THE SOUTH CAUCASIAN UNION – CHALLENGING GEOPOLITICAL CONCEPT REVISITED

Abstract

In the paper, we discuss a very complex and contestable idea, proposed and developed by us already for several years, about strengthening the uneasy political, economic, social, cultural and most significantly – security relationships between the three South Caucasian countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, towards forming new geopolitical centre in the south-eastern shore of the Black Sea, or more precisely, just in the middle of the Black and Caspian Seas; in one of the most important and complicated regions in the world. The South Caucasian Union (SCU) concept has quite reasonable historical roots and although not successful enough until now, however certain examples, which could serve as preconditions, whether predispositions more: the existence of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic (TDFR) (22 April-28 May 1918) and even the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (Transcaucasian SFSR or TSFSR) (1922-1936). Along with the corresponding consideration of the region’s hardest internal conflicts, at the same time globally so meaningful, and especially almost the dilemmatic dispute of Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh (NK), but not limited to, we have drawn some feasible conflict-resolution scenarios under the effective SCU model, which ensuring first of all security or in particular, protection of independence and sovereignty of the South Caucasian states as their basic interests, is to logically counterweight any threats coming from bigger, more powerful and ambitious regional competitors, whether dominants and due to evident aggression, from – Russia, in specific.