Anyone who is still thinking (so that does not include most of the political leadership and associated think-tanks in the West) will have been aware for some time; right now we are in the Ukraine crisis (in fact a very bloody war with mass casualties of human beings) but the same factors which caused this war are also present in Georgia. Like Ukraine, Georgia has been promised NATO membership. Like Ukraine they have been led to believe that they will be able to join the EU. I don’t think that Georgian membership of NATO is quite the red flag that Ukraine’s membership is/was for the Kremlin, but it can hardly be at all welcome; yet another member of a hostile military alliance on their borders. While many Georgians no doubt do want an EU and/or NATO future, some don’t. There is an elected government in Georgia which wants to introduce a policy at variance with the straight path to EU-NATO membership. There are popular protests against this policy. According to the UK government these are peaceful “democracy” protestors. According to the Interior Ministry of Georgia they are using violence against government institutions. The EU, UK and US are all egging on the protestors. (See also my previous post on this topic).
Stop. This is insane. Quite literally. The mess created last time is still very much ongoing. And now they are doing it again.
The Guardian reports statements by the US and the EU. This is the US National Security Adviser:
We are deeply alarmed about democratic backsliding in Georgia…. Georgian parliamentarians face a critical choice – whether to support the Georgian people’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations, or pass a Kremlin-style foreign agents law that runs counter to democratic values. We stand with the Georgian people.
(Notice how membership of the EU and NATO is now openly seen as a package – so much for European sovereignty). It is just crazy. There is an elected government in Georgia. Even the biased (pro-Western) OSCE recognised the elections which led to its coming to power as “fundamentally free and competitive”. [1] This government wants to pass a law which would, according to the Guardian, require organisations which receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to declare it. This is a law about transparency introduced by a government which was elected by popular mandate – and may win the next election as well. The response of the US and EU could not be clearer. They do not support democracy in the sense of elections, parliaments and laws. For them “democracy” simply means aligning your country with the EU-NATO alliance. They could not be clearer. The reason they are against this law is obvious – and is the reason, I imagine, that the elected government of Georgia wants to introduce it. The US and EU fund NGOs in target countries with the explicit purpose of shaping the social and political values and media landscape of the target country. [2] As Nuland clip [2] makes clear; part of the motivation for the US is to create favourable conditions for investors; one imagines she is thinking chiefly of US investment capital. The US and EU and UK are against this proposed new law in Georgia simply because it potentially interferes with their attempts, completely undemocratic, to control the future of that country in their (perceived) interests.
It gets even crazier. In the UK it seems that the UK’s Charity Commission already has a rule in place by which UK charities have to declare large donations from abroad!! [3] But I don’t think that the US described this as “democratic backsliding”. Are they going to ask the UK to leave NATO because there is a requirement for NGOs to be publicly transparent about foreign funding? This law which the EU, UK and US oppose in Georgia is not some “Kremlin” law; but a relatively mundane requirement for transparency in the NGO sector.
Update: today, 14-5-24 the White House has said: “We are deeply troubled by Georgia’s Kremlin-style legislation..If this legislation passes, this will compel us to fundamentally reassess our relationship with Georgia.” But the UK has already something very similar. Charities have to declare large foreign donations. [3] This just shows the absurdity of this. The problem is not the transparency law. The UK has one of these and it is fine. The problem is that the US is being blocked from subverting Georgian sovereignty as they did Ukrainian. While declaring they are for democracy and sovereignty they are, in reality, for the opposite. It really does seem to be the Empire of Lies.
Just like in Ukraine the US, EU and UK are trying to manipulate the destiny of Georgia, acting in open defiance of democracy. They appear to be unaware that democracy means, if anything, that ‘norms’ are decided by a process of elections and laws being passed by an elected government, as is happening in Georgia; they are not some set of rules decided in the Berlaymont, Whitehall and the State department for their own benefit!. They openly tell the parliamentarians of Georgia what to do – while complaining that Russia still believes in “zones of influence”. They claim to be doing this in the name of the “people of Georgia”. When they claimed to be supporting the “people of Ukraine” that did not end particularly well for the people of Ukraine.
Is there no one in UK media who can speak out against this madness?
Notes
- https://www.oscepa.org/en/news-a-media/press-releases/2020/fundamental-freedoms-respected-in-competitive-georgian-elections-but-allegations-of-pressure-and-blurring-of-line-between-party-and-state-reduced-confidence-international-observers-say
- US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPVs5VuI8XI [7.45] EU: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/projects-details/43251814/101101770/CREA2027 / https://fundsformedia.fundsforngos.org/awards-and-prizes/call-for-applications-eu-prize-for-journalism-in-georgia/ https://eu4georgia.eu/eu-support/ https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/prospect-details/180155PROSPECTSEN?keywords=EuropeAid%2F180155%2FDD%2FACT%2FGE
- https://www.stewardship.org.uk/blogs/considerations-when-receiving-money-abroad-or-unusual-sources https://uk.practicallaw.thomsonreuters.com/w-009-1873?transitionType=Default&contextData=(sc.Default)&firstPage=true