Revolution, Identity Change and Legacy of the Past: Case Study of the 2018 Armenian Revolution

Velvet Revolution which shook Armenia’s politics in 2018 is a rare exception of democracy development in the times of the authoritarian rise. Political change in the result of civil disobedience and peaceful mass protests clearly was sudden and unexpected for both internal actors and external observers. Possessing unprecedent revolutionary impetus it demolished consolidated system of façade democracy based on the mechanisms of patronage and clientelism. The agenda of the revolution was from the very beginning concentrated on the social and economic issues like an equality, poverty, corruption, misuses of power or lack of transparency. Deep multi-vectoral change requires revolutionary transformation of the identity based on the Post-Soviet colonial structures of reality perception. That would be difficult to achieve, albeit the mass protests prove the social expectation of it. Even more challenging is the identity/revolutionary change linked with the core self-perception mechanisms related to the past. The process-tracing analysis in the search of mechanisms driving internal Armenian politics after the collapse of USSR indicate its deeply interrelations with the past and external circumstances. Three long-lasting identity mechanisms are the Armenian Genocide, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and self-perception with survival as the core. Those three are the axiological issues beyond political discourse which have been remaining stable and unaffected despite of the political changes. Political community since the appearance of modern understanding of nation was based on the references to the past with special attention to politics of memory (Anderson 1996, Smith 1988). The possible lack of identity change in the context of the approach to the past, can stand as a definitive barrier for the possible integration of Armenia with Europe and its positive community. It is a consequence of the supposition about the inevitability of geopolitics. This belief force Armenia to remain under conceptual (understanding of power) cultural (soft power) and political (hard power – military alliance) influence of Eastern authoritarian traditions of Russia. The puzzle of the paper is the relation between the revolution (Aristotle), identity change, community and memory (Assmann 2008). Empirical research question is whether the revolutionary change equals identity change (Rumelili, Todd 2018). Theoretical additional questions are whether the revolution means always the identity change and whether is community possible without reference to the past. Exploration will be done through critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995) and process-tracing (Beach, Pedersen 2013) of a post-revolutionary narrative dynamics of the new Armenian elites. The paper will be based on the multi-methodological qualitative case study approach. The paper aims to theoretically and empirically research on the complexity of interrelation between the concepts and social reality. On the layer of ideas reflection is paid to the juxtaposition of the traditional concepts in postmodern political circumstances. In the context of particular case study the paper aims to analyze the accuracy of usage of complex and hybrid concepts. On the layer of social reality within abovementioned conceptual framework the paper is an attempt to describe impact and possibility of renegotiation of the discursive mechanisms which have been up to date, beyond the axiological cleavage.