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Georgia: a state of flux

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Abstract

This article explores a new perspective on Georgia's politics after 1991. Employing the critical political ontology of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben, it argues that Georgia as a political community has, since its modern inception, been (in) a state of permanent exception. Successive regimes of Gamsakhurdia, Shevardnadze and Saakashvili have operated as effective sovereign dictatorships striving to bring to existence a new order. The utopia of this order was described in various ways, but typically it included restoration of the territorial sovereignty, thereby relating to the boundaries of the political community; overcoming internal disorder; and more recently, emulating the Western Liberal State. That the realisation of the order as a Western Liberal Utopia defined by the sovereign power perpetuates the very state of exception, including the reduction of individuals to ‘bare life’, is finally argued to constitute the tragedy of Georgia's contemporary politics.

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Notes

  1. Analysis of the state of exception in Russia is beyond the scope of this article. Other enemies, both absolute and real, determined by the sovereign power/dictatorship realising the order of the new empire (the outside dimension) and ‘sovereign democracy’ (the inside dimension), would likely include the political opposition including business tycoons, human rights and other NGOs seen as ‘foreign agents’, as well as, recently, NATO and the US.

  2. Quoted in Toft (2005).

  3. At the 2006 Munich Conference on Security Policy, Saakashvili stated that Georgia ‘suffers from the cancer of separatism’.

  4. Commenting on the audience granted to de facto government leaders of South Ossetia and Abkhazia by Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Saakashvili denounced Eduard Kokoity and Sergei Bagapsh as ‘engaged in encouraging illegal terrorist acts and ethnic cleansing’ (RFE/RL Newsline, 19 February, 2008). Several years earlier, Shevardnadze's Foreign Minister Irakli Menagarishvili also spoke at the UN about Abkhazia as a ‘safe haven for criminals, human and drug traffickers, illegal arm dealers and terrorist groups’ (UN General Assembly, 2 October, 2003).

  5. Quoted in Jones (1993).

  6. Social capital was translated in rather unusual ways in the post-Soviet Caucasus politics. Gamsakhurdia was originally an English literature scholar and translator of Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot into modern Georgian; Ioseliani was a playwright and a film critic; Kitovani was a sculptor; a longtime head of the Abkhaz separatist government, Vladislav Ardzimba, used to research proto-Hittite mythology; and the former Armenian President Levon Ter-Petrosian was formerly a keeper of medieval manuscripts. In the North Caucasus, Musa Shanib, the hero of Derluguian's book and ‘Bourdieu's secret admirer’ was a sociologist; and the former Chechen President Yandarbyiev a poet.

  7. Quoted in the New York Times, 25 September, 1991.

  8. Transcaucasus Chronology, Armenian National Committee of America (April 1992).

  9. In what was claimed to be his suicide note, Gamsakhurdia explained that it was his inability to ‘normalize the situation’ and restore law and order that was the reason for his act. In a telegram previously sent to the U.S. Secretary of State from his Chechen exile, he called Shevardnadze's regime ‘criminal and terrorist’ (Gamsakhurdia 1997).

  10. The Speaker of the Parliament was elected directly by the people, whereas the Parliament itself, upon beginning its session, chose the Head of State. Shevardnadze was chosen for both these posts. This practice was abolished when the new constitution was passed in 1995.

  11. Reuters, 11 September, 1993.

  12. BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, 4 November, 1993.

  13. Transcaucasus Chronology, August 1995.

  14. Reuters, 29 August, 1995; Dow Jones, 30 August, 1995; BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, 31 August, 1995.

  15. BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, 19 October, 1995.

  16. The Independent, 10 February, 1998.

  17. Dow Jones, 10 February, 1998; Seattle Times, 10 February, 1998.

  18. BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union, 22 October, 1998.

  19. RFE/RL Newsline, 22 November, 2003.

  20. Civil Georgia, 5 February, 2004.

  21. Cf. 24 Saati [24 Hours], 10 November, 2003.

  22. Speech delivered by the President Saakashvili at the meeting with members of Supreme Council of Abkhazia, press release by President's Office, 10 October, 2004.

  23. Civil Georgia, 9 November, 2005.

  24. Agenda for Reform, Human Rights Priorities after the Georgian Revolution, Human Rights Watch (2004, http://www.hrw.org/english/docs/2004/02/24/georgi7650.htm).

  25. President Saakashvili Address Young Patriots at the Youth Forum, press release by President's Office, 11 September, 2005; ‘Georgia Pursues Campaign against Espionage,’ Eurasianet.org, 31 March, 2006.

  26. President Saakashvili Chairs Special Cabinet Meeting, press release by President's Office, 4 October, 2007.

  27. Quoted in Civil Georgia, 7 November, 2007.

  28. Quoted in Civil Georgia, 5 November, 2007.

  29. Patarkatsishvili was once a close business associate of Boris Berezovsky and Andrei Lugovoi, presently a Russian State Duma representative wanted in the UK in relation to the murder of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko.

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  1. Institute of International Relations, Nerudova 3, Praha 1, 118 50, Czech Republic

    Ondrej Ditrych

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Ditrych, O. Georgia: a state of flux. J Int Relat Dev 13, 3–25 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2009.29

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