Murray N. Rothbard’s “Ethnic Fury in the Caucasus: Sorting It Out” is a brief 1993 commentary on the post-Soviet Caucasus, written in his anti-interventionist and anti-establishment idiom. It is not a neutral regional survey: it is a polemical effort to show that recognized borders, Western diplomatic preferences, and humanitarian rhetoric obscure older national claims and imperial manipulations.
The Caucasus, as usual, is aflame, and we are in danger of forgetting about this little mountainous region in our absorption with Bosnia and Somalia.
The opening frames the essay’s governing problem. Rothbard treats the Caucasus as a region where peoples and states do not coincide, and where conflicts cannot be understood by simply defending existing republics. He quickly sets aside the Armenian-Azeri struggle over Nagorno-Karabakh as already familiar, then turns to Georgia as the key case through which to expose Western simplification.
Eduard Shevardnadze is Rothbard’s first major target. Rather than presenting him as a democratic reformer, Rothbard portrays him as a favorite of the American media and diplomatic class because he moved from Soviet respectability into acceptable social-democratic statesmanship.
Shevardnadze, once Gorby’s right-hand man as foreign minister, charmed his way into the hearts of the U.S. media and diplomatic corps, his greatest asset being the fact that he had converted from Communism to Social Democracy.
This passage is central to the essay’s political method. Rothbard does not defend Zviad Gamsakhurdia, whom he depicts as nationalist and dictatorial, but he also refuses to treat Shevardnadze’s accession as democratically legitimate merely because the West preferred him. The point is not that one Georgian ruler is virtuous and the other corrupt; it is that Western approval functions as a poor guide to political legitimacy.
Shevy then led a “democratic” coup d’état that ousted Zviad, who retreated to his homeland and stronghold in the west of Georgia to carry on resistance and guerrilla warfare against the Shevy regime.
From Georgia proper, Rothbard moves to the minorities and borderlands whose claims complicate state-centered narratives. Abkhazia and South Ossetia appear not as mere disruptions of Georgian sovereignty but as peoples resisting incorporation into a state that claims them. His account gives special weight to Soviet boundary-making: Stalinist administrative divisions are treated as deliberate acts of political fragmentation whose consequences outlasted the USSR.
The two halves of the Ossetian territory were arbitrarily separated by Stalin and dumped into different republics, in a typical Stalinist ploy to split and wreck peoples who were insufficiently Stalinist.
The Ossetian example provides the essay’s clearest historical principle. Rothbard argues that post-Soviet violence is not simply ancient tribalism reemerging after communism, but the legacy of coercive borders that divided peoples and placed minorities under rival national administrations. The same logic informs his treatment of Ingush and Chechen claims: administrative units that appear tidy on maps conceal layered grievances, expulsions, annexations, and rival claims to self-rule.
The concluding “sorting out” is deliberately ironic. Rothbard reduces each conflict to apparently simple nationalist formulas—Armenian Karabakh, Abkhazian Abkhazia, unified Ossetia, restored Ingush lands, free Chechnya—only to show how dangerous it would be to imagine that an outside power could impose such a settlement cleanly. His final gesture mocks the interventionist fantasy that ethnic justice can be engineered by foreign armies under international supervision.
OK, got it straight? Now all we need is for the United States to send about 500,000 troops to the Caucasus—under UN direction, of course—and in about twenty years we should be able to straighten it all out.
The essay’s force lies in this combination of local particularism and anti-imperial skepticism. Rothbard insists that national claims in the Caucasus are historically intelligible and often morally serious, but he denies that Western states are competent or entitled to resolve them by occupation. Its satire is therefore integral to its argument: the more carefully one “sorts out” the region’s claims, the more absurd the dream of outside management becomes.
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