Page 60 - bne_Magazine_March_2018

60 Opinion
bne March 2018
of subsidiaries on the ground persevered – dutifully inflating Saakashvili’s purported state-building powers, while rounding down on his undemocratic excesses.
Saakashvili seemingly went from success to success, winning
a US scholarship to study law at Columbia University, accept- ing recruitment to serve as Georgia’s justice minister, and capitalising on a civil society awakening that culminated in the 2003 Rose Revolution and his presidency shortly thereafter. As president, he garnered global acclaim, his country prema- turely dubbed a “beacon of liberty” by President George W. Bush in a 2004 visit, and streams of Western-calibrated media interest, international delegations, and gobs of foreign direct investment. When it all came crashing down in 2012, Saakash- vili and his backers could hardly believe it. They still can’t.
And why would Saakashvili think otherwise, surrounded by a bleating, uncritical branding apparatus? In the media, Saakashvili rarely earned a mention without some reference to his US taxpayer-financed study at Columbia. Columbia surely has a fine LLM program, but one year at an elite Western university is hardly sufficient qualifying evidence of liberal democratic instincts. Even as his presidency in Georgia rightfully lost its sheen over time, Saakashvili’s defenders (and more than a few casual observers) attempt to artificially bifurcate his tenure between an autocratic latter
COLCHIS:
Georgian tourism is on the cusp of greatness
Michael Cecire of New America
If the buzz is to be believed, 2018 may turn out to be yet another banner year for Georgia’s blossoming tourism industry. The newest darling of the international traveller set, Georgia is winning global acclaim with speed and aplomb, earning rave reviews and confident endorsements from a climbing stack of international media and travel outlets. In the furiously competitive race for new year visibility, Georgia has already earned enthusiastic 2018 nods from the likes of the London Guardian, LonelyPlanet. com, Bloomberg, National Geographic, the Financial Times, and CNN – and it’s only January.
Count me among the believers. It’s not hard to see Georgia’s
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period and rosier (pun intended), democratic earlier days,
as though November 2007’s mass protests and the crackdown that followed occurred in some kind of vacuum.
The tale of Saakashvili is an unflattering mirror image of the West’s stuttering and oftentimes self-defeating attempts at regional engagement. More than a parable of the pitfalls of investing in any one person, it also reveals an embarrassing synthesis between lofty democracy promotion rhetoric
and politically-driven strategic engagement. That Georgia resembles an electoral democracy today is only marginally, at best, the product of Western efforts, and in some respects may exist only in spite of them.
When it comes down to it, Saakashvili is an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances and found to be wanting. This is not a criticism; after all, many of the best among us are, when it comes down to it, ordinary people. In a way, having been so long burdened with outsized global expectations, his failures ought to elicit our sympathies, and perhaps even pity – but certainly not our adulation.
Michael Cecire is an International Security Fellow at New America and a non-resident Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
allure. A country the size of South Carolina, it features sparkling palm-lined beaches, towering alpine peaks, lush primeval forests, rolling wine regions, and rich landscapes positively saturated with ancient ruins, castles, and churches. Georgia’s flavourful and unique cuisine commands a fanatical and growing fanbase; Georgian wine is winning converts and disrupting global winemaking trends; and the country’s tourism and hospitality infrastructure, certifiably dire not very long ago, is increasingly up to par.
The numbers bear this out. According to the Georgian National Tourism Agency (GNTA), 2017 saw a record
number of international visitors come to the country at nearly