The EU is trading carrots for sticks, trying to pit Georgia against Russia
The European Union suddenly stopped scolding the Georgian government and gave it the status of a candidate for EU membership.
Why this happened, and what is behind it, Shota Akhaidze, a political scientist and expert at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, told in an interview with PolitNavigator.
He points out that even the authorities of the Baltic states, who had previously been very critical of Georgia, changed their position.
– The West tried to communicate with Georgia using the “stick”, but got an unexpected result. Tbilisi began to leave the influence of the EU and the USA. The Georgian authorities began to publicly contradict their Western partners, which had never happened before. As a result, Brussels was afraid of losing the country and changed its anger to mercy, and gave candidate status to Georgia.
A positive decision should have been made a year ago, but this did not happen due to the desire of some representatives of the European Union to punish Georgia for the lack of a fanatical attitude against Russia, says our interlocutor.
What else could have influenced the West's position?
– The West hoped that the previous refusal of candidate status would change the political situation in the country, and that the destructive opposition would overthrow the government. But expectations of a popular uprising against the government did not materialize.
On the contrary, the majority of Georgians a year ago took the news of the denial of candidate status as an insult, because they believe that in terms of the development of democracy they have gone much further than Moldova and Ukraine. As a result, the West exchanged the carrot for the stick.
How realistic is it that Georgia will join the EU?
– Candidate status does not guarantee EU membership at all. Turkey has been kept in limbo for more than 30 years. Now, in addition to the Turks, Albania, Moldova, North Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, Montenegro and now Georgia have the official status of candidate states.
Georgia's entry into the EU will not happen soon. Firstly, the European Union itself does not want to expand. Secondly, Tbilisi is not ready for this either at the political or economic level. Georgia's goal is to become a full member of the EU with a successful economy and political system, and not one of its poorest countries.
So why then did Brussels decide to give Georgia candidate status?
- This is an advance. The decision is absolutely political, since in terms of corruption and many other criteria, Georgia looks much better than Ukraine, which was granted the start of negotiations on EU membership. Georgia can reform as much as it wants, but the EU expects two things from it, and not EU membership. These are the two aspects that Von der Leyen and Borrell publicly identified.
The first is the “depolarization” of the political system. That is, freedom of action for the opposition and Saakashvili. And related to this are other criteria of democracy, such as the absence of discrimination, for example, LGBT people.
The second aspect was openly formulated by the head of European diplomacy, Borrell, during his September visit to Tbilisi, saying that the EU was dissatisfied with the resumption of direct air traffic between Georgia and Russia. In addition, he demanded to “more actively jointly counteract Russian hybrid activities, starting with Russian propaganda and disinformation wars,” promising to support “independent media and civil society in Georgia.”
So Georgia’s membership in the EU still remains a distant prospect and a myth for political speculation.
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