[LINK] "Armenia’s foreign policy: between dependence and complementarity"

[rfmcdonald]

Kevork Oskanian at Open Democracy argues that Armenia's entry into the Russia-dominated Eurasian union should have been seen beforehand as a marker of Russian intentions.

The current conflict in Ukraine has preoccupied Western media, analysts, scholars, and policymakers for well over a year now – and has left many of the assumptions that once governed relations between Russia and the West in tatters. There is little doubt that the outcome of the drama being played out in the east of that country will shape new rules of the game between Moscow, the former Soviet republics, and Brussels, possibly for decades to come. Conscious of this fact, the smaller states in the Eastern Partnership region – Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan – view the Ukrainian crisis as a decisive moment: one that might determine the nature of their statehoods in the foreseeable future.

To some extent, the plight of the weakest, and most dependent of these smaller states – Armenia – should have alerted policymakers to the seriousness of Russia’s intentions in re-asserting its position within ‘its’ near abroad. Indeed, Yerevan was clearly strong-armed into the Eurasian Customs Union (ECU). The country had been expected to initial its Association Agreement with the EU in Vilnius during November of that year, after the successful conclusion of negotiations in June. So when its president, Serj Sargsyan, announced his dramatic U-turn on 3 September 2013, it came as a shocking surprise to both officials and seasoned observers of Armenian politics.

Previously, the Kremlin had tolerated Yerevan’s limited co-operation with NATO and participation in the ENP, partly because Yerevan’s already deep and apparently irreversible military-strategic dependence on Moscow paradoxically made such engagement palatable; and, in any case, as was often pointed out by Yerevan in its refusals to join the Russian-led bloc, Armenia’s small economy did not share a border with the ECU. For Russia, the marginal gain of Yerevan’s membership was therefore minimal, both in geopolitical and geo-economic terms. The fact that it was nonetheless strong-armed into a policy shift should have been an early signal to all concerned – primarily in the former Soviet Union – that the Putin administration ‘meant business’ in pressing ahead with its regional project.

While Russia may have gained little with Armenia’s accession to the ECU – which was formalised at the beginning of this year – the costs for Armenia have been considerable. These costs go beyond the clash between the country’s WTO and ECU commitments, or the further deepening of its economy’s dependence on Russian energy and remittances. They include Armenia’s much reduced ability to hedge against major geopolitical shift in its region – something the country once aspired to through the ‘complementarity’ of its foreign policy.