Abstract
Observers tend to enthuse
about Georgia’s leadership or damn it, but such
black-and-white views do little to explain what is really
going on in the country. Examining the government’s recent
efforts to provide housing to those internally displaced by
the August 2008 conflict with Russia sheds light not only on
the housing program itself, but on contemporary Georgian
politics in general. In particular, four traits
characteristic of the ruling United National Movement’s
revolutionary governance are brought into focus: informal
decision-making, fluid roles, heroic action, and vanguard
politics.
Keywords:
Georgian IDPs,
decision-making, heroic action, democracy
Introduction: Georgia’s
Rulers: Saints or Sinners?
Beginning in late 2008,
strange new structures suddenly started mushrooming out of
the plains west of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital. Day and
night, in sunshine and under floodlights, construction
workers labored around the clock to build row after row of
identical-looking small houses at breakneck speed. Within a
few months, over a dozen new settlements had appeared in the
landscape, new homes for people displaced by the
Georgian-Russian fighting over the disputed separatist
territory of South Ossetia just months earlier. Of the over
100,000 Georgians who fled their homes during the
Russia-Georgia war of August 2008, most were able to return
before the onset of winter. Over half of the remaining
long-term displaced, around 18,000 people, have now been
moved into 15 “mushroom villages”.
The reactions of international
observers in Tbilisi to this government undertaking varied
hugely. Cynics interpreted the move as a public relations
stunt. According to this view, Mikheil Saakashvili, a
telegenic megalomaniac with sinister backers, seized power
in a 2003 coup, duped Western media into thinking he was a
democratic reformer (in early 2005, US senators Hillary
Clinton and John McCain even nominated him for the Nobel
Peace Prize together with Ukrainian President Viktor
Yushchenko),
and proceeded to make trains run on time while
redistributing the fruits of privatizations and the assets
of political enemies to his supporters. Brushing aside the
warnings of his backers in Washington, Saakashvili started a
disastrous war, lost it, and then wangled 4.5 billion
dollars in aid out of embarrassed donor nations unwilling to
let Georgia collapse and fall back into Moscow’s orbit.
According to these cynics,
building new houses for those displaced by the war fulfills
several functions for the government: improving its image at
home and abroad, ridding public buildings in the capital of the
embarrassing human fallout of its misadventure, presenting
visible results to alienated donors and a public critical of the
military defeat, bailing out well-connected construction
companies facing economic meltdown,
and generating ample opportunities for graft in the top echelons
of power.
To illustrate their point, the
critics point to Tserovani, the new settlement closest to the
capital. The government steers foreign dignitaries and Georgian
television crews alike towards this Potemkin village, with its
solidly built houses and indoor plumbing, while the residents in
other mushroom villages just down the road are left to
contemplate peeling paint and wooden outhouses.
Sympathizers of the current
government see a completely different picture. In their view,
Saakashvili’s initiative shows just how much Georgia has changed
for the better since the “Rose Revolution”
of 2003. Shevardnadze’s government had cynically kept many of
those internally displaced by Georgia’s 1990s wars in misery to
bolster its claims to the lost territories and preserve
international aid flows, while at the same time engaging in
profitable illicit trade with the self-declared republics and
embezzling the aid money destined for the displaced.
In contrast to its predecessor, the new government cared about
the nation and the people under its stewardship. In the name of
humanitarianism, Saakashvili’s government boldly abandoned the
long-standing pretense that Georgia’s displaced would be going
home soon,
stared realities in the face, and did its utmost to help the
victims of war. Not only was the government well-intentioned, it
also proved itself highly capable. While there may have been
some quality problems with the new homes, such lapses were
unavoidable when building within tight timeframes and budgets.
With around fifty construction companies reportedly involved,
some skimming may have taken place, but the results on the
ground are broadly in line with the stated cost per house.
Revolutionary Governance
Black-and-white views such as
those above do not do justice to the situation in Georgia, where
decision-making is opaque, agendas are frequently mixed, and
cabinet meetings involve the good, the bad and the ugly
convening around the same table under the leadership of a
mercurial president whose intelligence is as undisputable as his
impulsiveness, arrogance and lack of self-control.
The mushroom villages are neither the latest scam of a coherent
conspiracy bent on fooling its patrons in the West while
pursuing totalitarian control at home, nor are they the product
of a perfect democracy led by humanistic saints. Reality is far
more interesting than that.
The Georgian government sees
itself as a revolutionary government, with the vanguard National
Movement party engaged in a heroic and idealistic mission to
build a strong Georgian state which will lead the nation into a
bright future as a respected member of the European family.
Within a few years, the party line runs, the National Movement
transformed Georgia from a failed state that was the laughing
stock of the international media
into a functional state whose citizens enjoy electricity, good
roads, state pensions, and freedom from depredation by criminals
in and out of uniform.
From the moment it took power,
Saakashvili’s team showed scant respect for legal niceties.
Inheriting a hollow state with incoherent legislation, a corrupt
civil service and an untrustworthy judiciary, the new leaders
decided that radical reform could only be achieved if they
leapfrogged procedural hurdles and sidestepped legalistic
arguments in their pursuit of the greater good. With
overwhelming public support – and under the averted eyes of
sympathetic Western observers – Saakashvili’s team started off
by throwing members of the corrupt old guard into prison
on live TV, making them “donate” millions of their stolen
dollars to the treasury, and using the proceeds to raise
pensions for the elderly, many of whom had spent years going
hungry due to the avarice of those who were now being squeezed.
The frequently Western-educated reformers in Tbilisi also moved
to curtail local and regional government autonomy, arguing that
corruption could only be eliminated by sidelining incompetent
and ‘backward’
structures outside the enlightened capital.
Crucially, the National Movement
achieved its most dramatic successes by prioritizing results and
the perceived greater good over political and individual
freedoms, civil liberties and the rule of law. Today, the
domestic legitimacy of the ruling group rests not on its dubious
record on democracy and civil rights, but on its forceful
actions to restore Georgia’s national dignity, the near
elimination of petty corruption, and provision of tangible
benefits and visible improvements in infrastructure. Over five
years after the National Movement seized power, the
revolutionary mindset endures. When the ruling team’s legitimacy
and power seemed acutely under threat in September 2008,
President Saakashvili responded by promising Georgians not
gradual evolution, but a “Second Rose Revolution”.
Examining the mushroom villages
through the lens of Georgia’s revolutionary politics sheds light
not only on the housing program itself, but on contemporary
Georgian politics in general. In particular, four traits
characteristic of National Movement governance are brought into
focus: informal decision-making, fluid roles, heroic action, and
vanguard politics.
Informal Decision-Making
To this day, it remains mysterious
who took the momentous decision to reverse long-established
policy and take concrete steps towards providing “durable”
(read: permanent) housing not only to those displaced by the
August 2008 war, but also to the over 100,000 Georgians
displaced in the 1990s who still lack permanent residences. It
is equally unclear who decided to address the housing needs of
the displaced by building mushroom villages across eastern and
central Georgia before the winter. In Georgia, key decisions are
taken informally and often spontaneously by a closely knit group
of maybe half a dozen revolutionary comrades with long-standing
personal ties.
Decision-making on the mushroom villages seems to have followed
this pattern, with rumors indicating that the powerful Ministry
of Internal Affairs, which is headed by insider Vano
Merabishvili, suddenly began construction of the villages
without even informing the nominally responsible Ministry of
Refugees and Accommodation (MRA), which at that time was
formally headed by an outsider without clout in the inner
sanctum of power.
The more important a decision, the
less likely it is to leave a paper trail, and the easier it is
to amend or reverse. For example, it appears that the government
– though “the government” in itself may be a misleading term in
this context – originally planned to construct all houses to the
same design. The question of who finally decided to build houses
with differing designs will probably never be satisfactorily
answered.
Fluid Roles
The seemingly bizarre decision to
place supervision of the construction process under the remit of
the Ministry of Internal Affairs mirrored developments inside
the MRA that seemed equally puzzling to outsiders. In late
October 2008, amidst an acute and still very fluid humanitarian
crisis, the head of the MRA fell victim to a cabinet reshuffle.
The outgoing minister, Tamar Martiashvili, had been viewed as an
ineffectual political lightweight. Her replacement, Koba
Subeliani, while not a member of the tight inner circle himself,
had ranked second on the National Movement’s party list during
the last elections and brandished a reputation as a man who
could be relied on to get a job done. In fact, the reshuffle had
absolutely no effect on the ground, as Subeliani had de facto
been in charge of the displacement crisis since the war;
the elevation of the parliamentarian to the post of minister
simply formalized his long-standing role. Meanwhile,
registration of the newly displaced, theoretically under the
remit of the MRA, was being carried out by the Civil
Registration Agency, part of the Ministry of Justice. Pre-war,
the MRA had been a low profile ministry with few highly
competent staff, while the more prominent Ministry of Justice
had better human resources with which to meet the challenge.
Ministry of Internal Affairs
construction, epiphenomenal reshuffles and registration
outsourcing all illustrate a central feature of National
Movement governance: with low human capacity nationwide and a
lack of trust in outsiders’ abilities and probity, formal roles
and structures count for little in the quest for meeting high
priority goals.
The combination of informal
decision-making and fluid roles makes it nearly impossible to
get exact data on any kind of government activity in Georgia.
For example, the MRA appears to be genuinely unable to answer
the simple question as to how many houses were built in total.
(The fragmentary data that are available may or may not conflate
new houses in the mushroom villages with newly renovated
apartments in public buildings.) An aid organization spent weeks
trying to get a list of the around 6,000 people thought to live
in Tserovani before it was given some handwritten pieces of
paper, and MRA figures of displaced people do not necessarily
match those compiled by the Civil Registration Agency.
Heroic Action
Heroic action
is the third trait characteristic of National Movement
governance, and may shed some light on why Georgia’s rulers
decided to rush ahead and build accommodation for nearly 20,000
people in a matter of months, against the advice of most
international experts who argued for temporary winter shelters
followed by construction in the spring. While there were sound
arguments in favor of rapid and radical action, such as the need
to move displaced people out of kindergartens and schools in
order to let lessons continue, those in power may have decided
to attempt the impossible
simply because of the National Movement’s deep and long-standing
love affair with dramatic heroic action.
The period immediately following
the “Rose Revolution”, the golden age for the ruling team, was
also its most heroic age. Promising radical change, Saakashvili
won the January 2004 presidential elections with a resounding 96
percent of the vote. Armed with a popular mandate to do whatever
needed to be done to get Georgia back on track again, the
National Movement protagonists wildly jumped from issue to
burning issue in perpetual crisis mode with no regard to
established structures or legal constraints, adulated by
Georgians and cheered along by the West as they fired the entire
traffic police overnight one day and took out bandits in Svaneti
in a televised shootout the next.
Contrary to the predictions of
many observers, who had expected the government to settle into a
pattern of humdrum bureaucratic administration once the initial
momentum of the revolution had worn off, the pattern of heroic
radical action in pursuit of grandiose goals survived the
immediate aftermath of the revolution for several reasons.
First, based on past experience, heroic action was seen as the
key to success. The National Movement sees an inherent
contradiction between having a well-developed plan and achieving
radical change. Second, the dismantling of old institutions
without creating new ones to take their place perpetuated the
pattern of heroic action by generating a need for subsequent
quick fixes. Third, the mercurial personality of the chief
executive militated against his becoming a staid
administrator-in-chief in a grey suit.
Fourth, Georgians are widely thought to perform best at work if
the task is presented as a monumental challenge requiring urgent
and full-out action. Fifth, things in Georgia either happen
quickly or they do not happen at all. By the time a detailed
plan has been developed, the momentum has already passed and all
attention and energy has shifted onto the next heroic quest.
Sixth, Georgian culture worships the strong man of action as
much as it despises the drab bureaucrat enslaved by rules, and
prefers the grandiose to the mundane.
Elections in Georgia are not won by administrators with
elaborate party platforms. Finally, heroic action presents
greater opportunities for self-enrichment.
Heroic action is part of a
political culture that represents both the greatest strength and
the Achilles’ heel of the Georgian government. On the one hand,
thousands of houses were built in a matter of months, something
that most international experts had warned was impossible to
achieve. On the other hand, construction at breakneck speed has
had an impact on quality, necessitating retrofitting and
repairs, a mundane task that may never be completed once the
heroic momentum has passed and the issue drops off the
leadership radar.
Vanguard Politics
Interviews with displaced people
reveal that they were neither informed of nor consulted about
the government’s plans for their future. Even now, after the
immediate crisis has passed, there is a striking lack of
awareness among the displaced about what their rulers hope to do
with them. Similarly, the media has not been briefed, opposition
parties are in the dark, and the issue has hardly been touched
upon in parliament.
This is typical of the National Movement’s vanguard politics.
The leadership prides itself on having achieved the impossible
in its quest to build a modern nation state: in a matter of
years, Georgians have been provided with electricity, decent
roads, and personal security.
These very real successes have
created a sense of manifest destiny and even infallibility
amongst the ruling inner circle (only recently checked by the
humiliating defeat in the war of August 2008). The average
Georgian is seen as a beneficiary rather than as a citizen, and
the key unit of reference is less the individual than the
“sacred Georgian nation”. As a result, the National Movement
sees little if any value in providing information or requesting
input, and actively shuns making public commitments to detailed
plans today that would restrain its capacity for unfettered
heroic action tomorrow. As a result, the leadership’s style is a
blend of “the people are ignorant” and “trust us, we know best”.
Those who question the
government’s wisdom are perceived as ignorant, hostile, or both
– with some justice. While basic literacy rates in Georgia
approach 100 percent,
the gap between the frequently Western-educated ruling elite and
the bulk of the population is huge. Domestic politics revolves
around personality clashes, slanderous defamations and
conspiracy theories; fact-based argumentation is rare and does
not win votes. Furthermore, many opposition figures are
intellectually challenged, severely tainted by corruption and/or
suspected of receiving funding from abroad. Due to a lack of
broad-based human capacity, the government currently possesses
the only team capable of running a country, a priceless asset in
a winner-takes-all political culture where the term
“constructive criticism” is widely regarded as an oxymoron. Any
independent attempt at policy analysis is further stymied by
lack of access to information on leadership plans, the scarcity
of quality think-tanks, and a media comprised of politically
polarized television stations and newspapers that lack editorial
independence, professionalism and readership.
The National Movement regards
itself as a vanguard party with the democratically-mandated
historic mission of dragging a nation of ignorant and culturally
backward semi-peasants towards their European destiny.
Transparency is not required as the leaders are to be trusted
based on their past track record in providing goods and
services, consultation merely distracts
from producing the benefits for the masses on which legitimacy
is built, accountability begins and ends at the ballot box, and
criticism of the government between election dates is irrelevant
at best.
Conclusion
The four traits characteristic of
National Movement governance militate against simplistic
black-and-white views of Georgia’s ruling team. Cynics regularly
overlook that fact that while the National Movement includes
plenty of avaricious individuals, the leadership has staffed
many key administrative positions with smart and honest people
dedicated to the ideal of restoring national pride by building a
modern nation free from want. Foreign critics in particular, few
of whom have personal memories of the bad old days under
Shevardnadze, often draw unfavorable comparisons based on the
government’s vacuous rhetoric of Georgia as a European country,
forgetting what Saakashvili’s team inherited just five years
ago: a fragmented failed state hollowed out by corruption and
rife with crime, run by a loose coalition of gangsters and
kleptocrats unwilling to provide even the most basic of services
to their countrymen,with no tradition of
democracy or rule of law, drained of its best
and brightest by one of the highest outmigration rates in the
world, populated by a
disoriented people culturally torn between the twelfth century,
Stalin’s heyday and gangster rap.
While the National Movement’s
style of governance can drive diplomats to despair with its lack
of structure, aversion to forward planning, disdain for
transparency and non-existant procedural accountability, it is
important to realize that abandoning formally agreed-upon plans
in the pursuit of novel heroic quests does not always constitute
an act of bad faith, and that transactions between insiders that
take place outside the public view are not necessarily always
corrupt.
Conversely, the rose-tinted
apologists for the president and his tight inner circle tend to
overlook that Saakashvili’s Georgia is not a democracy, except
(arguably) in a strictly procedural sense. In Georgia, power has
never changed hands through the ballot; the one election in
Georgia’s history whose outcome was not crystal clear in advance
directly led to the “Rose Revolution”. The National Movement’s
popular mandate does not rest on abstract values like civil
liberties, human rights or freedom of the press, all of which
were devalued during Shevardnadze’s rule, when years of
political freedoms failed to produce a decent government, let
alone three meals a day. While the rhetoric of democracy may
have generated considerable support abroad, the National
Movement’s legitimacy at home squarely rests on a heroic
nation-building mission whose sincerity is demonstrated
by the implementation of relentlessly propagandized high-profile
heroic projects and the delivery of tangible benefits to
ordinary Georgians.
Associated Press,
“U.S. senators nominate Saakashvili, Yushchenko for
Nobel prize,” January 26, 2005,
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-104744926.html
(accessed March 20, 2009). For an interesting
perspective on this, see Ryan Powers, “Did Scheunemann
Engineer McCain’s 2005 Nobel Prize Nomination of
Georgian President for Financial Gain?,” 2008,
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/13/georgia-mccain-nobel/
(accessed March 20, 2009).
United Nations and
World Bank, “Georgia Joint Needs Assessment” (Tbilisi:
World Bank, 2008), completed on October 9, 2008, the
full uncensored version remains secret at the request of
the Georgian government.
For more background on the “Rose Revolution”, see
David Anable,
"The Role of Georgia's Media – and Western Aid – in the
Rose Revolution" (working paper, Joan Shorenstein Center,
Harvard University, Boston, 2005). Also of interest:
Zurab Karumidze and
James Wertsch (eds), ‘Enough!’ The Rose Revolution in
the Republic of Georgia 2003 (New York: Nova, 2005);
and
Jonathan Wheatley, Georgia from National Awakening to
Rose Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).
For a particularly compelling analysis of Shevardnadze’s
rule, see
Barbara Christophe "Understanding Politics in Georgia,"
Demstar Research Report no. 22, (2004),
www.demstar.dk (accessed October 7, 2008).
For example, see Thomas Goltz, Georgia Diary
(London: M.E. Sharpe, 2006).
Gerald Mars and
Yochanan Altman, “The Cultural Bases of Georgia’s Second
Economy,” Soviet Studies, vol. 35:4 (1983):
546-560. More generally, see Samuel Huntington,
Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1968).
The concept of
heroic action as used here implies a primacy of ends
over means in the pursuit of grandiose schemes. It is
adopted from Ken Jowitt, who persuasively argues that
Soviet-era grand projects like the space programme were
partly driven by a communist party whose identity and
legitimacy depended on keeping the heroic image of the
revolutionary period alive. See Ken Jowitt, New World
Disorder (Oxford: University of California Press,
1992).
In the words of an expatriate news editor who is a
long-term resident of Tbilisi, “everything must be an
exceptional triumph”. Interview with the author,
Tbilisi, March 2006.
The parallels with the international aid industry’s
attitudes towards its Georgian “beneficiaries” are
striking. See, for example,
Transparency International Georgia “Aid to Georgia:
Transparency, Accountability and the JNA” (Tbilisi: TI
Georgia, November 17, 2008),
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/JBRN-7LGKT2?OpenDocument
(accessed April 13, 2009).
UNDP, “Georgia Human Development Report 2008” (Tbilisi:
UNDP, 2008).
For a personal account of life in Tbilisi in the late
1990s, see Wendell Steavenson, Stories I Stole
(London: Grove Press, 2004).
Ronald Suny, The
Making of the Georgian Nation (London: Taurus,
1989).
For a fascinating discussion of building popular
legitimacy through visible outputs, see Sian Lazar,
“Citizens Despite the State: Everyday Corruption and
Local Politics in El Alto, Bolivia” in Corruption:
Anthropological Perspectives, eds. Cris Shore and
Dieter Haller (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 212-228.