Azerbaijan: Soon to Be a Household Word : Nationalism: Iran and Turkey may be drawn in as ethnic strife takes on new forms in the southern Soviet Union.

Three years ago, Azerbaijan was not exactly a household word. Except for a handful of specialists in the region’s nationalities, no one had heard much about the Soviet republic until a land dispute recently led to bloody clashes between it and Soviet Armenia. Today, Americans had better get used to hearing about Azerbaijan, for its political evolution is likely to cause increasing turmoil in the southern region of the Soviet Union and in the northern Middle East.

As the long inactive nationalisms of the Caucasus begin to rumble, Moscow and Tehran could be the big losers. Azerbaijan’s strategic location at the juncture of the Soviet Union, Armenia, Iran and Turkey means that its politics and aspirations will affect nearly all players in the region. Even Turkey, a member of NATO, is unlikely to remain uninfluenced by the shifting political currents as 19th-Century concepts of Pan-Turkism resurface.

Azerbaijanis make up part of the vast Turkic-speaking world that stretches from Turkey east across Soviet Central Asia and into western China. Speakers of these closely related languages number more than 100 million. Their political ambitions for some form of Pan-Turkic unity emerged powerfully within both the Czarist and Ottoman Turkish empires in the last century. Now, as the Iron Curtain falls and the Soviet national republics start flexing their muscles, Pan-Turkism will again be on the rise. Azerbaijan shares in that tradition, directly affecting its relations with each of its neighbors.

Many Azerbaijanis, now a divided people, are likely to start pushing for unity. This aspiration was at least part of the motive behind last week’s border disturbances, when some Soviet Azeris started tearing down barricades separating Azerbaijan and Iran. While Azerbaijan’s population is about 6 million, more than 9 million Azeris live in northern Iran, sometimes called Iranian Azerbaijan.

In the past, the Soviet Union has tried to use its Azerbaijanis to destabilize Iran. Now, they are destabilizing the Soviet Union. As the Azeris grow more strident in expressing their grievances , a quest for some kind of unity movement will strengthen their national clout against all their neighbors.

Both Moscow and Tehran have every reason to ensure that an Azerbaijani national unity movement does not tear huge hunks of land out of the Soviet Union and Iran. At present, there are no strong separatist instincts among the Iranian Azeris--mainly because the 70-year Communist character of their sister state to the north repels them. That ideological concern will now lessen, perhaps causing Iranian Azerbaijanis to rethink their own national aspirations. That would make Iran extremely anxious.

Some kind of close cooperation between Moscow and Tehran on the “Azeri problem” is thus likely. And the Armenians and Georgians, both Christians, are likely to put aside some of their own historical grievances to deal with the prospect of an even more powerful and resurgent Muslim Azerbaijan. The Azeris are largely Shiite Muslim, which adds religious tinder to a potentially volatile regional situation.

Turkey is also directly affected. Since the disastrous breakup of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1917, Ankara has been careful to stay away from Pan-Turkism, wisely understanding that there was no more dangerous card to play than to threaten the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union by flirting with old Pan-Turkist policies. But as the Soviet Union’s 50 million Muslims--mostly Turkic--move toward greater autonomy or even eventual independence, Turkey cannot remain indifferent to its brethren.

Central Asian Turks have always looked to Turkey for intellectual guidance. So, too, will the Azerbaijanis--geographically linked by the slimmest of land corridors to Turkey--look to Turkey for support. Turkey will be hard put to avoid the siren songs of the Azeris as a means of strengthening its own regional clout.

Azerbaijani aspirations could thus potentially make Turkey and Iran regional rivals for influence. While the Turkic-speaking Azeris look politically and linguistically to Ankara, they know they must also deal with Iran, where their Iranian Azeri brethren live and share the same Shiite faith. Also, when not separated by an Iron Curtain, the two Azerbaijans have a long record of interaction. This represents a new element of friction in what has been a relatively smooth Turkish-Iranian relationship this century.

In short, the raw material for new ethnic strife is abundantly present. The world is likely to be hearing a great deal more about Azerbaijan in the future, as one of many new potential geopolitical trouble spots that emerge from the gradual meltdown of the Soviet Empire.