Erosion of civilizational consensus: Armenian state discourse

Recent events in the post-Soviet space show the inertial continuity of the struggle faced by former Soviet member states between their axiomatic approach to their sovereign statehood and the factual challenges they confront. The result of this process is continuous socio-economic destabilization and frequent armed conflicts in the region, forcing the successor states to periodically implement a balancing and even rotational approach in their strategic orientation, along with a tendency to relocate basic pillars of their statehood to external actors who do not have a backup plan for their statehood in its sovereign form. Focusing on post-Soviet Armenia, the article argues that its statehood is predisposed to narrative-essentialism, which in its discursive form collapses under the pressure of a series of threats and events typical of sovereign state entities. The paper identifies the 2018 Velvet Revolution in Armenia and the subsequent 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War II as such events. As a consequence of these two events and the contradictory balancing-rotation policies of the current Armenian elites, is the discursive erosion of the Armenian civilizational consensus over its sovereign statehood.