Not All Quiet on the Eastern Front

Wed, 15 Feb 2012

While the conflict between Georgia and Russia seems to be cooled down for the moment, the bilateral relations are unlikely to get better anytime soon

Post-war

Despite the reached agreement over the WTO membership of Russia in November, three and a half years after the war it seems there is nothing that can repair relations between Georgia and Russia. Technically, the biggest obstacle for Georgia lays in the war heritage: the Russian troops in Abkhazia and South Ossetia and the recognition of independence of these entities.

Georgia, citing the so-called “six point” agreement of August 12 brokered by French president Nicola Sarkozy, argues that Russian soldiers are unlawfully occupying those territories, which legally are part of the sovereign Georgia. On the contrary, Russia deems it necessary for the security of its citizens to keep its troops in a conflicted area. Absolute majority of both Abkhazian and South Ossetian population have Russian passports, thus can technically be considered as Russian citizens.

Soon after the war, Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states and since then, has been pursuing an active diplomacy all over the world to win the recognition from other countries as well. So far, only Venezuela, Nicaragua and a couple of Pacific Ocean islands did so, not without a Russian financial stimulus. The Russian support for the independence of these two entities significantly undermines the concept of Georgian territorial integrity, thus making it a substantial obstacle for the latter to overcome and normalise relations with its northern neighbour.

The Russian side, on the other hand, emphasizes the personal factor of Mikheil Saakashvili, portrays him as a warmonger and asserts that there can be no friendly relations with Georgia as long as he is in power.

At the same time, these factors are only present since the war and represent only concrete points of a wider framework in which Georgia and Russia related to each other much before the war and which, to a larger extent, stipulated the conflict in 2008. This framework is largely defined by the identities of each state and dates back to the dissolution of the Soviet.

Pre-war

Since gaining its independence, Georgia has been striving to become a part of the West. Especially after the change of government in 2003, the integration in the EU and NATO has become the major foreign policy goal. This did not automatically mean to cut all the ties with Russia, but to a large extent it meant to break free from the Russian political influence. This influence was well preserved in the 1990s through the incorporation of Georgia into the Commonwealth of Independent States, a Russian-led intergovernmental organization of former Soviet republics. The Russian military bases on the Georgian territory were also an important common factor. By accepting these concessions, Eduard Shevardnadze, the former president of Georgia, easily managed to combine Georgia’s European aspirations with neighbourly relations with Russia. Saakashvili, unlike his predecessor, is a clearly pro-Western leader. At first, he tried to keep the relations with Russia stable, but at the same time get rid of the Russian influence. While he accomplished the latter (today Georgia is no more a member of the CIS and there are no Russian bases on a Georgian-controlled territory), the former became his own “mission impossible”.

As for Russia, after the breakup of the mighty USSR, it can be described as a country longing for its lost status of a world superpower. This idea was well articulated by Vladimir Putin, when he once admitted that the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. To regain its influence, Russian foreign policy has worked out the concept of “near abroad” where it has “privileged interests” and which covers the territories of the former Soviet bloc. The Russian privileged interests mean that no other major power can rival with the Russian domination in these areas. The concrete example is given in the Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation, which considers the expansion of NATO closer to the Russian borders to be the number one external military threat.

The War

The comparison of Georgian pro-Western identity and the Russian concept of “privileged interests” explains the confrontation between the two states. The Georgian interest was to become a member of NATO, while Russia’s goal was not to let this happen. This is a clear instance of “issue indivisibility”: when two parties have so much antagonistic stance on a certain issue that the negotiations between them become impossible and the chances of war as the only way to solve the problem get higher. When at the NATO summit in Bucharest several months before the war Angela Merkel rejected the Georgian bid to get the Membership Action Plan (MAP) by arguing that applicants involved in any conflict cannot become members of NATO, it became obvious for Russia that the war in Georgia could have been used as a perfect leverage to prevent the NATO expansion near its southern borders. This argument was proved by Dmitry Medvedev who recently admitted that “NATO would have expanded by now to admit ex-Soviet republics if Russia had not invaded Georgia in 2008”.

Today

As long as one of the two neighbours does not reverse its foreign policy orientation, which would basically mean the change of their state identity, it seems unlikely that Georgia and Russia will overcome conflict. It is not a coincidence that when pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich came to power in Ukraine, one of the first things he did in the framework of normalization relations with Russia was to cancel Ukraine’s further pursuit towards NATO. As for Georgia, in spite of experiencing the horror of war, Tbilisi has firmly kept its NATO-focused foreign policy. Russia does not show any sign to refuse its superpower aspirations, which will become even more ambitious if Putin returns to the top of the Kremlin. Although the normalisation of relations seems unfeasible in this scenario, the least that the West can and must do is to create guarantees that the security and sovereignty of a state will not be compromised once again for the benefit of the someone’s interest in world domination.

by Gela Merabishvili