The EU's Future Hinges on Georgia
How the bloc responds to Georgia's protest crackdown will set the tone for how it handles other errant EU hopefuls in Eastern Europe
Georgia’s leaders seem to want to have their cake and eat it too.
Since late November, after stating that it would be putting Georgia’s European Union accession talks on hold until at least 2028, the country’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, has been seemingly doing every in its power to stop these talks from ever resuming. It has cracked down with brutal force against protestors who took to the streets following their announcement, assaulting journalists, beating opposition parliamentary leaders unconscious after raiding party headquarters, and even abusing a Georgian Olympic athlete while in police custody. A month and a half earlier, Georgian Dream declared victory in a parliamentary election marred by systemic irregularities, voter intimidation, and ballot stuffing, which led Georgia’s opposition to boycott the country’s parliament and the European Parliament to call for a do-over of the entire vote.
Georgian Dream, which has been feuding with the EU ever since the party passed its controversial Russian-inspired foreign agent law in May, seems to believe, at least outwardly, that it can convince the EU process to eventually move forward without any effort on its part to make any of the required democratic and rule of law reforms — dismissing them as “blackmail” instead. Indeed, this was its reasoning for suspending the membership talks in the first place, thinking it will eventually be able to somehow bring Europe back to the table, but this time on its own terms.
Of course, many Georgians will rightly point out that Georgian Dream isn’t truly interested in European accession, and wishes to push Georgia toward subjugation by Russia instead. Yet both things can be true at the same time — for while Georgian Dream likely understands that its EU dreams are over, it believes it can maintain enough of a relationship with Europe to continue to provide Georgians with perks like visa-free travel and the benefits of its association agreement with the bloc to placate the public, while also doing nothing to change its autocratic, corrupt, and Russophilic political behavior.
The Georgian government isn’t the only prospective EU member that has chosen to take such a gamble — Serbia under President Aleksandar Vučić has been playing a similar, if less dramatic game for years, balancing the state’s overtures to Russia with cosmetic measures to keep Serbia in the EU’s good graces. Bosnia too has marched along the path to EU membership while nationalists like Putin-linked Serb leader Milorad Dodik have continued to undermine the bloc’s development efforts in the country. Other states in the Western Balkans like Albania and North Macedonia have made strides in their EU ambitions despite failing to address critical diplomatic and rule of law issues, while Armenia, in Georgia’s own neighborhood, has made moves toward becoming an EU candidate state even as it remains chained to Russia’s geopolitical sphere.
Naturally, the push and pull between Brussels and Moscow across Eastern Europe has hardly made meeting EU obligations an easy task for countries like these. In Armenia for example, the state is only just starting to move toward Europe after decades within Moscow’s embrace. But what the EU does in Georgia will set the tone for how countries caught between Russia and the West will approach their relationships with Europe going forward, and determine whether EU membership will remain enticing enough for these governments to meet the bloc’s prerequisites rather than existing in limbo on the continent’s periphery.
As of now, the EU has offered plenty of carrots for potential EU members states to stay the course on membership talks, but with few real sticks if they fail to meet accession obligations or willfully backslide on democratic governance, civil liberties, or anti-corruption reforms. Even in Bosnia, the EU has as of yet failed to sanction Dodik despite his years of active subversion of the state in Sarajevo and his efforts to undermine the EU process. In Georgia however, Georgian Dream leaders present an even more direct challenge, and have made a mockery of pluralistic democracy through increasingly alarming efforts at state capture — on Saturday, in spite of continued dramatic street protests, the party unilaterally installed a new president even though he had been the only candidate on the ballot due to opposition boycotts.
Yet in response to the crisis in Georgia, the EU has so far offered little beyond strongly worded statements. It has put forward revisions to its visa-free travel regime for Georgia and is set to “consider” diplomatic visa bans and sanctions against Georgian Dream officials tomorrow, even though there is a very real chance of a veto from Georgian Dream-ally Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán. Understandably, the bloc’s focus is on maximizing the pressure on Georgian leaders themselves while sparing regular citizens — but the only real way to convince Georgian Dream to think twice about its authoritarian turn is to make it clear that its behavior will lead to a total severance from the EU, rather than a piecemeal revocation of select privileges.
The EU’s future depends on it, if it wants to continue to convince its eastern neighbors to join. But this is not just about the bloc’s capacity for enlargement — by making it clear that corrupt autocrats who refuse to play by its rules will be cut off from Europe entirely, the EU can play a proactive role in nudging governments to give publics in the Western Balkans, the South Caucasus, and beyond the opportunities they so desperately desire.
Georgians are overwhelmingly in favor of joining the EU, and have been for years. For the EU to take half-measures against their government implicitly rewards its bad behavior, and works against the interests of the Georgian people. As flawed as the EU has become, it still acts as the most powerful force for the advancement of democratic norms for countries in Europe’s East, where enthusiasm for it is also higher than anywhere else on the continent. This is where the bloc’s future will take shape, so long as it makes it clear that states are either all in or all out on membership. Georgia can be Brussels’ line in the sand — or it can be the battlefield on which its vision of a free Europe from Portugal to the Caucasus dies.
Eastern Europe's thousand year history, caught between Russia and the West, will continue until the West accepts Russia as an equal.