Hegemonic Shocks and Georgia: Democratic Evolution and Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

The work, based on S. Gunitsky's theory of hegemonic shocks, explains the processes of democratic evolution and democratic backsliding in Georgia. In the author's opinion, the case of Georgia confirms the theory, according to which hegemonic shocks not only cause hegemonic transitions, which imply a change in the configuration of power distribution in the international arena, but also have a profound impact on the internal institutional development of countries.   If the unipolar world with a democratic hegemon determined the democratic evolution of Georgia, a democratic multipolar world has led to democratic backsliding. The paper identifies the mechanisms through which the hegemonic shocks influence the democratic evolution of Georgia. The unipolar world gave rise to an emulative political system, which determined the alternations of democratic and authoritarian cycles in the process of democratic evolution. This system tends to subordinate society to the state, but the democratic hegemon has restricted this tendency and ensured permanent democratic evolution, even during authoritarian cycles when democratic potential continued to rise. This was facilitated by the attractiveness of the West in Georgian society, as well as among the political elites and the opposition, who divided the world into "civilised" (the West) and uncivilised nations. The cooperation between them and the West (the USA, EU) has determined the development of autonomous political and civil societies, free media, and free political behaviours. This contributed to the accumulation of the country's democratic potential, which was the primary vector of Georgia's political development in the unipolar world. The USA and EU not only blocked the undemocratic activities of pro-Western political elites, but also, in cooperation with them and the opposition, ensured democratic changes in governments through the free expression of societal will.  Free political behaviours are the elements of democracy, which provide the necessary but not sufficient conditions for its development.  To ensure the irreversibility of democratic evolution, they must create autonomous and influential political institutions. However, a lack of economic security, as well as cultural and other resources, limits the capabilities of significant and permanent autonomous mobilisation and organisation of free political behaviours. In these conditions, they periodically led to "democratic explosions" - direct actions and even changes in governments through them. Georgia reveals that free political behaviours without organisation lead to electoral authoritarianism. Lack of awareness and ideological and political articulation of social cleavages hindered the political organisation of free behaviours and restricted the development of the democratic political system in Georgia. This determined that the democratic evolution of it was based on the direct actions, free political behaviours of citizens, pro-Western orientations of society, elites, and opposition who cooperated with the USA and EU in promoting democracy. The lag of the autonomous self-organisation of the society behind the development of the bureaucracy produces a contradiction between the maturation of the political system and the political regime, which is understood as the way society and government interact. The incomplete development of the political system prevents the full disclosure of the democratic potential of the political regime. Under these conditions, the West fulfilled the protective function of democratic evolution, and pro-Western political elites served as the primary conduits of Western influence in Georgia.   The transition to the multipolar world raises the influence of authoritarian states. This creates a perception of weakness of the democratic hegemon (the USA) in the Georgian elite.  As a result, it ends the cooperation with the USA and the EU in promoting democracy.   As a result, free behaviour has lost significant resources for organising democratic institutions and developing civil initiatives; the normative component of the democratic political system has been significantly narrowed. All this contributes to the development of irresponsible governance and the establishment of unlimited dominance of the political elite, which determines the transition into another cycle of authoritarianism. However, unlike the previous ones, in the last case, the country transitions into a hegemonic electoral authoritarian phase, democratic evolution is interrupted, and the dismantling of democratic potential begins.