Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party
How does the Parliament of a country one-fifth of whose territory has been occupied by Russia end up voting for a Russian-style law to attack independent civil society?
The answer has to do with the Georgian Dream party under the influence of Berzina Ivanishvili, a pro-Russian oligarch. He is fighting a battle for Kremlin influence in a country least likely to accede to it for the right reasons. Corruption, intimidation, and division is all he has left.
The public wants to join the EU, so like the man who accidentally-on-purpose breaks dishes so he’s never asked to do the washing up, the Georgian Government is practicing “strategic incompetence”: failing to meet the EU’s democracy criteria to preserve the patronage power of its pro-Kremlin elite.
The pattern is common in post-Soviet countries. Politically connected oligarchs dominate the economy and go into politics to protect their questionably acquired wealth. Alternatively, they acquire a fortune through political connections and need to stay in politics to protect it.
They obtain the support of a reservoir of voters both opposed to the old nomenklatura, but who are discomfited by what’s replaced it and remember the 1990s as chaos. The cities modernise at breakneck speed, and connect themselves to the international economy, its media, human rights organisations, and the English language.
The change and social and economic inequality that come with it alarm them further. Their best champions are ostensible anti-communists who rule with the same patronage that Soviet ideology disguised. Their most useful supporters are found in Vladimir Putin’s KGB regime.
The struggle in Georgia has echoes in Bulgaria, Slovakia, Moldova, and Montenegro — and pre-Maidan Ukraine. The Kremlin’s biggest problem is a lack of resources. Russia’s economy is tiny (even before the war it was only equivalent to Belgium and the Netherlands put together), and Moscow’s allies can’t cut the countries off Western investment if they are to avoid being turfed out for economic incompetence, so they try and cut off Western ideas instead.
Western money is transmitted through private-sector investment. Western ideas come in differently. Unlike the Russians (and unlike our efforts during the Cold War), we don’t channel much through our intelligence agencies anymore.
Instead, intellectual support for Georgian or Moldovan democracy is done through US, EU or UK-supported grants (such as through the US National Endowment for Democracy, which helps support the operations of my NGO, Unhack Democracy, in Central Europe, the German political foundations, or the UK’s own Westminster Foundation for Democracy). Government grants are supplemented by private foundations, the most famous of which is the Open Society Foundations, set up by George Soros.
So the Georgian government, inspired by Putin’s efforts some years ago, has decided to pass what they call a “foreign agent law”. They pretend it’s like the US’s Foreign Agents Registration Act, or a new law the EU is also passing, but it has two crucial differences: the US Act, originally aimed against Nazi activity in the 1930s, targets the undisclosed activities of an authoritarian state. The EU proposal takes aim at Russian and Chinese government activity.
By contrast, Georgia’s takes on all activity where money might come from abroad, whether state or private, as long as it is not intended to be profit-making. And it adds to the requirement to register the liability to be investigated and be subject to heavy disproportionate fines, levied in a justice system where corruption is rife.
It’s the second time that the Government has tried to introduce the law to muzzle the little platoons of Georgian society. It backed down in the face of international and popular pressure last time, but wants to put pressure on the opposition ahead of parliamentary elections so it can be free to change the constitution. But there’s also a more devious aim.
Georgians look to EU membership as a way to strengthen their defences against state capture. New members have to meet criteria related to the quality of their democratic institutions and the rule of law. But, though he dare not say it openly, Ivanishvili doesn’t want Georgia to join the EU. Like Aleksandr Vucic in Serbia, he can sabotage it by introducing repressive legislation that fails to meet the membership criteria.
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Author: Garvan Walshe
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