SECURITY THREATS IN THE CAUCASUS: GEORGIA’S VIEW

Abstract

For every country national security problems and priorities are of vital and primary importance. New, independent states are particularly sensitive to security problems, as they lack the experience that comes from independent statehood. They have not had the opportunity to develop a defined culture for strategic planning or foreign policy engineering. Furthermore, newly independent states - only just emerging as sovereign, autonomous actors - feel insecure and quite uncertain about what their security interests and priorities should be, and how to go about defining them. Thus, they tend to underestimate certain security threats, exaggerate others and, sometimes, even miss vital factors in the game of national security planning. Their strategic visions, and corresponding calculations, are mainly based on historical memories, which themselves are constructed with reference to ethnic lines. They are also affected by a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and the classical pattern of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, or ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’. These calculations are also grounded on an assessment of the global political and economic system, which quite frequently becomes unrealistic, being judged through the states’ perspective on security.

References

1. 1 See Rajan Menon, Treacherous Terrain: The Political and Security Dimensions of Energy Development in the Caspian Sea Zone, in “The National Bureau of Asian Research”, NBR Analysis, Vol.9, No.1, Seattle, February 1998.
2. 2 Thomas Goltz, “Letter from Eurasia: The Hidden Russian Hand”, Foreign Policy, No.92, Fall 1993, pp.92-116.
3. 3 S. Neil MacFarlane, “Government and Oppositon”, Democratisation, Nationalism and Regional Security in the Southern Caucasus, Vol. 32, No. 3, 1997, pp. 399-420.
4. 4 S. Neil MacFarlane, and Larry Minear, “Armed Conflict in Georgia: A Case Study in Humanitarian Action and Peacekeeping”, Occasional Paper No. 21, The Thomas Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, 1996, pp.15-16; S. Neil MacFarlane, and Larry Minear, “Humanitarian Action and Politics: The Case of Nagorno-Karabagh, Occasional Paper No. 25, The Thomas Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies, 1997, pp. 16-17/24-29; Thomas Goltz, “Letter from Eurasia: The Hidden Russian Hand”, Foreign Policy, No. 92, Fall 1993, pp. 92-116.
5. 5 How Iran views the region is discussed in: Mehrdad Mohsenin, “Iran’s Relations with Central Asia and the Caucasus”, Vol. VII, No.4, Winter 1996, pp. 834-853.