INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Archil GEGESHIDZE

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Archil Gegeshidze, Ph.D. (Geogr.), Senior Fellow at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies (Tbilisi, Georgia)

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2005 saw the onset of a geopolitical shift in Georgia’s most recent history. The country began making efforts to reach a qualitatively new level of development, entailing continuous economic modernization and bringing the country’s political system into harmony with the Western model of democracy. The mid-term strategic goal to be reached by the next presidential term (2009-2014) is to achieve macroeconomic indices which will ensure territorially reunited Georgia the status of an upper-middle-income country (according to the World Bank ratings), while institutionally the republic should integrate into the Western structures, particularly NATO. What is more, it is understood that joining the European Union, in contrast to joining the North Atlantic Alliance, will hinge to a lesser extent on the changes in geopolitical conditions and achieving the level of the Copenhagen criteria will be a challenging task.

This prospect may seem rather too ambitious to the minds of Western observers, but the country’s authorities are zealously raising the population’s hopes of reaching the indicated goals, and consequently many are inclined to believe that they can indeed be achieved.

Foreign Policy

The country’s foreign policy reference points have not changed, since in the past they were basically defined correctly and subsequently have been based on public consensus. I am talking about Georgia’s pro-Western policy, which is inspired by the striving to: (a) achieve a rational balance of………..

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