The National Interest
Armenia’s Peace Will Be Decided by One Constitutional Clause
To prevent a future flare-up of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the people of Armenia must end it once and for all—renouncing the disputed territory through a constitutional change.
In a setback for Russia and a positive sign for America and the West, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan won a major victory in his country’s parliamentary elections on June 7. Civil Contract, Pashinyan’s political party, defied an all-out Russian influence effort and propaganda blitz, winning 64 out of the parliament’s 105 seats—an outright majority, allowing it to govern Armenia alone. But the act that will actually determine whether Armenia’s peace with Azerbaijan holds is not the election just behind him, but the constitutional change still ahead. Until Armenia removes the language in its 1995 post-Soviet constitution that lays implicit claim to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, the deal initiated at the White House last August will remain a mere document, not a settlement. History offers a sharp warning about the difference.
The clause in question sits in the preamble of Armenia’s constitution, which invokes the 1990 Declaration of Independence and, through it, the 1989 act of “reunification” with Nagorno-Karabakh. That language amounts to a standing claim on territory that every UN member state, now including Armenia itself, recognizes as Azerbaijani, and over which Baku reestablished full control in 2023.
Azerbaijan’s insistence that the provision be struck from the Armenian constitution is often framed in Yerevan as a humiliating demand imposed by the victor. It is better understood instead as the load-bearing element of the peace itself. So long as a state’s foundational text claims a neighbor’s internationally recognized land, the conflict cannot be considered closed; any agreement signed over that claim basically binds the leader who signed it rather than the nation itself, and it stays hostage to whoever governs next.
Azerbaijan and Armenia Should Not Become Israel and Palestine
The cautionary tale here is not hypothetical. It is the Palestinian one.
When the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) entered the Oslo process in 1993, the single most consequential commitment it made was textual. The Palestinian National Charter—the movement’s founding covenant—was saturated with the rejection of Israel’s existence; its Article 19 declared Israel’s 1948 establishment null and void, and the bulk of its clauses called for the destruction of Israel and denied the possibility of any peaceful settlement. In his 1993 letters to Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat pledged that the offending articles were no longer valid and that the PLO would formally amend the charter through its Palestine National Council. That formal amendment, however, never actually took place. In April 1996, the PNC voted 504 to 54 to cancel the articles contrary to the Oslo letters—but only in principle, delegating the actual redraft to a legal committee that never produced a revised public text. A 1998 reaffirmation in Gaza during Bill Clinton’s visit was a show of hands, not a rewritten covenant. The foundational document was left intact in practice.
The consequences were not merely legal. Because the rejection of Israel was never unambiguously excised from the founding text, it was never retired from public life. Palestinian anti-Zionism persisted in school curricula, official media, and the political culture, where the maximalist claim retained its internal legitimacy even as leaders downplayed it to the rest of the world. The predictable result was that true reconciliation never took place. After leadership changes in Israel and Palestine, the relationship shifted to a managed, recurring conflict—rounds of violence punctuating a peace that the foundational rhetoric never actually endorsed.
The opposite scenario is just as well documented. When postwar Europe needed to close its most explosive territorial question, it did so in writing and without ambiguity. West Germany had for decades preserved a legal reservation over its lost eastern lands, declining to recognize the Oder-Neisse line between Germany and Poland as final. As long as East Germany stood between West Germany and the disputed border, the issue was moot. Germany’s reunification in 1990 forced its resolution: under the Treaty on the Final Settlement, the Allied powers headed off a long-running territorial dispute, making full German sovereignty conditional on settling the border. That November, Germany and Poland signed a treaty definitively recognizing the line and renouncing all mutual territorial claims. Bonn amended its Basic Law to match. Only after the claim was formally surrendered did genuine German-Polish reconciliation, and Poland’s eventual path into NATO and the European Union alongside a unified Germany, become possible.
Ireland did the same by referendum. As part of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Irish voters amended Articles 2 and 3 of the constitution of the Republic of Ireland, which had asserted Dublin’s claim over the entire island. The language was changed to allow for unification by consent of the voters of Northern Ireland. The amendment did not resolve the dispute once and for all, but it reframed it in peaceful terms, removing the constitutional pretext for an armed conflict and converting an aspiration to peace into a legal fact. In both cases, a democracy rewrote its founding text to lay a territorial conflict to rest, and in both cases, the rewrite was the thing that made the peace durable rather than provisional. This is the company that Armenia’s pending amendment belongs in, and the reason it should be portrayed by Pashinyan as the culmination of the peace process rather than a capitulation within it.
The Mechanics of Long-Term Armenia-Azerbaijan Peace
The obstacles are real but procedural. Armenia’s Constitutional Court has ruled the preamble to the constitution immutable, meaning it cannot simply be edited; the only path is adopting an entirely new constitution, requiring a parliamentary draft and ratification in a national referendum subject to turnout thresholds. Civil Contract has the legislative votes, and a draft shorn of the preamble was finalized in March. The referendum, expected around 2027, is the genuine test: an opposition or church-led boycott could pull turnout below the validity threshold and stall the process, and the change can easily be demagogued by a loud Armenian minority as surrender to a hostile neighbor.
That is precisely why the framing matters, and why Pashinyan’s task is as much rhetorical as legal. Armenians are being asked not to renounce their history, but to stop allowing a 30-year-old territorial claim dictate their future. The reward for doing so cleanly is substantial: an open border with Turkey, direct overland access to Europe and Central Asia, integration into the emerging Middle Corridor, and the strongest Western partnership Yerevan has ever enjoyed. The penalty for doing it ambiguously—a half-amendment, a contested vote, a claim that survives in spirit if not in letter—is the Palestinian outcome: a peace that exists on paper and in the minds of the country’s present leaders, but a conflict that lives on in the culture and could be reignited in practice at any time.
For Washington and Brussels, the implication is that the constitutional referendum, not the election, deserves their sustained attention. Western capitals invested heavily in Pashinyan’s survival; they should invest at least as much in helping him make the case for a clean constitutional settlement, and in hardening Armenia against the predictable Russian and domestic efforts to derail it. The amendment is not a bureaucratic box to be ticked after the real diplomacy is done; it is the diplomacy itself. Germany, Poland, and Ireland each demonstrated that a border is only settled when both nations say it is, and a claim renounced by referendum is a claim that cannot quietly return. The Palestinians demonstrated what happens when the text is left to fester. Armenia must now choose which precedent to follow.
About the Author: Joseph Epstein
Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an expert at the N7 Foundation, and a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Alekain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education to women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He specializes in Eurasia and the Middle East, and his work has been featured in various outlets such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Novaya Gazeta, RFE/RL, Foreign Policy, and others.
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