The crisis in Georgia exemplifies the brutal geopolitics of imperialism in the 21st-century, writes Mark Brown.
Georgia, a small nation of a little over 3.7 million people which sits in the geopolitically contested region of the Caucasus, is in the grip of a deep political crisis. The election of the increasingly pro-Moscow Georgian Dream (GD) party in October 2024 has precipitated a bitter and protracted battle between the forces of the Georgian state and a mass pro-democracy movement on the streets of the capital city, Tbilisi. The pro-Western opposition United National Movement (UNM) alleges widespread fraud and a “Russian special operation” to assist GD to “steal” the election. International observers have raised concerns about the integrity of the election process.
The crisis deepened on November 28, 2024 when the GD government announced that it was suspending talks on European Union accession and refusing budgetary grants to the EU until 2028. The announcement sparked mass protests in Tbilisi in which there were clashes between the police and demonstrators. Matters deteriorated further in December of last year when the governing party ousted the sitting president Salome Zourabichvili (who is pro-EU, but independent of the UNM), replacing her with former Manchester City footballer Mikheil Kavelashvili of GD. Zourabichvili left office refusing to accept the legitimacy of Kavelashvili as president and describing GD’s growing control over the levers of the Georgian state as a “parody” of democracy.
Georgia’s large, notably youthful, pro-democracy demonstrations reignited an existing movement which had taken to the streets in 2023 to oppose the then GD-led coalition government’s Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence. The law – which is widely considered within Georgia to be a Moscow-inspired attempt at a power grab by GD – seeks to designate NGOs which are more than 20 percent funded from outside Georgia as “foreign agents”.
Fuelled by the twin fears of an assault on democracy and civil rights on the one the hand, and increasing influence of Putin’s Russia on the other, the Georgian protest movement has grown exponentially, with day-long demonstrations in Tbilisi reaching an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 at their peak.
The movement’s fear of Putin’s Russia is well-founded. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reminded Georgians of the Russian invasion of Georgia (in support of the pro-Russian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia) in 2008. The invasion was, in no small part, brought about by the reckless actions of Georgia’s pro-American and (it has subsequently been proved) corrupt then-president Mikheil Saakashvili. But it was an object lesson in the dangers facing small nations that find themselves caught between the interests of rival imperialist powers.
If a legitimate fear of Russian influence motivates the Tbilisi protests, the demonstrators’ concerns about the future of Georgian democracy are at least equally justified. The GD government is behaving in an increasingly totalitarian fashion, exerting growing control over every aspect of Georgian national life. To take one example, in April of this year, Nino Zautashvili and Vasil Ivanov-Chikovani, two journalists at the state broadcaster GPB (Georgian Public Broadcaster), were sacked for their public criticism of the government. Two of their colleagues, Tea Kakhiani, head of the monitoring department, and actor and TV host Davit Velijanashvili, resigned in protest.
Pro-Western and Pro-Russian Polarisation
In such circumstances it seems clear that people on the left internationally should support those who are defending democracy and civil rights in Georgia. However, as so often in the Caucasus, the politics of the Georgian crisis are complex and difficult to navigate. Prior to its current governmental pivot towards Moscow, post-independence Georgia was very much within the Western sphere of influence. The government in Tbilisi was allied closely with the United States, and European Union flags flew outside every government department in support of the nation’s aspiration to become an EU accession country (which finally led to it becoming an EU candidate state in 2023).
On a corner of Liberty Square in the centre of Tbilisi can be seen a grand building emblazoned in gold lettering (in both Georgian and English) with the words “Information Center on NATO and EU”. In one instance of almost surreal symbolism, a major thoroughfare in Tbilisi was renamed George W. Bush Street in 2005 (midway through the Republican’s presidential tenure, and after his disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq). A huge photographic portrait of Bush was even erected on the street.
The polarisation of elements within the Georgian state, politics and society between pro-Western and pro-Russian sympathies has played powerfully through the current crisis. The protest movement has conflated democracy with support for the West. At every pro-democracy demonstration blue-spangled flags of the EU feature prominently alongside white and red Georgian national flags.
This pro-Western sentiment should come as no surprise to leftists in the West who have, particularly since the Berlin Wall was brought down in 1989, debated with their friends in the countries of the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Some of the most difficult political arguments I have had in my life have been with liberals and leftists in countries such as Georgia, Poland and the Czech Republic. The combination of their nations’ experiences of brutal dictatorships masquerading as “socialist” states and the belligerence of the Putin regime (not only in Ukraine, but also Chechnya and Georgia) results in the understandable, although erroneous belief that democracy, civil rights and, crucially, security can only be guaranteed through political alignment with the West.
Sometimes this is expressed by way of an argument that the former Stalinist states must embrace the West as the “lesser of two evils”. Yet the current situation in Georgia throws the weakness of this position into stark relief. The election of Trump in the US and his subsequent change of foreign policy has pulled the rug from under the feet of the pro-Western political leaders in Georgia. Trump’s shift away from Ukraine and towards Russia is not, as some mainstream commentators suggest, simply a reflection of the US president’s admiration for Putin or the possibility that the Russian administration “has something on” Trump and is blackmailing him. Rather, for all that Trump is an erratic, palpably semi-fascist president, the policy shift away from Europe reflects the current Washington regime’s desire to extend Obama’s “pivot to Asia” in order to challenge the rise of China. Not only does Trump want to reallocate US military resources from Europe to the Asia-Pacific region, but he wants to at least try to draw Russia away from its alliance with China. Having previously found itself caught between the rival imperialist interests of the US and Russia, the Georgian opposition now finds itself, like the Ukrainian government, abandoned by Trump, and reliant on the ineffectual support of an increasingly divided and hapless EU.
Abandon Camps
For the left, the Georgian case should make it clear that, everywhere and always, we need political movements that are independent of rival imperialist powers. In the UK, for example, the Stop the War Coalition’s position on the Ukraine War – for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine, against NATO’s escalatory use of Ukraine as a mere proxy, and for a negotiated solution to the conflict – should be a model for the international left. The alternative, a “campist” support for this or that imperialist bloc, is disastrous. In the case of Georgia it leads to a situation in which the admirable courage and determination of the pro-democracy movement is taken up the blind alley of appeals to the EU and a now uninterested US. This leaves very little space for the development of an independent, anti-imperialist left within Georgia. For instance, it is notable that while mass movements have exploded across the world in support of the Palestinian people in the face of the Israeli genocide, there have been no serious expressions of support for Palestine from within the Georgian movement.
Nor is pro-EU, pro-NATO campism unknown on the left (and the centre-left in particular) within Scotland and the UK. For instance, my colleague Joyce McMillan, a respected columnist for The Scotsman newspaper, takes the view (despite her past opposition to the US/UK invasion of Iraq) that progressives in the nominal West should support NATO’s involvement in the Ukraine War and, indeed, advocate its expansion. On the other hand, there are some on the left in Scotland and elsewhere in the West whose opposition to Western imperialism leads them into a position of, as the saying goes, “rootin’ for Putin” in the Ukraine conflict. This form of campism is equally corrosive for socialists and progressives.
In 2022 I had the unpleasant experience, during a visit to Portugal, of witnessing a supporter of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) angrily upbraid a news reporter who had been to Ukraine to report on the devastating consequences of the Russian invasion, and who I know to be a journalist of the highest integrity. Things she saw with her own eyes were fake, the PCP supporter insisted, and she was a mere stooge of US and Western imperialism. It is little wonder that PCP posters around Lisbon and Almada were being defaced with the Z that had become the war symbol of Putin’s army.
The cases of Georgia and Ukraine provide windows onto issues that span the globe. In the Middle East, for example, the anti-imperialist left should raise the slogan “hands off Iran” in the face of Israeli and American aggression. However, a campist support for the reactionary, theocratic regime in Tehran would be entirely wrong. The left should be for the toppling of the Iranian dictatorship by the Iranian people themselves. We should be for a second Arab and Persian spring, led by the kind of democratic, revolutionary working-class forces which played such important roles in the Arab spring of 2010. Such revolutions against autocracy in the region would also generate an irresistible power in solidarity with the Palestinians and in opposition to both imperialist interventions in the region and the genocidal, apartheid Israeli state.
Mark Brown is a journalist and activist. He is a regular contributor to the Sunday National and The National, and an active supporter of the Stop the War Coalition.