Europe and Azerbaijan

I am just back from a very interesting trip to Baku, Azerbaijan, home of Eurovision 2012. The capital city has experienced explosive growth over the last half decade, dating more or less to the inauguration of the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline in the mid-2000s. The completion of BTC enabled Azerbaijan, which lacks ocean access, to ship its oil to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan via Georgia, and thereby reap the benefits of selling on the global market. Oil booms are not new to Baku, but it’s been a while. Many Azerbaijanis I spoke with likened the development of Baku to a Caspian Dubai, though it should be noted that the construction cranes and bulldozers in Baku are still moving. As the fifth largest city in the Soviet Union, Baku already had a dense urban fabric of both pre-Soviet and Soviet-era residential neighborhoods, some of which is being bulldozed to make way for glitzier high-rises or open spaces. As I understand it, the dispossessed are being relocated to new apartment buildings on the outskirts of the city. The recent demolition of the house and offices of human rights activist Leyla Yunus, against a court order blocking such a demolition, is the most visible example of this practice (http://humanrightshouse.org/Articles/16879.html). Eurovision is only six months away, and the great clean-up has just begun.

The purpose of my visit was to learn about the proposed and currently-under-review gas pipeline projects in the region. A decision from the government and SOCAR, the state oil and gas monopoly, could come as soon as the end of this month. I will write more about that later.

For now, I have a few observations about Europe’s place in Azerbaijan and vice versa. I was surprised the first time I heard someone in Baku say that Azerbaijan is part of Eastern Europe. I heard it several more times during my relatively brief stay. I guess I should not have been surprised. In geography classes I always teach that the notion of a border between Europe and Asia is mythical and reflects a particularly European Weltanschauung that sought to order the world around cultural definitions of “us” and “them.” What I was hearing from these Azerbaijanis is the very reasonable expectation that the “Eastern Partnership” of the European Union and sustained interest in the region’s natural resources indicates a desire by the EU to move past the problematic and arbitrary geographical divisions of the past. After all, they’ve been competing in Eurovision since 2008.

Is Azerbaijan a part of Eastern Europe?

As a political geographer, I study both borders and the linkages that transcend them. This is where the Europe-Azerbaijan connection comes in. The European integration project has always been about creating interdependencies as a means of preventing conflict. It started with trading steel and coal, and eventually created a common currency and eliminated border checks within the EU. The current crisis is grave, but it will not be lethal to European integration because it is so much more than the euro. By establishing policies towards neighboring regions, such as the Eastern Partnership, the EU is attempting to spread a measured dose of this philosophy of interdependence beyond its borders. The current cornerstone of EU policy towards Azerbaijan is Nabucco, a proposed natural gas pipeline, a piece of infrastructure that would create an unbroken link from the hydrocarbon fields of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan to the most important Austrian village you’ve never heard of, Baumgarten, where now about 50 billion cubic meters of mainly Russian gas are handled each year. It remains to be seen if Nabucco will be built, but as proposed it is certainly consistent rhetorically with the goal of creating linkages for mutual (economic) benefit.

Figure 1: Source: European Commission External Relations

But it also is revealing of a deep irony in Europe’s relationship with the “new” eastern Europe. Earlier this year, I was in Bulgaria and Romania along the external borders of the EU, where great effort is being exerted to securitize borderlines to prevent the unwanted movement of humans onto EU territory. This is along borders that until 1990 were designed to keep people inside the Eastern Bloc. With EU money, new “guest houses” (read: prisons) are being constructed in Bulgaria in advance of Schengen membership. These are meant to handle the expected arrival of refugees and unwanted migrants from the Caucasus, Central Asia, Africa, and beyond. On the Greek-Turkish border, Greece is constructing a 120 km long water-filled moat to prevent unwanted border crossings. (http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15297025,00.html). Mind you, this is along the same external border of the EU where presumably in the next 10 years a new pipeline welcoming Caspian—or “eastern” European—gas will be inaugurated with great fanfare. Is this not reminiscent on some level of the great shortcoming of NAFTA, namely that it decoupled free movement of goods from free movement (which might also include people)?

The message it sends is this: We, Europeans, welcome your hydrocarbons, we invite you to think about the community of values we are trying to establish that is not limited just to this side of the Bosporus, and in the meantime we are going to do what we can to maximize the transit of hydrocarbons while minimizing the human capital that comes our way either from Azerbaijan (where the push factors for emigration are quite low) or elsewhere in Eurasia. Interdependencies, in other words, are still about the strict delineation of “containers” that mark inside and outside, and this brand of cooperation requires ever more stringent enforcement of these lines of demarcation.

As a country somewhat politically isolated in its own wider neighborhood, yet with obvious strategic importance well beyond its immediate region, elites in Azerbaijan have struggled to define a future path for the country that isn’t just about being a source of oil and gas. Europe should be encouraging a more variegated set of relationships with its eastern partners.