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Opinion
February 23, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 26
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 West- ern 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 of sub- sidiaries 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 suc- cess, winning a US scholarship to study law at Columbia University, accepting recruitment to serve as Georgia’s justice minister, and capitalis- ing 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 prematurely dubbed a “beacon of liberty” by President George W. Bush in a 2005 visit, and streams of Western-calibrated media interest, international delegations, and gobs of foreign direct investment. When it all came crashing down in 2012, Saakashvili 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 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.