*Originally published in 2022 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

Over the past few decades, we have witnessed how public faith is faltering, not only in the established leadership in the Western democracy, but in the concept of democracy itself. A major contributing factor to this erosion is the failure of decision makers to uphold the values they extol, being fundamental for our democracies, especially regarding human rights. This aspect is not only true domestically, but perhaps even more on the international arena where the collective community is supposed to uphold the enshrined democratic values guiding our decision-making globally. One such example among many is how both the US and the EU have addressed the democratic shortcomings of Azerbaijan and Russia in light of the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine respectively. The disparity has even increased due to the Ukraine War as the 2022 energy crisis in Europe has propelled Azerbaijan, an outspoken autocracy, to be heralded as a “strategic partner for the EU.” This article examines how the perceived double standard of Western Institutions, such as the EU, towards Russia and Azerbaijan have emboldened an autocratic Baku, whilst risking undermining emerging democracy in Armenia.

“Us First” in an Age of Universal Values: Realpolitik Reigns Supreme

Despite the advancement of our democratic systems and its core values concerning the universality of justice and human rights, decision-making still follows a strict power-centered “us first” policy. This is hardly surprising as we tend to first and foremost look after our own interests, individually, nationally and internationally. However, this selfishness has a price which grows exponentially when applied collectively and has a perilous effect on our democratic systems, which in the modern world are indeed based on universal equal rights. Such an inwardness corrodes and hollows out the backbone of democracy, namely the public’s faith in the system itself. This corrosion does not only pertain to domestic politics but is highly valid, as it grows in proportion with the globalization of our world, interlinking us much tighter to each other in every aspect: political, financial, climate, health, etc.

Thus, the pursuit of realpolitik at the expense of democratic values and human rights causes tangible contradictions within the very cornerstones of our functioning democracies, which in turn undermine people’s belief in them. One such example is how the victory of an autocratic Azerbaijan in the 2020 War over the Armenian populated Nagorno-Karabakh actually risks undermining the emerging democracies in Armenia and Georgia. Turning a blind eye to how an outspoken autocratic regime in Azerbaijan could not only run over the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, but also willfully threaten Armenia, has made many Armenians to question the double-standards of the Western world, especially in the light of the response to the war in Ukraine. The approach by the Western states to Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh are, however, only one of many examples in a list that is too long to mention exhaustively: Turkey’s assault in Syria, Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, abandoning Afghanistan’s people to the Taliban, etc.

None of this is new though in the past recorded three millennia of our civilization, we tend to care for ourselves first, sometimes even when it means disregarding our principles. That fact notwithstanding, there are two major changes affecting our perception: the enshrining of human rights in international laws as guiding beacon for our policymaking (at least seemingly) and the IT revolution and the information availability, providing almost instant information about........

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