The Five-Day War and Transnational Politics: A Semiospace Spanning the Borders between Georgia, Russia, and Ossetia

Abstract

A draft of this article was submitted to the conference, "Putin's Blueprint and the Five-Day War in Georgia: Security and Political Implications in the CEE/CIS and U.S. Policy," held on April 6, 2009, at Heldref Publications in Washington, DC.In this article, I scrutinize the impact of the Five-Day War of 2008 on the domestic politics of the Black Sea countries. Rather than focusing on one country involved in the war-either Georgia, Russia, or the de facto Ossetian polity (combining its northern and southern territories)-I try to show the existence of a political semiotic space spanning the borders of Georgia, Russia, and Ossetia that emerged as a result of two decades of conflict regulation and continues to function even after the Five-Day War. To put it differently, this is a case study of transnational politics.This article is a byproduct of my research on the Joint Control Commission for Georgian-Ossetian Conflict Resolution (JCC), which was active from 1992 to 2008.1 When I first visited Vladikavkaz in January 2009, I started conducting interviews to learn "objective" information about the JCC. Before long, I became fascinated by my subjects' narratives, which were full of wit and humor despite their unpleasant memories of the war. When I visited Georgia in March 2009, meetings, demonstrations, and rock concerts demanding the resignation of (or criminal sanctions against) Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, attended by thousands of participants, were held every day. I collected as many commentaries and stories from the opposition leaders as possible, conveyed them to the South Ossetian experts, and asked them whether the new tendencies in Georgian society were worth making them rethink their relations with Georgia. I essentially tried to organize virtual debates between the experts severed from each other by the military line after August 2008. This method of virtual debate is often used in historiographical studies.2In this article, I organize the further analyses according to questions that both Georgian and Ossetian experts recognize as relevant: (1) Who started the war, Russia or Georgia? (2) If Georgia started the war, was this because Saakashvili was trapped by Russia? (3) Why did Russian troops march toward Tskhinval so slowly, thus inflicting evitable casualties on the South Ossetians? (4) Was the creation of Dmitry Sanakoev's government a provocation or an attempt at peace? (5) Can Georgia expect to reunify South Ossetia in the future, despite the atrocities in August 2008? and (6) Should the Georgian nation bear collective responsibility for the Five-Day War?I will try to convey the experts' lively voices, particularly those of the Georgian opposition and the South Ossetians. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that a virtual transnational semiospace of Georgian and Ossetian experts continues to exist, even after the Five-Day War.Theoretical Proposition: Why Can the Unrecognized States Be a Nursery for Transnational Politics?As a theoretical proposition let me explain what significance my focus on unrecognized states may have in transnational studies. By unrecognized states, I mean the four polities that emerged during the collapse of the Soviet Union: Nagorny Karabakh, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. I continue to regard Abkhazia and South Ossetia as unrecognized states, since recognition only by Russia, Nicaragua, and possibly a few other countries will hardly change their international status, although it has drastically improved their military security.Criticism of a state-centered understanding of world politics and attention to nonstate actors has a long history, traceable at least to the classic work by Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye.3 If Keohane and Nye promulgated a new research agenda for transnational politics, twenty-three years later, Thomas Risse-Kappen and others tried to specify the agenda.4 Criticizing Keohane and Nye's zero-sum understanding of relations between transnational and traditional interstate politics, Risse-Kappen and his contributors examined under what conditions transnational, nonstate actors matter. …