Armenian News-NEWS. amcontinues Arianne & Armenia project within the framework of which Arianne Caoili tells about numerous trips across Armenia and shares her impressions and experience of living in Armenia.
Armenia and Cambodia (part 1): through the lens of Lawrence of Arabia
"Us Khmers are very lazy - that's the problem" was the most common maxim expressed in my recent trip to Cambodia. When inquiring with taxi drivers, restaurant owners, locals, and university professors about Cambodia's recent past and current economic climate, somehow the answer always came down to the sentiment that 'Cambodians just don't like to work'. For foreigners who have just landed in Yerevan, a similar complaint is often heard or expressed (and not just within expat circles). In fact, I can't go to any gathering where the sentiment that ‘Armenia is a country where 3 million kings wake up’ has not come up in some form or another, either in jest or thinly-veiled contempt.
In 1919, during the Paris Peace Conference, Thomas Edward Lawrence (better known as Lawrence of Arabia), speculated in one very strange but candid interview on a theory of small, ancient nations, saying that
"Armenians won't work...that is the trouble, really, with all these old races that have been civilized, learned the game and, having once dominated the world and worked it, have lost control, gone back, as you say; or, as I say, carried on. They have gone forward logically, psychologically, physiologically. They do not care for hard labor. The ex-civilized nations— they are not lazy. They are too intelligent to work for others."
His point was that some people are far too evolved for hard labor - they would rather sit back and collect, seeing no value in ‘work for wages’. Lawrence might be right on the money with the Greeks, who, being one of the cradles of civilization, are a little averse to hard work; one might say that government spending has nourished a sense of entitlement which Ms. Merkel is paying for.
Photo from Arianne Caoili Personal Archives
The Khmers, the predecessors of modern day Cambodia, were a dominant force in South East Asia, covering much of Indochina. The Khmer kings were addicted to wonder-building: their zeal for construction explains the scattering of temples, monuments, and extensive architectural marvels seen today in Cambodia and neighboring countries. Angkor - its historical capital- was the largest city in the world, covering an area comparable to modern day Los Angeles. Smidgens of human settlements in Cambodia date back several thousand years, and the archeological excavations at Areni 1 trace similar historical fingerprints of the Old World.
These two civilizations certainly do have something to be proud of. Cambodian locals boast about the rich cultural heritage of the Khmers and how their descendants have left their footprints and cultural fragments throughout the Indochinese block. Armenians (especially the Diaspora) left distinct artistic, religious and cultural stamps. Take the Crimea, for example – cluttered with marks of over 600 years of Armenian settlement (they left in 1778), and the Armenians of Transylvania who were strong figures in trade and commerce. By the middle of the 19th century, the Armenians dominated the cities of Tiflis and Baku (the first successful oil well was built in 1871 by an Armenian, Mirzoev; and as for Tiflis, Armenians towered over economic and political life and remained the largest ethnic group there until the 1917 revolution. Armenians essentially provided the capital for critical infrastructure and the administrative aspects of government, including the printing press, all to be inherited by the Georgians).
At least, the Khmers have the remains of their temples at Angkor. Armenian churches and towns were destroyed; I have seen with my own eyes the crude altering of official maps and schoolbooks to deny that there had ever been an Armenia in the first place; and a large majority of other Armenian-originating creations lay in the lap of others. But unlike Cambodia, Armenia has kept its human capital (the Khmer Rouge wiped out the entire Cambodian intellectual class, persecuting those who didn't have a wrinkle on their hands).
Although, excessive emigration is doing a good job of purging Armenia of its future brain and economic base. And unfortunately, benefits from the Armenian Diaspora in Russia and the US have diminishing returns. Remittances are considered a form of rent because they are earned overseas and then sent back to the home country. Beblawi and Luciani distinguish between a rentier state and rentier economy: the former is a typical Arab petrol state, in which the government is the main recipient of external rents. Armenia is the latter – as the massive volume of remittances from relatives overseas go directly to households. The problem is that remittances fuel a rentier mentality that embodies a break in the work-reward causation (in other words, motivation is killed at its source and replaced by a preoccupation with achieving the externally-generated rent rather than focusing on domestic production. Over time this cements a dependent relationship on the externally-generated income, and a festering desire to be expectant more so than productive).
Lawrence put it this way: “The Armenians…would not work them themselves, not even for themselves. They would not even do the work of organizing the work or development. They would let them out as concessions to others to manage. They want to live on the coast, in cities, on rent, interest, dividends and the profits of trading in the shares and the actual money earned by capital and labor.”
Photo from Arianne Caoili Personal Archives
The issue of “laziness” itself is rather contentious in Armenia: nobody likes to talk about it openly, but when they do, it’s a kitchen-table discussion where the default position is to blame leadership or anyone else other than themselves. A foreign director-level friend of mine working in the construction sector appears to be infuriated by all lines of service, from the construction workers to the top dogs: they simply do not like being told what to do; or, they will happily nod their heads in agreement and do the very opposite. Most work-ethics center on how to do one’s job well; whereas in Armenia the prevalent mentality appears to be focused on how one might do the master’s job better.
Perhaps there is something to be said though on the vigor with which Armenians work and flourish overseas. For the purposes of economic sustainability however, it might be high time for a shift in mentality: to focus on engagement from within rather than expectations on handouts from outside. But Armenians are intrinsically gypsy, in the sense that they seem more at ease thriving in another land rather than improving the conditions of their current environment.
It might be fitting to end with a musing of one wise Roman – Seneca, if I recall correctly – who humbly suggested that no man loves his city because it is great, but because it is his. Otherwise, it would be like loving your wife only up until the point that she loses her looks.
Arianne Caoili
(Part 2 to be continued next week).
