Западная поддержка Грузии привела к репрессиям против собственного населения и военному конфликту с Россией

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not reflect the views or positions of Georgia Today. In recent decades, a substantial body of scholarship has examined the post-Soviet South Caucasus through the lens of geopolitical competition between Western liberal-democratic integration and Russian revanchism. Considerable analysis has also been devoted to the formal institutional architecture of Georgia’s post-2003 Rose Revolution state: constitutional amendments, judiciary reforms, and the restructuring of the security services. Yet, almost no sustained attention has been paid to what might be called the domestic architecture of the performative state, the techniques through which a government that constructed its legitimacy on a claim to a European and liberal-democratic identity, simultaneously orchestrated a system of deliberate violence against its own population. This gap exposes a fundamental flaw in liberal internationalism: treating democratic procedures and superficialities, rubber-stamped by Western allies, as equivalent to genuine democracy. A normative offspring to liberal internationalism, liberal institutionalism relied on rules, courts, and monitoring bodies to standardize state behavior to preserve and internationalize the post-1945 U.S.-led order. It was this exact framework that Mikheil Saakashvili’s government (UNM) was meant to embody. This is the terrain that the Parliamentary Investigative Commission of Georgia has sought to map. The document draws on the European Court of Human Rights rulings, European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) reports, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch assessments, and the testimony of 139 individuals. Yet it must equally be read as a political artifact. Abuses under the UNM were not isolated, rogue acts, but a deliberate policy engineered to satisfy the metrics used in the liberal paradigm to certify democratic progress. The Commission was established at the initiative of the Georgian Dream Party. Its composition was overwhelmingly drawn from that party as the opposition declined to fill its allocated seats. This does not discount the Investigative Commission report’s evidentiary content, much of which was corroborated by independent international sources predating the current political process. It does, however, condition how the report must be approached: a document that deploys legal and historical materials for purposes that are both retrospective and prospective. A document that delegitimizes a principal opposition force while consolidating a narrative of national salvation for the current ruling party. The report is better read as a testament to liberal internationalist/ institutionalist failures, even if the authors do not frame it that way. Internationalism set the strategic goal; institutionalism supplied the evaluative infrastructure for Western-backed governments like the UNM: ratifying conventions, accepting monitoring visits, opening prosecutions. The entire enterprise treated institutionalized compliance as reliable evidence of a state’s ethos. While many of the report’s individual findings were already established by the European Court of Human Rights, its broader revelation is far more crucial. It definitively proves that abuses under the UNM were not isolated, rogue acts, but a deliberate policy engineered to satisfy the metrics used in the liberal paradigm to certify democratic progress. The gap between the state’s public face and its operational reality was intentional by a government that regarded liberal institutionalist evaluation as a genre to be authored, not a standard to be met. Torture, extrajudicial execution, media capture, and judicial subordination were the evidence; the rhetoric of European standards was the cover that practitioners of these liberal theories were structurally inclined to accept. Put simply, the performative state is the offspring of liberal ideology’s contradictions: authoritarianism wrapped in democratic language. What is most striking is that this gap was not merely tolerated by Georgia’s Western partners but actively sustained by them. Bush’s characterization of Saakashvili’s Georgia as a “beacon of liberty” in May 2005, at the very moment international monitors were documenting systematic torture and near-total impunity, is significant. The performance of democratic identity was rewarded rather than scrutinized, regardless of actual actions undertaken by the state. The institutionalist premise offered no framework for distinguishing sincere transformation from mimicry. Furthermore, by treating “the rule of law” and “democratic consolidation” as culturally neutral endpoints, democratic developmentalists discounted the post-Soviet reality: patronage networks, securitized statehood, a security establishment inherited nearly intact from the Soviet period, that determined how imported institutional forms would actually function. Regional and national particularities were not an obstacle on the path to convergence either. Liberal universalism’s refusal to reckon with particularity as such was not a peripheral failure but a constitutive one. This dynamic is plainest to see in the domains of information and judiciary. Under Eduard Shevardnadze, the media was considerably freer than under the Western-supported Saakashvili. From the earliest months of UNM rule, progressive capture followed, including an armed raid on TV Imedi under a fabricated pretext, cancellation of political programming, co-optation of ownership structures, and self-censorship of journalists. The legal system became merely a façade to maintain the appearance of accountability, ensuring lawfare while denying due process. The regime filed charges and suspended sentences arbitrarily such as “for deception of victims.” The law was selectively and opportunistically applied such as when the state attempted to use plea bargaining to conceal police violence. The central weakness of the post-Cold War liberal order: the tendency to reward the appearance of democratic governance while overlooking its internal erosion. To be sure, the document’s political character is not beyond scrutiny. The Georgian Dream government that produced it is not immune to claims that it reproduces features of the very performative state that it condemns. The Commission’s reach into opposition-aligned individuals and foreign-funded civil society suggests its ambitions extend beyond historical reckoning. It is, simultaneously, a forward-looking instrument shaping the terms of current Georgian public debate. The report’s ultimate significance then is perhaps best understood through the lens of liberal internationalism’s victims. Similar to investigations of the Pinochet regime in Chile and the Fujimori government in Peru, it documents patterns of state-sponsored abuse that flourished under governments strongly backed by the West. Although the document is unlikely to influence international law as the Chilean and Peruvian cases did, the Commission’s principal value lies in documenting abuse, assigning responsibility, and preserving the historical record against revisionism. More fundamentally, the report exposes a central weakness of the post-Cold War liberal order: the tendency to reward the appearance of democratic governance while overlooking its internal erosion. The case of the Saakashvili government thus illustrates a broader crisis in the universalist assumptions of the post-Cold War liberal order. In its most recent disastrous application, liberal internationalism has proved unable to accommodate the enduring security concerns and civilizational particularities of states such as Russia and Iran, treating them as obstacles to be transformed rather than political realities to be managed or accommodated. The Georgian case thus illustrates a broader crisis in the universalist assumptions of the post-Cold War liberal order. The then-in-vogue democratic peace thesis, and its expression in post-Cold War NATO expansion, could hardly avoid triggering major security dilemmas under the garb of democratic transition. This situation was exploited by governments skilled that violated their own citizens’ rights but were skilled at democratic theater. Far from modifying state behavior, such democratism systematically provokes the core security concerns of great powers or states with legitimate interests in their near abroad. In fact, it is fundamentally designed to undermine those states whose self-organization defies a liberal universalism that treats geopolitical and cultural identity as obstacles to convergence rather than persistent political facts. The cost has been high: measured in the tragedy of Ukraine, in Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and the occupied territories that followed, and in the bodies of Georgians tortured by their government, with the endorsement of Western partners who continued to present Georgia as a beacon of liberty and the rule-of-law. A reckoning with the fallout is not a counsel of despair. It is the precondition for a more honest, disciplined engagement with the genuinely difficult problems of international politics, one that abides the logic of great-power competition without sacrificing state sovereignty and cultural particularity, and which recognizes the difference between the performance and the substance of democratic life. *** Lasha Kasradze is an international relations analyst specializing in the post-Soviet space, with a focus on the South Caucasus, the Black Sea region, and great-power politics. OP-ED BY Lasha Kasradze for the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy