I’ve covered a lot of protests, rallies, moments of civil disobedience in my reporting career, at home and abroad. Yet I’ve never seen anything quite like that which I witnessed on the streets of Tbilisi last week, on the steps of the Georgian parliament. I’ve never seen a protest quite so youthful, quite so exuberant, so hopeful, so innocent.
Night after night, week after week, thousands of students and teenagers link arms, and occasionally conga their way past the city’s Freedom Square, often flying Georgian, Ukrainian and EU flags from the same staff.
Ostensibly they seem exercised by a modest matter. The Georgian government, which has long had designs on joining the EU, has proposed a new “foreign agents law”, which mandates that NGOs and media organisations which receive more than 20 per cent of their funding from abroad must declare it to the government. This, however, is more subversive than it appears, given the law would also give the Georgian government sweeping powers to shut down these organisations and suppress their activity. In addition, the problem for the protesters is its provenance.
The proposed idea is similar to a Russian measure passed some years ago by the Putin regime and used to crack down on dissent – hence the widely used nickname of “the Russian law” by its opponents. The EU has made clear the law would imperil Georgia’s accession and the government’s opponents fear further democratic backsliding in a country which is at heart an oligarchy. The controversy is therefore far more substantial than the law itself; rather it is a part-proxy battle for Georgia’s future.
When the EU says that the actions of the Georgian government will endanger accession, the Georgian government, deploying the curviest of circular logic, argues that the “Global War Party” is making the EU say it, necessitating the need for the law ever the more.
There is much to say about this, but for the purposes of this column I want to dwell on the role of conspiracy in Georgia and the UK. Georgia is awash in it. As one man, who had been beaten up by police on one of the protests (a not uncommon occurrence) told me, “we’ve had nationalist governments before, eccentric governments, liberal governments, socialist governments – we’ve never had one which has gone crazy”.
The Georgian regime and Moscow want to give the impression that the protesters are being manipulated, that they are CIA stooges, that someone is pulling the strings. The Georgian prime minister and his billionaire backer, Bidzina Ivanishvili, have aped Russian rhetoric and invective over a so-called “Global War Party”. They claim this shadowy organisation is to blame for rising tension across the world, manipulating the EU, US, the protesters and opposition parties in their state, alongside spreading so-called “gender ideology” and LGBT rights against unwilling populations. When I interviewed a governing party MP on the subject, she insisted that the Global War Party did indeed exist, but was unable to name any of its components, beyond vague muttering about Freemasons.
And yet once we published our report and podcast, I noticed something. The numbers on one of the videos, where the protesters spoke for themselves, went crazy. I’d like to think it was our high production values, and indeed our superb social media team do drive extraordinary numbers for News Agents content. But this was unusually, intensively high. When I looked at the comments, it was clear it was being targeted by the army of Kremlin bots, spreading the usual lies about Western collusion, of this being another Ukraine in the making, of Nazis infiltrating the Georgian state, of Georgia not being a proper country and so on.
More disturbing still were the numbers of British and US accounts, with minor social media followings and more established figures, who to a greater or lesser extent were parroting or amplifying these messages. Many questioned (obviously without watching or listening to our reports) why these people were there in the first place, that the proposed law was just about transparency and at the darker edges, that in some way the US or CIA must be involved. More cynically, others responded in a way that has become commonplace about Ukraine: that this is about Western encroachment, and that Georgia has always been (and for global peace probably ought to remain) in a Russian “sphere of influence”.
I’m aghast though not surprised by this reaction. It is darkly comic that some of those making these arguments claim to be left wing, or anti-colonialists. They are happy to ignore the clear self-determination of the Georgian or Ukrainian peoples and dismiss their political desires as unimportant or artificial. Inadvertently or otherwise, it helps create a safe space for Kremlin misinformation and false histories. For their own political reasons, usually an intrinsic suspicion of the West arising from the anti-colonial politics of the 1970s, they seem unable to compute that these young people would be desperate that their future would be European, be Western, be in Nato. The same goes for Ukraine.
I am both troubled and inspired by what I saw in Georgia. I am troubled by how fragile Georgian democracy seems. I am troubled by how prevalent and well-established Russian propaganda has become at the highest levels, and how it continues to interfere in the politics of its old backyard. I am troubled by how many of their tropes have infiltrated our own conversation, often regurgitated by people who should know better. I am troubled by the lack of respect for the self-determination of others that many in our own democracy, never mind Russia, might have.
But I am heartened by one thing. Those young people, many not even out of school, yearn for something better and are willing to be brave to obtain it. They see their future west, because for all of our continent’s manifest faults, for all of the West’s sustained hypocrisy, for all Western liberalism’s fragilities, it still exerts a deep pull.
No one, least of all Georgia’s young, or Ukraine’s soldiers, are campaigning or fighting to join Russia’s club. No one is queuing up at the door of the world’s many autocracies. However ahead of the game these dark states might feel in the geopolitical battles which envelop world politics, there is always that. At heart, it is incomprehension of this simple fact which unites Moscow and some of democracy’s internal critics – a fact that both parties simply cannot compute.
Lewis Goodall is journalist, broadcaster and host of the podcast The News Agents
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