Although the recent protests in Tbilisi have weakened day by day, Georgia has been in the center of international interest after the last parliamentary elections. With the uncertainty of further internal dynamics and international position.
In order to understand the present moment of Georgia, perhaps a brief review of the exciting past of this ancient nation with a thousand-year culture, language, and tradition, a country geographically located between Russia and Turkey, with a geostrategically important outlet to the Black Sea, can help us.
Two moments from recent history
"Comrades, they call it Georgia, the land of the sun. But for us, the real sun does not rise from the east, but from the north, from Russia; that sun is the idea of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin". (Pravda" February 27, 02.)
The inspired speaker was Eduard Shevardnadze, a rising party functionary, a cadre from the then Soviet republic of Georgia.
Shevardnadze will become the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union during the period of Gorbachev's rule, then the President of independent Georgia, second in line, since the Soviet Union collapsed in 90.
After the colorful, more precisely, "Pink Revolution" of 2003, the new president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, will replace Shevardnadze, who will go from the hero of Cold Labor to the brutally overthrown president.
The new president Saakashvili will radically shift the support of his country to the West, namely the USA. An integral part of that turn was Saakashvili's open promotion of Georgian and regional resistance to Russia's political and economic influence.
If we were to stick with the metaphor of the sun from the quoted speech in 1976, with the new political optics of the Pink Revolution in 2003, the Georgian sunrise changed direction quite a bit.
The Saakashvili era will end quite ingloriously between attempts at reform, growing corruption and an adventurous military intervention in South Ossetia, a Georgian autonomous province that will encounter a more than ready Russian military response in the "5-day war" that will result in the secession of South Ossetia. French President Sarkozy, then chairman of the European Union, contributed to such an outcome, preventing a wider-scale war conflict, with his agile diplomatic initiative.
Today, Saakashvili is not in the high pages of history, but he is in the current affairs and that is infamous, among other things, the harsh request of the Georgian authorities, i.e. the prosecutor's office, that the former, now fugitive president be extradited to Georgia in order to answer for the committed illegal, especially corruption, actions.
To make everything complicated and regionally exciting, Saakashvili, with Georgian, American and Ukrainian citizenships, will become the governor of the Ukrainian Odesa region.
Georgia today
Why is Georgia today becoming a topic of wide international interest, even managing to gain publicity these days for the wars taking place not so far from its territory? A new phase of tensions began last Sunday when the parliamentary elections were held, in which the "Georgian Dream" party of current Prime Minister Bidzin Ivanishvili won with 53 percent of the vote. The most active in contesting the regularity of the elections is the President of Georgia, Salome Zurabishvili, whose party, together with three other political entities, formed an opposition coalition. The president of the country called the citizens to protests. The state prosecutor, for his part, invited the president of the state to come to the prosecutor's office and present evidence about the irregularity of the election results, which she refused, stating that political reasons and goals are hidden in that invitation as well.
It is not without significance in looking at further political dynamics to remind that the mandate of the President of Georgia expires at the end of this year. Then the already adopted provisions of the constitutional reform will come into effect, according to which in the future the president of the state, with otherwise small constitutional powers, will be elected in the parliament.
How many unusual details there are in the recent history of Georgia is also illustrated by the fact that President Zurabishvili was not only not a direct Georgian participant in the "Pink Revolution", but that year she was the ambassador of France to Georgia. Then she left the French diplomatic service and as the daughter of Georgian emigrants in Paris, where Zurabishvili was born, she received Georgian citizenship and began her political career, first as a member of parliament, then as president of the country.
In the reports of the official OSCE delegation from the last elections, high tensions that characterized the election atmosphere, as well as certain irregularities, are mentioned, without disputing the results of the elections. (During the Georgian elections, Jevrosima Pejović, a member of the Montenegrin parliament, had observer status in front of the OSCE parliamentary structures).
Tones of critical evaluations or contestation of the election could also be heard from European countries, although not all, and words of warning also came from Washington. On the other hand, the president of Hungary, the country that holds the EU presidency, Viktor Orban, visited Tbilisi right after the election, congratulating the political party "Georgian Dream" on its "convincing victory".
The president of Ukraine, Zelensky, was explicit in his tweet with the sentence that "Russia won" in the Ukrainian elections.
Even the data on the political profiles of the prime minister and the party in power do not allow a clear view of the future direction of Georgia.
The prime minister and leader of the strongest party, Ivanishvili, is a rich entrepreneur whose affairs, according to several sources, are partly connected to Russia. By the way, Russia is Georgia's second economic partner.
The main and declared political direction of Prime Minister Ivanishvili and his "Georgian Dream" is membership in the European Union.
The country has been in partnership with the Atlantic Alliance for a long time, so there are NATO military structures on the territory of Georgia that train the Georgian army. The promises, still concluded at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, that Georgia would be admitted to the Atlantic Alliance, have not been realized.
Also, during the leadership of Georgia by the government of Ivanishvili and the "Georgian Dream", the European Union recently granted the state of Georgia the status of a candidate country.
On the other hand, the Georgian government did not impose sanctions on Russia due to the war in Ukraine. However, it was not a big obstacle for cooperation and progress in Euro-Atlantic cooperation. Even the adoption of the controversial law on foreign agents in the Georgian parliament, which was soon called the "Russian law" in the West, in addition to publicized criticisms, did not lead to the interruption of the military-political cooperation of the Western centers with Georgia.
Now the process opens with a lot of uncertainty. In it, the profile of the Georgian authorities and the direction they want to take the country will be seen more clearly.
First of all, is it a sustainable strategy of the prime minister and the leader of the "Georgian Dream" to achieve a primary partnership with the West and not to break relations, primarily economic, with Russia. In other words, can a strategy in which the country strives for a "Western vector" achieve results and survive at all, without breaking with Moscow and without, in the official discourse, the political demonization of Russia. And whether these two elements can be compatible or not - it will probably become clearer through further dynamics on the international level, including in the context of the outcome of the war in Ukraine.
That is why Georgia remains one of the more complicated geopolitical issues with potentially very sensitive international consequences.
Between the cycle of history and the way forward
In the unstable Caucasus region, which is very reminiscent of the Balkans due to its mountainous geography, multitude of ethnic communities and traditionally easy flammability, Georgians have preserved their identity between the pretensions of its neighbors, the great powers, since Persia, then the Ottoman Empire and Russia. Up to, just as complicated, coexistence with different ethnic minorities in their territory.
Specific relations with Russia have a special place in history. It should also be remembered that, due to the threat of the country, at the end of the 18th century, the Georgian king asked the Russian Empress Catherine for patronage over Georgia, which a few years later turned into a kind of Russian annexation and domination over the entire Caucasus region.
Petrograd and Moscow, equally in the imperial and communist times, paid special attention to Georgia. Not by chance, Georgians were part of the Russian political, military, and later party elite.
Georgian Petar Bagration, student and contemporary of Suvorov and Kutuzov, is a famous general of the Imperial Russian Army in the battles against Napoleon at Borodino and Austerlitz.
Georgian Josif Visarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known as Stalin, was Lenin's successor at the head of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. Shevardnadze was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR during the period of Gorbachev and Perestroika.
And then we get to the Pink Revolution of 2003. It was later discovered that there were thorns in the rose, so official Tbilisi issued an international warrant for the leader of the Pink Revolution.
Georgia is facing great trials today. Internally divided, it finds itself between the legitimate aspiration - to preserve the territorial integrity and its historical, state and spiritual individuality on the one hand, and the necessity to find a realistic measure again in geopolitical and interest balances.
It is important not to repeat initiatives for the guardianship of Georgia, which could resemble the invitation of the Georgian King Herakli to the Russian Empress Catherine in 1783 that Russia protect Georgia from the dangers of neighboring Turkey with a friendship agreement.
Now, in this historic season, the cards with friends and enemies are different and quite mixed, so in all of this the call sounds good, that is, the last statement of the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen: "Georgians, like all other European nations, should be creators of their fate".
By the way, analogies from the cycle of history are, as we know, seductive, even though they contain, somehow at the same time, elements of truth and exaggeration.
Center for International Politics, Diplomacy and European Integration
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