By Carlos Sapir
The last few months have seen large ongoing protests in Georgia against a proposed “foreign agents” bill that has nevertheless been signed into law by the governing Georgian Dream party. While the law’s provisions are reactionary and can clearly be used to repress independent political organizing, the reaction of EU officials, who have denounced the law as a Russian plot to block Georgian accession into the EU, is a major distortion to the benefit of their own imperialist bloc.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia has faced what is among the most severe raft of neoliberal austerity measures of any country in history. Much like Russia and other former Soviet countries, a first wave of privatization occurred in the 1990s as former bureaucrats turned capitalists transferred control of what remained of the workers’ state economy to their own pockets. A popular revolt in 2003 attempted to remove the corrupt politicians, but their replacements pursued a path of aggressive attempts to integrate into the EU, bringing on even more neoliberal reforms. The result has been a collapse of public services, low union density, and the domination of NGOs over much of civil society and the public sphere, many of which are aligned with the EU’s political goals of allowing European corporations free reign in the Georgian market. Meanwhile, the country remains wary of Russia, which militarily intervened in Georgia to protect its own economic interests during the Georgian Civil War in the 1990s and force it into the CIS, and then invaded the country again in 2008 in retaliation for making diplomatic overtures to NATO, a war which ended with Russian forces establishing an ongoing military occupation of territories claimed by Abkhazian and Ossetian separatists (territories which continue to see economic underdevelopment and neglect following their de facto integration into the Russian economy).
The goal of European integration has been one of the main political platforms even of the ruling Georgian Dream party which sponsored the foreign agents law, a platform that they have not abandoned. In proposing the law, GD spokespeople identified that the law, which would require organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register with the government, is similar to laws in force in the U.S. and various European countries, as well as Russia and other states. Nevertheless, opposition politicians denounced it as a Russian-backed ploy to block Georgian entry into the EU, a claim repeated by EU and NATO spokespeople, without evidence beyond textual similarities between the Georgian bill and a Russian counterpart.
It is precisely based on our experience with similar laws in the U.S. that we can confidently state that this law is reactionary and that it will be wielded against the labor movement, anti-oppression movements, and environmental justice movements. Such laws allow for the government to accuse any organization they dislike of having violated the law, and subject them to surveillance and repression, regardless of whether any foreign funding is actually involved. Further, while the rhetoric of “foreign agents” could be interpreted as fighting against imperialist meddling, it equally restricts the ability of international working class organizations to collaborate across borders. Georgian activists have also noted in particular that this law presents a major threat to academics, as virtually all funding for academic research in Georgia comes from international organizations.
The Georgian government has already indicated who the law’s first victim will be: GD officials have emphasized that they intend to investigate “foreign forces” that are “sabotaging” the Namakhani HPP pipeline project in the Rioni Valley. But there are no EU-backed NGOs to be found in the Rioni Valley. Instead, the main organization opposing the pipeline are the Rioni Valley Defenders, a grassroots environmentalist group. Much as we’ve seen in the U.S. with the militarized police response and RICO charges against Stop Cop City, laws officially intended to fight organized crime or other anti-social organizations are used to attack popular movements that challenge capitalist interests.
Despite these real reasons to mobilize against the law, reporting in English-language media has focused on “the Russian law” that will “drag Georgia into Russia’s sphere of influence”. EU officials have claimed that the law is incompatible with accession into the European Union, but there is no actual legal mechanism underpinning this claim. EU-aligned groups have thus painted this as a fight for “democracy” and against Russian “authoritarianism”, playing on the massive Georgian sympathy for Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, which comes from Georgians’ own experience of having faced Russian invasion in 2008, and centuries of imperial domination before then. The Georgian public’s fear of Russian intervention is justified, but the EU’s actions have taken advantage of the passage of the reactionary foreign agents law to bolster support for European integration, and to assert its already-substantial influence in the country. U.S. government officials, meanwhile, have also stepped up the pressure, threatening sanctions against politicians backing the law. The popular struggle against this law is a legitimate battle for democratic rights of organization, against repression, and against the machinations of the local Georgian bourgeoisie personified by GD-founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, who single-handedly holds a large swathe of Georgia’s capital. But the EU and U.S. efforts to make this about EU integration set the movement down the wrong path, and the sanctions against Georgians leveled by the U.S. only reinforces the GD narrative that they need draconian security laws to stop imperialist meddling.
As noted in Giorgi Kartvelishvili’s article in LeftEast, this law and the EU/NATO response to it coincide with a new geopolitical reality for Georgia. Following the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, imperialist powers–and among them, particularly the EU and China–have scrambled to secure dominion over alternate trade and fuel routes from Asia to Europe, with Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus once again finding themselves at the crossroads of the continents. Facing this period of renewed imperialist interest, Georgian Dream has tactically tried to hedge its bets between the imperialist camps in the hopes of playing one off of the other while preserving their own interests. Thus, despite the country’s natural inclination towards solidarity with Ukraine, GD politicians have declined to criticize the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and have pushed forward with the foreign agents law despite pressure from the EU and NATO. Rather than standing in solidarity with Ukraine, the ruling party of Georgia has sought to profit privately from the international sanctions on trade with Russia, becoming a lucrative port of call processing goods bound for Russia. The party has further gone from making public statements in defense of Pride parades as part of European rapprochement in 2013 to denouncing NGOs for “LGBT Propaganda”, echoing Putin and other reactionaries. The narrative of Russian meddling against EU integration may be a fabrication, but the political crisis reflects a geopolitical reality of imperialists trying to lock in their influence over a semicolonial country due to its newfound geopolitical importance.
The protests against Georgian Dream’s legal machinations have been an important stand against cowardly, self-interested, opportunistic politicians whose only goal is to reinforce their own position over the working class, cozying up to one imperialist today and another imperialist tomorrow in an effort to maintain control. Georgian Dream is rightfully hated, and its law is genuinely reactionary. But the path to European integration will only serve to once again subjugate Georgia to a different set of capitalist masters, and will only further disempower the working class regardless of whether it happens under the aegis of Georgian Dream or another capitalist party.
Like other contemporary protest movements internationally, the movement against the foreign agents law has emerged in a decentralized fashion, without identifiable leadership and without a democratic structure that could allow the movement to debate political questions and chart a path forward. While the existence of the protests despite these weaknesses is in a sense a positive sign of the level of political outrage among Georgia’s population, without conscious political organization the movement will dissipate, or else be derailed by the well-funded representatives of imperialism looking to advance their own interests in this situation. Nevertheless, it has been noted that students have been at the forefront of the protests, and that the protests have brought together these students with a wide swathe of grassroots groups, unions, and also entirely unorganized workers. This combination of forces, united against state repression, can be a crucible for revolutionary politics, but only if people take up the task of converting these newfound connections into lasting political organizations grounded in the working class, and with a commitment to political independence from the bourgeois powers that be.
Integration into the European Union will not save democracy in Georgia: it will only further drain away its resources and suffocate its politics, as we have seen happen with Greece and other smaller Eurozone economies subject to the whims of France and Germany. But the foreign agents law will not stop European integration, it will only further undermine the formation of the independent, working-class political organizations necessary to fight against capitalism and oppression in Georgia. The fight against the Georgian Dream party, its reactionary laws and the corrupt capitalists that it represents is a struggle that must be supported. But the EU-aligned forces that have tried to claim the protests as their own must be challenged, defeated and replaced with leadership that understands that the governments of both the European Union and Russia are trying to subjugate Georgia to their imperialist interests.
