Armenian nationalism §

Armenian nationalism is the political articulation of an Armenian national identity rooted in a distinct Christian church (the Armenian Apostolic, autocephalous since 451), a singular alphabet (Mashtots, c. 405), a literary canon dating to late antiquity, and a sense of historical territorial loss from successive Sasanid, Byzantine, Seljuk, Ottoman and Russian sovereignties.

The modern movement crystallised in the Armenian National Awakening (Zartonk) of the early 19th century, with three regional centres: the Mkhitarist Catholic congregation of Venice and Vienna, which produced philological and historical scholarship; the Eastern Armenian intelligentsia of Tiflis, whose canonical author Khachatur Abovian (abovian) wrote Wounds of Armenia (1841, published 1858); and the reformist Armenian community of Constantinople, which secured the 1863 Armenian National Constitution from the Sublime Porte.

The political phase opened with the Hunchakian (Geneva, 1887) and the Dashnaktsutyun (Tiflis, 1890), socialist-nationalist parties oriented to the liberation of Ottoman Armenia. Their fedayee networks waged armed self-defence during the Hamidian massacres and the 1909 Adana massacre. The Armenian Genocide (1915–23) shattered the Ottoman demographic base of the movement and shifted its gravity to the diaspora, where Hai Dat (the Armenian Cause) became the dominant programme: recognition of the genocide, reparations, and territorial restoration in line with the Treaty of Sèvres.

Soviet Armenia (1920–91) sustained a domesticated state-tolerated nationalism centred on language, the Apostolic Church at Etchmiadzin, and commemoration (the 1965 50th-anniversary demonstrations in Yerevan; the Tsitsernakaberd memorial). Independence in 1991 produced two competing strands: a Hai Dat-aligned maximalism reinforced by the Karabakh Movement and the war of 1992–94, and the civic-democratic state nationalism that became hegemonic under Nikol Pashinyan after the Velvet Revolution and especially after the 2020 defeat. (sourced opinion: Panossian reads the post-Soviet trajectory as a tension between diaspora-led "transnational" and state-led "territorial" nationalism, with the latter currently ascendant.)