Georgia: A Political History Since Independence by Stephen Jones (review)

Abstract

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 932 an appearance on page 280, and there is no reflection of the intense conflict between him and Mikhail Gorbachev. There is nothing substantial on the problem of finding an adequate political vehicle for the moving aspirations for human dignity and social justice. Given the exhaustion of ideologicallyinspired programmes of social renewal, the emancipatory movement in all the Soviet republics in the end took national forms. This was accompanied by spatial representations of the future, such as ‘the return to Europe’, or the even the more vacuous ‘return to civilization’. What does ‘citizenship’ mean in this context and what should be its institutional forms? Repentance is indeed important, but Russia is not the only country that could do with a bit more humility and engage in penance for past misdeeds. The foreign policy vision presented here is naive in the extreme, and we know now how other countries did not hesitate to take advantage of the country’s weakness. There is nothing here on the ‘quality of freedom’, including its economic and social ramifications. Political freedom in the Russian case for many led to new forms of economic servitude, the loss of social rights, the erosion of what Catholic social philosophy would call ‘the dignity of labour’, and a catastrophic decline in foreign policy coherence. In other words, there are many different roads to the temple, and there are many different temples. As a study of the metaphysics of freedom this is a moving and brilliant book; but as a study of the decomposition of power and the attempts to create a new political order, it is deeply wanting. School of Politics and International Relations Richard Sakwa University of Kent Jones, Stephen. Georgia: A Political History Since Independence. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2012. xxii + 376 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Timeline. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £35.00. Reviewing Jonathan Wheatley’s Georgia from National Awakening to Rose Revolution, I noted that the work read like ‘a manual on how not to build a functioning state, following the steps by which Georgia’s three successive leaders (the late Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Eduard Shevardnadze, Mikheil Saak’ashvili) have managed in the space of twenty years to ruin what was probably the most prosperous and vibrant of the USSR’s fifteen unionrepublics ’ (SEER, 88, 2010, 4, pp. 784–86). Why, one might wonder, would even Georgians feel comfortable there, let alone resented and disaffected minorities keen to determine their own destinies? Jones’s competence in the language allows him to marshal many Georgian materials to amplify and update the depressing saga. So packed with information is the volume that many will be tempted to believe that it must provide definitive (if often painful) answers to every REVIEWS 933 imaginable question about its theme. The book, however, suffers from, frankly, ill-informed coverage of especially the crucial issue of Abkhazia. This is hardly surprising as, eschewing trustworthy sources, Jones relies heavily on, and indeed recommends, Svetlana Chervonnaja’s Conflict in the Caucasus, a vanity-publication from 1994 so reeking of pro-Georgian propaganda that it should never receive favourable mention in any work with academic pretensions; I would also advise caution in approaching (parts of) another of Jones’ recommendations — Svante Cornell’s 2001 Small Nations Great Powers. My review (Asian Affairs, 32, 2001, 2, pp. 196–99) warned that it represents ‘an absolute distortion of reality in the treatment afforded to Abkhazia’ (p. 197). It is grossly misleading to suggest that Abkhazia’s problems with Georgian overlordship were engendered either by the élites (pp. 43, 44, 218, 223 & 234), the local Russian organization Slav Home (p. 95) or ‘Russia’s post-imperialist ambitions’ (p. 13); if the reference on page 43 to ‘the bloody demonstrations in Abkhazia in 1989–90’ primarily concerns the fatal clashes on 15–16 July 1989, then, pace Chervonnaja/Jones, the pre-planning was entirely Georgian. Jones properly acknowledges the damage done by ‘chauvinistic statements from Tbilisi’ (p. 43) but fails to recognize that the problems in the secessionist areas were essentially reactions to Tbilisi’s long-standing (mis)behaviour, culminating from the late 1980s in the real dangers inherent in the rhetoric and actions of the...