The Conduct of Armenian Foreign Policy: Limits of the Precarious Balance

Abstract

Armenia is one of the 44 landlocked countries in the world. It is also among those landlocked nation states that face peculiar geopolitical challenges. Armenia has no diplomatic relations with two of its neighbors, which renders 80% of its land borders closed. The geography and regional political conjuncture have unambiguously shaped the priorities in Armenia’s foreign and security policy in the post Soviet-era. Since the early days of independence, a plethora of historical, political, and geostrategic factors has converged the interests of Russia and Armenia. Armenia has actively participated in several Russia-led integration and security projects—the Commonwealth of Independence States, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Union, to name only a few. The fact of multi-layered cooperation with Russia, however, did not prevent Armenia from cooperating with the European Union (EU). Armenia has been part of the EU-led European Neighborhood Policy, Eastern Partnership and signed the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement with the EU in November 2017. How was Armenia able to find a working compromise between its strategic ally—Russia—and its “normative ally”—the European Union? In contrast to the prevalent argument that the foreign policy choices and security alignments of small states are mostly determined by external and imposed factors, this chapter argues that a set of equally significant domestic variables impact small states in making foreign policy decisions.