Those who are so fond of delivering speeches about sovereignty in Armenia seem to have overlooked Nikol Pashinyan’s statement that he would be happy if the CSTO member states decided to expel Armenia, thereby freeing us from that dilemma.
Of course, Pashinyan is himself one of the great preachers of “sovereignty.” Yet in this case, he is quite happy to outsource a sovereign decision concerning Armenia to the CSTO member states, including his “bitter enemy,” Alexander Lukashenko.
For someone who constantly proclaims Armenia’s “unprecedented sovereignty,” Nikol Pashinyan is strangely calling on the CSTO member states to make the decision in his place and relieve him of the problem. Why, then, does the prime minister of Armenia not relieve himself of it by making the decision to withdraw from the CSTO? And all of this escaped the attention of the followers of “sovereignty fundamentalism.”
Although this is hardly surprising, because they worship Robert Kocharyan’s imprisonment even more than they worship “sovereignty.” And Nikol Pashinyan, by outsourcing “sovereignty” to the CSTO on the one hand, has at the same time satisfied the most fervent obsession of the “sovereignty fundamentalists” on the other: the pursuit of Robert Kocharyan.
Read also
In practice, this seemingly secondary or incidental circumstance has revealed two things particularly well. First, it has shown the substantive, principled and value-based level of the rhetoric about “sovereignty”: in practice, it has virtually nothing to do with the concept or value of sovereignty itself. Second, it has revealed the level of the decision-making mechanism on matters of vital importance to the state, when the highest-ranking representative of Armenia’s political authorities “hands over” to the CSTO member states a decision concerning the Republic of Armenia on one of its important issues—and does so gladly.
It would be interesting to know whether, for example, if Azerbaijan demanded that Armenia grant it the authority to make this decision in the name of peace, Nikol Pashinyan would agree. Would he, in his characteristic style, “argue” that Armenia would also decide on Azerbaijan’s withdrawal from the CSTO—if, of course, Azerbaijan ever joined the CSTO and then froze its participation?
Incidentally, official Yerevan has still not responded to the idea voiced by the Kremlin that Armenia can make its own decision to leave the CSTO if it wishes to do so.
Yerevan has not responded because, perhaps by Prime Minister Pashinyan’s decision, it is not Armenia’s CSTO membership that has been frozen, but Armenian statehood.
Hakob BADALYAN
