Authors

Vladimir Liparteliani¹;  ¹ Durham University, UK

Discussion

The end of the Cold War coincided with a notable conceptual innovation in the sphere of international relations – the emergence of the concept of ‘soft power’, pioneered by Joseph Nye at the end of 1980s. Ever since, ‘soft power’ has been embraced by state actors across the international arena through the development of diverse strategies for influencing other international actors and their publics in non-military and non-economic ways. What is more, rivalry in international relations has been steadily moving away from the previously dominant principle of cumulative military and economic power and towards competition in soft power. The geopolitical area where soft power rivalry came to matter a great deal following the collapse of the Communist bloc were the states that had just gained independent status as a result of the dismantlement of the USSR. One example of such a state is the Republic of Georgia. Already during the 1990s, Georgia became a soft-power ‘battlefield’ between the collective ‘West’, the USA and the EU, and the Russian Federation, the dominant power in the former Soviet space. What was at stake here was not only the reshaping of international power-relations in the Southern Caucasus but also the development of post-Soviet Georgia as a nation-state. Indeed, given that soft-power competition between Russia and the West in Georgia was ostensibly for the ‘soul’ of the Georgian body politic, this struggle decisively shaped, and still continues to shape, Georgia’s self-construction as a nation. In this paper I will examine what this meant throughout the thirty years of Georgia’s independence, with particular focus on the role of soft-power rivalries for the formation of Georgian nation-building.