After the signing of the Bishkek Protocol ceasefire in May 1994 among Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Armenian society entered a prolonged period of chronic internal discord. This was largely driven by the absence of a national consensus on the prospects for a peaceful settlement of the Artsakh issue, a crisis of trust in the electoral mechanisms through which power was formed, the weakness of the rule-of-law state, and, as a consequence, a low level of trust between the state and society. Following Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 war, the surrender of Artsakh, and the deepening of domestic political confrontation—fueled, among other things, by the government’s conflict with the Armenian Apostolic Church—this internal division assumed a dangerous character.
Although internal cohesion is shaped by a wide range of factors, internal legitimacy—a condition in which, despite existing differences and disputes, trust between society and the state, a sense of common belonging, and a willingness to live by shared rules are preserved—continues to occupy a central place in sustaining it. This is because internal legitimacy lies at the heart of society’s recognition of the state as a lawful, just, and universally binding political and legal order. There can be little doubt that, for decades, the deficit of internal legitimacy has remained one of the most persistent problems in Armenia’s political development. The very fact that the ruling «Civil contract» party has singled out this issue as a distinct objective in its electoral program suggests that it recognizes both the urgency and the political significance of the problem. Yet for precisely that reason, the ruling party’s proposed solution, set out in point 7 of its program, is deeply troubling. In the authors’ view, the solution to the problem of internal legitimacy lies in adopting a new constitution, whereas under current conditions the severity of the problem stems above all from a systemic deficit of the rule of law and from the conditions under which the constitutional reform process itself is being launched.
The problem is that internal legitimacy is not secured automatically by the adoption of a new constitution, even if the future basic law is approved through an impeccable procedure. From the perspective of an Armenian citizen, the deficit of internal legitimacy is rooted not primarily in the legitimacy of the founding act as such, but in the rule-of-law problem—whether the law applies equally to all, whether genuine equality before the law is ensured, whether impartial justice exists, and whether the authorities themselves are constrained by law. When the law is applied selectively, when access to justice depends on social status, closeness to power, administrative resources, or political affiliation, public trust in the state is undermined. Without the rule of law, even the most rights-oriented constitution cannot, by itself, secure an acceptable level of internal legitimacy. History offers examples of such a divergence between a progressive constitutional text and political practice: although Stalin’s 1936 Constitution of the USSR enshrined an extensive catalogue of socio-economic and political rights and was regarded by many foreign experts of its time as an exceptionally democratic act, in political practice those guarantees remained only on paper because of the personalist nature of power and the subordination of constitutional order to the political will of the stalinist regime.
The next problem lies in the very logic embedded in Civil Contract’s electoral program. Immediately after invoking the people as the source of internal legitimacy, the authors argue that, in order to secure rights and freedoms, the state inevitably introduces certain restrictions. From this they derive a highly questionable claim: that the very existence of such restrictions allegedly generates tension between the state and the citizen, which is then treated as a serious internal security problem. This approach shifts the emphasis away from the rule of law and toward the restrictive function of the state, portraying it primarily as a coercive authority rather than as an institution of the common good, a guarantor of equal legal status, and an impartial arbiter.
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Yet for internal legitimacy, what is decisive is not the mere existence of restrictions, but the manner in which they are introduced and applied: whether they are grounded in law, whether they are proportionate, predictable, and applied equally to all. The crisis of internal legitimacy arises not because the state imposes restrictions at all, but because in practice those restrictions may be arbitrary and selective. Moreover, tension between the state and society in a democratic system is not, in itself, an anomaly or—still less—a security threat. It is a natural condition of political life and becomes destructive only when fair and lawful mechanisms for resolving conflict are absent or do not function.
Also questionable is the claim that such tension can be neutralized only where there exists an “organic link” between the citizen and the legal order—namely, when that order flows directly from the citizen’s decision and consent. This way of framing the issue absolutizes the significance of original consent, treating it as the sole foundation of the internal stability of the political and legal order. In reality, however, the bond between citizen and state is sustained not only by the fact that the legal order originates in the will of the people, but also by how that order works in practice: whether it is binding on everyone, whether it restrains the authorities themselves, whether equality before the law is ensured, whether justice is impartial, and whether law enforcement is predictable. In other words, the internal stability of the state is determined not only by constituent consent, but above all by the conviction that the existing legal order is just, binding on everyone without exception, and equally constrains the authorities themselves.
The third problem is fundamental. In public perception, the impending constitutional reform is driven not primarily by the internal logic of Armenia’s political and legal development, but by an external factor—coercion from Azerbaijan. In such a situation, the central issue is not so much the content or procedural form of the proposed constitutional reform as the source of the political impulse behind it. The forthcoming political process is tainted from the outset by an “original sin,” because it is not an internally matured act of sovereign self-determination, but a compelled step taken under pressure from Azerbaijan—the victor of the Second Karabakh War. As a result, the constitution of the so-called “Real Armenia” will be perceived not as the sovereign expression of the will of Armenia’s people, but as the political and legal formalization of an external will. Yet a constitution is, by definition, the document meant to express the constituent autonomy of the Armenian people. Under such conditions, even an impeccable referendum cannot guarantee the strengthening of internal legitimacy.
The vision of strengthening internal legitimacy set out in Civil Contract’s program is therefore a travesty of one of the perplexing problems in Armenia’s political development and an attempt to give domestic legal form to Azerbaijan’s demand that Armenia amend its current Constitution—a demand that Baku has made a condition for signing the so-called peace agreement with Armenia. Crucially, despite all the procedural flaws that accompanied earlier constitutional changes, and substantive problems none of those reforms was initiated under coercion.
Armen MARTIROSYAN
Member of the Supreme Council of RA (1990-95)
Member of the National Assembly of RA (1995-99)
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary