Civic Dominion: Nation-Building in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan over 25 Years of Independence

Abstract

This article surveys nation-building in post-Soviet Azerbaijan over the country’s first quarter-century of restored independence. It examines the core dimensions of ethno-demographic and national minority issues, language policy, and the role of religion in the development of the state’s formal ideology Azerbaycançılıq (Azerbaijanism). The article highlights the nexus of nation-building and regime-building as a dominant trend over the last two decades, generating what we term “civic dominion”: the domination of a regime tradition, legitimated through the imagery and ideology of civic nationhood. Finally, the article considers the role of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict as a long-standing exception to the ostensibly civic ethos of post-Soviet Azerbaijani nation-building.

Introduction

Over its first quarter-century of independence, Azerbaijan was simultaneously a state confronting protracted, externally supported secessionism at home, and an external power culturally linked to non-core groups in neighbouring states. Among the post-Soviet states Azerbaijan shares only with Moldova a majority population that is linked by culture to a larger co-ethnic population across a border, in Iran and Romania respectively. There is consequently a bivalent quality to Azerbaijani nation-building as a process that in seeking to define a nation within the borders of the Republic of Azerbaijan, is also inescapably in dialogue with actors, discourses, and practices seeking to define ethnic Azerbaijani communities beyond its borders. The plurality of these settings, and of the meanings associated with being Azerbaijani in each of them, illustrate the fluid, situational and socially constructed nature of ethnic identity. There is neither a singular nor hegemonic understanding of the group referent for an Azerbaijani identity, nor of the territorial referent Azerbaijan itself. Indeed, the Azerbaijani nation-state tradition, demarcated from a wider imagined Azerbaijani ethno-space, is predicated on a malleable view of identity rationalizing this separation.

In this article we chart the trajectory of nation-building over Azerbaijan’s first quarter-century of post-Soviet independence as an exercise in both containing secessionism at home and fears of Azerbaijani irredentism abroad. In the context of enduring territorial fragmentation in an era of hegemonic international liberal norms, nation-building in Azerbaijan asserted a pragmatic, and dialogically conceived, doctrine of civic nationhood, known as “Azerbaijanism” (Azerbaycançılıq). In this framework, subsections of the article discuss ethno-demographic and national minority issues, language policy, and the role of religion, and how these contexts affected understandings and praxis of nation-building within the republic. We then consider the nexus of nation-building and regime-building as the dominant trend over the last two decades, before briefly assessing the role of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict in Nagorny Karabakh as a theatre of nation-building characterized by exceptionality to the putatively civic norms of Azerbaijanism. ¹ Unfortunately space does not permit us to address Azerbaijanis beyond the borders of Azerbaijan.

We define “nation-building” as the assemblage of discourses, policies, and practices enacted by political elites to engender a collective sense of identification with the nation among all, or part, of the population of a state. These are internalized by both that population and a range of external actors, including states, international organizations, and populations identified with the nation living beyond its borders. This definition adopts a perspective emphasizing the interactions, and mutually constitutive effects, of internal and external factors in nation-building (Mylonas 2013; Ayoob and Ismayilov 2015). The Azerbaijani case resonates with Harris Mylonas’ assertion that nation-building practices are contingent outcomes of strategic responses by elites to geopolitical competition (Mylonas 2013, xxi). The containment of both secessionism linked to irredentist currents in a neighbouring state (Armenia) and the potential within Azerbaijani ethno-nationalism for irredentist currents focused on another (Iran) was the salient imperative for Azerbaijani nation-building in the period considered here.

By the same token our definition also emphasizes the centrality of elite legitimation in nation-building practices, and hence the instrumentalism inherent in the choices that elites make among plural historical, cultural, and symbolic traditions (Isaacs and Polese 2016, 8). This emphasis highlights Azerbaijan’s trajectory from nationalist mobilization before independence through to the brief accession to power of a nationalist counter-elite, the Azerbaijani Popular Front, in 1992–1993, and finally the restoration after that time of its former communist elite. As a result of this trajectory, nationalism in Azerbaijan constituted a major cleavage between the former communist elite restored to power in 1993 and the nationalist opposition.

This trajectory differentiates Azerbaijan from Central Asia, where communist elites remained in power and adopted a symbolic nationalism to craft new identities as nation-states. It also differentiates the situation in Azerbaijan from that in Armenia in 1991–1998 and in Georgia 1990–1992 and after 2004, where nationalism was the legitimating ideology of a new, non-communist elite. By contrast, in the context of a military defeat in Nagorny Karabakh and ongoing secession, restored former communists in Azerbaijan faced a nationalist opposition ousted from power that claimed to be the true custodian of national values. Azerbaijan’s elite responded to this context with a strategy blending state, nation, and regime, investing their power with qualities of constitutional, institutional and ideological permanence. We call this strategy “civic dominion”: the domination of a regime tradition, legitimated through the imagery and ideology of civic nationhood.

Azerbaijanism: Civic in Form, Nationalizing in Substance

Several transitional factors mediated ambiguities in post-Soviet Azerbaijan’s potential to be a “nationalizing state” (Brubaker 1996). Post-independence desires for nationalization confronted a republic that had already been significantly transformed as a result of prior nationalist mobilizations. In the late 1980s, refugee flows between the Soviet Armenian and Azerbaijani republics resulted in demographic exchanges depleting Azerbaijan’s substantial Armenian minority while increasing the numbers of Azerbaijanis. The socio-cultural space sustaining the Russian-speaking milieu of the capital Baku was transformed by communal violence and migrations from the countryside in the early 1990s; more than half of Azerbaijan’s largest remaining minority, Russians, had departed by 1999 (see Table 1). Ethno-nationalist mobilizations among minorities in northern and southern peripheries of the republic attached a conspiratorial air to minority identity issues, particularly in light of Armenian secessionism (Goff 2020, 215–239).

Table 1. National Composition of Azerbaijan 1989–2009

Source: State Statistical Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan, www.stat.gov.az

* In 1989 this category applied to Ahiska (or “Meskhetian”) Turks; subsequent Azerbaijani censuses have not distinguished between this group and Turks originating from Turkey.

Moreover, a nationalist elite formed by the Azerbaijani Popular Front (APF) had acceded to power for one chaotic year in 1992–93 before departing under the catastrophic conditions of the deepening first Karabakh war and internal civil strife (Wasserman 1995; Tahirzade 1997). Mixed with the APF’s Turcophile and ostensibly democratic leanings was a vision of the Azerbaijani nation as an integral geo-body transcending the Azerbaijani-Iranian border, unjustly partitioned by nineteenth century imperialists (Shaffer 2002). This sharpening of the ethnic Azerbaijani contours within Iranian statehood incited Iranian fears of Azerbaijani irredentism. Combined with the consequences of Armenian secessionism and irredentism, this context shaped the nation-building horizon for the former First Secretary of the Azerbaijani Communist Party 1969–1982, Heydar Aliyev, when he returned to power in 1993.

Rather than the classical post-colonial project of inserting the nation into colonized social, cultural, and political spaces, post-Soviet and post-war Azerbaijani nation-building faced a different imperative. This was to insert minorities into an integral state identity capable of reversing and preventing secessionism and securing international legitimacy for Azerbaijan in its de jure boundaries. The resulting discourse, Azerbaijanism, involved a fundamental doctrinal change from Elchibey-era ethno-nationalism to shape civic codings of Azerbaijan as an inclusive and territorially framed state-nation (Mehdiyev 2007). Policing the contours of this civic construct were a “politics of omission” vis-à-vis overt expressions of majoritarian ethno-nationalism, and of proscription vis-à-vis expressions of minority ethno-nationalism. Yet while the resulting nation-building program was civic in form, tacit ethno-national consolidation was the result.

Civic codes dominate Azerbaijan’s Constitution. The Azerbaijani people were defined as “citizens of the Azerbaijan Republic living on the territory of the Azerbaijan Republic” (Article 1.2). Azerbaijani passports and identity documentation upheld this coding by recording only the citizenship, and not ethnicity, of the holder. Other articles explicitly affirmed the Republic’s unity and integrity (Articles 5, 11) and the inadmissibility of change in state borders without a nationwide referendum (Article 3.2). The civic character of the state is underscored by the fact that its only autonomous state-territorial formation, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, is not based on ethnicity. Azerbaijani census data is complicated by claims of the probable under-representation of minority communities, inconsistency in Soviet demographic categories posing problems of continuity and comparability, and shifting motives for census respondents in identifying their ethnic background in different ways (Goff 2020). It is nevertheless clear that the late 1980s and 1990s resulted in an ethno-demographic consolidation of the Azerbaijani majority, growing according to official figures by 9% over a 20-year interval from 83% in 1989 to 92% in 2009 (see Table 1).

Azerbaijan’s National Minorities

Migrations, forced and voluntary, have transformed the context of Azerbaijan’s national minority politics. In 1989 Azerbaijan’s two largest minorities, Armenians and Russians, comprised more than 10% of the population and were linked to neighbouring republics undergoing their own nationalist mobilizations that then became states. Twenty years later, Azerbaijan’s two largest minorities, Lezgins and Talysh, comprised less than 3% of the population and did not have external homelands configured as sovereign states. But border issues still remain salient, especially in the case of the Lezgins, a North-East Caucasian group straddling Azerbaijan’s border with the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation, home to a larger population of 385,240 Lezgins (Rosstat 2012–2013, 77). The Talysh, an Iranian-related group, also straddle the Azerbaijani-Iranian border in the south. ² Although these minorities lack external homelands configured as states, sponsorship of minority cultural activity, such as conferences and minority language media, by neighbouring states contributes to the securitization of ethno-nationalism among them (Siroky and Mahmudlu 2016; Kotecha 2006, 44–45), meaning their depiction as threats to national security justifying the imposition of restrictions on civil liberties or new security measures. Azerbaijan’s other minorities are generally small in number or geographically dispersed.

Articles 44 and 45 in the Constitution guarantee rights to nationality and the use of the mother tongue. Azerbaijan signed and ratified the Framework Convention on National Minorities (FCNM) in 2000. With the specific exception of the Armenian minority, Council of Europe assessments initially praised implementation of the FCNM in Azerbaijan (Council of Europe 2004, 2008). Criticisms generally concerned more procedural than substantive issues. Yet if Azerbaijani legislation complies with international standards on non-discrimination, active mechanisms institutionalizing minority participation have not taken root. Constraints on separatism prohibit the formation of regional or ethnic parties; a Consultative Council for National Minorities established in 1993 is defunct and a single State Counsellor on National Policy advises the President, a post that has not always been occupied. ³ There is no law on the protection of national minorities, envisaged since 1992. Rather, it was the Ministry of National Security (remodelled in 2015 as the National Security Service) that emerged as the primary institution dealing with minority issues, through a securitizing lens (Cornell, Karaveli, and Ajeganov 2016, 56). A resulting irony was that while national minority representation was better in Azerbaijan than in several neighbouring states, international criticism focused on the fact that there were no formal mechanisms ensuring that this is so (Popjanevski 2006, 69; Council of Europe 2008, 4–5; Council of Europe 2013).

The demographic homogenization of the republic has been accompanied by increasing assertions of its multicultural character. In 2014 a Baku International Multiculturalism Centre was established, teaching “Azerbaijani Multiculturalism” courses at home and abroad; 2016 was Azerbaijan’s Year of Multiculturalism (see Cornell, Karaveli, and Ajeganov 2016, 48–57). Geopolitical factors and the management of secessionist conflict explain pressures to embed Azerbaijani nationalism within a bordered civic frame making multicultural inclusivity explicit. Yet as Bruce Grant argues, the post-Soviet idiom of tolerance follows a Bakuvian tradition of egalitarian discourses “most often advanced by those looking to assert or assume the mantles of power” (Grant 2010, 125). Azerbaijanism, hinging on the ambiguity embedded within distinct geographic and ethno-national meanings of “Azerbaijan,” renders implicit the fact that Azerbaijanis already dominate in all spheres of social and political life. But if the majority refrains from ethno-nationalist nation-building, it is a core plank of the majority-minority compact in Azerbaijan that minorities should do so too. This is a form of tolerance, yet it is clear where the power lies. As Krista Goff puts it, Azerbaijanism “tells minorities that identifying themselves as Azerbaijanis connects them to a civic identification while disregarding the ways in which it is defined in practice by the Turkic Azeri nation and culture” (Goff 2020, 217).

There is a harder edge to Azerbaijanism. Where minorities straddle borders, the securitization of secessionism has the potential to intersect with securitizations of both external sponsorship and civic activity. In 2007 and 2012 Talysh journalists of the Talysh-language newspaper Tolishi Sado were arrested and imprisoned on charges of espionage for Iran (Mamedov 2012; Goff 2020, 235–6). Some NGO reports by outside actors, such as the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples’ Organization (UNPO), have complained of assimilatory policies and a lack of cross-border access for Lezgins. Yet other field-based reports have indicated mingled identities and respondents uninterested in sharpening them (Gerber 2007, 16; Kotecha 2006, 34–35). It is debatable whether such conflicting claims are symptomatic of wider issues in the legal environment and conditions for independent civic activity, or of active discrimination. More evident is the decline of formal procedures and criteria for the adjudication and mediation of such claims. If minorities adapt to the majority Turkic culture, coded civically as Azerbaijanism, they face few obstacles. But there are few avenues for bottom-up calibrations of Azerbaijanism outside of state-sponsored cultural forums, themselves a vehicle for the expression of Azerbaijanism as a harmonious but apolitical multiculturalism.

Language

Owing to both structural legacies and transitional factors, linguistic nationalism has played a subdued role in Azerbaijani nation-building. Although Soviet rule had subjected the Azerbaijani language to successive script reforms, by the 1980s Azerbaijan was significantly less russified than Central Asia. ⁴ While a segment of the Azerbaijani intelligentsia was russified, the depth and demographic scope of russification were insufficient to make this a salient intra-ethnic cleavage. The early “decolonizing” policies of the APF in 1992–3 involving the Latinization of the previously Cyrillicized Azerbaijani language and its renaming – later reversed – as türk dili (Turkic, sometimes parsed confusingly as Turkish), were largely symbolic and became less relevant after emigration had diminished the numbers of Russian-speakers in Azerbaijan. The return to power of the prior communist leadership also embedded a Russian-speaking ethos among parts of the elite structure, associated primarily with the previously influential Head of the Presidential Administration and later head of the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences, Ramiz Mehdiyev, author of several major policy documents published in Russian in the mass media (Mehdiyev 2014; Mehdiyev 2015a, 2015b). Without either a substantial settler population of unassimilated Slavs or a demographically significant constituency of russified Azerbaijanis to incite Azerbaijani linguistic nationalism, Russian remained resilient in the early post-Soviet period. Although divested of official status Russian-language materials continued to dominate curricula by default and by virtue of the long-standing respect accorded to the Russian pedagogical tradition. ⁵ The number of Russian sections in Baku’s schools, and number of students in them, has remained stable compared to the 1990s despite ethnic Russian demographic decline, indicating that most of these pupils are Azerbaijanis (Azadlıq Radiosu 2009). There is also a wide range of Russian cultural and media organizations active in Azerbaijan promoting Russian language and civilization.

Twenty-five years after independence, the language market had been fragmented by the entry of Turkish and English, alongside Russian and Azerbaijani. Each of these languages was associated with different realms of civic and educational activity, although neither is as structurally embedded as Russian. Turkish-language linkages have been associated with the activities of Turkish businesses and, until 2016, a largely non-governmental educational network (Ismayilov 2016; Balci 2013). English-language linkages have been associated with the neo-liberal civil society sphere of Western-funded NGOs, the foreign policy milieu, and educational institutions with an internationalist outlook, such as the Azerbaijani Diplomatic Academy. Multilingualism consequently remains a salient feature of post-Soviet Azerbaijan. The fragmented linguistic landscape points on the one hand to the absence of a single salient cleavage that would sharpen Azerbaijani linguistic nationalism. On the other hand, it points also to the unifying role of the national language in a context where language repertoires for upwardly mobile citizens must nonetheless also include Russian, English, and Turkish. Without external sources of funding and support, the teaching of minority languages in Azerbaijan remains a problem area. Against the backdrop of a relatively low and declining budget for education ⁶, minority language instruction appears limited to transitioning students from minority groups to proficiency in Azerbaijani (Cornell, Karaveli and Ajeganov 2016, 62).

Religion

A complex concatenation of internal and external factors has mediated the role of religion in post-Soviet Azerbaijani nation-building (Altstadt 2017, Ch. 6). Although Islam was the dominant identity in Azerbaijan since its introduction in the seventh century, a sectarian divide between majority Shi‘a and minority Sunni populations has always been an underlying cleavage, and a key determinant of secularism as a core pillar of nationhood in the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) of 1918–1920. Official figures put the ratio between Shi‘a and Sunni at 85:15, although some Azerbaijani scholars estimate a higher Sunni share at 65:35 (see Lonardo 2016, 241). The historical, pre-Soviet precedent of state secularism in 1918–1920, with its concomitant incorporation of Islam as a cultural component of nationhood, implies that Islam poses less of a challenge to the legitimacy of the nation-state tradition in Azerbaijan as compared to Central Asian republics lacking this precedent.

In the 1990s–2000s, research indicated that Azerbaijan is one of the most secular Muslim societies in the world (Wiktor-Mach 2012), although 94% of the population surveyed claimed a (cultural) Muslim identity. Despite commitments to secularism, sovereignty nevertheless re-introduced religious identifications (Yunusov 2004; Balci 2004; Kotecha 2006; Bedford 2009; Sattarov 2009; Mammadli 2015; Altstadt 2017, 186–191). Azerbaijan’s multi-sectarianism is both geographically patterned – with Shi‘a predominance in the south and Sunni predominance in the north – and geopolitically inflected through linkages to neighbouring and transnational faith communities. Some public and governmental discourses have portrayed contemporary orientations within wider Sunni trends, such as Salafism and “Wahhabism,” as threats to the Azerbaijani secular model. Yet Sunni Islam also has an indigenous, historical presence in Azerbaijan preceding these tendencies, and connects Azerbaijan to other Turkic nations. Shi‘ism not only links Azerbaijan to Iran, but also constitutes the core field for the projection of Iranian influence into Azerbaijan. This projection has typically been imagined reciprocally in terms of threats of theocratic political Islam (for Azerbaijan) and irredentism (for Iran).

Post-9/11, as a small but strategically located power, Azerbaijan positioned itself as both an ally of Western powers in conflict with Islamist extremism, for example by facilitating over-flight routes for American forces engaged in Afghanistan and deploying troops as part of the coalition in Iraq, and a model of moderation from within that “same” Islamic world out of which extremism has emerged. Reprising Azerbaijan’s bridging role between Marxism and the Middle East in the 1920s, Azerbaijan’s positioning in the overall context of the “War on Terror” bridged the problem and its putative solution. This is a strategic response to Islamophobia salient in the Western world, and an astute appraisal of the privileging of secularism over democracy in Western evaluations of friend and foe in the Islamic world after 9/11. It is also a position enabling “double-dipping” between the championing of (moderate) Islamic values against Islamophobia within international, especially Western-defined, discursive fields, and the domestic securitization of Islam through policies including closures of religious parties and mosques; co-optation of religious organizations; beard-shaving; enabled departures of alleged insurgents; and anti-terrorism legislation. The scope to bridge secular and Islamic values has been narrowed, however, by the increasing proximity of Islamist conflict to Azerbaijan. An estimated 800 Azerbaijanis are thought to have fought in Syria and Iraq, with some 200 estimated killed; this is the largest cohort of Azerbaijanis ever involved in jihadist violence (Lonardo 2016). However, high battle casualty rates and executions of Azerbaijanis by the Islamic State, combined with the tightened security response of the Azerbaijani state to the threat of returnees, suggested that Islamist insurgency did not pose a threat to domestic stability.

Muslim religious practice rose significantly in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. If a cultural Muslim identity was claimed by some 94% of the population in 2012, 44% of respondents to the Gallup religiosity index in 2012 considered themselves “religious.” This represents a rise of more than 20% compared to 2007–2008 (Crabtree and Pelham 2012; Global Index of Religiosity and Atheism-2012, Win-Gallup International, Press Release 2012). Three discursive approaches competed to interpret and “place” this rise in religiosity. From different angles, any rise in religiosity was interpreted by supporters of secularism in both government and among the liberal opposition as evidence of the risk of “political Islam.” From the perspective of government mitigating this risk required the deferral of democratization; for the liberal opposition, it required its acceleration. A countervailing stance portrayed increased religiosity as evidence of disenchantment with political cultures of elitism, corruption, and amorality. In this view, advocacy of Islam offered an ideological alternative to political opposition (Kotecha 2006). A third stance found in increased religiosity the potential for an encompassing cultural-civic component to Azerbaijanism, given that population movements in the terminal and early post-Soviet periods led to the dramatic depletion of minorities traditionally identified with Christian cultures. Despite multi-sectarianism, in cultural terms post-Soviet Azerbaijan has become significantly mono-confessional. Provided “extremist” tendencies can be contained, a cultural Muslim identity can serve as a supporting buttress to the kind of integrative, inclusive identity underpinning the project of Azerbaijanism (Siroky and Mahmudlu 2016).

The interaction of internal and external factors underscores that religion is a highly contingent aspect to Azerbaijani nation-building. Policy on religion charts an unstable and potentially incompatible course between securitization (whether of certain Islamic practices, or Islam’s potential to express a social justice agenda in general), and institutionalization of a domesticated Islam as an inclusive cultural identity, rooted in an indigenous tradition of secularism opposed to both sectarianism and transnational currents. In other words, it is a unique “Azerbaijani Islam” that is “interreligiously tolerant, non-aggressive and apolitical” (Bedford 2016, 127). The Azerbaijani government has invested considerable efforts in this direction, for example through the institution of a “Unity Namaz” performed by representatives of different denominations as a symbol of Azerbaijan’s Year of Multiculturalism in 2016 (“Unity Prayer in Baku’s Heydar Mosque,” Trend, January 15, 2016; “Prayer for unity held in Baku’s Heydar Mosque,” Vestnik Kavkaza January 16, 2016). More recently, to promote national “Azerbaijani Islam,” the government has introduced “Traditional Islam” as the main religious policy of the state (Bedford, Mahmudlu, and Abilov 2021).

But a more lasting insulation of Islam in Azerbaijan ultimately implies its incorporation into domestic channels of political contestation as one of a number of interest groups in society. ⁷ This was the role played by the Islamist Ittihad party in the era of Azerbaijani parliamentary democracy in 1918–1920 (Swietochowski 1995, 77; Balaev 2012, 373–374). The prospect of radical Islamism in Azerbaijan is often over-stated in securitizing discourses of whatever provenance. But whether Azerbaijan can once again incorporate religion through civic modes compatible with secular values depends on the quality and openings offered by institutionalized channels of representation and contestation.

Nation-Building and Regime-Building

Beginning in the early 2000s, Azerbaijan’s civic nationalism was fundamentally re-shaped. A dynastic succession was enacted from Heydar to Ilham Aliyev in 2003, the first and for many years only such case in the post-Soviet space. This was followed by a constitutional referendum in 2009 ratifying the abolition of limits to presidential terms. These developments ran in parallel with the marginalization of political parties ⁸ and the onset of exponential increases in oil revenues in the mid-2000s, ushering in a period of unprecedented, world-leading growth averaging 12.6% between 2002 and 2013. ⁹ Oil revenues have enabled the Azerbaijani elite to avoid a “representation for taxation” model, to finance public welfare mitigating social grievances, and to stunt the formation of social groups and aggregated interest groups, for example by financing a loyal civil society. Under the circumstances of a dramatic fall in oil prices in 2014–2015 and consequent concern about Azerbaijan’s economic model, another constitutional referendum in 2016 ratified the extension of presidential terms from five to seven years and further strengthened presidential prerogatives, including control over the appointment of multiple new vice-presidential positions. First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva was subsequently appointed First Vice-President on February 21, 2017.

The qualities of dynasticism and permanence that these changes imparted to Azerbaijan’s system of government also posited a crisis for a nation civically conceived. If a civic nation is predicated on a participatory citizenry rather than primordial community, these developments inevitably raised the question of what practices defined the Azerbaijani nation as civic. The situation demanded an alternative civic mythology to one of an egalitarian community of choice. Three vectors in elite-led nation-building have sought to address this issue by constructing a new civic mythology blending nation-, state-, and regime-building.

The Cult of Dynasty

Post-Soviet Azerbaijan was crowded with billboards depicting portraits of former president Heydar Aliyev, sometimes accompanied by his son. This imagery, juxtaposing the person of the former president with the “poetic spaces” (Smith 1991, 65) of the nation and unmediated by any other symbols (except usually the Azerbaijani tricolor), visualized the identity of Heydar Aliyev as the Ümmumilli lider, all-national leader, and founder of Azerbaijani statehood. ¹⁰ These visualizations of a founder myth enacted the symbolic elision of earlier presidents of Azerbaijan to transform Heydar Aliyev into an icon of the civic Azerbaijani nation, often accompanied, as on the backdrop to his tomb in Baku, by the outline of Azerbaijan within its internationally recognized borders.

Although visually prominent, the kind of personality cult practiced in Azerbaijan lacked the all-encompassing ambition and ideological eccentricity of leaders, for example, in Turkmenistan or North Korea. Although a “Department of Aliyevology” (Aliyevshunasliq) existed in the Academy of Sciences in the mid-2010s (“Inside the Department of AliyevScience,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 16, 2013), this did not appear to be implemented. Over the first decades of Aliyev family rule, the cultic emphasis was on dynasty rather than a single individual. It was not only Heydar Aliyev but also the current president and his wife Mehriban Aliyeva who featured; the Aliyev daughters, Arzu and Leyla, also assumed prominent public roles. The cult of the Aliyev family performed several regime-building roles. Dynasticism provides a straight-forward solution to the problem of regime continuity, legitimating the derogation of presidential term limits and averting succession issues. This was possible because the dynasty served as a symbolic nexus, and in some cases a real kinship network, for influential families and networked factions comprising the informal politics of the Azerbaijani state. Predicated on a neo-patrimonial distribution of oil windfalls, this framework allowed for durable divisions of labour, resource flows, and networked franchises between a number of key figures, families, and factions constituting the backbone of the state (Guliyev 2012, 2013).

The Aliyev dynasty also overcame an ideologically problematic continuity with the Soviet past. It symbolized continuity with a de-ethnicized, cosmopolitan, and internationalist outlook, ostensibly the positive values of the Soviet legacy that it could legitimately claim. Simultaneously, the generic device of dynasty also cued a pre-existing historiographical tradition of identifying Safavid dynasties, including its founding dynasty, as “Azerbaijani,” and hence “national” (Shaffer 2004, 21). Thus, the Aliyev dynasty cued multi-layered symbolisms in its affirmations of traditional patriarchal values, agnatic succession and ruling Turkic dynasties in history, simultaneous to the assertion of modern secular values. The latter were represented by an ex-communist ethos, the high profile of Mehriban Aliyeva as a female politician and public figure embodying a modern Western aesthetic of dress and appearance, and the presence of both russophone and russophile tendencies within the elite. The continued viability of internationalist cosmopolitanism as a framing device is also rooted in key moments of the Azerbaijani national narrative, such as the commitment to secularism transcending sectarian divisions, Baku’s mythos as a cosmopolitan milieu transcending narrow ethnic proclivities, symbolized in Kurban Said’s novel Ali and Nino (filmed as a blockbuster film in 2016 with Leyla Aliyeva, daughter of President Ilham Aliyev, in the role of executive producer), and a dual reading of the Soviet past, in which negative moments are balanced by acknowledgment of its contribution to the development of an Azerbaijani national tradition.

Azerbaijan as Petro-Nation

A narrative of Azerbaijan as a “petro-nation” provides a second pillar of civic mythology. Azerbaijan’s oil industry was integral to the advent of modernity, urbanization, and class-based ideologies that incubated the national tradition in the early twentieth century. At the beginning of that century, for a brief moment, it led the world in oil production. Over one hundred years later, in 2015, Azerbaijan was endowed with an estimated seven billion tonnes of oil (0.4% of global reserves) and 1.2 trillion cubic metres of gas (0.7% of global reserves). Beginning in the mid-2000s and peaking in 2010, Azerbaijan’s second oil boom has run parallel to the presidency of Ilham Aliyev. Oil (and to a lesser extent gas) played enormously significant roles, from the imagining of nation to the consolidation of sovereignty and regime building.

Oil indigenizes nation and state in the elemental physicality of place. Spontaneous fires burning on oil surfacing to ground level are a staple of historical accounts of the area. They offer a link to an ancient Zoroastrian pre-history (and can still be observed at preserved fire temples on the Absheron peninsula), provide a heraldic device for the state’s crest, and serve as a branding leitmotif of the “land of fire.” As the defining natural resource of the national patrimony, oil also offers a decolonization narrative from the imperial logic of mise en valeur to sovereign control. Throughout the twentieth century, Azerbaijan’s oil industry transitioned from domination by foreign and Armenian capital in the first oil boom, to post-Second World War desuetude as the Soviet Union privileged Siberian reserves, to a final “nationalization” under Heydar and Ilham Aliyev (LeVine 2007). Oil can thus be read as a metaphor for the Azerbaijani nation itself, in turn dominated, exploited, and neglected, before achieving emancipation in the national golden age of the present. But in characteristically ambiguous fashion, the petro-nation narrative simultaneously yields symbols of internationalist connectivity. It is a narrative that deeply embeds and internalizes external influences, from enabling foreign capital of figures such as the Nobel brothers in the first oil boom, to the synthesis of European and local aesthetics in Baku’s late nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, to providing the original magnet for Baku’s celebrated multiethnic mix. Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet oil boom is founded on the partnership between the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijani Republic (SOCAR) ¹¹ and multinational oil companies sealed in the Azerbaijani International Operating Company (AIOC), which in its original form recruited oil companies from all relevant global powers in a moment of consensus on the existence and legitimacy of what was at the time a fragmented and fragile Azerbaijani state. Midwife to the traumatic rebirth of the nation, oil has underpinned consistent affirmations of both its geopolitical importance to global partners, and its independence from Russia in the critical field of energy. A rebranding of SOCAR in the mid-2010s replaced the company’s oil derrick logo with a simulacrum of the state’s flame-based crest reproduced in the colours of the Azerbaijani tricolor, a symbolic trinity of regime, nation, and state.

Oil revenues have also provided the ruling elite with more than sufficient resources to concentrate and protect its own power, to enable substantial public spending mitigating socio-economic grievances that could structure political mobilization, and to postpone structural reforms in the direction of diversification, despite rhetorical commitments to this goal. ¹² In addition to financing a substantial coercive apparatus, government revenues enabled a larger proportion of the population to remain employed in the public sector than in Georgia or Armenia (Guliyev 2012, 120–122). Oil revenues supported public expenditure campaigns to serve as the elite’s preferred lever of influence over public opinion, helping to secure “supermajority wins” in elections affirming the incumbent (Kendall-Taylor 2012). They also financed showcase policy initiatives such as the ASAN “one-stop-shop” public service centres both embodying an Azerbaijani iteration of post-modern e-governance and mitigating petty, predatory and cash-based corruption. ¹³ Furthermore, oil revenues replenished the State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ), a sovereign wealth fund intended for the future benefit of the nation. SOFAZ flows have paid for important social initiatives, such as re-housing communities displaced by the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, and they have also played a central role in balancing the state budget. Although SOFAZ earned plaudits for transparency on the revenue side, rules of transparency do not cover the ultimate fate of oil revenues once they flow into the state budget (Meissner 2012).

Oil revenues also fund more opaque funding streams that are close to key regime figures, such as the Presidential Fund ¹⁴ and the Heydar Aliyev Foundation administered by the First Lady. From what can be discerned from public scrutiny, oil revenues have sustained informal patterns of patronage constituting the core networks of the state and which make the popular politics of elections – and consequently an institutionalized contestation of what national values are or should be – irrelevant to power. In sum, oil provided a core narrative for the post-Soviet Azerbaijani state melding the regime tradition within internationalist multilateralism and asserting Azerbaijan’s geopolitical relevance. Oil revenues simultaneously displaced representative politics at home with depoliticizing development and financed a political economy resistant to institutionalized forms of political mobilization, including the electoral contestation of national identity.

Globalizing Azerbaijani Multiculturalism

A third vector of civic nation-building entails a complex process of the mutual embedding of Azerbaijani multiculturalism and multiple globalizing frames drawing on Azerbaijan’s membership of plural worlds: Middle Eastern (Iranian, Turkic, Muslim), Western (European, secular, cosmopolitan), and Eurasian (Russian-speaking, post-Soviet, Caspian). This parallel construction of Azerbaijan as both host and friend to all major world cultures and religions is enacted across diverse domestic settings, notably elite promotion of diverse geo-cultural discourses: Azerbaijan’s hosting of the World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue or the “Baku Process” after 2008, the holding of high-visibility international events (such as the Eurovision Song Contest, European Games and Islamic Games in 2012, 2015, and 2017 respectively), the advent and encouragement of Western-style consumerism in the Absheron peninsula, the establishment of international traditions of higher education in the country, toleration (albeit declining) of a Western-funded neo-liberal civil society, the embrace of Turkish popular culture and toleration of Turkish-sponsored mosques, the enduring status of Russian within parts of the elite, and many others (Ismayilov 2012, 2015 2016; Ismayilov and Tkacik 2009; see also Balci 2013, Militz 2016). The melding of different, counterpoised worlds is evident in numerous discursive and visual dichotomies in the oil windfall era, ranging from elite affirmations of apparently contradictory moralities (Ismayilov 2015, 7) and architectural juxtapositions of the new Flame Towers and Baku’s old town, to formulas advocating Azerbaijan as bridge absorbing the values of both European and Islamic civilizations ¹⁵ and marketing the country as the “European charm of the Orient.” Spectacular new architecture and mega-events mapped onto urban landscapes dissolve the differences between downtown Baku and developmentally distant hinterlands of the republic. They disguise the informal networks of economic power that have structured the distribution of Azerbaijan’s oil wealth (Grant 2014), and transform a local variant of multiculturalism into a synecdoche of a globalized and inclusive cosmopolitanism. Azerbaijan’s civic identity manifests itself as a congruent heterogeneity, a myriad of discourses unified only by the transcendent quality of the person of the president at its apex.

Such congruent conjunctures are not new to Azerbaijani imaginaries. Syncretism is built into the iconography of the Azerbaijani nation in its tricolor flag, ¹⁶ as well as the cultural and tactical chameleonism of key figures in the Azerbaijani cultural and national revival movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Mirza Fath Ali Akhundov, Ali bey Huseynzade, Ahmad bey Ağaoğlu, and Mammed Emin Rasulzade. ¹⁷ Indigenized globalization melds easily with, and nationalizes, the inherited tradition of Soviet internationalism, which underpins the state’s formal celebration of ethno-religious tolerance and civic values. But as Murad Ismayilov (2015, 12–13) has observed, an implicit question accompanies these tactical emphases within a highly heterogeneous canvas. Over the long term, this strategy could lead to the dilution of the over-arching values associated with the nation, and a disconnect with more ideologically inflected silos within it, experiencing divergent socializations and generating conflicting visions of the nation’s “proper” values and orientation. As Ismayilov and Tkacik (2009, 93) note, the emergence of new Azerbaijani elites educated in Turkish, Western, and Russian milieus introduces not only differences in outlook but parallel civil society structures, inhibiting the formation of a unified civic space between state and citizen. In its Western-oriented, neo-liberal variant that space contracted significantly as a result of activist arrests and organizational closures in the 2014–2015 period, thereby contributing further to authoritarianism (Welt 2014, Altstadt 2017). This leaves unclear the question of the identity and agency of brokers between a state committed to eclectic discourses of nation-building, and a heterogeneous society with varying cultural and ideological commitments and potentially dissonant visions for the nation’s future. Whether the person and institution of the president can maintain an englobing transcendence above these currents, particularly in an era beyond oil windfalls, is uncertain.

The Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict

The restoration of Azerbaijani independence was preceded, accompanied and in many ways defined by a successful secessionist bid by the Armenians of Karabakh, supported by Armenia, resulting in the secession of what was formerly the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast’ (NKAO) and the occupation, in whole or in part, of seven adjacent regions. The magnitude and trauma of Azerbaijan’s defeat, in which substantial human and territorial losses were accompanied by successive implosions of central state power, may perhaps be compared to France’s defeat at the hands of Germany in May 1940 or the rout of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan by Israel in 1967. ¹⁸ The conflict provided a symbolic calendar, narrative of genocide at the hands of Armenians, and a geography of memorials across the republic known as “Martyrs’ Alleys.” These are dedicated to war dead, and in Baku also to more than 130 civilians killed in the capital by Soviet forces on January 20, 1990, an event known as Black January (Qara Yanvar).

The loss of Nagorny Karabakh and the surrounding regions disrupted the primary territorial referent – Azerbaijan – on which an Azerbaijani national identity was based. The conflict was also the single domain where civic prescriptions of Azerbaijanism were derogated to emphasize an ethno-nationalist idiom of nationhood, almost without inhibition (although even then religious framings of the confrontation were generally avoided, on both sides). The Armenian-Azerbaijani antagonism became the dominant structuring device in imagining recent, modern, and even pre-modern Azerbaijani histories. A master narrative alleging the recent arrival of Armenians in the South Caucasus (i.e. since the Russian annexations of the early nineteenth century) dominated multiple discursive sites, including elite speeches, scholarly literature, mass media, advocacy campaigns, historical-cultural locations, and school textbooks. The Karabakh conflict thereby destabilized Azerbaijani nation-building not only by its violation of the borders inherited from Soviet rule, but by feeding retroactive ethno-cultural constructions of Azerbaijani identity as being associated with much wider territories, namely those where the Republic of Armenia is located today. From around 2010, President Ilham Aliyev’s speeches regularly mentioned the Erivan khanate, in addition to Göyçə (Sevan) and Zangezur (Syunik), as historically Azerbaijani-populated lands. Our point is not to engage here with the veracity or verisimilitude of such claims, but to emphasise how the Karabakh conflict has driven a tension between the civic ideology of Azerbaijanism, and the more primordial, “ethno-genetic” assumptions underpinning portrayals of the Armenian-Azerbaijani antagonism. There is an inconsistency between civic framings of a modern Azerbaijani nation bounded by citizenship and territory, and retroactive ethno-spatializations invoking much wider cultural boundaries to define an expansively imagined community of Azerbaijanis (in fact subsuming a wide variety of historically Muslim identities) in historical competition with Armenians.

Although lying beyond the scope of this article, in the 2020 second Karabakh war Azerbaijan recovered most of the territories lost in the 1990s to Armenians. Turkish political, military, and operational support played a significant role in Azerbaijan’s victory, and President Ilham Aliyev shared the podium at the post-war victory parade with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In the aftermath of the war, President Aliyev declared the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict “resolved.” These outcomes carry highly significant if as yet unforeseeable implications for the future of Azerbaijani nation-building. If the conflict is deemed over, then its role as the primary challenge to democratization, nation-building, and state-building (Ergun 2021) would presumably also end. Insofar as a nation-building process can ever be “complete,” Azerbaijan’s national identity would ostensibly be so. Moreover, with Armenia decisively defeated, it is uncertain to what extent it can continue to effectively play the role of the “Other” against which, in its ethno-cultural incarnation, Azerbaijani national identity has been defined, except as a subaltern other to be dominated. But rather than a harmonious “conclusion” to the nation-building process, the intensifying promotion of Azerbaijani-Turkish affinity, the reappearance of Russian armed forces on Azerbaijani soil in the form of a peacekeeping mission deployed to Nagorny Karabakh in November 2020, the passing of the oil boom era, and the longevity of a regime about to enter its fourth decade in power suggest instead that in the longer term the Azerbaijani nation-building process will be both dynamic and contested, with uncertain consequences for the future of Azerbaijanism.

Conclusions

Similar to Azerbaijan’s first period of independence in 1918–1920, the repudiation of cultural, ethno-nationalist doctrines of nationhood connecting Azerbaijan to co-ethnic communities beyond its borders was an obligatory corollary of early post-Soviet Azerbaijani sovereignty. After 1993 Azerbaijanism asserted a pragmatic, and dialogically conceived, doctrine of civic nationhood seeking to assuage both secessionism at home and fears of Azerbaijani irredentism abroad. Azerbaijanism effectively neutralized the legacy and risks of ethno-nationalism for state-building through the strategic ambiguity of coding ethnic majority domination as civic equality and multicultural harmony. Yet the regime-building dynamics of the last two decades increasingly marginalized the horizons, spaces, and practices that could institutionalize the praxis of civic nationhood in Azerbaijan. Between proscriptions on ethno-nationalism and withered civic practice, regime-building emerged as the dominant political animus of Aliyev-era Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijani elite appears intent on deepening its monopoly on public life, an authoritarian pattern dissolving the institutional basis for democratic opposition. The risk that such a choice poses is an increasing divergence between the regime tradition and founding national tradition – the civic tradition on which the Azerbaijani state was founded and which gives this state its legitimacy as a nation-state. This path presumes that the regime tradition – a tradition that is emphatically opaque, informal, and personalized – will be able to both reflect critically and act on the profound socio-economic challenges confronting Azerbaijan as it shifts from an oil-based economy. Accommodating pluralism is the strategic challenge awaiting the regime tradition beyond the post-oil horizon.

This challenge matters because heterogeneity is deeply inscribed into the historical and contemporary experiences of Azerbaijanis. Beyond historical templates contemporary Azerbaijani nationalism has an elective affinity with a civic frame because no singular identity project – whether oriented towards Turkic, Eurasian/Russian, Western or Muslim poles – appears able to subsume a sufficient totality as to dominate on its own in Azerbaijan. But after a quarter-century of nation-building, rather than a coherent space or unified civil society encompassing the heterogeneous elements that are present in society, multiple civil societies exist whose profile, organizational basis and cultural orientation derive from their refraction of Azerbaijan’s external relationships into the domestic sphere. Through their connectivity with actors and networks beyond Azerbaijan, these compartmentalized fields of civic politics are vulnerable to threat perceptions arising from external change and shocks. Two examples are the attrition marking the trajectory of a Western, neo-liberal concept of an NGO-led civil society, conditioned by the structural autonomy of the state permitted by oil windfalls and significantly accelerated by the onset of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014 (Altstadt 2017, Ch. 5), and the rippling effect of domestic events in Turkish politics from 2014 on through Turkish-sponsored civic networks in Azerbaijan (Bedford 2016, 142–143; Safarova 2016). These developments signal the vulnerabilities experienced by civic networks in Azerbaijan for as long as they are not fully indigenized within a unified civil society.

The result is the externalization of the state itself as the arbiter, rather than the embodiment, institutionalization, and ultimately legitimation, of the heterogeneity that is salient in society. The state may prefer to deal piecemeal with contained islands of civil society rather than a single, coherent, and unified space that organizes representative politics. But the securitization of society and of public participation itself, claimed as justified in the chaotic political environment of the immediate post-independence period, has become progressively embedded to the point of excluding institutionalized political contestation. For a decade public welfare spending has mitigated the coalescing of social grievance and moderating the need for repression. But now there is a risk that as the government’s natural resource revenues decline over the long term, Azerbaijan may shift from a state in which economic resources are sufficient to fund a repressive apparatus but are no longer sufficient to provide the public goods obviating the need for repression.

The merger of regime with state and nation through the civic dominion of the Aliyev system carries the risk of rendering the nation, no longer separable from regime, an irrelevant category of political contestation. This would have the effect of fundamentally reshaping the nature of political contention away from civic forms. The echo of Azerbaijan’s short-lived parliamentary democracy in 1918–20 is faint, even though it institutionalized the accommodation of a heterogeneous set of constituencies including socialists, Islamists, liberals, Armenian nationalists, and others. Whether to institutionalize this bequest by conceding the case for law-bound pluralism and contestation, or to extend the regime tradition’s monopoly on public life under conditions where its distributional capacities are in long-term decline, constitutes the dilemma confronting Azerbaijani nation-building today.