Anchored in the Past: History as Ontological Resource in Armenian Collective Memory

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There’s a joke. Archaeologists were doing an excavation on Karmir Blur, a hill near Yerevan, and uncovered an entire fortress from the 8th century BC. They also found a cuneiform inscription describing the founding of the city of Erebuni. In short, this makes Yerevan older than Rome. Naturally, the Georgians didn’t like this. Something along the lines of: “Wait, so Yerevan is better than Tbilisi now?” So they took a bucket, wrote “Tbilisi — 3000 years old” on it, and buried it at some archaeologically interesting site. Sure enough, archaeologists found the bucket. Sensation! Tbilisi is 3000 years old! The Armenians got hold of this historic bucket, examined it, turned it over, and on the bottom it said: “Yerevan Aluminum Plant.”

Armenians talk a lot about their history, sometimes it seems like too much. This gets played up especially often in jokes and stories about Armenians. The constant references to the past, the listing of Armenian contributions to world culture, the raw sensitivity around historical recognition; all of this is easy to write off as national temperament, a special attachment to ancestors. But behind this habit lies something more than pride. The better question is different: why does this nation need so much history, and why does this history resist revision so strongly? For a society that has survived catastrophe, forced displacement, and the constant threat of erasure, the past serves a function that researchers call ontological security—a stable sense of the continuity in the collective self. It provides three things at once: continuity, dignity and an explanation for pain. Seen this way, the past stops being some abstract archive and becomes a foundation instead.

That’s what this pattern in Armenian history ultimately comes down to: holding on to a sense of who you are, in a world that keeps hinting your existence might be up for debate.

Ontological Security: Why People Need Routine

British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that human existence rests on a set of coordinates we rarely put into words, yet take entirely on faith: time, space, the continuity of the self. These are existential questions that philosophy has been probing for centuries, but questions an ordinary person, in ordinary life, simply can’t afford to ask all the time. If we did, acting in the world would become impossible. We take it on faith that the world around us is stable, that people and objects go on existing even when we’re not looking at them, and that our sense of self stays continuous over time. This trust isn’t the result of rational proof. It’s an emotional foundation, built out of hope, courage, and a basic trust laid down in early childhood.

For Giddens, self-identity isn’t something handed to us ready-made. It’s an ability we have to keep maintaining the ability to tell a coherent story about ourselves: who I was, who I am now, where I’m headed. Every new event from the outside world has to somehow be folded into this narrative. Otherwise, the biography starts to fall apart, and with it, the sense of self falls apart too.

For an Armenian, this framework carries a particular weight, because everyday commitment to national identity here isn’t optional. It’s woven into the very fabric of life; into rituals, family memory, religious holidays, school curricula, public spaces. To question this identity means more than just revising an opinion; it means losing the very coordinates by which your whole picture of the world is built. It’s no accident that attempts to critically re-examine established historical memory are so often met not as intellectual work, but as a betrayal of ancestors, of the dead, of the very possibility of being Armenian.

The same trust an individual places in the stability of the world, a collective places in the stability of its own history. Jennifer Mitzen, who applied Giddens’s theory to international relations, shows that states and nations need ontological security just as much as individuals do, and they achieve it through stable, repeated practices she calls routines. These routines serve not just a cognitive function providing the sense of certainty needed to act, but an emotional one too, shielding the collective from the paralyzing fear of chaos. What matters especially in the Armenian case is that the age-old logic of confrontation with neighbors, paradoxically, doesn’t undermine this security but sustains it, because a stable image of the enemy is more predictable than uncertainty.

A Routine of Memory: How Trauma Holds a Scattered Nation Together

A foundation, though, only works if it’s stable, which is why the historical landscape of nations with an intense collective memory tends toward permanence rather than development. It doesn’t just preserve the past; it guards it. Revising the narrative stops being an academic exercise and becomes a threat to the foundation itself. That’s what explains the raw, painful reaction to denial of the Genocide, to any challenge of historical achievements, or to any attempt to reconsider the past.

It’s precisely this routinization of historical thinking, the constant, almost ritual repetition of the story of an ancient nation that has endured countless trials that serves a function for Armenians nothing else can fill. The Armenian world is heavily regionalized: belonging to a specific city, region, family, or diaspora community often means more to a person than the abstract sense of belonging to “Armenians in general” — something a resident of Yerevan, Gyumri, Los Angeles, or Marseille might understand in entirely different ways. A shared narrative of suffering and resilience, passed down generation after generation, tinged with a sense of messianic purpose and studded with reminders of Armenian contributions to world science and culture, becomes one of the few things that lets people with such different lived experiences synchronize their sense of self and, at least partly, trust one another.

Mitzen puts it this way: society is nothing more than the sum of practices its members continually reproduce, and individual routines constitute the society that, in turn, stabilizes each person’s sense of self. Applied to the Armenian case, this means the routine of historical memory isn’t decoration on top of identity. It’s the load-bearing structure underneath it.

This structure has a weak point too, one Mitzen describes as follows: it’s precisely the routines held onto most tightly that make a rupture so dangerous. As long as the routine holds—as long as the past, present, and expected future fit together into a coherent story—a collective can withstand even very difficult circumstances. But once the routine itself breaks down, the rupture isn’t felt as a local setback. It’s felt as an existential threat.

That is exactly what happened in 2020. The defeat in the war and the loss of much of Artsakh struck not only at territory and military standing, but also weakened the routine that had sustained Armenian ontological security for decades. The old logic—Armenians suffered, but endured and prevailed—did not disappear, but it ceased to operate automatically or provide the same sense of stability and coherence. At the same time, nothing comparably convincing emerged to reinforce or replace it. Hence the sense of chaos that keeps society from remaining unified precisely when unity is needed most.

The Mechanism of Trauma: From Chosen Suffering to the Collapse of Time

To understand why a break in routine is felt so acutely, it helps to turn to the work of psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan on what he calls “chosen trauma”, a shared mental image of mass suffering that a group’s ancestors experienced at the hands of an enemy. Over time, the historical accuracy of the event stops mattering. What matters instead is the function the trauma serves as a connective thread, woven into the fabric of national identity.

Volkan introduces the concept of “time collapse”. When a chosen trauma is fully reactivated under the pressure of stress and anxiety, the boundary between past and present dissolves: fears, expectations, and defensive reactions tied to the old event resurface, and, consciously or not, attach themselves to the current threat. The image of today’s enemy swells into the image of the historical enemy, and the felt entitlement to revenge, or to reclaiming what was lost, intensifies sharply. Volkan illustrates this with the Serbian case, where the image of the Battle of Kosovo was reactivated by Milošević so intensely that the centuries-old defeat was finally, properly mourned, but that mourning didn’t lead to reconciliation. It led to a new wave of violence instead.

Chosen trauma has a mirror image. Volkan himself later introduced a concept that complements it symmetrically: “chosen glory.” Alongside the shared image of mass suffering, a collective also holds onto an equally selective, equally loose-with-the-historical-record image of triumph. In the Armenian case, chosen glory is embodied by the era of Tigranes the Great, the legendary forefather Hayk, the 1918 victory at Sardarabad, and the golden age of Mashtots. That layer of mythologized names and symbols that dominates Armenian historical consciousness far more powerfully than the memory of actual twentieth-century experience. Chosen trauma and chosen glory work as a pair. One explains the pain; the other justifies the nation’s existence and promises it future greatness. Together, they form the full outline of the narrative that carries the main weight of ontological security.

The Armenian case has its own version of the time-collapse story. The Karabakh movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s was a moment when centuries of loss and humiliation were, for a time, interrupted by victory. But that victory was never fully secured, and instead of resolving, the trauma carried forward all the way to the far heavier defeat of 2020.

This is where the vicious circle Volkan describes reveals itself. A society experiences the complete loss of trauma memory as a loss of identity itself, because the trauma has become an inseparable part of it. That means the trauma can’t simply be forgotten or “worked through” in the therapeutic sense. It has to be kept constantly in view, but in a way that mobilizes rather than paralyzes. This is where the heroization comes from: alongside the memory of victimhood, a memory of struggle gets built up; alongside monuments of mourning, monuments of vengeance and triumph appear. The circle closes and any attempt to overcome the trauma threatens the collective identity built around it, while the pressure of unprocessed trauma forces the group to compensate with self-glorification. Armenia’s neighbors, through their policies, through the ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, through the destruction of Armenian monuments and cities, keep producing new material for retraumatization. So the very type of national self-awareness that seeks to preserve the memory of suffering inadvertently provokes new suffering, which in turn reinforces that identity all over again.

From Underrecognition to Collective Narcissism

The same vicious circle can also be described in the language of social psychology. Aleksandra Cisłak and Aleksandra Cichocka, who study the phenomenon of national narcissism, show that individual and collective narcissism are usually linked, but they arise from different sources. Where individual narcissism most often grows out of excessive parental praise, collective, national narcissism grows out of a chronic sense of being underrecognized; the feeling that your group isn’t given the credit it deserves.

The outside perception of Armenians, either as a victim nation, or, in a more cynical version, as a nation of shrewd traders looking for an advantage, reinforces this very sense of being underrecognized. And that perception is partly fair: not many people in the world are in a position to properly gauge the contribution a small, globally dispersed nation has made to world science, culture, and the economy. It’s precisely out of this combination, chosen trauma plus chronic underrecognition, that national narcissism is born: not simple self-respect, but a compensatory strategy in which a nation starts to see itself not just as equal to others, but as superior to them.

The problem is that this strategy does not solve the underlying psychological need; it tends to make it worse. Cisłak and Cichocka describe this as a classic defense mechanism: a narcissistic investment in the national image does not relieve frustration. Paradoxically, it sharpens the perception of threats, because the more convinced a nation becomes of its own greatness, the more painfully it reacts to any sign of disrespect. This produces several specific, well-documented effects that are also recognizable in Armenian public discourse. One is an obsession with history and the search for achievements, comparable to the Polish case, where high levels of national narcissism correlate with support for rewriting school textbooks to emphasize the nation’s outstanding successes, even at the expense of accuracy. In Armenia, the same compensatory impulse is visible in the persistent search for historical precedence and in the tendency to treat critical revisions of established national narratives as attacks on the nation itself.

The Armenian case, however, complicates the established link between collective narcissism and populist leadership. Nikol Pashinyan’s rhetoric has relied heavily on populist devices, but much of his symbolic politics, especially after 2020, has moved in the opposite direction. His attempts to shift attention from historical Armenia to the existing republic, and from inherited symbols of greatness and sacrifice to practical state-building, challenge rather than reproduce narcissistic compensation. What reveals the strength of the mechanism described here is not Pashinyan’s rhetoric itself, but the resistance these attempts provoke. The image of a country with a rich history and considerable human capital, but one that has never quite become genuinely prosperous, continues to demand compensation on the symbolic level precisely because the practical foundations of collective dignity remain fragile.

One related but less clear-cut hypothesis deserves a separate note. There’s a common view that collective narcissism, along with associated stereotypes like “the world’s oldest nation,” functions as a kind of psychological defense against hostile propaganda—Azerbaijani and Turkish propaganda above all. This idea, in its logic, echoes the work of Karl Gustafsson and Maria Mälksoo on what they call memory-political deterrence. They show that states really do use memory politics—rhetoric, declarations, commemorative practices, and memory laws—to discourage other actors from taking actions that threaten their collective memory, and by extension their ontological security.

A Precedent: How Trauma Broke Through Even the Soviet Framework

This mechanism has a Soviet history as well as a post-Soviet one, and that history shows something important: the need for ontological security can break through even an ideological system that, on the face of it, should have left no room for it. On April 24, 1965, on the 50th anniversary of the Genocide, an unauthorized demonstration took place in Yerevan, with estimates ranging anywhere from 20,000 to 200,000 participants, demanding official recognition of the tragedy and the return of Armenian lands in Turkey and Soviet Azerbaijan. Historian Maike Lehmann calls what happened next “apricot socialism”: national and Soviet ideological elements fused into a stable blend that felt psychologically coherent to Soviet Armenians. The apricot, Armenia’s national fruit, its skin shifting from deep crimson to pale orange, serves here as a metaphor for how Armenians came to experience the Soviet project: not in spite of their own identity, but through it.

In the letters Armenian citizens sent to Soviet authorities during those months, Armenian suffering was consistently tied to the broader Soviet narrative of resistance against outside threats, right down to the NATO threat so prominent in the Soviet press of the time. These letters kept reproducing the same boundary between “us” and “them”: the authors called the Turks lackeys, beasts, imperialists, barbarians and exploiters, drawing a sharp line between a shared Soviet “we” and a Turkish “they.” Tellingly, even Armenia’s party elite spoke in the same terms. At the Central Committee plenum, speakers described Turkish barbarians in the same breath as Genghis Khan and German fascism, even as the events of April 1965 themselves were pointedly kept outside the definition of “nationalism” and framed instead as righteous anger, fully compatible with Soviet morality.

After 1965, Yerevan went through a genuine boom in monuments, in which Soviet and national symbolism fused almost seamlessly: the statue of Mother Armenia took the place once held by a monument to Stalin, and for the 50th anniversary of Soviet Armenia, a stele went up bearing Zoroastrian symbols—anchoring the Soviet promise in Armenia’s pre-modern past. In other words, even within a system that in principle had no tolerance for open ethnic nationalism, the need for ontological security through historical trauma found itself a legal form. This shows that the mechanism described above isn’t some invention of the post-Soviet era, but a far more enduring structure in Armenian historical consciousness.

Post-Soviet Mythology and Its Limits

After the collapse of the USSR, this mechanism lost its Soviet frame and began unfolding directly, along the logic of an ethnonational state. Researcher Suren Zolyan traces how, over the more than 30 years of independence, several political myths have succeeded one another: from the Soviet-revolutionary myth to pre-modern history and the memory of the First Republic of 1918–1920, then to the “Genocide–Karabakh victory” axis, and, after 2018, to an attempt to build a fundamentally new image of Armenia as a democratic state, distinct not just from Russia but from its autocratic neighbors as well. This same trend includes, for instance, Nikol Pashinyan’s pointed remarks about internet freedom, made in Vladimir Putin’s presence. The debates around state symbols were another symbolic expression of this attempt. The prime minister publicly criticized the coat of arms, with its depiction of Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark, on the grounds that Ararat lies within modern-day Turkey, and proposed replacing it with Armenia’s own Mount Aragats; he also criticized the national anthem’s lyrics for invoking enemies and ending on the theme of dying for the homeland.

The survey data Zolyan cites in his work shows just how hard it is for this new myth to take hold. Contemporary Armenian society, judging by this data, lives in several different eras at once. Roughly 60% of respondents name the era of King Tigranes the Great, in the first century BC, as the most successful period in Armenian history; 22.5% name the Soviet 1970s; 15% point to the legendary age of the mythical forefather Hayk; and only 12% place the best times in the period of the independent Third Republic. The ratio of mythological past to present in Armenian consciousness thus works out to roughly 87.5 to 12 percent. In other words, what dominates as a point of reference for most people isn’t events at all, but name-symbols — Hayk and Tigranes — while the actual lived experience of Soviet Armenia or the independent republic is perceived less as reliable memory than as just another layer of a mythologized construct.

This leads to a key conclusion: the government and most of society today are living through this historical moment within different temporal and discursive frameworks, and the symbolic politics imposed from above inevitably runs up against the majority’s own sense of identity. This doesn’t refute what’s been said above about ontological security through trauma and collective narcissism—quite the opposite, it demonstrates just how durable that mechanism actually is. A change of political regime, even a genuinely sincere attempt by the elite to offer society a non-traumatic, democratic self-image, still isn’t enough to displace the far more deeply rooted, pre-modern, heroic-tragic temporal framework in which most Armenians continue to think of themselves.

The Diaspora As a Magnifying Glass

The same mechanism, only in a more exposed form, shows up in research by Dmitry Chernobrov and Leyla Wilmers on the young Armenian diaspora in France, the UK, and Russia. Young people who grew up after Armenia declared independence never witnessed the Genocide or the Karabakh war of the 1990s themselves; their knowledge of these events comes to them second-hand, through family and collective transmission of memory. And yet it’s precisely in this group that the researchers identify a phenomenon they call the presence of the past: the memory of tragedy and conflict isn’t stored somewhere on the periphery of consciousness, it’s built directly into everyday life, into friendships, family expectations, and the way current events are perceived, even when the interviewees themselves carefully say they want to move forward and not build their identity solely around trauma.

Tellingly, the diaspora perceives the Karabakh conflict with more ambivalence than the Genocide. On one hand, it’s a symbolic victory and a unifying, mobilizing factor. On the other, it’s a source of disillusionment with the state and a sense of powerlessness—a community living far from Armenia, unable to influence what’s happening there. It’s precisely in the diaspora that the mechanism of routinized memory as a foundation of identity shows up most vividly, because where everyday life isn’t automatically saturated with Armenian context, the way it is in Armenia itself, sustaining identity demands a far more conscious effort. One interviewee in the study puts it this way: the importance of belonging to a people born on a mountain of the dead is something he feels sets his relationship with a fellow Armenian apart from, say, an Italian’s relationship with another Italian.

This survival mindset, so visible in the diaspora, is today, after 2020, increasingly showing up in Armenia itself as well: a country that, for the first time in a long while, finds itself needing to articulate not just a memory of the past, but a model of the future, one not yet built on the familiar repertoire of tragedy and heroism.

Conclusion

Ontological security requires a stable narrative about the self, and for the Armenian nation, that narrative has, for over a century, been the story of trauma suffered and heroically overcome. This narrative worked successfully even within the Soviet system, proving its durability independent of political regime. But because the trauma itself is never worked through psychologically, only ritually reproduced and heroicized, the chronic experience of underrecognition transforms into a compensatory collective narcissism, which in turn sharpens the perception of threats instead of easing it, thereby creating the conditions for new trauma.

The 2020 defeat broke the old routine so sharply that it stopped functioning automatically, and the alternative the post-Soviet political elite is trying to offer has, so far, found no real footing in the still pre-modern, mythologized temporal consciousness of most Armenians. This is exactly why the static quality of Armenian historical space, its persistent resistance to revision, reconsideration, and ordinary forgetting, shouldn’t be mistaken for rigidity or stubbornness. It’s the price paid for a psychological regulator that actually works: until another source of continuity, dignity, and an explanation for pain emerges, the past will keep carrying the weight that the present cannot.

Whether this circle is closed forever, or whether Armenian society, in Armenia and in the diaspora, can find a way to maintain ontological security without constantly reproducing trauma and superiority, remains an open question. The answer will likely be decided not in theoretical scholarship, but in whatever model of the future Armenia and its diaspora ultimately manage to work out for themselves.

References

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