A new geopolitical stalemate: revisiting the EU’s neighbourhood policy in Georgia

ABSTRACT

This article examines the EU’s neighbourhood policy, focusing on the extent of its role in instigating democracy promotion and responding to the security challenges in Georgia. It argues that although the EU has a positive impact with its normative undertaking, it remains short of answering the geopolitical expectations of the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries. In Georgia, the EU’s constraints arise from the interplay between internal (domestic) and external (strategic) factors that need to be addressed to resolve the persistent challenges related to the democracy-security nexus in the country. While internally the problems emanating from the challenges of the dominant political party system translated into the Georgian political elite’s reluctance to implement necessary reforms, the external dynamics stem from the deteriorating strategic situation in the region and the EU’s ambiguous positioning in responding to the security needs of the country.

KEYWORDS:

• Georgia
• The EU’s neighbourhood policy
• democracy-security nexus
• geopolitics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14683857.2024.2387468.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Regarding the level of progress of the GD government on the EU’s 12-point recommendations, Olivér Várhelyi, the European Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement, announced the preliminary results of the European Commission’s interim report, indicating that Georgia fully met three of the conditions, while pointing out limited progress on the de-oligarchisation and no progress on media pluralism in June 2023 (Civil Georgia 2023b).

2. According to Manners, the ENP is very diverse and there are large geographical and linguistic differences. Thus, it is a difficult empirical field of study. Also, it is neither strictly EU enlargement policy nor strictly European foreign policy, but rather ENP, best characterized as a ‘mass of contradictory impulses, led by an EU desire to improve its relations with its nearest neighbors in the aftermath of its most recent enlargement’ (Manners 2010).

3. In a more elaborate context, stressing the dual aspects of resilience, i.e., ‘the inherent strength of an entity to better resist stress’ and ‘shock and the capacity of this entity to bounce back rapidly from the impact,’ the resilience strategy implied a new strategic perspective that the EU entails in empowering the EU’s internal mechanisms as well as bringing a new impetus to its external actions (European Commission 2012, 5).

4. The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell explicitly declared ‘the awakening of geopolitical Europe’ following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, identifying it as ‘the biggest challenge to Europe’s security order since the end of World War II’ leading to ‘the belated birth of a geopolitical EU’ (Borrell 2022).

5. Gavrilov’s visit itself and his speech in Russian on the Orthodox brotherhood of Georgia and Russia had drawn serious criticisms from the opposition parties as well as from the members of parliament of the European Georgia and UNM who demanded the Russian delegation to leave the Georgian Parliament.

6. The recent assessment of the implementation of the EU-Georgia AA released by the European Parliament in 2022 also denoted the ongoing challenges stating that ‘Georgia has seriously backslided with respect to the basic democratic principles and key political commitments it made as part of the AA’ (European Parliament 2022).

7. Another indication of the rising tension between the GD and the UNM came to fore with the arrest of Nika Melia, the former chair of the UNM accused of inciting violence in street protests in June 2019, in a violent raid on UNM headquarters in 2021. Merely, the Melia case caused severe friction between the ruling party and opposition parties as well as serious criticisms from Brussels and Washington and the Western diplomatic missions in Georgia (Dartford 2021).

8. The level of political strife had been remarkably high when European Council President Charles Michel paid a visit to Tbilisi to offer a six-point plan that envisaged ambitious electoral and judicial reforms, a solution to the issue of political prisoners, the possibility of new elections, and power-sharing in the Georgian Parliament (Panchulidze and Youngs 2021).

9. In fact, ‘de-oligarchization’ can be considered a new criterion in addressing EaP countries, since the post-Soviet political systems tend to suffer from the constraints of the dominant political party systems where the ruling parties could easily dominate the political atmosphere and reverse the democratic path of any post-Soviet country.

10. The draft law raised serious concerns and criticisms from the EU and other international bodies. Josep Borrell asserted that draft law’s adoption would be inconsistent with these aspirations and with EU norms and values, highlighting that media freedom and the involvement of civil society (Civil Georgia 2023a).

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Yelda Karadağ

Yelda Karadağ holds a Ph.D. degree in the Area Studies Program at Middle East Technical University (METU) and specializes in Europeanization in Georgia. Her doctoral thesis on Georgian Europeanization has been awarded the best doctoral thesis by the Social Sciences Institute at the Middle East Technical University in 2020. She obtained an M.Sc. degree in Eurasian Studies at METU in 2011. She received her B.A. degree in International Relations at Bilkent University in 2008. Dr. Karadağ has been involved in several national and international projects and conducted various academic research activities on Europeanization, democratization, political parties, and civil society in the post-Soviet region as well as the Black Sea Regionalization Process. She recently finalized her post-doctoral research at Harriman Institute, Columbia University on critical geopolitics, political imaginary, and foreign policy of Georgia.