Georgia’s liberal transformation. An ongoing adventure

Photo: Adam Reichardt

By idealising the Anglo-American traditions of freedom and the free world more generally in its drive to westernise, neoliberalism became part and parcel of the social and political thought in post-communist Georgia. Cultural liberalism was also welcomed as a means of moving away from the dominant Soviet cultural narrative. Hence, neoliberalism and cultural liberalism became the tools for exorcising the phantoms of Soviet heresy.

Today, the liberal assumptions are being challenged by illiberal reactionaries. Interestingly, the illiberal resistance is itself an alternative method of exorcist ritual in post-communist Georgia. The task they set themselves is to fight neoliberalism and cultural liberalism.    

On neoliberal purification    

It is not surprising that the post-communist transition in Georgia was dominated by the spirit of Atlantic liberal capitalism. The post-communist ruling class had to deconstruct the Soviet past. Western liberalism, including its cultural and radical economic dialect, was globally dominant and promised highly appealing material gains, and had always defined itself in opposition to communism. During the transition, the struggle against Soviet phantoms became a moral mission of the post-communist elite in many post-Soviet states. In their monumental work, Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-Communist Central Europe, published by Verso in 2001, scholars of post-communism Gil Eyal, Ivan Szeleniy and Eleanor R. Townsley detail the key rituals accompanying the transition from communism to capitalism, amongst which purification features prominently. In particular, the authors argue that purification is a ritual which aims to deconstruct the socialist welfare system in order to purify the population from socialist state dependence and thus to make a new “capitalist man”.

Georgia was no exception to this trend. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the best examples of how these rituals were carried out, sometimes to the extreme. Georgia wholeheartedly embraced neoliberalism, the modus operandi of the West in the 1990s. It was thus not only a national project organised by Georgia’s national elite, but it was also ethically and technically supported by the global elite who aimed to export the practice of neoliberal democracy to peripheral areas of Europe. In his book, Europe since 1989: A History, published in English by Princeton University Press in 2016, Austrian historian Philipp Ther argued that the embrace of neoliberalism by the East European elite was strongly influenced by the Atlantic political elite and experts who believed that “development of a market economy and democracy were interconnected and interdependent”. Thus in Georgia, the ritual of purification was part of a larger wave of neoliberal experimentation in the regions opened up by the fall of communism. The western powers had earlier applied these techniques in Latin America – and now it was the turn for the post-communist economies to experience the social and economic programme developed by the Chicago School in the early 1970s.

Neoliberalism was celebrated after the Rose Revolution, under the political rule of eccentric right-wing president of Georgia Mikhail Saakashvili, which put stronger emphasis on neoliberal hegemony. Since that revolution, neoliberalism has been presented as the victorious western ideology that has triumphantly defeated communism. By demonising the communist past, on the one hand and supporting the westernisation of Georgia on the other, the neoliberal elite consolidated itself. They naturally consider the Baltic states to be ideological partners for their success in implementing the historic mission of decommunisation and the neoliberalisation of political and cultural life. They perceive a common historical experience and thus the potential to learn from each other on how to find proper political and cultural strategies for transforming society. Of course, similar to many post-Soviet states, the drive to establish a right-wing liberal hegemony has been just as much to institutionalise inequality and strengthen the dominant position of the new ruling class.

The liberal transformation of the cultural space

The liberal transformation of the cultural space, or more precisely the change of attitudes and behaviours in cultural life, became a dominant exercise in many post-Soviet states, including Georgia. This was a rather imitative and repetitive process, essentially replicating western culture. Scholars and intellectuals were prominent in positioning themselves as pro-western elites, translating Atlantic cultural discourse and moral reflections to the local, peripheral space. This allowed them to flirt with western institutions as they saw themselves as having an ethical mandate to purify Georgia of any remnants of communism. Ironically, however, many of these liberal exorcists – knights crusading against Soviet ghosts – were previously members of the privileged class during Soviet times. It was their families who enjoyed the dominant roles in the communist hierarchy.

The process of transformation is largely visible when one sees the changing attitudes of society. Although the liberal mindset is not native to Georgian culture historically, individualism, self-expression and globalised thinking are now embraced, especially amongst the younger generation. Many young people are now receiving education at pro-liberal institutions in Tbilisi and are naturally well disposed towards liberal narratives. Their outlook increasingly puts them at odds with the rural population, including the rural youth, who are more concerned with economic survival than theoretical ideals or grand social transformations. Their lives remain very traditional.

The liberal transformation is an ongoing adventure, far from completion. Like the communist ideals of the Soviet Union, liberalism in post-Soviet Georgia is expanding and is backed by the new ruling class; it is presented as conventional wisdom, a universal way of life to which there is no alternative. To be sure, both communism and liberalism emerged from intellectual circles in Western Europe, but importing such systems from abroad wholesale, without qualification, necessarily means sidelining local traditions.

Thirst for career  

Liberalism and its radical contemporary offspring, commonly referred to as neoliberalism (admittedly a contentious term, and unlike liberalism, neoliberalism is not a moniker many will use to describe their own school of thought), is an important tool for career-making in contemporary Georgia. This ideological flirtation with liberalism is reminiscent of the practice of career-making in the Soviet Union. While some people were genuinely fascinated with Bolshevism, others just pretended to be passionate merely to enhance their careers. In fact they had to as Bolshevism was the only philosophical-ideological basis of all political, cultural and administrative institutions in the Soviet Union. The same practice can be seen in post-communist Georgia today – the only difference is that Bolshevik narratives are replaced by liberal ones. Politicians, scholars, public servants and civil society technocrats are all engaged in a race to prove their loyalty to the narratives of liberal capitalism. To give an example: an effective approach to building a career in contemporary Georgian academia is to be a right-wing scholar, to glorify capitalism and demonise any theory that opposes it. The prestige attached to aligning oneself with this school of thought exerts a steady influence on how scholars are inclined to see the world. The influence has meant a specific ideology has become an endemic feature of academic life, which rather limits its power to generate genuine knowledge. 

As in cultural life, a commitment to liberalism and neoliberalism is one of the keys needed to make a good career in Georgian politics. Politicians sing the praises of the minimal state and extol the virtues of free enterprise as an alternative to the Soviet welfare state. Career politicians and public servants are hijacked by the spirit of the free market hegemony. The term neoliberalism is not something that is regularly used by career politicians, but their ideas and thoughts all spring from that source: free market enterprise, small government and deregulation. Their ideological conformity has been practically a recreation of the situation under communism, in which dissenting voices were faint, if they could be heard at all.

Illiberal reactions against liberal exorcism 

Today, liberal democracy in Europe is in crisis. An anti-elitist and populist uprising is challenging neoliberal democracy. Although Georgia is not the best example of such a crisis, cultural liberalism and neoliberal globalism are being challenged here by illiberal forces, from the left and the right. The language used by Georgian liberals is the same as the language used by European liberals, and anyone who challenges the current hegemony is labelled a fascist, an extremist or a communist. They can be more accurately thought of as illiberal groups, a term already well established in western academia.

The agenda of the conservative resistance is, of course, different to that of the left. Conservatives attack cultural liberalism because, in their eyes, it is incompatible with the social and cultural traditions of Georgia. They form a new breed of illiberal exorcists, who plan to save the nation from the post-Soviet liberal devils. The liberal counter-strategy portrays Georgia as part of European civilisation and argues that it should follow the values that are celebrated in Europe. But this is perhaps wishful thinking. Modern European civilisation is rooted in western Christianity and the ideals of the Enlightenment. There is no use pretending that Georgia has played any part in this history.

Attacks from the left focus rather on issues of socio-economic emancipation, but they are just as opposed to neoliberalism as the cultural conservatives. They campaign against the tyranny of big capital that is supported by a small circle of intellectuals. It is rooted in western leftist activism and it has also gained some prestige by imitating the admired West. Thus we might also see this as a form of neo-colonialism. Their campaign faces large obstacles in Georgia, however. For one, they are divided. Leftist intellectuals fall mostly into two camps: left-liberals and anti-liberal leftists, who share different views on politics and morality. The left-liberals have an increasingly hard time selling their views to the Georgian public, who are growing tired of the neoliberal narrative that does not seem to reflect their lives.

Will Georgia experience the same kind of illiberal uprising as the European democracies? It depends. The ruling class remains committed to western liberalism. But as discontent with the state of the economy and democracy in Georgia grows, the space into which anti-liberals could insert themselves grows increasingly wider.

Bakar Berekashvili is a lecturer in politics and critical theory at the Georgian-American University in Tbilisi.

Georgia, neo-liberalism, transformation