Shevardnadze always believed that Georgia, which lies at the intersection of three civilizations – regardless of its own civilizational choice – had to pursue a multi-vector policy in order to turn the region into a zone of cooperation of civilizations, rather than one of conflict. Shevardnadze was an outstanding politician, a representative of political realism who advocated a civilizational approach to history and politics.
Eduard Shevardnadze should be considered from two angles: as a politician of world stature and a national leader. The distinction is of course a bit of a stretch because we are looking at one and the same person with a settled system of values, yet it is a necessary distinction because international politics and world history are made by local civilizations (past empires) and not by nation states, especially if they are small states.
The starting point for assessing both spheres of Shevardnadze’s activities is the same – his time as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was then that his two goals as a politician manifested themselves: to reform the Soviet (socialist) system (the USSR) and to make Georgia a fully fledged constituent entity of the Soviet Union. He was well aware of the shortcomings of the system that had caused its stagnation, its lack of competitiveness in the world arena and, as a consequence, the aggressive and unpredictable Soviet foreign policy. He also realised that it was as part of the USSR that Georgia attained the highest form of autonomous statehood, which enabled it to develop its economy and culture.
The milestones of that period included the industrialisation of the country, economic experiments to boost agricultural production (the Abasha experiment of leasing land to the more efficient farmers), and promoting the Georgian language, science and culture. A tell-tale episode of the epoch saw Shevardnadze disrupt an attempt to strip Georgian (and the languages of other republics) of its status as an official language in the new version of Article 75 of the 1979 Soviet Constitution. On April 14, 1978, thousands of students took to the streets of Tbilisi to defend their language. Shevardnadze himself joined them, presenting an appeal from the Georgian Supreme Soviet to the Constitutional Commission. Defying Moscow’s threats of a crackdown, he was able to persuade the Kremlin to preserve the official status of the national language. This was Shevardnadze’s vision of the USSR as a union of states. We can thus say that even during Soviet times, he was already laying down the foundations of the future state structure of both the USSR and Georgia.
It is an issue of principle. Political realism is not about lofty slogans about the brotherhood of nations; it is about protecting the national interests of states. Every state, especially a small one, seeks strong partners to ensure security and development. The empires of the past fit into that scheme: the central state of the empire ensured the security of its constituent autonomous parts, while the autonomies paid for security by ceding some of their sovereignty and (human, financial and natural) resources. For most of its history, Georgia was an autonomy (with the exception of a spell in the 13th century when, according to Gumilyov, it was itself a Great Power, and another in the 19th century when it lost its statehood as part of Tsarist Russia). So, for Georgia, the Sun rose sometimes in the East, that is, in Iran; sometimes in the South, in the Arab Caliphate; sometimes in the West (Rome, Byzantium, Turkey) and sometimes in the North (the USSR).
It was not Shevardnadze’s aim to bring about a collapse of the USSR and to gain token independence for Georgia. On the contrary, he wanted to see the USSR as a union of equal democratic states, with Georgia being one such state. After the First World War, Georgia did not seek independence. Rather it saw itself as an autonomy within a democratic Russia. Only the advent of the Bolsheviks and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk – the breakup of the Russian Empire – forced Georgia to become independent (the Empire unilaterally refused to protect it) and to seek new allies in the West. This was also the case in 1991, because Georgia did not take part in the Belavezha Accords. And again it had to look for new allies, naturally in the West – since there was no alternative for a Christian country. So, for Georgia, the best option was a USSR reformed according to the model of the European Union today. However, this time Moscow once again failed to safeguard Georgia and indeed used the Georgia-Abkhazia and Georgia-Ossetia conflicts to further its political ends, that is, to restore its influence on Georgia without any guarantees of restoring its territorial integrity.
Shevardnadze’s attempts in this case failed, the USSR failed to reform itself and simply fell apart, while Georgia was so carried away by the idea of independence that it forgot about the main condition for the survival of small states – the existence of strong allies interested in their preservation and survival. The policy of Gamsakhurdia, who set himself up in opposition both to Russia and the West, nearly led to the disintegration of the Georgian state. Shevardnadze decided to return to Georgia and took an active part in building a democratic Georgian state. True, he could not prevent a war in Abkhazia, but he did stop the war in South Ossetia. He secured international recognition for Georgia and effectively created a viable democratic Georgian state. He failed to establish relations with Russia, but, in line with his concept of balancing between international power centres, he adopted a state strategy developed by the Georgian Economic Forum dubbed a “cross-like foreign policy”, which envisaged Georgia’s Western orientation while remaining a partner of Russia. This meant a balanced multi-vector policy.
Shevardnadze always believed that Georgia, which lies at the intersection of three civilizations – regardless of its own civilizational choice – had to pursue a multi-vector policy in order to turn the region into a zone of cooperation of civilizations, rather than one of conflict. Georgia’s relations with Azerbaijan is an example of this.
It would be wrong to put the blame for the failure of Shevardnadze’s multi-vector policy on Russian intransigence. In the early years after the collapse of the USSR, the United States pursued a unipolar policy that caused resentment on the part of all the other civilizations, including Europe. It took the Russian-Georgian war to realize that the alternative to a bipolar world was a multipolar – not a unipolar – world. It was only under President Obama that the United States shed this political euphoria.
To sum up, Shevardnadze was an outstanding politician, a representative of political realism who advocated a civilizational approach to history and politics. He can be regarded as one of the founding fathers not only of the Georgian State, but also of the reunified Germany (Europe) and of Russian political reforms.
