The depth of Russian anger at Georgia’s move on South Ossetia should not be underestimated. Moscow has said it will establish permanent bases in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. With the Kremlin likely to keep up efforts to unseat a humiliated Georgian government, Georgia faces a turbulent future following Saakashvili’s adventurism.
What advantage Saakashvili expected to gain from a military encounter is hard to fathom, but the result is that Georgia has definitively lost control of the two disputed territories and has seen ethnic Georgians driven out of them. Its hopes of American support in the event of a confrontation proved groundless. What military power it had was, in effect, eliminated for some time to come.
Meanwhile, of the two newly ‘independent’ republics, Abkhazia has swapped a nominal master, Georgia, for a real one, Russia, and will have a very hard time asserting the independence that it truly wanted. This is especially so with Russia eyeing its ports for the Black Sea fleet. South Ossetians saw their capital devastated, but at least advanced towards their goal of reunification with North Ossetia under Russia’s umbrella.
The Georgian prime minister, Lado Gurgenidze, acknowledged that his country was at a pivotal point. ‘It’s up to Europe, as much as to Georgia itself, to determine if it will emerge from this crisis as an even more European, young liberal democracy with a successful economy which recovers quickly – or whether Georgia emerges as something decidedly different, far less compatible with European standards and values,’ he told the Financial Times.
Cautious Europe
For its part, Europe played a crucial role in securing a ceasefire, with the French president and current holder of the rotating EU presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy shuttling between the two capitals. But at a subsequent summit on 1 September, EU leaders could agree only on a condemnatory statement on Russia, a donor’s conference for Georgia and freezing of talks on an EU–Russian partnership. They stopped well short of any sanctions against Moscow, which praised their common sense.
Those European countries that had supported the US in promoting NATO membership for Georgia found their approach just as invalidated as Washington’s, as there was no chance of their providing military support to Tbilisi in the eventual crisis. Europe, and most importantly the German ‘grand coalition’, was divided on whether to take a softer or harder line with Moscow.
This division seemed bound to inhibit any more decisive European approach for the foreseeable future, and has been perhaps mostly one of nuance, given that Europe as a whole depends on Russian energy resources and has no desire to embark on a new Cold War-like confrontation. One possibility that could be advanced for the future, helping to answer Gurgenidze’s point, would be to set Georgia more firmly on the long road to EU membership, which is now seen even in Tbilisi as a distant prospect.
Russia isolated
The questions over Russia’s future international relations are those that loom largest following the conflict. Even though it responded to a Georgian military move, its sparing observance of the ceasefire agreement and repeated use of defiant language, daring the world to stand up to it, has been the dominant feature of this small war.
Russia has not yet found support among many of the capitals that it might have expected. The failure of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation to support it was a major setback. China, with its own problems curbing ethnic separatism, was careful to distance itself at an early stage. Moscow was already alienated from the West, but could ill afford to worsen its relations with the East as well. Even Serbia, which has had close ties to Moscow, was alarmed. It neither criticised nor supported Russia’s recognition of the two territories’ independence but said it had warned that Kosovo’s ‘illegal act’, in declaring independence from Serbia, could set a precedent.
By any standards, the absence of international support for Russia represented a stark diplomatic failure. While this may be acceptable for a Russian government full of the bravado of the moment, with President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin seeking to outgun each other in the toughness of their language, it would be a growing embarrassment for Moscow in the longer term.
There is a risk, however, that the momentum of NATO enlargement policy will divide the West. Despite the fact that 20% of Georgia’s territory is lost, the US will argue for continuing the path towards eventual membership. It will do the same for Ukraine, even though that country‘s divided leadership is at best ambivalent about, and the majority of its population firmly opposed to, NATO membership.
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