The text of Armenia’s Declaration of Independence is anti-state and makes it impossible to have an independent state. This is the view expressed by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who, until 2023, voiced entirely different opinions about Armenia’s Declaration of Independence. Since 2023, however, he has been saying that the conclusions he draws from reading the Declaration before and after the war are substantially different.
Many will think that the realities surrounding Armenia have changed, and that this is why Pashinyan has revised his assessment. But when the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1990, the Republic of Armenia was not a victorious state. Moreover, Armenia was already facing the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the gathering storm of war, the consequences of the earthquake, and the socioeconomic and socio-psychological fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union.
With that Declaration of Independence in place, Armenia managed, through a difficult and turbulent but steady process, to establish itself as a state and also to win a victory in a war that had been imposed on it and was, once again, unequal.
At the time, the very same Declaration of Independence existed that Nikol Pashinyan today describes as “anti-state”, claiming that it makes it impossible to have an “independent” state.
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It was under that Declaration that Armenia joined the United Nations and various international organizations, without any reservations or reproaches. Azerbaijan, for its part, did not utter even a single word against the Declaration. Moreover, under the mediation of the OSCE Minsk Group co-chairs, it negotiated on the basis of the principle of Artsakh’s right to self-determination as well.
Consequently, what is anti-state is not the Declaration of Independence itself. Rather, it is the very act of labeling it as such that is anti-state, especially given that this is happening not simply in the aftermath of the war, but after Azerbaijan began making this issue one of the conditions for the so-called peace treaty with Armenia.
Because the issue had already begun to directly affect the power structure Nikol Pashinyan had sought to preserve ahead of the 2026 parliamentary elections.. The Declaration of Independence is not an obstacle to the state, nor is it anti-state; it is an obstacle to Nikol Pashinyan’s current power structure.
Quite simply, because he operates, in essence, according to the Louis XIV logic of “L’état, c’est moi” (“I am the state”), he sees the Declaration of Independence as anti-state.
Hakob BADALYAN
