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Guram SVANIDZE
Ph.D. (Philos.), works at the Civil Integration Committee, Georgian Parliament (Tbilisi, Georgia).
GLOBALIZATION-WESTERNIZATION: DIFFICULTIES OF TRANSITION IN GEORGIA
Abstract
The author offers a general sociological analysis of the state of Georgian society during the transition period; he contemplates specific historical, culturological, and political prerequisites
of the new choice and assesses the degree of their maturity. He also concentrates on the hypothetical risks society might run up against in the globalization process.
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Globalization struck root in Georgian minds long ago; more than that—the country has opted for the Western vector. Today, the market economy, the institutions of democracy and civil society, and human rights are treated as the main priorities of the Georgian state.
Society accepted on trust the old mythologeme about Georgian culture sharing European values. The truth is not that straightforward. There is an awareness in the country that the unifying nature of globalization and impact of Westernization are fraught with assimilation and the loss of specific ethnic characteristics. An Academy for Saving National Values set up by members of the academic and artistic elite has been functioning in Georgia for some time; it joined with a passion the discussions of educational reform in Georgia.
Today, a rational analysis of the current developments is often replaced with heated discussions and tags that say “an abettor of masonry,” “grant hunter,” “Uncle Soros’ agent,” or “Uncle Sam’s nephew twice removed.” Strangely enough, Georgian experts tend to ignore the poly-cultural nature of Georgian society and the fact that it is the home of peoples of diverse cultures that accept globalization (which normally betrays itself as Westernization) to different degrees. Here I have undertaken to discuss this side of globalization.
Westernization’s Negative Sides
Globalization, or rather Westernization, is a dramatic process with numerous inner contradictions; they are acute enough to add dynamism and competitiveness to the entire process and, at the same time, cause numerous frustrations.
“Some Sociological Aspects of Fascist Movements” authored by classic of American sociology Talcott Parsons,1 written in 1948, revealed the inner prerequisites of fascism inherent in the Western development model. Modernization as an “intensifying” factor imposes a high pace of qualitative changes on society in all spheres of social life, while any culture can accept a limited amount of changes and their pace; if neglected this factor might cause either aggressive crises or deep depression.
Rationalization, which forces society to abandon its customs and traditions or bridle its emotions for the sake of effective social action or interaction, can be equally “depressing.” Being drawn into complicated forms of interaction, the individual learns to drop some of his requirements, postpone their satisfaction, and adjust his actions to the existing resources. Abandoning some of the elements of his sovereignty in favor of interaction causes misgivings that become even worse in the rapidly changing situation.
This is fraught with anomie: the habitual traditional landmarks are lost, the system of expectations falls apart; this might cause the disintegration of public consciousness and culture, as well as an identity crisis. Affective responses predominate, while society loses its knack for an adequate assessment of the situation: each novelty causes panic.
Talcott Parsons believes that the problem should be treated in a systemic way: fascism is a systemic crisis not limited to activities of the right political spectrum: it is a movement of highly agitated masses.2
Samuel Huntington believes that certain societies and cultures cannot change in principle; they oppose Westernization, which Huntington himself sees as an absolute boon: “Those with Western Christian heritages are making progress toward economic development and democratic politics; the prospects for economic and political development in the Orthodox countries are uncertain; the prospects in the Muslim republics are bleak.”3 In Georgia, this conclusion cannot but cause concern.
Public consciousness cannot change smoothly: changes as a rule cause trouble. It can be functional if the system of values has certain reserves for transformation. Society might be pulled back to the traditional fundamental values. The humiliating conditions of the Versailles Peace Treaty stirred up revanchist sentiments among the Germans, which later developed into claims to world domination. They were rooted in the early German myths from which fascism derived the theory of Aryan superiority.
The trouble can be limited to certain population strata, it might be caused by the malfunctioning of one of the social mechanisms, not by the entire civilizational paradigm. This may happen in the socialization framework, when the process of sociocultural inheritance is disrupted. For ideological considerations, the wave of youth protest in the West in the 1960s was interpreted in the Soviet Union as a total crisis of capitalism. This was said at a time when the West had reached a very high level of prosperity and living standards. The young insurgents went against the entire civilization, its “repressive reality, which quenched the natural instincts and cost mankind the blessings of natural existence,” etc. The West paid for the stupid rebellion of the youth with demographic gaps caused by the cult of drugs as a way to recreate the “original blessings.”4
The same fully applies to the racial unrest in the United States: the mass actions of the Black population under slogans of racial equality rapidly gave way to anarchy and chaos. The still abandoned neighborhoods of Newark are the result of the riots of the 1960s and a reminder of the recurring
1 See: T. Parsons, “Some Sociological Aspects of Fascist Movements,” in: Essay in Sociological Theory, A Free Press paperback, London, 1964, pp. 124-141.
2 See: Ibid., p. 125.
3 S.P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Touchstone Books, New York, 1998, p. 29.
4 Iu. Davydov, I. Rodnianskaia, Sotsiologia kontr-kul’tury. Kriticheskiy analiz, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1980.
racial troubles. While the Black community has finally found its niche in the system of rational and modern American society and become integrated into it, the Red Indian communities had to seek refuge on reservations.
Their example demonstrates that globalization has triggered wide-scale assimilation processes. Under the pressure of rationalization (modernization), traditional cultures are merging (willingly or unwillingly) with the dominant cultures. The academic community has gathered a huge body of data describing the colonization process, as well as the situation of the emigrant communities and indigenous groups. Today this experience is widely used in state programs for the integration, absorption, and repatriation of migrants. These groups counter assimilation with isolationism; not infrequently members of such groups seek refuge in escapism, liquor, or drugs, which leads nowhere except to degradation.
Georgia’s recent history has already revealed the cost of revolutionary changes, when the country moved from one civilizational paradigm to another.
On the Brink
Georgia remained in the context of the communist paradigm as long as the model of socialism was actively realized on its territory. The Stalinist communist system based on terror and fear was replaced with the dual standard relations of “developed socialism.” The communist slogans degenerated in people’s minds into mere formalities, while public life was nothing more than a system of rudimentary rituals.
The clan structures, although inherent in Stalinism, were never comfortable under it: both the family members of the top party figures and captains of the economy and they themselves were the system’s hostages. Rotation in the elite went on through purges and executions. This made upward social movement a very risky enterprise.
After the Khrushchev “thaw,” the top party apparatchiks and leaders of the Soviet economy developed into an elite, which willingly snatched the chance to consolidate for the sake of smooth reproduction and development, a generation later, into an impregnable fortress. Careers depended on the individual’s closeness to the party and economic nomenklatura; the state institutions were used for purely private purposes; a new social dimension appeared—the access of large and small groups to shadow sources of income and services.
It was not the communists who invented double standards: they are a sign of a total social crisis and the manifestation of social anomie.5 This presupposed a distorted unity of opposites possible only in the equivocal deal/consensus between the corrupt and legitimate public sectors. The mafia, the shadow structure of the party and economic core, became the factor of power; corruption developed into a systemic characteristic, while national interest deteriorated into the interests of all sorts of mafia—tobacco, tea, and citrus.
Nothing done to put an end to this brought positive results, mainly because repressive measures were used against individual phenomena and people rather than the system. The contradiction inherent in the double standards system did not presuppose advance—it led to stagnation that, in turn, degenerated into corruption.
In fact, double standards are rooted in the distant past: this could be observed in Georgia long ago and was functional to a certain extent. The centuries-long experience of Georgia’s relations with
5 This should be distinguished from the schizophrenia of culture, which is a conflict between two universal alternatives or inside the paradigm. Turkish society is frequently used as an example, in which the military guarantees and carries out Westernization, while the rest of society guides itself by the traditional Islamic values. Under the conditions of double standards, a collision is taking place between the universal and particular levels (see: S. Huntington, op. cit.;
S. Lurie, Istoricheskaia etnologia, Aspekt Press, Moscow, 1998).
Oriental empires was not limited to inroads and genocide. There were periods of peaceful coexistence, cultural exchange and borrowings, as well as attempts at assimilation. The Georgian ethnos protected itself against the perpetual threat of aggression and complete destruction by congregating into communities based on blood kinship.
Georgian Orthodoxy became the religion of the nation, which was fighting for its physical and spiritual survival. The Church increased the ties inside and outside the communities and blessed them; the ties between the communities were treated as just as important as those based on blood kinship. The Church looked after the people’s cultural heritage and its historical memory.
At that time central power with limited (or absent) sovereignty continued to exist through deals with empires. The state institutions were purely pragmatic: they were nothing more than adjustment tools. What they did was never axiologically valuable. Public memory and historical documents, however, have preserved the memory of great czars who gathered the lands together and who built the state (David the Builder, Queen Tamara). Their rule was remembered as the golden age of Georgia’s history. It was in this context that people learned to doubt the legitimacy of central power. The never-ending manipulations with dynastic inheritance still further undermined the authority of the throne.
The country was a conglomerate of communities with an obvious ethnic identity that created the concept of “people” (“eri” in Georgian), but there was nothing that could blend the people into a nation as a community of citizens of one state. The Church was the vehicle of the people’s (not nations’) spiritual unity. Christian Orthodoxy was changing; in the traditional sense it was the factor that made the state sacral. The undeveloped communications and the country’s mountainous terrain regionalized the country both geographically and politically.
The mythologemes about strong peoples who shared a religion with the Georgians and would come to liberate and unify the country were fed by the general craving for legitimate central power and the historical memory of a strong statehood of the distant past. At first this was the West, the first contacts with which coincided with the time of the Crusades.
Later Russia, which was building up its influence in the Caucasus, emerged as the central force of the mythologemes. Much later, as part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the Georgians, like all the other peoples of these giant empires, were involved in huge messianic projects: “Moscow, the Third Rome” and “The Soviet Union, the Trailblazer of Communist Construction.”
As soon as the projects collapsed, Georgia turned to the West once more: it pinned its hopes on Zviad Gamsakhurdia. His movement freed the country from the burden of its communist past; Western orientation was seen as a liberating factor and an alternative to the state of affairs at that time. His movement concentrated on anti-communism, the main subject of all the ideological documents it produced. The top party functionaries preferred to step aside; later this saved them from many troubles and led to a deep-cutting power crisis caused by the drama of 9 April, 1989, when a peaceful rally was ruthlessly dispersed.
Most of the Georgian population tried to overcome the anomie caused by the collapse of the communist regime by lauding, with a great degree of fanaticism, the charismatic leader and consolidating around the national idea. After a while the euphoria caused by the democratic advent to power of the first president of independent Georgia was replaced with bitter disillusionment. President Gam-sakhurdia failed to save the social organism: the upper echelons of power were in chaos, while the president tried to rule through permanent public rallies. The negative features of the time deserve special investigation.
Events unfolded rapidly and chaotically, the public inevitably trailing behind them. The West refused to cooperate with the Gamsakhurdia regime because he was “swimming against the current.” The situation quickly deteriorated. The “orphaned nation” subject predominated at the rallies and in the media, while hysterics became the main argument. Society developed into a loose entity of haphazard social contacts.
People rapidly armed themselves; the process spiraled out of control and caused numerous fatal accidents. The country was flooded with delinquent behavior, alcoholism, drug abuse, and crime. Cultural monuments, cemeteries, and museums were plundered, the scope of which became threatening. Public order was frequently violated at football matches and elsewhere.
The regime speeded up the collapse of communism in Georgia, but it offered no real alternative to it: it was busy fighting communism, while the communists had already betrayed it. President Gam-sakhurdia’s policy was, in fact, undermining the pillars of social order.
Was self-annihilation of the communist regime in Georgia absolutely unnecessary, or did society preserve a certain amount of potential to stand opposed to the degradation of the Gamsa-khurdia era? The most eloquent tags of the time (there was a multitude of them) were: “Tbilisi chauvinism,” “provincial fascism,” and “the criminal intelligentsia.” Stuck in the chaos of numerous disorderly and short-lived political contacts, they were used haphazardly with no obvious inner association. The highest point of their confrontation came together with the coup d’etat that removed Gamsakhurdia and developed into fighting in the very center of Tbilisi in December-Janu-ary 1991-1992.
The “Tbilisi chauvinists” disdainfully rejected the political styles of “provincial fascists.” The figure of the president gradually developed into an epic hero with all the adequate attributes giving rise to corresponding veneration. Ethnocultural performances that smacked of folklore and involved hired mourners and sorcerers practicing witchcraft against the enemies became one of the political tools.
The differences were rooted much deeper than the mere taste for public performances. There was a clash between the cosmopolitan megapolis and the much more narrowly oriented provinces. Having allied, albeit unwillingly, with Mkhedrioni, the intelligentsia became one of the best-organized opposition forces. Indeed, even the tiniest islands of organization in the sea of general chaos developed into fortresses. In this way, the well-organized criminal community became the country’s only real force. The fact that it was headed by Jaba Ioseliani, “the most criminal of the intellectuals,” or “the most intellectual of the criminals,” prettified, to a certain extent, the unpleasant situation in which the state found itself. Tengiz Kitovani, a political delinquent in command of the National Guard, had an important role to play too: by a quirk of fate, he moved against the president.
The 1991 coup brought no stability; however, disintegration of the state slowed down.
Ethno-Nationalism and What Came of It
In some spheres of social life double standards produce immediate and dramatic effects. In Georgia this happened in the sphere of ethnic relations. Proletarian internationalism devised as a tool for forming the Soviet people left imprints that have not yet been studied in depth. The failed attempts to create a “Soviet super-ethnos” slowed down nation-building in the Soviet “sovereign” republics. Negativism was strong enough to prevent the attributes of a civil society from being incorporated into the alternative nation-building projects. So-called ethno-nationalism dominated in all projects that gave no space to shared civil principles and national interests. This contributed to the crisis and negatively affected the course of events in Georgia. Its radical forms took the shape of ethno-egotism, the “inflated and irrational ethnic consciousness.” General civil principles were rejected for the sake of egotistical ethnocratic interests. The narrow interests and attitudes of ethnic groups contradicted the universal values shared by the entire nation.
Mutual mistrust between the titular nation and ethnic minorities was almost inevitable: the ethnic minorities took the titular nation’s desire to preserve its dominant position as an attempt to assimilate them. On the other hand, the titular nation took the ethnic minorities’ preoccupation with their rights for disloyalty. Ethno-nationalism pushes the minorities toward the re-division of territories, undermines their trust in the country they live in, and shifts their loyalty to their historical homeland.
Ethno-nationalism was looming high on the domestic scene—it drove many other issues, such as the country’s socioeconomic development, democratic, and human rights slogans, into the background. The vocabulary of the classes and class struggle was excluded from political parlance. Ethno-nationalism Georgian-style has shown us all how a crisis in a multinational state might affect the titular nation. The Mingrelian origins of President Gamsakhurdia (not entirely proven) became all-important; this stirred up the Mingrels, set them against the center (and ignited a civil war in Mingrelia), and played a pernicious role in the war in Abkhazia. There are problems with the Svans, who also insist on special treatment.
Ethno-nationalism triggered tragic events in the autonomies. It should be said in all justice that ethnic problems were not a novel phenomenon—they have existed in latent and open forms at all times. The country’s total crisis merely exacerbated them. Today it has become obvious that the separatist movement in Abkhazia has no political overtones—the demand for national self-determination and preservation of ethnic specifics presented it as a textbook case. Reality, however, is again somewhat different: it is not an ethnic conflict, but a clash of mentalities within the Abkhazian ethnos. It can be described in a paradoxical way as self-determination and self-alienation of the ethnos.6
The identity crisis goes back to Soviet times: a small nation found it increasingly harder to preserve its culture and ethnic specifics under the pressure of more universal cultures with much vaster resources. It was highly doubtful that such ethnoses could create their own states: the status of a titular nation inevitably called for alienation; elements of tribal social organization were another stumbling block. Indeed, there are institutions, the council of elders being one of them, that pass judgments about the “possible or impossible coexistence of peoples” and operate with such categories as “blood kinship,” “historical hatred,” etc., which have nothing to do with legal systems.
The conflict was fanned by a clear realization that “self-determination” was next to impossible in Georgia; this increased the Abkhazians’ desire to merge with the Russian culture. The Kabardinian intelligentsia (which represents a culture close to that of the Abkhazians) has already resolved the problem for itself by stating that their ethnic culture has exhausted itself and could no longer actively influence the development process of public consciousness.7
The negative impulse of the Abkhazians’ self-alienation was spearheaded against the Georgians. Hatred of them was the Abkhazians’ defense reaction; their historical memory weeded out everything that gave reminders of the millennium-long coexistence, of the time when the two peoples lived in one state and had a common history. The Abkhazians accuse the Georgians of the evil intention to assimilate them. In actual fact, however, a large share of the Georgian population of Abkhazia uses the Russian language and is oriented toward the Russian culture, while some of the Georgian sub-ethnoses (Mingrels and Svans) have preserved their local tongues and old customs.
The small Abkhazian ethnos was easily drawn into a bloody conflict; today its position is even more vague and more dangerous. The Abkhazian minority was hard hit by its own “victory.”
6 See: G. Svanidze, “National Minorities in Georgia: Problems of Definitions and Legal Status,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, No. 6 (42), 2006.
7 See: I. Babich, “Looking for a Contemporary Mountain Ideology in the Northern Caucasus,” The Caucasus & Globalization, Vol. 1 (1), 2006, p. 144.
Indeed, it deprived them of their inner conviction that they were the “victims of violence,” a conviction they enjoyed for the past fifteen years when they denied themselves a chance of normal development. Abetted by a third force, their separatist intentions developed from bold ethno-na-tional dreams or a myth into a program of action. This negatively affected the national minority’s public consciousness. The ethnically based structure is meaningless: it allows anyone who formally belongs to the titular nation, but knows nothing about his native tongue and culture, to climb to the very top.8
The conflict in South Ossetia, on the other hand, did not assume very complicated psychological forms. It is a political conflict caused by the desire to unite with North Ossetia; the fear of assimilation was less pronounced. In fact, in this respect, the situation in North Ossetia is much less favorable than in South Ossetia.
We all know that President Gamsakhurdia was often accused of fanning nationalist hysterics, which allegedly complicated national relations inside the country. It should be said in all justice that the first president was politically sober-minded enough to realize that the national question might disrupt the country. He reached a compromise with Abkhazia and tried to maintain relations with Aslan Abashidze, who headed Ajaria. He regularly spoke to the Armenians of Javakhetia. Zviadism, as an inconsistent policy born of the disintegrating system, was inevitably ethno-na-tionalist.
This phenomenon per se cannot bring about a civilizational crisis; extreme ethno-nationalism, like any other extreme policy for that matter, might produce radical results.
Prerequisites: Internal and External
By the period of transition from one civilizational model to another we mean the degree of maturity of the situational prerequisites.9 For this purpose we should establish whether society has completely rid itself of the burden of the past in order to assess the scale and nature of innovations and their incorporation into the culture of the titular ethnos, as well as the minorities’ attitude toward them.
It turned out that, in the 1990s, the objective conditions of radical reforms were still absent from the country. Society, which was developing according to the double standards principle, had not yet created forces able to bring about genuinely revolutionary changes. The public wrongly perceived the wealth amassed through corruption as entrepreneurship, while it was the large number of very ambitious people as manifestation of bourgeois individualism. Georgia lacked a diaspora socialized in the West. Chaos and anarchy instead of business activities and social stability engulfed the country.
An outburst of consumer demands provoked by the crisis of the communist system and the plummeted living standards at the time of the communist system’s death-throes added attractiveness to the Western consumer society and its freedoms. We can say that radical ethno-nationalism brought about a crisis of identity in certain ethnoses and exacerbated the problems between the titular nation and the sub-ethnoses.
Populist Gamsakhurdia and cautious politician Shevardnadze were afraid of radical reforms. We can say in all justice that real prerequisites for Westernization appeared together with Shevard-
8 See: G. Svanidze, “An Essay on Caucasus Mentality,” available at [www. Minelres.lv/], January 2001.
9 See: R. Garagozov, “Azerbaijani Dilemma in the Globalization Age: ‘Advance’ to Europe or ‘Retreat’ to Asia,”
The Caucasus & Globalization, Vol. 1 (1), 2006.
nadze. It was under him that the country gradually left the time of troubles behind. It was included in geostrategic projects, which meant that it would be integrated into the West. In fact the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline project coincided with Georgia’s pro-Western orientation. There were democratic elections, the outlines of civil society became much clearer, and a system of human rights protection and the free press appeared. Georgia’s advance toward democracy paved the road for its South Caucasian neighbors.
At the same time, communist inertia and the fairly passive ageing leader did not allow the conditions of Westernization to develop to the full extent. President Shevardnadze’s balancing policies were not intended for a country that wanted to move forward; double standards, which hindered its advance, were revived little by little. It was at that time that the party nomenklatura developed into the bourgeoisie. In fact, the president himself renounced his past without qualms. The party and economic nomenklatura transformed itself into a new pro-Western nomenklatura. The functionaries of the party and economic structures betrayed their inherent features when privatizing state property with money the so-called magnates earned through shady deals. The country still lacked a middle class— the backbone of the Western world. Laundering corruption money and nomenklatura capitalism set in instead of a free market.
The new Georgian leaders brought to power by the Rose Revolution could not deal with all the issues within a short period of time, however, they have already done a lot of useful things. According to the WB report that appeared in July 2006, the corruption level in Georgia, as compared with other countries with transition economies, has dropped. Is it a sign of systemic shifts? Corruption in Georgia is a systemic phenomenon, a form of relations between the state structures and interest groups. Has competition replaced bribes, nepotism, cronyism, patron and client relations? Have we reached the point at which the qualitative increase of direct contacts with the Western world might acquire new quality?
We all know that the first shoots of a market economy, democracy, and other Westernization attributes might appear in the most unlikely places at the most unlikely times. It was in Western Europe, however, that individual factors combined to form one of the alternatives of world development. Have we acquired a constellation (system) of these institutions in Georgia to be able to count the Georgian state part of Western civilization?
Individualism, its status as an institution and part of culture, has often been selected for investigation among the numerous aspects of the ethnic mental predisposition to imbibe the values of other civilizations (up to lexicographic analysis of religious and folklore texts and economic ethos of national culture).
For example, the Muslim religious community presents itself as a universal, internally coherent unifying and assimilating super-society. The individualist culture of Protestantism is found at the opposite pole. In the former case, the individual is only physically detached from the group since he belongs to a “privileged mass,” while in the latter case, the individual is free to identify himself with any group, this freedom being a condition of individual religious salvation.
The systemic theories postulate that the freer the elements of the whole and the lower the level at which the system restructures itself, the wider the leeway that enables it to maneuver and establish new ties. This is supposed to create a new quality, a new entity, which means that the system acquires necessary flexibility to adjust to modernizing and rationalizing realities. Accordingly, a system that changes at the level at which the individual is free to select his group is more effective and more dynamic. In the ethno-national context, the principle of free choice of identification with an ethnic minority and with the institutions of citizenship comes to the fore. The former should not incur any unwelcome repercussions for an individual (Art 3 of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, etc.).
The individual aspect of choice is supplemented with the right of any person “individually, as well as in community with others,” that is, collectively, to preserve and develop their identity. This
follows from “the principles enshrined in the present framework Convention” (Art 3 of the same convention).
In the ethno-national system, restructuring takes place at the ethnic group rather than individual level. Membership is associated with strictly observed roles and statuses. In this case, the individual represents not himself, but a group and his own social role. This is typical of a traditional society, in which the authority of the community is higher than individual freedoms. Membership in such groups is self-sufficient and cannot be analyzed (ethnic conceit is a manifestation of this). While a civil society can be described as the unification of individuals as persons, ethno-nationalism presupposes the sum-total of ethnic groups.
It is commonly believed in Georgia that individualism is fairly developed: even at the everyday level, during feast rituals, the subject of “I” (meoba) regularly recurs. Since the 19th century, Georgian literature has been discussing the individual/community issue (Vazha Pshavela). The authority of the community and the leader’s infallibility were doubted. The very fact that the inner conflict between the individual/community role attitudes was inherent in the ethnic culture could be described as the first step toward very strong individuality.
At the same time, the hero was marginalized, the conflict did not let him move beyond the cultural paradigm. The individual born and educated in a community had even more reasons to rebel when he stood opposed to the state and faced a choice between the law, tradition, and personal honor. In such cases, marginalization was directly associated with criminalization of the apostate hero (Simona of E. Ninoshvili).
The image of a “greedy scoundrel” typical of pre-revolutionary urban Georgian literature of the turn of the 20th century perfectly fit the system of traditional values. Those preoccupied with amassing capital were not strong enough to move away from communal relations; they were not protected by the ideology of individualism either. This subject was developed by the working people (karacho-geli); it continued the folk Epicurean motifs as a compensatory response to routine and unrewarding labor. Competition Western-style did not strike root: its moral and ethical principles contradicted traditional values.
Georgia is a patchwork of system-forming factors and interest groups of all forms and sizes, which objectively presupposes that the individual is more or less independent from the group. The situation in Georgia demonstrates that inner ethnic and sub-ethnic diversity leads to a variety of “group representatives,” but does not presuppose the presence of individuals in their personal capacity. On the one hand, diversity creates the illusion of a strong individualist principle in society; while on the other, there is a lot of talk about Georgians being part of Asian cultures because the traditional way of life is still strong among them. Some people are convinced that mere membership in situational collectives (classmates, childhood friends) guarantees access to the boons to the same extent as the individual’s personal achievements and natural abilities.
Under the communists, an outflow of the agrarian population to the cities, particularly to Tbilisi, undermined this type of relations. This means that the efforts to put an end to nepotism and cronyism in the state structures and protectionism that flourished precisely because of such relations could not but be effective. At times, these efforts went too far: it is enough to mention the so-called Mingrelian File opened by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s. Village-city migration was a more or less planned process that went on together with industrialization of the republic. At that pace cities could assimilate the migrants, while the latter had time to adjust to the universal values of the institutions of citizenship. At that time, the newcomers wanted to look like accomplished urbanites out of fear of being recognized as villagers. The balance was upturned in the 1990s when people fled their impoverished regions. Tbilisi proved unable to oppose the psychology of the newcomers—this looked like an urban culture crisis.
Under Shevardnadze, this led in particular to a very specific situation in the human rights sector. Human rights practice, an important and indispensable feature of culture of the developed traditions
of individualism, took very specific forms and existed with certain limitation in Georgia. The experience of drawing up state reports about how U.N. documents were put into practice in Georgia revealed that the public formally responded to the “Western” issues: “do we really need laws to follow the traditions of humanism?” This shows that the traditional ideas about human rights were opposed to their rational universal interpretation. Very soon, however, the issue shifted to the sphere of interests: for some time certain people “close to the funds” kept the addresses of these funds secret or feigned deafness when asked about them. Much time passed before the usefulness of the funds was realized and their addresses became common knowledge. In the meantime, grants went to “those who belonged to the right group” rather than to the deserving people who submitted excellent projects. We can say that the practice of grant distribution in Georgia was privatized together with democracy. It turned out that members of one of the sub-ethnoses occupied nearly all the human rights organizations in this country.
Studies of the prerequisites for institutionalizing individualism in Georgian Orthodoxy, folklore, and the socioeconomic milieu offer good prospects for those who undertake them. Indeed, it is difficult to overestimate the factor of individual land use, which greatly contributes to the development of social and cultural principles of individualism; it did not develop, however, into homesteads. The peasant community was useful when it came to bringing in the harvest: for this reason each peasant was socially tied to the community. We need special investigations to acquire a scientifically substantiated idea about the development of individualism in Georgian society—we should no longer rely on mythologemes.
C o n c l u s i o n
Orientation toward traditional values and interests is not a negative feature that blocks the road toward modernization and rationalization. Double standards can be overcome if the universal values of globalization-Westernization are viewed not through the prism of their opposition to tradition, but in unity with it, which presupposes their interaction and mutual enrichment. In other words, Georgian society should become integrated with the Westernization processes through unity and opposition of the universal and specific and their mutual enrichment.
I have already written that almost nothing is being done to study the reserves of the nation’s ethnic psychology. Meanwhile, the reforms have not yet begun in earnest. Those who say that “the market will put everything in order” are hardly more responsible than those who are convinced that a greater flow of investments that calls for a stricter control over its use will increase the number of people involved in the new system of relations. These people either underestimate the risk of assimilation or “by default” presuppose that the old habit of double standards will save the day.
This analysis will help us mobilize the resources offered by the nation’s culture and historical traditions, which is needed to withstand the unifying pressure of globalization-Westernization. We wonder whether society will reconcile itself with assimilation if the resources prove scarce.
