In 1991, although the majority of Armenians did not imagine what deprivations and difficulties independence would bring, the struggle of the previous three and a half years had convinced the majority of people that they should fight for the sake of Artsakh. The reason is simple. In 1988, the Karabakh committee had no idea about the independence of Armenia, but it carried out powerful and convincing propaganda for the liberation of Karabakh, for the sake of keeping that land Armenian. It means that society was ready for war, but not ready to build a state. That is why we won the war but did not build a normal state.
What happened after 1994? It is very natural that the manifestation with negative potential (weak state) dragged the positive one (victory in the war) behind it. It was legal, because only a citizen of a state with a strong sense of the state could appreciate the military victory and the liberation of the Armenian lands. On the contrary, people who lack such a feeling perceive that victory as the “cold and dark” years, and in that sense the Kocharyan propaganda developed after 1998 fell on fertile ground. Twenty-six years of development led to the fact that in 2020, society was not ready to wage war.
What were the main ideological theses that were promoted after 1994? They were neither the ideas of the 19th century national-liberation struggle of Dashnaktsutyun, nor Nzhdehism, nor “national conservatism,” although they were talked about a lot from high podiums. In fact, it is the ideology of “just living well.” “Just living well” with a profound indifference to anything above the necessities of life. Of course, the state and political elite promoted such approaches in their own way. Those ideas were finally recorded after 2018 when it was officially announced that the era of “isms” is already in the past.
After 2020, it developed as a propaganda of defeat by the government, according to which “nothing terrible has happened and will not happen, even if we lose our national identity and become part of another state, that’s nothing, the important thing is that we will live well. It is also important to take revenge on those who prevented us from living well.” Lowering the benchmark of the demands of the Armenian society, so to speak, essentially means that the form of the state, which was supposed to be built in 1991, was not only not built, but is also in strong contradiction with the real desires of the majority of citizens.
Read also
It is not the end of the state. That’s the end of the state’s 1991 draft.
Aram Abrahamyan
