Page 59 - bne_Magazine_March_2018

bne March 2018
Opinion 59
COLCHIS:
The Saakashvili we wanted, the Saakashvili we had
Michael Cecire of New America
This is not a column about Mikheil Saakashvili. If we
are honest, the onetime Georgian president, former Odesa governor, professional revolutionary, and lifelong rabble rouser is now so minor a figure in global or regional affairs that he barely merits mention at all. And yet, with every new protest, charged public proclamation, or new twist in Saakashvili’s manic career, we are challenged to assess
and scrutinise the brightness of his star in the firmament of Eurasian politics, and it is increasingly dim.
Long the darling of Western boosters, the cult of personality Saakashvili cultivated was most enthusiastically nurtured
– and is arguably still most fastidiously maintained, if diminishing – by an army of fawning politicos, analysts,
and functionaries in the US and European capitals. Even as Saakashvili’s support in his home country cratered, Western operatives and analysts continued to uncritically service and “run interference” for him and the authoritarian apparatus he created, while privately (and sometimes publicly) parroting his inevitable propaganda about the supposed Kremlin
origins of the political adversaries that bested him in elections.
Yet, this is not a column about Mikheil Saakashvili. This
is about us. Why do so many Western politicians and key segments of the international commentariat lavish such praise and attention on someone with such a chequered record? Has there ever been a regional politician of such celebrity with so tenuous, or at least asterisked, a history of success? Ultimately, the story of Saakashvili’s rise and fall is not about coloured revolutions, or Ukraine, or Georgia, or Russia, or even of Saakashvili himself – but about the stubborn triumph of a flawed brand over reality.
There is no question that Saakashvili’s tenure in Georgia brought stability and some newfound prosperity to a largely broken country, but only through an unusual confluence of favourable conditions: seemingly unlimited political capital (that he quickly squandered); generous Western political and economic aid; and broad control over the organs of state power. Even then, Saakashvili’s regime triggered mass protests less than three years following his accession to the
The tale of Saakashvili is an unflattering mirror image of the West’s stuttering and oftentimes self-defeating attempts at regional engagement.
presidency; stumbled into a disastrous war less than a year later (formalising and cementing the loss of 20% of Georgian territory); and was ejected from power in 2012, despite expansive structural advantages.
And yet, improbably, Saakashvili’s Western fame persisted. Without presidential immunity, Saakashvili was granted refuge in the United States, where he was granted a golden parachute as a “senior statesman” at Tufts University, which was as generous an opportunity as it was short-lived, with university life apparently ill-suited to Saakashvili’s high-octane
“The cult of personality Saakashvili cultivated was most enthusiastically nurtured”
ambitions. Decamped to Ukraine, his career newly buoyed by Ukraine’s EuroMaidan and subsequent Russian aggression, Saakashvili eagerly attached himself to the new Ukrainian government and eventually found work as the presidential proconsul in Odesa. That, too, did not last.
As it turns out, reform is hard without a primed political consensus, imperial powers, and major periodic injections
of Western cash. Frustrated, Saakashvili rebelled against Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko – his onetime patron and old university buddy – and predictably found himself politically adrift, accused of colluding with pro-Russia forces for his own personal ambitions, and has now been exiled to Poland.
In a way, one can hardly blame Saakashvili for carrying on
as he does. On his shoulders long sat the projected hopes
and aspirations of the Western democracy bureaucracy, who desperately sought a liberal democratic kwisatz haderach to lead Eurasia to a Western-style end of history. Whatever the paltry merits of such an approach, Saakashvili was clearly not the man for the job, but his Western backers and their array
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