Nationalism Of Armenia And The Outbreak Of Nagorno-karabakh Conflict

For Nagorno-Karabakh,the disputed territory,intense conflicts had broken out between Armenians and Azerbaijanis since 1988-1994.The traditional interpretation mainly believes that the combined effect of the following three points leads to the final outbreak of the conflicts: Stalin‘s wrong territorial division in the early days of the establishment of the Soviet Union,the Armenian nationalist movement that was reawakened by ?openness? of Gorbachev,and the collapse of Soviet legitimacy.But this traditional explanation not only neglects the long-term accumulation and change of Armenian nationalism beforehand,but also fails to sort out the relationship between outbreak the conflict and the independence of Armenia.Through the research,this paper finds that although Gorbachev and his ?openness? have an inescapable responsibility for the outbreak of Armenian nationalism,which experienced long-term accumulation before Gorbachev took office because of the relaxation on the nation issues of the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin,the special autonomy of NK,and the promotion of the modernization process in Armenia.Moreover,this article compares the state of Armenian nationalism before the Soviet Union and in the NK conflict,and found that Armenian nationalism has undergone significant changes in the seventy years under the Soviet Union,due to the special institutional arrangements of the Soviet Union and the craving of the territory of NK,the Armenians‘ original object of hatred was transformed from the Turks into Azerbaijanis.The accumulation and reconstructing under the rule of the Soviet Union made the rise of Armenian nationalism play a decisive role in the outbreak of the NK conflict.Compared with other republics before the disintegration,opposing the current Soviet system was less important in Armenian nationalism.Its primary appeal is to ?recapture NK?,so ?achieve independence? has always been in a relatively minor position.Therefore,although the decline of Soviet power is a necessary condition for the outbreak of the Naka conflict,the Naka conflict also objectively promoted the process of Armenia's independence from the Soviet Union,but this is ultimately two independent processes in the same period of history.