ორსახოვანი დასავლეთი: საქართველო კოლონიური წარსულის ტყვეობაში

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.