State power and autocratic stability: Armenia and Georgia compared

Abstract

This chapter compares regime development in two most similar cases. Armenia and Georgia are both small states in the same region, with similar levels of economic development that witnessed the rise of powerful ethnic nationalist movements in the late 1980s. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, both cases were plagued by violent ethnic conflicts and independent paramilitaries that threatened to undermine all central state control. Finally, both countries were hybrid or competitive authoritarian regimes throughout the 1990s and 2000s.2At the same time, the two countries have differed considerably in terms of regime stability since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Armenia, governments faced down several enormous opposition protests to hang onto control. Throughout the post-Soviet period, incumbent governments or their chosen successors managed to stay in power. By contrast, Georgian governments have suffered greater instability (including several years of total state breakdown) in the face of relatively modest challenges. Since 1991, oppositionist forces have forced two incumbents from power. I argue that these divergent outcomes are the result of different interactionsbetween ethnic nationalism and state building. In Armenia, the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh generated a unified ethnic nationalist response that contributed to successful state-building efforts and sufficient coercive state capacity necessary to thwart even a highly mobilized opposition. By contrast, Georgian leaders lacked such a salient unifying issue. As a result, Georgian politics remained extremely fragmented, which in the context of emerging ethnic conflict resulted in total state collapse. Georgia’s weak state in turn was unable to cope with even modest opposition challenges in 1991-92 and 2003.