In his 1953 collection of political essays, The Captive
Mind, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz described a visit by a
Soviet journalist to Silesia in the aftermath of World War II.
Mistaken for an Englishman, the journalist “was embraced on the
street by a man crying: ‘The English have come.’” The apparatchik
wryly responded: “That’s just how it was in the Ukraine in 1919.”
According to Milosz,
This recurrence of sterile hopes amused [the
journalist] and he was flattered to be the representative of a
country ruled according to infallible predictions; for nation after
nation had indeed become part of its empire, according to schedule.
I am not sure that there wasn’t in his smile something of the
compassionate superiority that a housewife feels for a
mouse caught in her trap.
There is a Russian word for this sort of attitude:
naglost’. A blend of condescension, arrogance, and
brazenness,
naglost’ has always been associated with
political power in Russia, and lately has been a defining
characteristic of its revanchist foreign policy with respect to the
democratic states of the post-Soviet “near abroad.” The gas
shut-offs in Ukraine, the bronze soldier mayhem in Estonia, and the
combative rhetoric from the Kremlin concerning NATO Central
European missile defense initiatives were relatively irenic,
however, when compared with the unfolding crisis in the Georgian
region of South Ossetia. As the young democracy of Georgia grapples
with its gigantic adversary, with the world looking on
ineffectually, we can see Robert Kagan’s notion of an “end of
dreams” and a “return of history” in action in the volatile region
of the Caucasus.
When Georgia definitively slipped the Russian leash after the
Rose Revolution of 2003, bringing the pro-Western Mikheil
Saakashvili and his United National Movement party to power, an
escalation of tension with Moscow was inevitable. Georgia, since
gaining independence in 1991, had been torn asunder by ethnic
conflicts and the proliferation of de facto states within its
borders. Yet the government of Eduard Shevardnadze (Saakashvili’s
predecessor) had managed to bring about rapprochement with the
breakaway province of Javakhetia, while Saakashvili had brought the
region of Ajara to heel, one of the first victories in his quest
for territorial integrity. Two open sores remain: the Black Sea
separatist state of Abkhazia, and South Ossetia, with both
receiving vital support from the Kremlin. It is in the latter
province that an increasingly less localized war has broken out
between separatists, now fighting alongside their Russian backers,
and the sovereign state of Georgia. Meanwhile, as of August 9 the
Abkhaz authorities are opportunistically attacking Georgian forces
in disputed regions in northwest Georgia.
THE ORIGINS OF THIS CONFLICT are relatively simple to understand.
“All multi-ethnic landscapes,” the historian Neal Ascherson has
written, “are fragile. Any serious tremor may disrupt them, setting
off landslips, earthquakes and eruptions of blood.” Georgia’s move
towards independence between 1989 and 1991 produced hard-line
policies that attempted to forestall the establishment of
autonomous regions that would undermine the integrity of the
nascent state, but these moves only encouraged ethnic strife. A
vicious 1991-1992 war gave South Ossetia, with its predominantly
Ossetian population (linked culturally to North Ossetia across the
border with the Russian Federation, and politically by gratuitous
Russian grants of citizenship beyond its own borders) de facto
statehood, but also led to the region devolving into little more
than a racketeer state, run until 2003 by the infamous Tedeyev
brothers and to this day a rabbit warren of illicit smuggling.
The Saakashvili administration has consistently sought to return
the region to the Georgian fold. After all, Georgia has never
accepted complete South Ossetian autonomy, and most Georgians refer
to the region as “Shida Kartli” or “the Tskhinvali region” instead
of “South Ossetia” (and the most nationalistic Georgians even go so
far as to call it “Samacahblo” after a historical Georgian
aristocratic family that resided in the area). In recent months and
years, Georgia has had some success in this project, fostering a
South Ossetian administration, headed by Dmitry Sanakoyev (nearly
assassinated on July 3) and controlling some one-third of the
province, all the while exploiting the unstable nature of the
region to allow Georgian products to reach Russian consumers
despite repeated blockades.
These modest gains led to an inevitable reaction. Roadside bombs
targeted Georgian police patrols, and bombardment of Georgian
villages began in earnest (as opposed to the often merely symbolic
shelling of previous years). An August 7 unilateral ceasefire on
the part of Georgia only brought about intensified shelling, and
Georgia’s subsequent intervention, followed by Russia’s
counter-intervention, ensued. This rapid escalation comes as little
surprise, however, since Russia had been rattling its sabers for
some time, as evidenced by regular summits with Ossetian and Abkhaz
leadership, constant Russian intrusions on Georgian airspace, a
propaganda campaign that made absurd claims about Georgian
toleration of entirely chimerical terrorist chemical weapons
facilities in the tiny Pankisi Gorge (near the border with
Chechnya), and the seemingly anachronistic mobilization of Cossack
groups willing to fight on behalf of their Ossetian comrades.
VLADIMIR SOCOR of the Jamestown Foundation has astutely pinpointed
Russia’s four strategic goals for the mounting war: (1) “to force
Tbilisi to acknowledge a leading Russian role as ‘guarantor’ of an
eventual political settlement,” (2) “to capture Georgian-controlled
villages in South Ossetia” (thereby reducing “the Sanakoyev
administration’s territory to insignificance or even remove it from
South Ossetia altogether”), (3) “to dissuade NATO from approving a
membership action plan (MAP) for Georgia at the alliance’s December
2008 or April 2009 meetings,” and (4) “to bleed Georgia
economically through protracted military operations.”
If anything, the situation is more dire now that Georgia has
challenged the Kremlin’s traditional foreign policy
naglost’. Russia, given its vast advantages in size and
resources, could replicate a similar strategy in nearby Abkhazia
(as seems to be happening with the widening of the conflict), the
better to secure its Georgian footholds. However this situation
plays out in the coming days, it is clear that Russian actions have
put paid the hopeful assessments of analysts like Dmitri Trenin,
who had previously stated that a Russian “enlightened self-interest
approach would call for further steps towards conflict-resolution
in Abkhazia [and] South Ossetia,” since “it is in Russia’s interest
to continue to support the domestic stability and territorial
integrity of its neighbors.” Trenin, it turns out, had it precisely
backwards. “Enlightened self-interest” carries little value in an
increasingly sultanistic nation whose security is traditionally
defined by the insecurity of its neighbors.
International reaction to the outbreak of war in the Caucasus
has been entirely predictable. International organizations have
called for a ceasefire while sympathetic nations like Poland,
Ukraine, and Azerbaijan have insisted on Georgia’s right to
territorial integrity, declaring the anti-separatist campaign to be
in compliance with international law; US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice likewise called on Russia “to cease attacks on
Georgia by aircraft and missiles, respect Georgia’s territorial
integrity, and withdraw its ground combat forces from Georgian
soil.”
Yet it already may be too late for Georgia. If Tbilisi loses
control of the South Ossetian territory held by its interim
administration, Russia will indeed have imposed itself as the
guarantor of a political settlement over the region (the fight over
the now obliterated regional capital of Tskhinvali now has immense
symbolic importance). If Georgia’s allies do not offer civil and
military aid, it will perforce be bled dry by the ongoing conflict,
and it is unlikely that the U.S. and its NATO allies would wish to
in effect engage in a proxy war with Russia over an obscure
province in the Caucasus.
Moves towards Georgian accession to NATO would heretofore have
had a prophylactic effect against Russian revanchism, but a
membership action plan now seems more than unlikely, as NATO
constituent states would never offer an Article 5 collective
security guarantee to a nation recently locked in combat with the
Russian Federation (and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s
statement that “Georgia’s aspiration to join NATO…is driven by
its attempt to drag other nations and peoples into its bloody
adventures” indicates that such reluctance on NATO’s part is a
hoped-for result). Ultimately, though the developing situation on
the ground remains tenebrous at best, it may be that all Georgia
can hope for is the status quo ante bellum.
IT IS A STATE of affairs worthy of a threnody that the territorial
integrity of Georgia, a sovereign nation and a burgeoning
capitalist democracy to boot, has been so imperiled. It is equally
troubling that many observers have viewed Saakashvili’s Georgia
with such derision. Anne Applebaum, for instance, writing in the
Washington Post about the public unrest that followed the
machinations of the pro-Kremlin media mogul Badri Patarkatsishvili
back in November 2007, referred to Saakashvili as having done “more
damage to American ‘democracy promotion’ than a dozen Pervez
Musharrafs ever could have done,” this after comparing an
understandable Georgian response to civil disturbances to the
French Revolutionary Jacobins and the Soviet Red Terror. It is
unclear what Saakashvili, who brought necessary democratic reforms
to a foundering nation and whose 2005 joint Borjomi Declaration
with Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko (an attempt to create a
“Community of Democratic Choice” in the Baltic-Black-Caspian Sea
region, wherein a “sea of democracy, stability, and security” could
exist in Europe and the “Democratic and Atlantic community”) was an
innovative but overlooked attempt to bring peace to a troubled
region, did to deserve such calumny. It is likewise unjust that
Georgia, a key contributor of by all accounts heroic peacekeepers
in the reconstruction of Iraq (currently being withdrawn to defend
their own country), should be hung out to dry, but such is the
“return of history.”
There may be some consolation for Georgians in the fact that, as
Dio Chrysostom quoted Phocylides in Borysthenitica (an
ancient description of the Black Sea region) as saying, “The
law-abiding town, though small and set/On a lofty rock, outranks
mad Nineveh.” Yet as Russia, in gross contravention of the law of
nations, invades sovereign Georgia, the international community
will likely stand by idly as previous assurances of Georgian
western integration serve only to give rise to another “recurrence
of sterile hopes” like the ones CzesÅ’aw Milosz observed in
those threatened by Russian aggression so many decades ago. It
should not be so.
