Afterword

Abstract

The case of the gortsy mountaineers of the North Caucasus, who came to view the Transcaucasian Federative Democratic Republic (TDFR) as a viable state structure for Transcaucasia and sought to join it, represents one of the clearest examples of support for the TDFR. All of the contributions to this collection have dealt in one way or another with the question of who wanted the TDFR, examining the positions at different points in time of the influential political forces in the constituent nationalities, the small regional entities, and the key policy-makers of the Great Powers, who had all in some way – in some cases decades before the onset of the First World War and for decades after it – conceptualized of a federative or confederative framework of co-existence and cooperation for the nationalities of the North and South Caucasus. Many viewed such elements of interaction and interdependence as appealing and progressive, both in historical and cultural terms, and also as a modern path toward economic and political development. Insightfully, many viewed such a framework as more attractive than that of the nation-state for the region’s nationalities. And while the appeal for a federative arrangement had grassroot support, a key issue that came to the fore as the result of the First World War, the collapse of the Russian Empire, and the subsequent establishment of de facto federative structures such as the Transcaucasian Commissariat and the Seim, was whether the constituent elements in these structures could or should declare independence from their former metropole, the Russian state, which was undergoing an existential crisis and revolutionary transformation that many found frightening. In this context the range of actors who viewed the independence of the TDFR as viable was more limited. In the Georgian case, the most powerful political party, the Social-Democratic Party, was split on this issue: Akaki Chkhenkeli and Noe Ramishvili became the most ardent promoters of independence, while the rest of the party merely acquiesced, as did other parties during the five weeks of the TDFR’s existence. In the Azerbaijani case, even though most of the political parties were sympathetic to Ottoman Turkey, they wanted the independence of the TDFR and rejected the idea of its incorporation into the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian political parties, too, especially the Dashnaks, opposed the TDFR, but were reluctant to part with it when faced with the option of taking on the Ottoman army all on their own, which, ultimately, they had to do. Although the three main nationalities of the Transcaucasus were divided among themselves and also vis-à-vis one another in their views towards the independence of the TDFR, the Ottoman Empire was the most explicit among the Great Powers in its support for such independence while it existed. The Ottomans had their reasons and motivations for doing this, even though their own political experience with federalism compelled them to oppose