Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia claimed their right to be reunited, organizing mass protests. This does not mean that the Armenian political leaders had not their share of rivalry and opposition. A complementary study of bottom-up processes would be necessary to understand the overall process of state formation, studying for example the effects of partial military and social demobilization from 1994 onwards, which resonate on state-society relations and shed light on recent evolutions of the Armenian state. Armament was left over by the disbanding Soviet Army in 1991, but certainly not enough to wage three years of intense fighting. In the last chapter, Tilly insists on the weight of external factors on contemporary emerging states: colonial legacies, influence of a particular power in institutional setting, importance of the international community to get recognition11. This observation induces a rapprochement with Charles Tillys famous formula that war made states, which, in spite of some a priori reservations, may be an interesting prism through which one should understand the formation of the Armenian state2. 28 The figure is given by the Defense Ministry on its website, www.mil.am, last access as of March 2008. In 1994, their special economic privileges were abolished.

It opposed the President to Prime Minister Kocharian allied with National Security chief Serge Sargsian. It is still a common reference in Armenian. War is seen here as not only a destructive process but to a certain extent as a creative dynamic, a resource in state-making. In subsequent years the number of servicemen in the Defence Army of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic increased several times.

It was signed on 29th August for 20 years. Understandably, war is never the only factor determining state institutions. The acute perception of a concrete threat and the state of war dictated the terms of state-building. 27As the parliamentary elections of summer 1995 drew closer, it became more obvious that positions of power relied within the military and security forces. A month later, on November 9, the first battalion of the Azerbaijani army was created in Shushi, and on November 19 another was formed in Lachin (Berdzor)2. From the very beginning of the modern phase of the national liberation movement of Armenians of Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan has opted for solving the conflict by force and rejected any political dialogue. This is for Tilly among the vital functions a state must perform, proving existence by sustenance. 26 Ch. by Anna Matveeva and Dankana Hizkoka, Saferworld, April 2003. (Viktor Baranets. From the Collective Security Treaty, signed in May 1992, to the 1997 bilateral Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, Ter-Petrossians administration tried to build a security alliance that would guarantee Armenias protection39. Opposed to this view, the ANM claimed that statehood must be supported by national forces, not in order to launch external aggression although this might prove necessary, but in order to sustain sovereignty and to defend the structure in itself. All three countries developed an anti-colonial rhetoric but in the case of Armenia alone did this lead to a durable withdrawal of Communist leaders from the political hierarchy. At about the same time, when Abulfaz Elchibey came to power in Baku, he directly threatened Armenia proceeding to the shelling of border villages, thus giving a new dimension to Nagorno-Karabakhs security: from then on, the need for security both in Armenia and Karabakh was on a par. A charismatic ex-writer, Vazgen Sargsian knew how to convey enthusiasm and belief in him as well as in his grand ideas. States were shaped through mutual intercourse, especially one of war and competition for trade of capital. Had the 1994 cease-fire been quickly transformed into a peace accord, a constraining burden in the building of the state would have been alleviated. In the process of army-building Azerbaijan also received support from Turkey. In spite of being one of the poorest countries of the ex-USSR, it was rapidly able to lay the foundations of a national army. Apart from them, OMON units (around 4,000 persons) and armed units of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan (around 7,000 persons) were actively engaged in military operations4. Paradoxically, the high mobilization of the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s contributed to the emergence of stable state power institutions but reverted into estrangement from society vis--vis the state.

25 FBIS-SOV, 27 March, 1997, National Security Minister Comments on Extradition. Back in 1993, the decisive year of the war, defeats that Armenians inflicted on Azerbaijan were attributed largely to the self-defense forces, although regular Armenian forces were involved too. In addition, the capital-city of Armenia, which virtually tends to substitute itself to the rest of the Republic, is already a figure of center of power in the administrated Republic, contributing to differentiation of the structure and of the communist local elites.

In December 1994, Kocharian was elected President by the Parliament of the unrecognized Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, while still assuming the Commander-in-Chief position. In early 1992, more than ten self-defense units were formed in Artsakh, which were later re-organised into companies with a total number of 1000 people. Moscow. 34 Figures are from a report by International Crisis Group, Nagorno-Karabakh: Viewing the Conflict from the Ground, 14 September 2005. The first potential adversary was the former colonizer and still foremost player in the region, Russia. 32 Precaution is indeed necessary: the two countries are in a situation of cold war and propaganda is a common tool in their political discourse. . cit., p.84 and following. Yerkrapah is not an offset of the army, and its entry in parliament did not signal the establishment of a military regime in Armenia: Unlike Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, where military regimes are a familiar phenomenon, the post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav worlds have seen no full-blown military dictatorships.

This declaration was never put under referendum. With the independences1, the unsolved issue turned into the bloodiest open conflict of the former Soviet Union, except for Chechnya. For reasons of available resources, this study does cover exclusively these processes. The importance of security suffocated Armenia, reduced her options, and contributed to the current narrow share of political power. 23As early as 1992-1993, the issues of threat and security guarantees prevailed in all ex-Soviet Republics. Two political leaders played a prominent role in building the army in Armenia, and two others in Nagorno-Karabakh. Under the seventy years of Soviet rule, the Armenian Soviet Republic (only formally a state in its own right) was not the locus of monopoly of coercion; however part of its nationals along with all other titular nationals of the Soviet Union- benefited from military formation in the Soviet army and the Military academies, with a proportion higher than in other non-Slav Republics of high-rank officers. These reservations hold on a number of levels: first, the object of Tillys analysis is the European states from the Middle Age to the contemporary period within which military mobilisation and financial resources came to be centralized and monopolized in the hands of an institutionalized ruling group. The aftermath of the cease-fire had made public the organization of power and the growing influence of the power ministries within the Armenian state. In the collection 'The Caucasus: Armed and Divided. For Armenians, the link to sovietization was a difficult mix of political failure and national grievance that paradoxically strengthened and clearly cut the political boundaries of the Armenian nation. 24 FBIS-SOV, 30 December 1993, Deserters told to return or be severely punished. Other groups such as Armenian Kond, Tigran the Great, Armenian self-Determination Union and Jermuk militia, pledged allegiance to the new government, and were allowed to resume their defense activities in Karabakh, where they had been for more than a year. For a study of how these connections were set, see Rosaria Puglisi, Clashing Agendas?

The assassination of Vazgen Sargsian in a terrorist attack on Parliament in 199946 shaking the entire country left former allies of the first government, Robert Kocharian and Serge Sargsian, occupying the decisive political functions of the country. After regrouping, the forces of the NKR Defense army succeeded in stoping the advance of the Azerbaijani army by the autumn of 1992, and reached a breakthrough at the frontline in 1993. After a few months of internal struggle, the pressure put forward by Prime Minister R. Kocharian and National security chief Serge Sargsian, eventually rallied by Defense minister Vazgen Sargsian, resulted in Ter-Petrossians resignation in February 1998. Azerbaijan started with a marked advantage in terms of men and left over material by the Soviet army. Open conflict ended in 1994, freezing Armenian advances in Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan, thus marking victory in the eyes of the Armenian military. Economic Interests, Elite Coalitions and Prospects for Co-Operation between Russia and Ukraine, in Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. In connection with this expansion of aggression and in order to prevent further occupation of territories, on August 12, the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the NKR, headed by Georgy Petrossyan, the Acting Chairman of the Supreme Council, adopted a decree on introducing martial law in the Republic. Given the difficulty to reach landlocked Armenia in the beginning of the 1990s, the amount of equipment can not have been that great in absolute terms, although when considering the scale of the conflict and its guerrilla form before 1993, it is probable that in relative terms help was noticeable. 47 The Ukrainian case seems quite similar to the Armenian one with the concentration of national economic resources in the hands of a few families, Russian capital largely present in all strategic sectors of the economy and the political elite associated with both sets of actors, at least until the Orange Revolution of 2005. The Future Belongs to the Professional Army. - . 55, # 6, September 2003, pp. A number of political actors acknowledged, during interviews, that the Diaspora had helped in providing equipment18, but they would not specify the amount of help, merely saying that it was substantial19. The third reservation is that Tilly situates his reflection is not only in a different location (Europe, including Russia), but also in a different time, over a millennium, whereas the history of statehood in the FSU (Russia excluded) is either recent or discontinuous in terms of time or territory, or both in the case of Armenia.

Arif Yunusov.Azerbaijan:The Burden of History - Waiting for Change. After Armenia signed the Collective Security Treaty of the CIS in May 1992, another wave of Armenian officers serving in the ex-Soviet army volunteered in Armenia. The fact that the largest warehouses of weaponry and ammunitions of the Transcaucasian military district of the former Soviet Army, as well as most of its heavy military equipment and aviation potential, were located in the territory of Azerbaijan was an additional factor contributing to the militarization of Azerbaijan and its choice to solve the conflict by force. To give but one consequence: since financial accountability of the Ministry of Defense is unverifiable, it can not be concluded that war allowed for an efficient monopolization of capitalized coercion; if corruption highly permeated Defense, and blurred lines between private and public use of the Ministry resources to such a point that they could be diverted of their intended use, state institutions would not be said to be differentiated and autonomous.

36 Coordinated by the Russian Defense Ministry and Azeri OMONs Operation Ring intended to suffocate Armenian villages in Karabakh (in Gedachen and Shahumyan district). 9 Speech by Vartan Oskanian, Minister of Foreign Affairs, at the Permanent Council of the OSCE, 8October1998. Vagrius, 1999). The interdependence of states and the influence of the world system imposed by consolidated democracies - to put it roughly - leave no emerging state isolated. On February 24, Presidium of the Supreme Council of the NKR adopted a decree on the legal status of the Republic's armed formations, bringing them under a united command. Since Nagorno-Karabakh has no enforceable legal status, the international community chose to treat the conflict as one opposing two principles of international law: territorial integrity versus right to self-determination. However, the American theorist leaves little room in his major Capital and Coercion for application to recently formed states. Azerbaijan declared independence on August, 30th, 1991. In mid-1992, about 40 thousand people had been drafted into Azerbaijani army. by Anna Matveeva and Dankana Hizkoka, Saferworld, April 2003. The situation that emerged after 1991 was characterized by an overall sharp decrease in capital due to the tremendous economic collapse of the FSU, whereas means of coercion were benefiting from whatever financial resources available, resembling what Tilly calls state formation by capitalised coercion. In 1990 and 1991, self-defense groups burgeoned in the Republic, in reaction to anti-Armenian pogroms in Azerbaijan and violence against a handful of Armenian villages in Nagorno-Karabakh. However, the government did not proceed to the complete dismantling of militias before the cease-fire: the dramatic episode of Khojaly in 1992, when Armenian militiamen killed Azeri civilians on seizing the village, is proof of the existence of incompletely controlled militias in Karabakh. Yet, for new emerging states, tempo and conditions are different. Modern Armenian state reappeared in 1918 on the territory of Eastern Armenia, formerly part of the Russian Empire, after centuries of non-existence. Vazgen Sargsian, a second-generation ANM militant at the time in charge of coordinating all military forces of the Republic, reunited volunteers in the largest paramilitary group of Armenia, the Yerkrapah (Guardians of the land) in 1993 that was later legitimized. According to Tillys definition of a national-state, the USSR qualified as one, but failed short of being a nation-state, that is a state whose population shares a strong linguistic, religious and symbolic identity. To give but a few elements, these are characterized by a tension between growing concentration and centralization of coercion and capital in the hands of a small political and economic elite, and growing social discontent in reaction to oligarchic accumulation of financial resources and social exclusion, a common phenomenon in the FSU where Armenia holds the sad privilege of high-ranking12. 20 Coercion, op. Already in November massive and regular shelling of Armenian civilian settlements began1. This sense of victory coupled with the return of soldiers to civilian life transcribed into a Karabakh syndrome, a tentative notion for the mindset of victorious militiamen eager to be rewarded for their sacrifices in war by economic or political benefits.

8 A series of three anti-Armenian pogroms shook Azerbaijan from 1988 to 1991. In October 1990 the Soviet universal military draft was suppressed (the law dated back to 1967); instead, the law on the draft of Armenias citizens was adopted in 1990 as well as a law on Armenians serving outside Armenia. 10Leaders of the national movement of the late 1980s explicitly undertook a reflection on statehood, in the context of modern Armenian history (since the end of the 19th century), and then in the particular moment of perestroika. This situation eventually allowed Armenians to advance into Azerbaijani territory outside Nagorno-Karabakh proper. For 2004-2006 these amounted to 9979, 1113 and 12440 b. drams respectively*. Azerbaijan: The Burden of History - Waiting for Change. Figures for Ukraine are for the adopted budget for the Ministry of Defense, military pensions and paramilitary forces. Taline Papazian, State at War, State in War: The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict and State-Making in Armenia, 1991-1995,The Journal of Power Institutions in Post-Soviet Societies [Online], Issue 8|2008, Online since 14 July 2008, connection on 21 July 2022. Table 1: Military Expenditures as % of GDP: Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, 1988-2006, Military expenditure as percentage of gross domestic product, Figures for Armenia do not include military pensions. Numerous attempts of international supervisory bodies to compel Azerbaijan to comply with the treaty failed. The broadest social movement in a decade that followed the Presidential elections of February 2008 had to be crushed by violent intervention of the coercive apparatuses of the state in March, leaving a dozen people killed. 1During 1988-1995, Armenian policy mainly concentrated on the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated enclave in the Azerbaijani Soviet Republic. Nearly 40% of the territory of NKR came under the occupation of the Azerbaijani troops; about 66 thousand people became IDPs. Political leaders of all new states, especially since the end of the cold war, have to make clear which way of state development they chose for their country. The Republic of Armenias accession to independence came along with open war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian populated enclave dispatched within the Azerbaijani SSR in 1923. Political leaders however having delegated part of their control over a fraction of their external forces (border guards and customs), moved to reform the internal security apparatuses.

However it is necessary to precise that the tension war poses to the political objective of almost all FSU states between democratization and military power is a known fact, and that the positive role that war seems to be endorsed almost unequivocally here will be questioned in a more extensive work. 3 A. Blom, La guerre fait ltat: trajectoires extra-occidentales et privatisation de la violence, www.c2sd.sga.defense.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/thematique2charte.pdf , last access May 2008. 20It comes as no surprise that the two conflicting parties in no time attempted to create their national armies; although several factors contributed towards the weakening of this attempt in Azerbaijan, in Armenia it was the first state apparatus set up with success. 42 FBIS-SOV 95-248, 25 December 1998, Armenian Pan-national Movement Opens 7th Congress. 29 Statement of the Karabakh Committee, in Hayk, June 10, 1990. As Tilly himself emphasizes the accumulation of coercion and capital does not follow a linear process of growth. 15Tillys innovation is to focus his analysis of state-making on the organization of coercion and preparation of war: coercion is the first variable that accounts for state-making. 21 Russia played a crucial part in the timing of some battles in Nagorno-Karabakh on both sides, as weapons were sold or delivered to both countries, sometimes at the same moment. Still an opposition movement to Communist rule, the Armenian National Movements concern for security was directed at the Armenian people, whether in Armenia, in Karabakh or Azerbaijan. Acquiring significant superiority in military equipment and manpower, the Azerbaijani army embarked on a new large-scale offensive on June 12 ,1992 and, with the participation of the forces of former Soviet 4th Army stationed in Azerbaijan, occupied the entire Shahumian region and a part of Martakert region. Table 2: Public Spending in Armenia, 1995-2000, Source: United Nations, Republic of Armenia: Public Administration Country Profile, January 2004. 18 Since the start of my Ph.D., I travelled a number of times to Armenia where I stay a couple of months every time, to do fieldwork. The new minister also had the status of special negotiator in the search of a cease-fire. In December 1993, the Azerbaijani troops made another attempt to take the initiative on the frontline, yet the assault failed again and ended in heavy losses for the Azerbaijani army. Others were seized from the Azeri army, when Armenian troops entered some combat headquarters hastily abandoned in Nagorno-Karabakh. 33 Figures are from the Library of Congress data for 1994, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+am0012). Thus, the Karabakh issue appeared as a threat to the Azerbaijani state, one that might trigger other separatist claims from ethnic minorities. For instance, heavy weaponry (tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, large-caliber artillery) deployed in Azerbaijan was exceeding those in Armenia by 15%. This argument may be adjusted in the post cold-war period where triumphant liberalism was imposing its mark on a majority of emerging states, and even when only the least worse of all regimes or just a by default necessity to be integrated in global economic structures, this adhesion to economic and political liberalism strengthens mutual influence of state relations in shaping each other. In the years following the cease-fire, Armenian leaders worked toward making the national army a small, well-balanced, combat-ready defense force. To the dissidents that reformed a Karabakh Committee at the spring of 1988, Karabakh is perceived as a window of opportunity, a chance to seize, no matter how committed they may have otherwise been to the issue in itself. A mobilization of men from the age of 18 to 45 began. In the summer of 1992, 21 thousand soldiers and officers were deployed in the zone of military operations. Lingva Publishing house, 2001)). The only time when the institutional calendar got disrupted was in February 1998, when then President Ter-Petrossian resigned in what a constitutional coup. . It deported the Armenian population of 24 villages in Spring 1991. In the village of Maragha only, Azerbaijani servicemen killed 100 civilians. Still, mobilization against Azerbaijan and for Karabakh was high enough to make a last collaboration possible, with Manukian assuming the Defense Minister office in 1992-1993, and scoring important victories on the battlefield, before definitely rallying the opposition. Ironically, this situation cast heavy doubts on the capacity of such a state to re-mobilize its society in case of imminent threat the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict being unsolved- whereas permanent insecurity dilemma is precisely the pretext summoned by Armenian authorities to justify the priority given to stability of the regime. cit., p.2. The last chapter he devotes to states emerged from the decolonization especially in Africa and Latin America; he points out major diversions between the state-formation process that characterized Europe and the one from which new states have been emerging. For the needs of war, the government left a number of them operating, but after Khojaly, proceeded to check them requiring the intervention of an undisputed charismatic figure. 38 It is commonly accepted that the first Republics Dashnak government (1918-1920) surrendered to the Bolsheviks in order to gain protection from the advancing Turkish armies and to avoid the loss of Eastern Armenia. On September 5, 1991, the president of Azerbaijan signed a decree on establishing its Ministry of Defense. How an economically devastated country, with inexperienced political leaders acting in a collapsed environment, can build itself a state while being at war? The Karabakh issue not only united Azerbaijanis but also crystallized their national construction in opposition-competition with Armenians. In 1996, the total number of soldiers in the army was between 50000 and 60000 (including reserve) for a total population of 3.5 million, according to official and optimistic figures.

Once retrenching the portion of national propaganda, numerous witness accounts remain besides supposedly more objective arguments such as Russias interest in the region, Azerbaijans numeric and technical advantage, etc. These specific conditions determined state-building in Armenia, launching two complementary processes: building of a national army from a meagre Soviet heritage and accumulating scarce resources into a restricted number of state institutions, the Defence Ministry in particular. 13What this chart does not capture however is the implicit tension between these objectives; they can be grasped by a system of inductive and deductive arrows in chart 2 (See chart 2 in Annex). For Azerbaijanis, sovietization had been a way of gaining formal statehood and territorial aggrandizement, making some sense of a nation emerge. Interestingly enough, the higher ratios for Armenia compared to Georgia speak for the tremendous costs that the Karabakh war imposed on the Armenian economy. The Dashnak government ruling the first Republic mobilized all forces to sustain heavy fighting against the Turkish armies managing in the process to hold on the rural capital town of Yerevan, which for the first time in its modern history, acquired political meaning as a centre of power and national state. The first leading team came to power supported by the unity of a vast majority of people around the Karabakh issue primarily. Armenians boast themselves on having won the war thanks to their own strength, and to the adversarys lack of motivation. 169-191. Therefore the Soviet regime was perceived in different ways. 35 For an overview of the new political thinking of the ANM/Karabakh Committee leaders, see Armenia at the Crossroads: Democracy and Nationhood in the Post-Soviet Era; Essays, interviews and speeches by the leaders of the national democratic movement in Armenia, edited by G. Libaridian, Blue Crane Books, Watertown, Massachusetts, 1991. Whereas non-Slav nationalities were poorly represented in the Soviet Army, Armenians were an exception to the rule, therefore numerous soldiers and officers came back to serve in the Republic. To my opinion this economic involvement is more decisive in terms of loss of national sovereignty: here, we come to suspect the limits of conflict as a major incentive to state-building: when no solution is found, state-building may become hostage of conflict, conflict may dictate the evolution of the state. 23 Library of Congress, address as of 14 March, 2008, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field(DOCID+az0068). This move towards Russia was dictated by the heavy burden of war costs on a devastated economy that made civilian life hardly bearable. Contrary to the European model then, the common wisdom on post-colonization states would hold war responsible for the further destruction of already unstable state structures. Armenia has nothing else to trade than its good will and respectability. Buying them was hardly possible.

16The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute gives the following estimates for four countries. Yerevan. In total, there were 11 thousand carriages of ammunition in Azerbaijan's warehouses, while Armenia had only 500. 4. Fairbanks, The Postcommunist Wars, in Diamond, Larry and Plattner, Marc, Democracy after Communism, op.cit. I am not sure why this is so, although it is tempting to speculate that military leaders, themselves affected by flight from the public world, want money and power more than glory and responsibility43. Fairbanks, The Postcommunist Wars, in Diamond, Larry and Plattner, Marc, Democracy after Communism, John Hopkins University Press, 2002. In Armenia, Vazgen Manukian, from the Karabakh Committee, Defense minister from October 1992 to June 1993, and Vazgen Sargsian, from the ANM, head of the Defense Committee from May 1991 to January 1992, when the Defense Ministry was established and entrusted to him. In Armenia, where election contestation has been the rule since the 1996 presidential elections however, incumbents never retired to the benefit of their opponents. However, as in May 1992 Azerbaijan received 325 tanks, 344 infantry fighting vehicles, 78 amphibious infantry fighting vehicles, 38 military reconnaissance vehicles, 329 armored personnel carriers, 343 howitzers and self-propelled artillery, 63 Grad multiple launch rocket systems, 52 mortars, 35 MIG jet fighters, 7 frontal bombers, a Su-25 jet aircraft and 52 L-29 military jet trainer aircraft, 18 Mil Mi-24 attack helicopters and 15 military transport helicopters and around 100 air defense missile systems through the distribution of the combat military equipment and ammunition of the former Soviet army, the situation on the frontline drastically escalated. On September 5, 1991, the president of Azerbaijan signed a decree on establishing its Ministry of Defense. By 1991, Armenia was the most homogenous Republic of the USSR, with a population of around 95% Armenian. In other terms, only a direct order from the President could bring about such an interference; which happened in the turmoil following Presidential elections in 1996, when the military was deployed to stop the opposition from violently seizing power. Figures for Georgia from 2002 are for the budgeted expenditure. The Azerbaijani diplomatic stance on the other hand was to follow Moscow and treat the issue as an unmotivated claim running counter the Soviet motto of the brotherhood of people, and after the Soviet collapse as an international war provoked by an independent states aggression and supported by a separatist population on its territory.