Collective letter of Georgian scholars
Propaganda, Jeffrey Sachs and Our Resistance:
A View from the Georgian Academic Community
We want to share with Professor Jeffrey Sachs and the general English-speaking public an adapted translation of a collective letter that a group of Georgian scholars initially published on the platform “Georgian Education Under Threat” in the wake of an interview with Professor Sachs aired on the Georgian pro-government propaganda TV channel Imedi. With this letter, we hope to bring to Professor Sachs’ attention the polemic occurring among the Georgian public, of which he seems unaware. We kindly thank Shota Papava for the translation.
Georgia is gripped by a most acute political crisis. The ruling Georgian Dream party, led by the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, is struggling with maintaining legitimacy in the wake of rigged parliamentary elections, followed by the unconstitutional manner in which the parliament was convened. Georgian Dream then poured fuel on the fire by suspending accession talks with the European Union. In response to the protest triggered by Prime Minister Kobakhidze’s statements about suspending Georgia’s EU-accession process, the Georgian Dream deployed such vicious violence that it eroded any supposed moral superiority it enjoyed in relation to the previous repressive regime of the United National Movement. Currently, the Georgian Dream is trying to break the people’s unwavering protest by means of propaganda, rapidly-adopted undemocratic legislative packages and the use of informal violent groups deployed against the protesters. Public discontent also grows in light of the mass firing of personnel from public and private institutions based on political affiliation.
This conflict has long moved past the mere question of European integration and has become a matter of national dignity: either Georgia will be gripped by a transparent dictatorship, or we will finally coalesce into a democratic society. What does the Georgian Dream offer its members and its electorate in this crucial moment? It is pushing the narrative of geopolitical restructuring in hopes that this will shift attention away from the violence it has perpetrated against the protesters and the total erosion of democracy in the country. The Georgian Dream is trying to convince us that in the painful process of shifting from a unipolar to a multipolar world order, the Georgian oligarch and his party are the most trustworthy guides and the sole guarantors of peace.
Peace is indeed under question, urging us to cautiously maneuver on the world stage. But it is a tragedy that in this precarious moment we have a government that is leveraging the threat of war and stoking fears in order to secure its grip on power through increasingly undemocratic means. By incessantly talking about averting war through geopolitical recombination, the Georgian Dream wants to make it easier for Georgians to forget local problems. In the 12 years that it has been in power, the Georgian Dream could have administered reforms of the judicial system, created a more just socio-economic system, tempered partisan rhetoric, taken steps towards Europe. However, since the Georgian Dream has only ever been interested in maintaining power, it has leveraged everything, it has sullied everything, and now it openly blackmails the entire country with the idea that if we dare to resist its corrupt regime, Russia will steamroll over Georgia.
The Georgian Dream traces its anti-western turn to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, when supposedly the West attempted to drag Georgia into the war as well. In reality, this turn began well before February of 2022, and the only basis for it was the Georgian Dream’s active desire to wholly neglect the reforms necessary for European integration. These are reforms that would guarantee institutional stability and the strengthening of the justice system, but for the Georgian Dream they would herald the loss, or at least a severe diminishment, of the power and privileges they enjoy. In order to discredit these reforms and the entire process of Euro-integration, the Georgian Dream copy pasted a narrative from a well-tested Russian playbook. Under the guise of protecting the country from Western aggression (including the notorious “LGBT-propaganda”), the Georgian Dream is attempting to establish full scale authoritarianism, while passing off the sanctioning of Georgia’s oligarch and his inner circle as Western punishment of the entire country. In this narrative, effectively, the oligarch is the country.
This confrontation with the West is being labeled by the Georgian Dream as decolonization and the reclaiming of national sovereignty. The question is whether talk of sovereignty is legitimate for a force, which violently undermined popular sovereignty, while offering nothing to strengthen economic sovereignty over the course of 12 years. Georgia remains (more than ever) precarious in the face of Russian aggression, while its economy remains dependent on foreign capital, currency, and goods. A significant portion of the country’s natural resources are in the hands of either Russian companies and/or companies registered in offshore zones. The benefits of natural resource extraction not only do not trickle down to the Georgian population but come at the cost of the health and the natural environments of entire families and communities. For the Georgian Dream, sovereignty means strengthening its own immunity, so that after it is done suppressing critical voices within the country, it may be inured to complaints about the violation of human rights and democratic principles from without.
It is most paradoxical that while constantly invoking ideas of sovereignty and self-sufficiency, it is again the authority of the West with which the Georgian Dream attempts to appeal to its members and supporters. Meanwhile, the people that have been protesting the ushering of authoritarianism into Georgia for almost two months now, do not shy away from rejecting anyone, including some European Union higher ups, who might provide an iota of legitimacy to the Georgian Dream’s anti-democratic rule. The idea that we will abide by “whatever Trump says” is being used to silence unprecedented expressions of Georgian people’s will. Can anything be more colonial than such a position?
As part of the attempt to silence Georgian protests with western voices, the government propaganda channel TV Imedi, aired an interview with Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, where he cautioned Georgia against antagonizing Russia.
Professor Sachs is likely unaware of the context within which his interview was aired. But perhaps this is of no consequence to him given that, to put it mildly, he does not leave an impression of familiarity with the Georgian reality, or history, or concern for the agency of its people. He consistently discusses specific countries solely from the perspective of US foreign policy. In this discussion, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and other countries are all interchangeable entities.
Professor Sachs understands the protest in Georgia in line with the Ukrainian ‘Maidan’ and declares it a process orchestrated by the Biden administration. He claims that everything is essentially a byproduct of the one-upmanship between the US and Russia, with Georgia being only a pawn of the US. The Georgian people, for Professor Sachs, possess no initiatives that are their own. He is oblivious to the nature of the protest and does not seem to know that not only is it not guided by outside forces but it has no leaders at all. The resistance is spread across different social layers of Georgia as well as spatially across all of the different regions of the country. Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed the formation of multiple unities, that arise organically out of the people’s initiatives and are governed horizontally. It is precisely this decentralized form of resistance that can coalesce at a needed time and place, which is the unique force that the Georgian Dream cannot bring to heel.
Professor Sachs’ views take root in geopolitical constellations and their reorganizations. For him, there are only states and governments and it is entirely unclear what role societies could play, especially if they are in conflict with their own governments. For Sachs, the ideal world is full of states that cooperate and trade with each other, which, alas, is far from actual geopolitical realities. Furthermore, a country like Georgia possesses no leverage in establishing peace, while it remains a mere receptor of global tendencies. Scenarios of the ideal world do not help us to deal with the political situation on the ground. Professor Sachs calls upon us to rid ourselves of the illusion that America will come to Georgia’s aid and be more prudent in our relations with our northern neighbor. He cautions us in our desire to join NATO and to temper our belief that Georgia is Europe. Instead, professor Sachs offers us a 3+3 format, which entails cooperation with our regional neighbors, as well as Russia, Iran and Turkey. Currently, Georgia refuses to participate in such talks on the basis of Russia’s involvement. It is interesting to know how Professor Sachs imagines a geopolitical or geoeconomics alliance with a country, which acts as an occupying force and is internationally recognized as such?
Of course, it is seductive to dream, as professor Sachs does, of a multipolar world, where the Chinese silk road and European Union projects develop concurrently and Tbilisi is the point of their intersection. But how realistic is this dream? Especially when the Georgian dream does not even attempt to engage in a politics of balance. It openly and deliberately furthers anti-western propaganda and tries to undermine all previous efforts at cooperation with western institutions. It is clear as day that the reason behind such actions is not the economic benefits derived from geopolitical restructuring, but in fact the Georgian Dream’s goal of unburdening itself of the demands of democratization that come with cooperation with the West. Geopolitics based on the rhetoric of multipolarity is only a pretext for an authoritarian power grab, where no one will issue demands for reforming the justice system or protecting basic human rights. It also serves to silence local protest, where no one is left to object to the ‘development’ of those large-scale projects that run counter to the interests of the people of Georgia.
Georgian society, which resists the Georgian Dream regime so fiercely, chooses association with the West, because all of the other potential allies, suggested by Professor Sachs, are hotbeds of autocracy. The European Union is the space, which besides socio-economic welfare, also offers the possibility of organizing a democratic political system, even if the democracy of the European Union is not without its challenges, to say the least. Besides, to be a part of the instructional structures of the European Union by no means excludes the possibility of maintaining relations and trade relations with other states, despite the Georgian Dream’s false claims that Euro-integration presupposes cutting ties with all other political actors.
Sachs and others like him don’t seem to understand that the western orientation of Georgia is no mere geopolitics. It is not a policy or the whim of a particular government or group. For Georgia, the advancement towards Europe is a historical necessity determined most of all by the proximity of a state like Russia and dictated by Georgia’s survival instinct. Besides the fact that Europe is associated with social and economic welfare, it is the Russian threat which is the greatest determinant of the Georgian desire for European integration. By contrast, Prof. Sachs suggests that the responsibility not to antagonize Russia lies with Georgia. Of course, any state, regardless of size, must consider the interests of its neighbors, but how should the society of a small country behave when its own corrupt government ‘considers the interests’ of a vastly more powerful neighbor as a means of abolishing democracy?
It is noteworthy that democracy is the proverbial elephant in the room that Professor Sachs neglects to mention. Nor does he seem to address the importance of democracy in the economic development of a country. Meanwhile, democracy is what protesters have been defending for almost two months now, in the streets of Georgia. To these people it is clear as day that without democracy, without an end to the police state, without the restoration of law and justice, no geopolitical structuring or restructuring (even one that could guarantee economic advancement) could secure an acceptable future and durable peace for the Georgian people. The idea that fair redistribution of economic gains can be trusted to the good will of an oligarch is patently absurd. Therefore, the core of our thought and action is shaped by resistance against authoritarianism and not geopolitical sympathies or the benefits of peace professor Sachs claims we can enjoy, contingent on a non-antagonistic relationship with Russia.
We can only advise professor Sachs to take an interest in Georgia’s protest movement, which expresses the aspirations of hundreds of thousands of people. It takes a special kind of blindness to deploy sweeping generalizations and place the protesters within the framework of a multipolar world and lock them within the confines of 35-year-old historic events. Professor Sachs seems determined to criticize US imperialism but what could be more colonial and arrogant than arguing that in 1990 Baker and Gorbachev already decided the aspirations of countries like Georgia, and now this deal is to be abided like fate, by those generations that were not even born at the time?
In the worldview proffered by Jeffrey Sachs, Georgia is simply an empty vessel. At most, the only original Georgian contribution is to produce good wine and host tourists. Sachs offers us the cliché of Georgia as an ‘ancient culture,’ instead of properly evaluating the struggles of Georgians here and now. Why is ‘ancient winemaking’ the chief determinant of Georgian culture and not the culture of democratic self-organizing, which has defined us since the 19th century and which has produced everything that is best and most resilient in modern Georgian society? Professor Sachs should not be surprised that the skill of self-organization, which has sedimented in Georgia over decades, and manifests today with unprecedented energy, is at its core anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian. The protest of the Georgian people steeped in this skill of self-organization has no patience for those figures of authority that advise passivity in the face of antidemocratic forces. It is precisely our history of the struggle to become democratic, and not the exoticized history of our antiquity, as it might seem from New York, that does not allow us to relinquish political freedom, statehood, and principles of a just society, giving us energy to resist and persist.