THE CONFLICT IN SOUTH OSSETIA AND THE FRONTIERS OF STRUGGLE FOR THE GREATER CASPIAN’S ENERGY RESOURCES
Abstract
The oil pipeline projects overshadowed the conflict in South Ossetia from its very beginning. The TV audience was especially impressed by the picture of the Azpetrol tank cars burning somewhere in Georgia. The Caspian oil market promptly responded to the warfare: British Petroleum, the BTC operator, suspended oil pumping along this route; the same was done on the Baku-Supsa pipeline; and the Poti and Kulevi oil terminals were left idling.
Later numerous surveys and analyses stressed the economic aspects and calculated the losses sustained by Azerbaijan and the Western oil companies. It seems that the political analysts were more concerned about how much the war cost Azerbaijan and British Petroleum in lost profit and how many million tons of oil did not reach the market than about anything else. As Azerbaijan and the BTC shareholders regained their lost profits, the issue gradually retreated into the background.
This left the geopolitical effect of the events in the shadow. From the very beginning, however, the South Ossetian conflict had obvious global implications. In his article “La Lezione di Putin alla Casa Bianca,” Lucio Caracciolo wrote: “The Georgian war not merely produced a colossal regional effect; it is helping to revise the global balance which, it seems, was firmly established late last century.”1
Few of the analysts, however, tried to answer the question of whether the sides’ geopolitical interests can be discerned in the figures of the losses and profits of those involved in the Caspian oil business. A positive answer suggests the question: What are these interests? Seen from this angle, the causes, both obvious and concealed, of the August war and the key stimuli this inspired in the sides become much clearer.
Here I intend to reveal the nature of the geopolitical race for the energy and transportation resources of the Greater Caspian2 at all stages of its post-Soviet development and concentrate on the rapidly accelerating rivalry in the 21st century with its unexpected, yet logical, post-Tskhinvali finale.
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References
L. Caracciolo, “La Lezione di Putin alla Casa Bian-ca,” La Repubblica, 18 August, 2008.
To a great extent the terms “Caspian,” “Caspian basin” and “Caspian region” are conventional and synon-ymous. The term “the Greater Caspian” is preferred in ge-opolitical and energy contexts (it includes the Russian Northern Caucasus, the Southern Caucasus, and Central Asia). For the purposes of this article I prefer to use the somewhat limited term in the form of the Caspian-Black Sea and Caspian-Mediterranean meso-areas dominated by the logic of the oil transportation routes and transport cor-ridors because I have left aside the eastern (Chinese) direc-tion of the energy-communication policy in the Greater Caspian region. The terms “transport,” “transit,” and “communications” are synonymous; here they are related to energy policy or, rather, to oil and gas pipelines. Laid in parallel they form transportation corridors that trans-form the geostrategic landscape in different parts of the world before our very eyes.
V. Maksimenko, “Central Asia and the Caucasus:
eopolitical Entity Explained,” Central Asia and the Cau-casus, No. 3, 2000, p. 63.
It was one of the routes used for a considerable part of the British and American lend-lease deliveries.
u.G. Golub, “1941: iranskiy pokhod Krasnoy Armii.
zgliad skvoz’ gody,” Otechestvennaia istoria, No. 3, 2004,pp. 24, 26-27.
K. Haushofer, O geopolitike, Mysl Publishers, Mos-cow, 2001, p. 282.
Energy Superbowl. Strategic Politics and the Persian Gulf and Caspian Basin, Nixon Center for Peace and Free-dom, Washington, DC, 1997, p. 14.
V. Maksimenko, op. cit., p. 60.
Energy Superbowl, p. 14.
A. Daalder, J. Goldgeider, “Globalny alians. NATO predstoit otkazat’sia oy regional’nogo statusa,”Kommersant-Mnenia, No. 161, 31 August, 2006, p. 9; A.D. Bogaturov, “Sindrom kosy i kamnia,” NG-Dipkurier, 10 December,2007.
A. Khanbabian, “Marshrut kaspiyskoy nefti mozhet byt’ peresmotren,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 22 June, 2001, p. 5;D. Orlov, “Bol’shaia truba dlia diadi Sema,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 26 December, 2003, p. 10; M. Khazin, “Goluboy potok ili BTE?” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 27 August, 2004.
S. Eduardov, “Zhazhda v trubakh,” available at [www.utro.ru/articles/2003/02/07/126422.shtml]; another highly typical comment: Yu. Aleksandrov, D. Orlov, “Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan: gde neft’?” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 4 October, 2002,p. 10; idem, “Neftianoy rychag russkoy politiki, Izvestia, 1 June, 2005.
Washington Profile, available at [www.washprofile.org/arch0403/interviews/Kazhegeldin]
Here it is advisable to outline the essence of the Russian geoeconomic ideas stemming from Atlanticist and glo-balist expectations. My ideas about geo-economics are very close to those of Vadim Tsymbursky who has provided the most convincing analysis of Russian geo-economics. In the West geo-economics stemmed from geopolitics and is its inaliena-ble part while in Russia it is perceived as its alternative. Understood in this way geo-economics is the “highest form of market investigations” and is much more important, at least in the eyes of its ideologists, than the national security idea .As a re-sult, according to Tsymbursky, “removal of geopolitics for the sake of geo-economics is directly connected with the removal of the state as a vehicle of shared interests. V. Tsymbursky, “Russkie i geoekonomika,” Pro et Contra, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2003,pp. 184, 185. Those who supported geoeconomics believed that benevolent globalization would create a transnational civ-il society in which economic interests would come to the fore amid the disappearing state borders and dying national sov-ereignties.
D. Oreshkin, “‘Zolotoy milliardr’ ili ‘Zolotaia Orda’?” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 10 June, 2003, p. 11; idem, “Petushi-noe slovo Kremlia,” Moskovskie novosti, 22-28 October, 2004, p. 8; A. Bogaturov, “Geoekonomika zakhvatila vlast’ v mire,”Nezavisimaia gazeta, 25 May, 2004, p. 8.
K. Haushofer, op. cit., p. 244.
V. Maksimenko, op. cit., p. 61.
A. Useynov, “Kommandos dlia truby,” Nezavisimaia gazeta, 11 February, 2003, p. 5.
R. Hetz, “Bol’shaia igra na Kaspiyskom more. V Rossii regional’naia diversifikatsia mozhet istolkovyvatsia kak ugroza energobezopasnosti,” NG-Energia, 22 May, 2007.
N. Ziiadullaev, “Tsentral’naia Azia: konkurentsia i partnerstvo,” NG-Dipkurier, 2 July, 2007, p. 13.
The Nabucco project (which some of the analysts call “futuristic;” in the past there were doubts about the BTC oil pipeline’s economic efficacy) presupposes that several pipelines from the Southern Caucasus, Central Asia, and Middle East will reach Turkey and move further on to Bulgaria, Rumania, Hungary, and Central Europe.
A. Terekhov, “Samyy bol’shoy vyzov. Condoleezza Rice raz’iasnila, pochemu vozmozhen konflikt s Rossiey,”Nezavisimaia gazeta, 12 November, 2007.
A. Bogaturov, “Indo-sibirsky koridor v strategii kontrterrorizma,” NG-Dipkurier, 24 October, 2005.
Kommersant, 20 December, 2007.
The Report of the Swedish Defense Research Agency (FOI) The Caucasian Litmus Test: Consequences and Les-sons of the Russian-Georgian War in August 2008 gives details about Israel’s involvement in arming Georgia on the eve of the South Ossetian war. Novye Izvestia offered a detailed account of the Swedish findings in an article called “Izrailskiy sled” (Israeli Trace) of 23 September, 2008.x
V. Baranovskiy, review of “Dmitri V. Trenin, Getting Russia Right, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,Washington, 2007,” Pro et Contra, No. 1 (40), January-February 2008, p. 101.
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