Critical Historical Perspectives on the Centenary of the Short-Lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, 22 April-26 May 1918
Abstract
On 22 April 1918, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians and other nationalities in the South Caucasus declared the independence of their first common state, the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic - a state recognized only by the Ottoman Empire. An unprecedented move by leading political activists/representatives of these constitutive nations, it nevertheless is debatable whether this federative state was solely a reactive outcome of the geopolitical imperatives following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) or also a materialization of federalist projects circulating for decades among many Armenians, Azerbaijanis and Georgians.
During its month-long existence as a state - having a cabinet that sought to draft a constitution, finalize its borders, end the war, stop anarchy within the state and begin land reform - respective national political projects appeared reconciled with this federative project. Yet such projects became the only alternatives succeeding this state's disintegration on 26 May 1918.
To what extent was this first ever Transcaucasian political union undermined by these competing national projects or by unfavorable geopolitical context and warring geopolitical forces? A largely unexplored historical event in Western scholarship and respective national historiographies, this special issue brings together historians and scholars working on the region and the period to reconstruct several perspectives from this state's constitutive nations: Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian as well as from regional and Great Powers' ones: British, Ottoman, German and Soviet Russian. The special issue aims to shed light on and to critically assess this unique moment of political unity/disunity of the early twentieth-century South Caucasian history and to uncover the political language/concepts articulated in the making and the breaking of the first-ever Transcaucasian state.
In so doing, it seeks to lay bare the tensions and interactions between national and federal visions in Transcaucasia as well as to untangle the impact of geopolitical forces on the region and on the larger, volatile context of World War I.