The authorities have often started talking about the interconnectedness of state and homeland recently, formulating a notable landmark in that context and advancing the notion of equating homeland with statehood: the homeland is the state, if you love your homeland, strengthen your state. If we leave aside the simplicity of the thought, maybe it is so, but first, we need to understand what the state is in general and the next question arising from it is what kind of state we want to build.
It seems to many that a state is a polity (an organized group of individuals) living in a particular territorial area who form a government through elections or other means and live like that, while political parties fight for power. This is certainly a misconception, the consequence of which is what we have today. And what we have today is only a mere trifle compared with the worst that is yet to come in terms of further collapse. The state is, first of all, a political project, in fact, a rather complex project with philosophical, geopolitical, cultural, value-based, and other components.
The United States, for example, is a political project that was drawn up long before it was created. This is a separate and interesting topic. Russia was also formed from political programs initially around Moscow on the basis of orthodoxy, then on the basis of the communist postmodernist project in the form of communism. Now Russia is in search and still survives by inertia. Byzantium was a multi-ethnic melting pot as a project of a Christian empire founded under Emperor Constantine. Poland is a Catholic project of the Slavic world constituted as a counterweight to Russia.
As for our neighbor Iran, let us note that the latter is a Shiite project of the Seleucids, which was interrupted during the Pahlevuni period on the basis of nationalism, after which it returned to its original state in 1979. The Ottoman Empire is the same Byzantium where Christianity was replaced by Islam, which Atatürk then replaced with Nationalism. Turkey is currently undergoing transformation, and we will know what will happen in the next decade. Israel is also a consequence of postmodernism, a nationalist birth of liberalism in the form of Zionism. This is a classical project, the creation of which was almost impossible, but they managed. For now.
We can talk about this topic for a long time. In its turn, Armenia, whether we like it or not, was created by the Russian Empire for a very specific purpose. Its foundation was laid at the time when the Catholicosate was moved from Sis to Etchmiadzin. It was, in fact, the anchor on which the new project of the Russian Empire was realized. Leaving aside its reasons now, let's note that the Gandzasar Catholicosate played a big role in it.
The Russian Empire also laid the foundations for the creation of the present-day Baltic republics, Finland, Azerbaijan, and Central Asian countries; therefore they can be regarded as projects of the Soviet Union.
When we consider the state as a political project, our thinking changes and a number of questions arise. What kind of state did we want to create in 1991 and did we have a political project? Do they consider their activities from such a point of view regarding today's political struggle, or rather is the terrible mess we have a reflection of political "we don't know what we're doing"? Or, let's simplify the question, do they perceive such a point of view in general, so that they can move forward and strengthen the state for the sake of a flourishing homeland?