GÜNEY KAFKASYA'DA FEDERALİZM VE ULUS DEVLET ARAYIŞLARI (1905-1921)

Abstract

This study examines the political transformation that took place in the South Caucasus between 1905 and 1921 through the lens of the tension between the quests for a federative regional order that emerged during the process of post-imperial restructuring and competing nation-state projects. The main point of departure of the study is that, in the context of the South Caucasus, the idea of federalism was not merely a theoretical political conception, but a concrete political alternative aimed at providing solutions to the problems of sovereignty, representation, security, and territory in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-centred geography. The political mobilization that emerged throughout the Russian Empire after the Revolution of 1905 paved the way for socialist, nationalist, and federalist ideas to become more visible in the public sphere of the South Caucasus. In this process, Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani Turkish political actors developed different visions of the future in response to the dissolution of the imperial order. Federalism was regarded as a model capable of addressing demands for local autonomy and political representation; at the same time, it was also evaluated as a security framework that could enable the region to act collectively against external threats. However, the deepening of ethno-political competition and the increasing centrality of demographic and territorial issues in political conflicts gradually weakened the ground for federative compromise. The First World War and the Revolutions of 1917 accelerated the dissolution of imperial authority in the region and created a serious power vacuum. Under these conditions, the Transcaucasian Commissariat, the Transcaucasian Seim, and the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, established in 1918, emerged as concrete institutions of the quest for common representation and collective security. However, the strategic calculations of external factors such as the Ottoman Empire, Germany, Britain, and Bolshevik Russia, together with territorial disputes concentrated around regions such as Batum, Kars, Karabakh, Zangezur, and Nakhchivan, eroded this federative ground. Therefore, the emergence of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia as independent republics in 1918 was not only the result of post-imperial state-building, but also the consequence of the failure of the quest for a federative regional order. The Bolshevik intervention of 1920–1921, in turn, largely eliminated local political alternatives and incorporated the region into a Soviet-type centralist federation model. Consequently, this study argues that the modern political history of the South Caucasus should not be read solely through the process of nation-state formation, but also together with the quests for federalism, confederalism, autonomy, collective security, and regional integration.