Twenty years ago, on a clear spring afternoon in May, President George W. Bush appeared on an outdoor stage in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to the rapturous applause of tens of thousands. For the tiny republic, which had seceded from the Soviet Union only to suffer through many years of stagnation, stolen elections and war, it was a moment of great hope. Just 18 months earlier, dissidents clutching roses marched on Parliament and peacefully forced the tainted government out. Thanks to what had become known as the Rose Revolution, Bush declared, “Georgia is today both sovereign and free, and a beacon of liberty for this region and the world.”
Standing alongside Bush that day was a beaming Mikheil Saakashvili — “Misha” to most of his countrymen, the fervently pro-Western political leader who engineered the Rose Revolution and was now Georgia’s president after winning an astonishing 97 percent of the vote in a clean election just 16 months before Bush’s visit. In that short time, he initiated a major anti-corruption effort, accelerated the nation’s drive to join both the European Union and NATO and quintupled the number of Georgian troops serving alongside the Americans in war-shattered Iraq. As Bush continued that day, “Your courage is inspiring democratic reformers and sending a message that echoes across the world: Freedom will be the future of every nation and every people on Earth.”
That bright future has, alas, not come to fruition. In the years since then, every other nation that Bush mentioned that day as emulating Georgia’s march to freedom — Afghanistan, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and Ukraine — is now either a brutal dictatorship, a failing state or at war. What’s more, it now appears that Georgia itself is descending a similar path. Over the past two years, Georgia’s democratic structures have been steadily dismantled, and a single political party now has near-total control. As for Misha Saakashvili, he is in a Georgian prison serving more than 12 years on questionable charges of embezzlement and abuse of power.
Georgia’s tumble toward autocracy has come with a most peculiar twist. As might be expected, Georgia has long existed in the shadow of Russia, that great colossus to its immediate north. Since gaining its independence in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, Georgia has seen Russian-supported separatist forces carve out two mini-republics, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, amounting to nearly 20 percent of its national territory, through force of arms and murderous ethnic-cleansing campaigns. The wounds from those wars have never healed — tens of thousands of war refugees remain displaced today — nor have Russian protestations of innocence gained much traction.
For these and other reasons, most Georgians stoutly insist on their affinity and attachment to the West, often describing their west Asian homeland as the easternmost corner of Europe. A main thoroughfare in Tbilisi still bears the name George W. Bush Street. Polls consistently show that upward of 75 percent of Georgians wish to join the European Union, while only slightly fewer also want to join NATO. So unswerving is this Western orientation that it is enshrined in the national Constitution.
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