red China, isolated the region into the periphery of world politics. The collapse of Soviet power, however, returned the region to our consciousness. It is becoming a new Heartland of superpower geopolitics.
The concept of Heartland was created by the classic of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, in early 1900s, but instead of Eastern Europe it was relocated in the area of Caspia, Turkestan and Western China by Donald Meinig in 1956. After the Cold War, Inner Asia has been risen into a strategic focus by the vast natural resources of the area, especially energy resources oil and gas, as well as the increasing and emerging population potential. Unfortunately the same reasons have made the Caucasian and Central Asian region also the battlefield in the hegemonic struggle of surrounding superpowers. The U.S. expert of Eurasian geopolitics, former security advisor with Polish origins, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has described the area as "a grand chessboard".
The world of the Silk Road as a romantic scenery has returned also to popular culture. The latest James Bond movie "When the World is not Enough" takes place in the core of the Caspian oil game, around the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline plan. The pipeline would offer the new Caspian oil states, Azerbaijan, Kazakstan and Turkmenistan, a transport route, independent on Russia and Iran, through Georgia to Turkey and the West. This would promote the status and economic independence of especially Georgia and Azerbaijan.
The plan is opposed by Russia and Iran as well as Armenia, which is dependent on the two. An expert of Iranian politics, Olivier Roy, and many other analysts remark that around the Eurasian oil, two contrary axis formations that cross religious and linguistic boundaries. An East-West axis is taking shape in the leadership of the USA and supported by Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Israel. A North-South axis is being constructed under Russian leadership, Iran, Armenia and Turkmenistan acting as its links.
If this pattern expands to cover all Eurasia, it is to be expected that the pro-independence regimes in the Caucasus will ever more desperately lean to Western and Turkish support, whereas while Russia is getting allied with China, all the authoritarian regimes of Central Asia may join this bloc, as it could be judged from the Shanghai Summit. A Russo-Chinese alliance is counting on Iran and India as their southern allies, which would break the Sino-Pakistani alliance and would then make Pakistan a natural continuation for the East-West axis. The new division can be expected to extend also to the Middle East, Syria and Iraq taking Russia’s side while Israel and Jordan making alignment with the West and Turkey.
If the grand game intensifies, the small nations and states of Central Eurasia, struggling to protect or gain their independence, will become pawns in the game. This may bring supporters from the East-West axis for Chechens, Kashmiris, Uighurs, Iraqi Kurds as well as for the democracy movements of Central Asia and Iran. At the same time the North-South axis can be expected to use Turkish extremist movements, Ossetians, Abkhazians, Karabagh’s Armenians and Afghan Taliban to bring about instability in countries favourable to the East-West axis. Supply routes of armaments tend to suit well the geopolitical game settings of Eurasia.
Samuel Huntington predicted in his "Clash" that the conflicts in Eurasia would take place on the fault-lines dividing great religions. His theory has been exploited a lot both as a self-fulfilling prophesy and as a background for propaganda, but the real situation proves that Huntington was wrong. Religions have of course been used as a power supply for conflicts, but friend and foe patterns have strictly followed the chessboard of cold realism.