Who wanted the TDFR? The making and the breaking of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic
Abstract
n addition to the emphasis in existing literature on the uniqueness and contingent nature of the TDFR, what the accounts here essentially reveal, however, is that all of the sides/parties/powers (the local actors and the Great Powers) for their own reasons and motivations, and at various times, wanted the TDFR and/or its federative and confederative framework because a larger and politically unified region was seen as more viable (geo)politically, developmentally and ideologically than its constituent parts. Yet while the appeal of the TDFR at the beginning of the twentieth century emerged in the context of the geopolitical earthquake that was the First World War and the ensuing Bolshevik revolution/coup and the impact that these had on the larger region of the Caucasus, as well as in the context of the vibrant and contested contemporary political vocabulary of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, nation-state and supra-national state/empire, its valence for the fractured Caucasus at the onset of the twenty-first century remains to be seen.