Abstract
Georgia’s stable but stagnant Shevardnadze era came to an end in dramatic fashion on November 23, 2003. His former Justice Minister, Mikheil Saakashvili, led a populist protest to remove him and ultimately replaced him as president.2 Saakashvili’s leadership has led Georgia down a complex path of state building, territorial centralization, economic reform, anticorruption programs, and war. For the leadership of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Achara, Saakashvili’s presidency has brought a change to the stable but corrupt status quo under Shevardnadze. The relative peace of the late 1990s and early 2000s relied on a weakened Georgian state with individualized benefits and informal institutions surrounding economic enrichment and political power. Saakashvili’s arrival onto the political scene, however, implied that the sort of politics by illicit mutual gain would end.
Of all the unhappy conditions to which princes or republics can be reduced, the most unhappy is that when they are unwilling to accept peace and incapable of sustaining war.
Niccolo Machiavelli1
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Notes
Niccolo Machiavelli, Writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, trans. Christian E. Detmold (4 vols.), vol. 2 (Boston: Tames R. Osgood and Company, 1882), 289.
Charles King, “A Rose among Thorns: Georgia Makes Good,” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (2004): 13–18; Louise I. Shelley and Erik R. Scott, “Georgia’s ‘Revolution of Roses’ Can Be Transplanted,” Washington Post, November 30, 2003.
Henry Hale, “Democracy or Autocracy on the March? The Colored Revolutions as Normal Dynamics of Patronal Presidentialism,” Communist and Post-communist Studies 39, no. 3 (2006): 313.
The Georgian Ministry of Defense has announced its intention to convert its forces to an all-volunteer force, at one time declaring the deadline for 2009. At the date of writing, there had been no clear announcement of conscription in the development of Georgia’s defense policy after the 2008 South Ossetian war. For a catalog of the various policy consideration for determining conscription policy in Georgia prior to the war, see Julie A. George and Jeremy M. Teigen, “NATO Enlargement and Institution Building: Military Personnel Policy Challenges in the Post-Soviet Context,” European Security 17, no. 02–03 (2008): 339–66.
Irakli Seshiashvili, “The Military Appeals System in Georgia,” in After Shevardnadze: Georgian Security Sector Governance after the Rose Revolution, ed. Philipp Fluri and David Darchiashvili (Geneva, Switzerland: Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces, 2006): 269–89.
See for example, Andranik Migranyan, “Georgia Propelling its Disintegration,” Russia in Global Affairs 2, no. 4 (2004), 118–25, and International Crisis Group, “Georgia: Avoiding War in South Ossetia.”
Mikheil Saakashvili, “Speech Given to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,” (2005).
Gearóid Ó Tuathail, “Russia’s Kosovo: A Critical Geopolitics of the August 2008 War over South Ossetia,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 49, no. 6 (2008): 670–705.
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© 2009 Julie A. George
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George, J.A. (2009). The Tragedy of the Rose Revolution. In: The Politics of Ethnic Separatism in Russia and Georgia. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102323_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230102323_6
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