What is the reason for these attacks?
In this recent demarche, which largely repeats a similar statement from March 7, 2024, the European Commission condemns Baku for excluding “those convicted for exercising their basic rights” from the latest presidential pardon by Ilham Aliyev, which included 154 prisoners.
The EU bureaucrats’ concerns focus on the health conditions of Gubad Ibadoglu and Alesker Mamedli. There is also specific mention of “rights violations” against media outlets (Abzas Media, Toplum TV, Kanal 11, and Kanal 13) and the fate of several recipients of grant funding from European donors.
It’s worth recalling that in February this year, during an operation to uncover financing channels and mechanisms for laundering funds aimed at supporting anti-government actions and provocations in Azerbaijan’s information space ahead of the presidential elections, a group of “activists” including several bloggers and journalists, was detained by the country’s law enforcement agencies.
It is no secret that Western decision-making centers have long tried to systematically influence Azerbaijan’s domestic politics. It must be acknowledged that many high-level decision-makers would prefer a more controllable and manageable Azerbaijan under the Euro-Atlantic alliance, rather than the dynamic, independent nation led by President Ilham Aliyev, which makes principled decisions based on its own strengths.
A strong Azerbaijan pursues an independent policy, achieving its goals, which particularly frustrates Western strategists and ideologues. The West has long realized the futility of provoking a color revolution in Azerbaijan and overthrowing its legitimately elected president. However, they can still continually complicate the situation, provoke various scandals, and destabilize the media landscape, trying to create “manageable chaos.”
Especially considering that the West relies on decades-old stereotypes ingrained in mass consciousness, such as unquestioning trust in European politics, faith in the moral infallibility of the West, and the image of prosperity and infallibility prevalent in post-Soviet countries, especially among middle-aged citizens who have lived through decades of economic crisis and ethno-territorial conflicts during the power transition.
For these people, Europe has always been an ideal, a spiritual and material oasis they dreamed of either relocating to or replicating these images/dreams in their homeland.
The perception of life in the European Union and the West, formed through YouTube, advertisements, and occasional tourist trips, has created a peculiar cult of unconditional, reflexive belief in any moral lessons, statements, recommendations, and demands issued by the EU to Azerbaijan and other CIS countries under the guise of “protecting human rights” to maintain control and the ability to manage the post-Soviet space in their own interests.
However, the paradox lies elsewhere: if the political elite of Azerbaijan or any other post-Soviet state, which embarked on forming their own world using the same Western management techniques, political technologies, and strategies, eventually reach the same level of capability as Europe, they immediately become competitors to the “European goal-setting.”
The fact is that European “ultrahumanism,” which defends any manifestations of human rights, including even the unnatural ones like the promotion of same-sex marriages or tolerance towards pedophilia, in its “export” version, is invariably dressed in a colonial officer’s uniform, topped with a pith helmet of a typical late 19th – early 20th-century colonizer. It seeks to harshly identify and suppress the slightest signs of potential competition from the newly formed national elites on the periphery of the EU, who have their strategic planning horizons and development goals that do not align with the European world.
This is exactly what happened with Azerbaijan.
The specificity of Baku’s relationship with the EU lies in its multifaceted nature. One level involves contacts with Brussels, the European Commission, and the PACE. The second level is with the capitals of major European centers, where the relationship agenda with Paris, Berlin, and Rome notably differs. Finally, the third, more significant level than the previous two, is interaction with a number of capitals in Central and Southeastern Europe, which, like the Azerbaijani political elite, find themselves under the total control of the European “ultrahumanism” ideology. Unfortunately, the EU is a complex phenomenon, and one must very carefully control the capacity of this entity to support positive processes with one hand while ruthlessly destroying them with the other.
The destructive part is the monopoly of political templates combined with a certain nervousness towards countries that can and want to use European values and achievements but do not wish to submit to Brussels’ control and hierarchical rules. This is clearly seen in the constant attempts of the EU to lecture Azerbaijan and the pressure the US and EU are currently exerting on Georgia’s political leadership.
The reason for the ideological conflict between Baku and Brussels
The Euro-Atlantic community is accustomed to managing peripheral conflicts indirectly, spending relatively small amounts of money to sustain local conflicts in regions where participants do not want to agree and live by Brussels’ rules. This was the approach during the Cold War, repeated in the post-Soviet period in the South Caucasus (for instance, the OSCE Minsk Group’s work, which, according to Ilham Aliyev, essentially served to continue the occupation of Azerbaijani territories), and we see the same picture today with a current agenda twist.
The West’s offer to conflict parties is extremely simple: either you agree by our rules, or we start supporting those who fully meet our criteria of manageability. This is essentially what happened in the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. When Russia strategically sided with Azerbaijan while trying to maintain influence over Yerevan, EU ideologists, along with American partners, immediately exploited the crack in trust between Moscow and Yerevan with their “package of measures” capable of sheltering Armenia under the umbrella of European security.
As a result, a paradox arose: the globalist elite of the EU, making strategic decisions, is mostly anti-Azerbaijan (primarily Emmanuel Macron and Josep Borrell). And if in previous decades the so-called “oil lobby” of Western countries (particularly the owners and management of British Petroleum) played a significant role in decision-making in the post-Soviet space, their influence has now noticeably diminished, and the policy is dictated not by the pragmatists of the 1990s-2000s, but by leaders of ideological “values.”
Conversely, at various levels of power in Russia, despite the maneuvering and pro-Armenian media policy of recent decades, there are still people capable of rational assessments and understanding the strategic depth and importance of Moscow-Baku relations.
Baku protects against hegemony
The emergence of Azerbaijan as a “middle power,” that is, an influential state on a trans-regional scale, has changed the security system rules in the South Caucasus. Primarily, this concerns the collapse of the hierarchy of external “decision-making headquarters.” Decisions are now made not in Moscow, Brussels, or Washington, but right here, in the capitals of the South Caucasus.
Moscow has already adjusted its foreign policy settings to fit into the new arrangement and maintain its positions.
However, the ideologists’ headquarters of the Euro-Atlantic alliance still try to restore the positions of neo-colonial management. But times have changed, and Azerbaijan is not an overseas territory that can be managed by force, commands, or sanctions. It is a state independently seeking solutions to its national development tasks without the supervision of Euro-Atlantic “commissioners.”
Thus, the new balance of collective security and internal stability in the South Caucasus will not be the result of a deal by external global security operators, but will gradually emerge through the natural process of interaction between the region’s states and their search for acceptable options – without winners and losers, without donors and dependents.
The new non-hierarchical era of the international relations system is simultaneously emerging in many regions of the world as an evolutionary leap. In the South Caucasus, this coincided with the full restoration of Azerbaijan’s borders and the strengthening of its influence.
But Baku’s influence does not and cannot seek hegemony. Moreover, on the South Caucasus, the very aspiration to monopolize it by any single center is doomed to failure, precisely thanks to a strong Azerbaijan, which has become a kind of “safeguard” against forces seeking uncontrolled expansion of their influence.
And the EU commissioners in their pith helmets need to finally understand this.
Ilgar Huseynov
Translated from haqqin.az
