Presenting his government’s program, Nikol Pashinyan has announced that Armenia is now the Fourth Republic. Apparently, he is thereby beginning to “get the Fifth underway.”
The “arithmetic” of republics is a political sleight of hand for him — a way of trying to conceal, through a new “birth,” what he has “killed” through his actions or his policies. He killed the republic in which he “took to the streets” and through which he came to power, the republic in whose regard he used to declare: “Artsakh is Armenia, period.” Now there is neither Artsakh nor Armenia.
Now Nikol Pashinyan declares: “It is the Fourth Republic now, period.” He does not put it in precisely those words, but that is the meaning and the logic of his statement. And this means that, most probably, the outcome will be the same. In other words, what we are likely to see is not a new Republic of Armenia, but the de facto disappearance of the Republic of Armenia. What will emerge instead is a state whose model is being shaped not by the government of Armenia, but by Azerbaijan.
This is why there is reason to fear that, at some point in the future, Nikol Pashinyan may find it necessary to announce the birth of a Fifth Republic in order to conceal his own political inability to survive or his “stillborn” politics — arguing, for example, that in a rapidly changing world, Armenia’s system of numbering its republics must also be changed rapidly.
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In practice, however, the problem facing Armenian society — and perhaps the Armenian people as a whole, as the fundamental stakeholders in Armenian statehood — is not Nikol Pashinyan’s linguistic and political sleight of hand. The real problem is not to fall for the “arithmetic” tricks of Nikol Pashinyan and the political force he leads, nor to live by them, but to develop conceptual alternatives for the relationship between the Republic of Armenia and a world that is genuinely changing. This is important in order to demonstrate that the numbering of Armenia’s republics is not the ceiling of the intellectual capacity of Armenian society or its political elite.
Hakob BADALYAN
