A Rose Among Thorns: Georgia Makes Good

Charles King

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004

Summary:  Georgia's recent, peaceful revolutions might allow the country to become a beacon of hope for a troubled region. For that to happen, however, its new leaders must find a way to deal with local secessionists, as well as with Moscow and Washington.

Charles King is Associate Professor of Foreign Service and Government at Georgetown University and author of The Black Sea: A History.

"Oh, fatherland! How I think of you now," lamented Euripides' Medea, the princess of ancient Colchis -- today part of the republic of Georgia. "In every way the situation is bad." Modern Georgians understand her sentiment only too well. In the first decade and a half since their independence from the Soviet Union, they have faced civil war, separatist movements, economic malaise, rigged elections, and dysfunctional government.

Recently, however, Georgians have started to take matters into their own hands. In November, they staged a bloodless revolt against their president, Eduard Shevardnadze, for overseeing fraudulent parliamentary elections. When Shevardnadze tried to open the new legislative session, protesters took over parliament peacefully, some handing out roses to the police. At first, Shevardnadze responded by declaring a state of emergency, but he soon thought better of his legacy. Within days, he agreed to resign. New presidential elections, which international observers deemed generally free, were held on January 4, 2004. By an overwhelming majority, the vote awarded the presidency to Mikheil Saakashvili, a 36-year-old Columbia University-educated lawyer who had led the demonstrations.

During his brief electoral campaign and tenure as president, Saakashvili has made all the right moves. He has promised to fight corruption, to reform government -- from the structure of the constitution to taxation policy -- and to improve relations with Russia while maintaining strong ties with the United States. What his government must do first, however, is find a way to win the allegiance of all Georgia's inhabitants, including staunch secessionists in the north and a prickly potentate along the Black Sea. Before it can become a real democracy, Georgia must become a real state.

VANISHING LINES

The peaceful ouster of Shevardnadze was a signal event in the politics of Eurasia -- but only because it is unlikely to be repeated elsewhere in the region. Georgia is the only member of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the association of 12 former Soviet republics, that can be said to have genuinely democratic aspirations. Some -- Russia, Ukraine, and Moldova -- still use the language of democracy but have spent the last several years perfecting their own brand of illiberalism. Others -- Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Turkmenistan -- have tired of even pretending. Since the downfall of communism, most governments across the region have simply replaced Soviet authoritarianism with homegrown varieties. Elections -- if they are held at all -- are systematically manipulated, either at the ballot box or, more subtly, through control of the media and harassment of opposition parties. In Russia, the "dictatorship of law" promoted by President Vladimir Putin now seems disturbingly close to a dictatorship pure and simple. If, as the old adage goes, democracy is a system in which it is safe to lose an election, then Eurasia's democrats still need to watch their backs. Georgia's "revolution of roses" stands out as the former Soviet Union's only successful popular uprising against this trend and the lackluster statesmanship and corruption that have attended it.

Observers have been quick to draw lessons from the Georgian experience, for Eurasia and for other parts of the world. The billion dollars in democracy and development aid that Georgia has received from the United States since 1991 -- by far Washington's largest per capita investment in any Soviet successor state -- seem to have paid off. Washington at first lauded Shevardnadze as a beacon of democratic reform, but as the 1990s progressed, his democratic credentials became more suspect. The United States, along with nongovernmental organizations such as the Open Society Institute, stepped up support for the growing political opposition. That assistance was an important catalyst of change. And it is evidence, observers say, that sustained political engagement, party training, and civil-society building can eventually bring down autocrats.

Yet the story of Georgia's awakening is also a cautionary tale. Development strategies there and in many other parts of the world have sometimes encouraged democratization programs without tackling basic problems such as undefined state boundaries or weak government capabilities. In failing states, the strategy has been to build a democracy and hope that, in time, the rest will take care of itself. But the history of Georgia since 1991 illustrates that leaving fundamental questions unanswered -- Is this one country or several? Who is sovereign? Where are the country's legitimate borders? -- can stymie reform and pollute public life.

Development specialists are not wholly blind to this problem, of course, which is why "governance" -- capacity building, institutional design, anticorruption campaigns -- has recently become a fashionable focus of international assistance programs. But "governance" is simply a euphemism for what used to be known as "politics," the first requirement of which is to know where power resides. Since the early 1990s, Georgia has been divided among a weak central government and several functionally independent regions, with predictably corrosive effects on national politics. Turning Georgia into a country that is both functional and democratic is the goal of the post-Shevardnadze leadership and of Georgia's friends in the West. The coming months will show whether it can be achieved without first settling the basic issue of territorial control. So far, the lesson seems to be that it cannot.