Radio Free Europe, Czech Republic
June 15 2005
Georgia: Analyst Ghia Nodia Assesses Saakashvili’s Attempts To
Transform Country
By Robert Parsons
Ghia Nodia speaking at RFE/RL
In an extensive interview last week with RFE/RL, Georgian political
scientist Ghia Nodia evaluated the success of President Mikheil
Saakashvili’s efforts over the past 18 months to transform Georgia
from a corrupt “failed state” into a flourishing democracy with a
market economy. At the same time, Nodia admitted that Saakashvili’s
inconsistent and sometimes contradictory statements have given rise
to confusion about his “real” agenda.
RFE/RL: [U.S. President] George [W.] Bush described Georgia when he
was in Tbilisi [on 10 May] as a beacon of democracy in the region. In
your view, is that a fair assessment of where Georgia is today?
NODIA: It may be fair in the sense that Georgia, an example, has an
influence on other countries in the region. And so other countries
often do see Georgia that way. But when we look from the inside, we
see more problems about our democracy than just, you know, this rosy
picture or beacon of democracy.
RFE/RL: But nevertheless, given the starting point, progress has been
made.
NODIA: I think so. I think it was a very big boost, a very big
impetus, it gave a very big impetus to Georgia’s strive to democracy.
First, it demonstrated the Georgian people are really committed to
democracy and that the Georgian people can hold themselves to higher
standards, they can demand of themselves more. And, of course that
makes things difficult at the same time for the new government
because it is held to higher standards than Shevardnadze government
was held.
RFE/RL: If you were to put your finger on it, what would you say has
been Saakashvili’s greatest accomplishment in the last 1 1/2 years?
NODIA: I think it’s quite clear for me that Adjara was his greatest
accomplishment in terms of both nation building, because Adjara was
kind of semi-separatist region, and in terms of democracy
development, because Adjara was a local tyranny. And now Adjara is
part of Georgia. It has, of course, many problems with democracy, but
it’s still a much, much freer region than it used to be.
RFE/RL: Saakashvili himself refers now — although at the beginning,
rather less so — but now he refers to what has happened in Georgia
as a revolution. But, in what sense can we really describe what’s
happened in Georgia as being a revolution?
NODIA: In some sense it may be described as a revolution. Of course
it’s not a classical revolution, like you know the French Revolution.
But, [firstly] it was not just a change of regime, but it was a
change of regime with the participation of a large amount of people
who were really motivated by the idea of democracy. And they thought
that what we had before was not democracy, and they wanted democracy.
So this, I think, very broad level of public participation, of public
commitment justifies the term revolution. “I think the main
difference [between Saakashvili and Shevardnadze] is that
Shevardnadze did not have real trust in the ability of Georgia and
the Georgian people to build [a] credible, sustainable state
independently.”
And secondly, I think I would call that kind of Pareto criteria,
after Alfredo Pareto, an Italian sociologist [who] said revolution
was in a way a change of elites. Some people contest that, saying
that, you know, Mikheil Saakashvili, Zurab Noghaideli, other leaders,
actually served the Shevardnadze government. But I think it’s
different elites that came to power, who are more allied to Western
ways of thinking and acting, ways of thinking and acting, which is a
new generation, which was not part of the former communist
nomenklatura. So in that sense, our revolution in 2003 was reminding
of [an] Eastern European revolution of 1989 when these new,
noncommunist elites came to power.
RFE/RL: I suppose, in a sense too, it’s also been a rejuvenation of
elites as well.
NODIA: Yeah of course, new elites, and also in terms that they are
much younger people. Some of them were kids when it was communism. Of
course, it’s a very juvenile government, probably the youngest in
Europe and sometimes inexperience, sometimes it makes blunders, and
sometimes its ineffective, but it’s certainly extremely motivated,
extremely impatient about changing their own country.
RFE/RL: You’ve put your finger on one of the problems there, the lack
of experience, the lack of experienced cadres (i.e. personnel) at the
disposal of the Georgian government. How much of a problem has this
been and how much of a problem do you think it will continue to be
for Georgia?
NODIA: I think its one of the key problems. It’s not the key problem
for this government because there is a very small pool of people whom
the leadership actually trusts. And this also explains recurring
reshufflings in the government, because there are scarce human
resources and sometimes they turn out to be less successful than the
president or prime minister hoped they would be. During the first
year, we had these frequent reshuffles and this created some sense
that this government is maybe well intentioned, but kind of messy.
RFE/RL: In many respects, Saakashvili defines himself or has defined
himself in opposition to his predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze. But in
what sense do you think he’s different from Shevardnadze?
NODIA: I think the main difference is that Shevardnadze did not have
real trust in the ability of Georgia and the Georgian people to build
[a] credible, sustainable state independently. He thought that
Georgia always needed some kind of external patron. It had to be
Russia. If it’s not Russia then it had to be America, the West,
somebody else. But he thought that Georgians would always be corrupt
people, that the Georgians on their own can only enforce some kind of
very basic level of security, very basic level of order. But when it
comes to strategic direction, Georgia should take some guidance from
abroad. Therefore, he thought that his mission was mainly to ensure
some kind of protection for Georgia from the outside, from NATO
maybe. He thought the Baku-[Tbilisi-]Ceyhan [pipeline] project is the
project of his lifetime and the main project for Georgia because that
brings Western interest to the country.
While this new bunch of people have this kind of candle approach.
They think that we Georgians may be inexperienced, we may have
problems, but eventually we can do things, we can accomplish things
on our own, they’re also very strongly attached to the West, to the
idea of trans-Atlantic and European cooperation. But they believe
that the main decisions should be made by Georgians, and the main job
has to be done by Georgians.
RFE/RL: What you’re saying then is that for Saakashvili the main
thing in his first year or so in government has been to inject a
sense of self-belief into the population?
NODIA: Yes, yes. And he is very high on trying to inject this
national pride without making it ethnic pride. He is very big on
state symbols, he changed the flag, the hymn, the state seal,
everything, and he is very proud that the Georgian people have
started to love their hymn and sing their hymn, which was not the
case before. And you know, everybody loves the new Georgian flag, and
so he tried very hard. And it is certainly his priority to instill,
somehow to fill this gap between the state and the citizen because
Georgians, especially after their 200 years in the Russian Empire,
are used to treating the state as a kind of adversary, enemy,
somebody you have to cheat, somebody whose control you have to avoid
and not have a really positive relationship with the state. But
Saakashvili sees, I think rightly, his important mission to somehow
create a connection between citizens and the state.
RFE/RL: You’re saying it’s important, or he sees it as being
important, to instill as sense of loyalty to the state. But the
dividing line between patriotism and nationalism, particularly in a
multiethnic state like Georgia, can often be a very narrow one.
NODIA: I think he tries hard to make that line and he’s aware of the
necessity, so he makes this message of inclusiveness, sends this
message of inclusiveness to both Abkhazians and Ossetians and he send
messages to the Armenian or Azeri population who are the largest
minorities in Georgia, as well as to other minorities, please be
active, please take part in state governments and so on. His critics
say, probably with good reason, that it is largely rhetoric, and not
that much has been done actually, but I think rhetoric is also
important. The consensus about Saakashvili’s nationalism in [an]other
sense, that he considers, you know, the restoration of the
territorial integrity of Georgia, that is solving Abkhazian and South
Ossetian issues and his priority as he should do, but he is kind of
impatient about solving those problems very fast, and he makes people
think that he may revert to force at some point, or at least he
certainly uses the demonstration of force. He somehow combines this
message of inclusiveness and demonstration of force.
RFE/RL: Sometimes he doesn’t seem clear what his message is towards
Abkhazia and South Ossetia. On occasions he’ll emphasize military
force, particularly on National Day last year, with this huge parade
through Tbilisi, unprecedented in Georgia’s history. And then on
other occasions he starts talking about the need to build democracy
in Georgia, to build the economy as a way of demonstrating to the
Abkhazians and the South Ossetians that this is a state that they
should want to be part of. He doesn’t seem clear in his own mind
sometimes what it is he wants to say to them.
NODIA: I myself am confused about what he thinks. Sometimes I think
that he is just really confused himself and he cannot make up his
mind, which is not difficult to understand because if you only divert
to confidence-building measures in hopes that eventually one day it
will be solved, it’s very hard to believe in that because no such
conflicts were solved like that. But on the other hand, you may think
sometimes that some kind of quick action may solve the problem. I
think he may entertain those ideas and somehow oscillate between
different ideas. “Civil society does not look as strong as it used to
be under Shevardnadze in part because many people in the civil
society just moved to government personally and Georgian civil
society as a social actor was really a relatively small network of
people. Half of that network is now in the government.”
But sometimes I think this contradictory combination may be
intentional. That on the one hand, he sends a message to the
separatist governments, that they cannot just relax, cannot think
that Georgians have contented themselves with the status quo and will
not do anything. But parallel to that, he sends a message to the
population, to the people that this Georgia is a different Georgia
from Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s Georgia, that we are building democracy,
that we are going to join Europe, that we are inclusive, open-minded
people. It’s not kind of a ethnocracy and you Abkhaz and Ossetians
are welcome somehow to take part in making Georgia a better place to
be.
RFE/RL: But the big stick still has to be there.
NODIA: Yeah, yeah. I think it is a stick-and-carrot approach. I
rather think it’s kind of calculated.
RFE/RL: One of the things that Saakashvili always spoke about when he
was in opposition to Shevardnadze was the need to root out
corruption, which he saw as being the one thing which was doing more
than anything else to undermine Georgian society. Is he winning the
battle against corruption?
NODIA: Oh, it is too early to say that. His resolve is still strong
on that. He thinks that it was kind of a cultural revolution that
they saw in Georgia because corruption is the way Georgians used to
solve their problems, through the last two centuries at least and
that part of kind of endemic practices, lets say, in Georgia.
Sometimes, in private, people say that this revolution continues and
this is a fight between government and society, if you wish, a large
part of society. And there, they think that what matters here is
continued resolve.
Many people in the former elite think that this is kind of, you know,
a fresh new government. You know, they’re young, naive, they will try
to do that for a couple of years, maybe you know, arrest somebody,
but then everything will fall back to tested ways to solve problems
and they should just wait out this storm. And the government thinks
that they should break this kind of cultural pattern, and they should
do that by continuous efforts, and continuous showing and very strong
nerve, that OK, we arrest somebody, then we appoint somebody else,
and we arrest him too if breaks a law, etc., etc.
RFE/RL: Do you think that the government, and in particular
Saakashvili, are approaching this in the right way, because you
sometimes get the impression with Saakashvili that he wants to defeat
corruption, reunite the country, reinvigorate the economy, do all
these things through the force of his own personality, through that
massive energy that he seems to have, forgetting that these things
need institutions as well?
NODIA: Exactly, I think that’s certainly the greatest weakness of
this government that they depend on this kind of Jacobean government,
which relies on the kind of strong revolutionary spirit. And they
know this, they understand that institutions are important, but
that’s not their culture in a way, it’s not their culture to define
long-term strategies and action plans and believe that, you know,
this now we are doing that, but maybe in five or 10 years time, maybe
we’ll do something else. They have some sort of general guidelines, a
sense of general direction, more than Shevardnadze had. But I think
they are more attached to, committed to ad hoc measures and following
some comprehensive plan.
I wrote, myself I wrote an article last fall, that now what the
government should do is to end the revolution and somehow return to
more or less normal governance, you know, through institutions rather
than through, kind of, willpower, sheer willpower one would say. And
I think many people in the government somehow resist that message.
They think that’s unrealistic because the institutions are still not
there, so they cannot rely on institutions yet. So at this point,
they should rely on this willpower.
RFE/RL: In this process, how important is the role of the European
Union and the United States in putting pressure on the Georgian
government?
NODIA: I think they are extremely important. I think if we had not
the context of Europe and NATO and Georgia’s very strong will to
integrate themselves, this government would have constraints.
Saakashvili understands that he has to balance his modernizing
authoritarian instincts against these values and procedures and
practices which are demanded from Georgia by the European Union and
NATO and demanded exactly because Georgia wants to be part of both
organizations. Georgia now has an individual partnership plan with
NATO and Georgia is going to have an action plan within [the]
European Neighborhood Policy. Those are very important constraining
factors.
RFE/RL: I suppose to one could say that it’s also up to the Georgian
people themselves. To what extent can Georgian civil society create
the sort of society in Georgia that people want?
NODIA: Civil society does not look as strong as it used to be under
Shevardnadze in part because many people in the civil society just
moved to government personally and Georgian civil society as a social
actor was really a relatively small network of people. Half of that
network is now in the government. So of course it was weakened in
that sense, but also it was much easier to look strong when you had,
you know, this weak Shevardnadze government, which did not have real
conviction, did not have the nerve. And now you have this very
strong-willed government, which basically shares the same values as
the civil society, although they cut corners sometimes in a way that
is unacceptable to civil society.
So, civil society tries to be persistent in its message, but it does
not have its own independent social base, so that it is difficult for
it to make its voice heard. So for the civil society it’s still, in
the short run at least, to work in coordination with Western
institutions, although at the same time trying to reach out more to a
broader social base.
RFE/RL: Does civil society in Georgia have the oxygen to breathe?
Does it have the access to the media that is required to be
successful?
NODIA: It has less of an access to the media, both because the media
thinks it’s less important now, the civil society organizations are
less important than they used to be before and they were seen as kind
of informal partners of the opposition. And also, because many public
faces moved to government. And also, the media, especially TV, which
is most influential, has become, for different reasons, some kind of
reluctant to upset the government too much. But that does not mean of
course that civil society has lost access to the media. And I think
there is this sense that civil society and independent media’s
interests are related, that they are in the same boat.
RFE/RL: One of the criticisms of the present government has been that
it has interfered in the media, perhaps even more so than the
Shevardnadze government did, particularly as regards television.
NODIA: Shevardnadze tried to interfere in the media in 2001 when [the
government] made some kind of raid on Rustavi-2, the most popular
television station. But it almost got a revolution as a response. I
think it was kind of the first attempt at revolution, which we had in
the fall of 2001. So afterward, he was scared. I think Saakashvili’s
government is much more skillful in that. He does openly attack the
media, so international organizations, for instance, when they assess
the situation in the media, they can trace any specific facts of
interference, they speak about self-censorship. So people think that
there is some direct pressure behind the scenes, mainly on the
owners, because the owners have usually other businesses to take care
of and they are afraid if they have bad relations with the government
then their other businesses will be affected. And then they exercise
pressure themselves on the journalists. I think that’s [the] more
major mechanism for influencing the media.
There is pluralist opinion in the media and you know, the opposition
and people critical of the government speaking in the media, you
cannot just say that it’s sterile, of course. But when it comes to
very sensitive issues, then that the government wants somehow to
block, then it has some leverage to avoid those very sensitive issues
being publicized. One example was last year’s events in South
Ossetia, when the government really succeeded in maintaining certain
control on the media. The second was the very controversial issue of
the death of Zurab Zhvania. And until very recently the whole media,
I mean electronic media, not printed media, was basically silent,
kept silent on this issue, and so it was very controversial in the
society. Whether it was really an accident, or he was murdered. And
only recently, that kind of blockade was lifted.
RFE/RL: And yet the government itself says it is firmly committed to
free media, that it has introduced this concept of public television,
through which you are associated yourself now.
NODIA: I think also, one has to say that within the government, you
have different trends. On the one hand it has also introduced, even
before that new law on media, which is on freedom of expression,
which is maybe more liberal than many European legislations. Some
people in the government are really committed to the principle of
free media, but what they say is that the main problem is the media
itself, that it does not have economic foundations of independence
and every government or every political actor can make a phone call
to the media and say that you are wrong and probably the White House
also calls on ABC or CBS when they think they are wrong, but it’s
just the function of the media not to cave in to political demands.
So they cannot just restrain themselves from trying to promote their
own views.
RFE/RL: Turning aside from domestic policy, one of the things that
Saakashvili said when he became president was that it was absolutely
critical for Georgia to normalize its relations with Russia. We’ve
seen Georgia and Russia reach agreement now on the withdrawal of the
bases. Does this signal, do you think, the beginning of that
normalization that Saakashvili was talking about?
NODIA: I think of course it is a step in the right direction. And it
removes one very important obstacle in Russian-Georgian relations. Of
course, provided that this agreement will be actually implemented.
But the biggest obstacle is still there, which is South Abkhazia,
South Ossetia. So until that obstacle is really removed, I think
we’ll have these very bumpy relations with Russia continued.
I think in the beginning Saakashvili proposed to Russia some kind of
rational pact, that, you know, you accept our strive to join NATO and
the European Union, our kind of Westernization direction, but we will
welcome Russian business to be, you know, as active in Georgia as it
wants to. And he thought it’s rational, I also think it’s rational.
But the Russians don’t think it’s rational because they want
political domination, or at least very strong political influence,
and they think the European Union and NATO being active in the South
Caucasus is contrary to their interests so that pact that Saakashvili
proposed to them is at this point unacceptable to Russian political
elite.
RFE/RL: eighteen months into Saakashvili’s presidency, what do you
think he most needs to do or the Georgian government most needs to do
to strengthen Georgian democracy?
NODIA: I think he has to, as we already said, institutionalize his
achievements. I think without that, we’ll have this continuing sense
of uncertainty about his government, about the ability of this
government to somehow keep its act together. And, somehow, this
government is seen, I mean many people appreciate certain
achievements, specific achievements of this government, but they
still don’t think, don’t see this government as somehow having a
comprehensive policy in general. And I think that’s the main problem
that Saakashvili has to solve. He should convince the Georgian
people, and the international community for that matter, that he is a
stable leader, which can continue this comprehensive reform for the
long term. He is not just a revolutionary that has to make some
changes in the short term.