The Ministry of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure of Armenia has published a draft proposal to place the Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) under the state’s overriding public interest—or, put more plainly, a project to finally seize the Electric Networks of Armenia from its owner. The draft, of course, proposes that the network’s owner, Samvel Karapetyan, negotiate with the state and sell the company to it. If this does not happen within a three-month period, the state will take over ENA “by force of law.”
In practice, however, this is not about the Electric Networks at all. The “nationalization” of the Electric Networks, whose ownership rights are legally protected, is about dismantling the Republic of Armenia, because the right to property is one of the fundamental rights underpinning the history of modern states, so to speak. The social consensus surrounding that right is also what defines the degree of modernity and viability of a given society. The histories of statehood in a number of successful societies offer vivid evidence of this.
Yet the government led by Nikol Pashinyan has made it clear that it intends to bring the history of the Republic of Armenia to an end. The de facto abolition of property rights is one of the key manifestations of that process. Of course, in a formal sense, the right to property will continue to exist in Armenia, just as the Republic of Armenia itself may continue to exist in a formal sense.
But a state is not merely a formality; it has substantive values. And the right to property is an important, even cornerstone, part of that substance. It cements public consensus around the idea of statehood and becomes a reference point for the international community in shaping its attitude toward the statehood created by that society. Therefore, dismantling statehood does not at all require its formal legal dissolution. States are, in practice, dismantled through the erosion of their substantive foundations. In essence, that is the substance of the published draft.
Read also
Hakob BADALYAN
