Two Years of the Dream. Georgian Foreign Policy during the Transition
Two Years of the Dream. Georgian Foreign Policy during the Transition

Author(s): S. Neil MacFarlane
Subject(s): Civil Society, Governance, Post-Communist Transformation
Published by: CSS - Center for Social Sciences
Summary/Abstract: Despite some stumbles, the Georgian Dream government has managed to make considerable progress on most of its foreign policy objectives. Relations with Russia have improved significantly, reopening an important trading relationship. At the same time, relations with Western institutions have deepened. Georgia initialled an association agreement with the EU in November 2013. Partly prompted by the crisis in Ukraine, the EU accelerated the process that led to signature of the agreement in June 2014, which the European Parliament ratified in December. This happened without the kind of interference from Russia that Armenia and Ukraine experienced over the same issue. In addition, although Georgia failed to obtain the NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) that it had sought at the organization’s September 2014 summit, NATO agreed to enhance cooperation with it. At the same time, the government has delivered on popular demands for members of the previous government to be held to account for alleged corruption and abuse of power. This is a puzzlingly positive outcome, which this paper seeks to explain. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the background to Georgian Dream’s electoral success. It then analyses the major challenges Georgian Dream faced in foreign policy and its performance in dealing with them. The paper concludes by considering how sustainable this success is, given that it is due mostly to factors outside Georgia’s control. // A CHATHAM HOUSE PUBLICATION, PUBLISHED BY THE ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

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