ორსახოვანი დასავლეთი: საქართველო კოლონიური წარსულის ტყვეობაში
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Date
2021
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Abstract
Georgia is among the countries to which identity crisis posed serious problems
at the dawn of independence. Soon after declaring independence, the country fell
into the chaos of civil war, which defined economic collapse, political, social and
territorial disintegration. The situation changed in the subsequent period and, in parallel
to strengthening pro-European political aspirations, the Georgian national project
gradually acquired civil characteristics. It seemed to stand firmly on the path to
Western integration. Despite this, the ghost of the colonial past still haunts Georgian
society and poses existential challenges on the way to Western development. The
research aims at analyzing the post-Soviet experience of the country in terms of the
West’s role in the Georgian identity discourses. The seventy years of occupation in
the last century have completely removed the Georgian society from the clearly defined Western path. The Soviet legacy remains an important source of anti-Western
sentiments and stereotypes, leading to a mixed perception of the West.
In the process of deconstruction of the Soviet system, Georgians started looking
for new identity construction and place of the country within the international system.
From the time the idea of Georgia’s European origins and tight relations to the
West were broken into the Georgian public discourse. The “Europeanness” still plays
one of the key roles in Georgian identity discourse, but attitudes towards Europe are not unequivocally positive. Following the process of Euro Atlantic integration on the
political level, featured as the major massage of the Georgian national project, fear
and mistrust of Europe (and of the West in General) eventually conquered the part of
the Georgian society.
The ultimate goal of this research is to study peculiarities of the formation and
development of the Georgian national project concerning the attitudes towards the
western space. Furthermore, the research explores the factors that defined the process
of establishing counter national narratives. The research will reveal the controversial
nature of post-Soviet Georgia’s western way. For the last decades, the inconvertible
process of western orientation on the political level has been developed in the background
of multifaceted social processes. The synchronous process of idealization and
demonization of the West in the recent period distinctly confirms the complication
of the tendency. Supposedly, the processes are the result of the formation of counter-
narratives after independence. To analyze them in dynamics helps us in searching
for the response to the question of why Georgian society’s attitude to the West stands
to be controversial.
The study of identity and national discourses are a new trend in Georgian humanities
and social sciences. Many issues in this respect are still to be analyzed with
the use of recent theories and new methodological approaches there are only a few
works that review the subject of our research from the above perspective. Despite
having rich and diverse empirical material, most of it is not systematized within relevant
theoretical approaches. This reality determines the importance of the topics to
be researched.
Description
კონფერენცია ეძღვნება ჭაბუა ამირეჯიბის დაბადებიდან 100 წლის იუბილეს/ The Conference is Dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of Chabua Amirejibi
Keywords
საქართველო, იდენტობა, დამოუკიდებლობა, Georgia, identity, independence
Citation
საერთაშორისო სამეცნიერო კონფერენცია: 1921 წლის ისტორიულ-კულტურული მოვლენები: ხედვა საუკუნის შემდეგ, თეზისები, 2021, გვ. 158-161/ International Scientific Conference: HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL EVENTS OF 1921: THE VISION A CENTURY LATER, Theses, 2021, pp.: 158-161