The study examines the semiotic systems and semantic content of the concepts “real Armenia” and “historical Armenia” as they appear in the document. It is demonstrated that, following the restoration of Armenian independent statehood, the concept of “real Armenia” has become a mere tautology in Armenian discourse. Moreover, due to the physical non-existence of historical Armenia, these two notions cannot be compared on a synchronic level, while from a diachronic perspective, scholarly understandings of the past and the present do not oppose one another but rather complement each other.
Therefore, attempts to construct an opposition between these concepts lack any scientific foundation and, politically, recall only the faint “rustling” of the ANM-era (Armenian National Movement) “innovations” of the 1990s. Whereas in the 1990s such devices could, to some extent, be understood as attempts to draw comparisons with the Soviet period, today they are transformed into epistemological nihilism. This is because, without even grasping the meaning of the concepts they themselves employ, the authors of the tautological notion of “real Armenia” have resorted to a commonplace populist maneuver—namely, the artificial separation of the Armenian nation’s past from its present.
Accordingly, with the aim of providing Armenian society and political forces with elementary knowledge concerning the history of Armenian statehood, the editorial board of Vem has undertaken a brief examination of the historical experience of the first Armenian statesmen of the modern era—not in order to analyze Armenia itself, but to overcome the cognitive dead ends inherent in the project “The Ideology of Real Armenia.”
Furthermore, taking into account the acceleration of regional developments, the Vem editorial expresses the conviction that the superficial experiments carried out through the concept of “real Armenia,” which emerged under conditions of the absence of statehood in Armenia, will soon lose their strategic prospects. In the context of the current disintegrating world order, the formation of yet another Armenian reservation reminiscent of Soviet Armenia—this time in service of the Greater Turan—is excluded. This is because the political objective of servicing a rotation of reservations through the “Ideology of Real Armenia” contradicts the medium-term plans of global actors.
The strengthening of U.S. positions that preclude a new “Lenin–Atatürk” deal, together with signs of Russia’s retreat, has outwardly created the impression of a Turkish–American consensus. However, at the core of the global game unfolding
around us lies not an American–Russian confrontation, but the objective of containing China’s growing power. Consequently, the threat of activating the Greater Turan project deprives Russia of the ability to maneuver between the United States and China. The clearly emerging existential threat of losing the entire post-Soviet South and subsequently being drawn into a war with the “internal Turks” can now be prevented only through the restoration of political dialogue with the entire West.
Thus, the overt objective of turning Armenia into a testing ground for a rotation of reservations through the ill-conceived project “The Ideology of Real Armenia” will operate only within a short temporal horizon.