Searching for Democracy, Finding Nationalism

In May 2018 a democratic breakthrough occurred in Armenia known as the Velvet Revolution. The leader of the protests was Nikol Pashinyan, who after the resignation of Serzh Sargsyan became the prime minister of Armenia. Pashinyan’s coming to power coincidentally overlapped with the celebrations of the centennial of the First Republic of Armenia, which, particularly in the post-Soviet era, is largely considered to be the point marking the revival of Armenian statehood. Based on the congratulatory remarks and speeches by Pashinyan, this article argues that the leader of the Velvet Revolution used a language that united the principles of the First Republic with the ‘Velvet’ ideas. By drawing links between 1918 and 2018, Pashinyan claimed that the post-Velvet Armenia was regenerating the democratic values inherent to the pre-Soviet spirit of the Armenian people. This was a convenient strategy for Pashinyan for avoiding the image of the Revolution as an anti-Russian step supported by the West. Thus, during the celebrations of the First Republic, Pashinyan linked the idea of democracy to the First Republic of Armenia and represented the Velvet Revolution as a revival of the values that were suppressed during the Soviet era and the first decades of post-Soviet Armenia. However, by giving a narrow focus to the discourse of democracy which dominated the whole Caucasus region after the collapse of the Russian Empire, by representing Armenians as an elemental source of democracy and by linking their democratic breakthroughs with the notion of survival, Pashinyan elaborated a nationalist narrative rather than a democratic one.