Mobility as an Ideology of Postsocialist Success: The Case of Georgia

Abstract

In the more than three decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, spatial mobility has become a dominant normative horizon through which social mobility is imagined and pursued in many postsocialist societies. In Georgia specifically, narratives of success have been closely tied to the capacity to move: to migrate abroad, to study in Western universities, or to relocate from peripheral and less developed regions to the capital, Tbilisi. Public discourse has essentially presented spatial mobility as the primary pathway to social (upward) mobility, meritocratic achievement, and integration into the modern global world that is supposed to be different from the “Soviet past” and its assumed “regressive” attributes. The presented paper suggests that in the Georgian postsocialist context mobility has acquired an ideological function: it has operated as a political-economic narrative through which structural inequalities and the country’s peripheric position in the global economy were reframed as matters of individual opportunity and personal initiative. Gradually, even if in large segments the “postsocialist mobility project” has brought disillusionment by unfulfilled promises and social costs of migration, it was never translated into a political project or political-ideological alliances. The article examines how the normative valorisation of mobility emerged during Georgia’s postsocialist transformation and how it has shaped contemporary understandings of success and social advancement. Drawing on insights from World-systems theory and critical approaches in International Political Economy, namely, the neo(Gramscian) perspective, the paper conceptualizes Georgia as a semi-peripheric economy integrated into the global capitalist world system through asymmetrical economic and institutional relations. Within such contexts, spatial mobility often becomes a key mechanism through which individuals attempt to access opportunities concentrated in economic and political centres – a practice that carries substantial resemblance to the well-known “catch up” projects and “developmentalist illusions,” but still has its own distinct characteristics. At the same time, the political and policy discourse surrounding mobility oftentimes tends to individualize responsibility for advancement, obscuring structural constraints associated with peripheric economic positioning, labour market segmentation, and uneven regional development. By situating mobility within the political economy of postsocialist transformation, the paper argues that the ideological valorisation of mobility contributes to the depoliticisation of structural inequalities. It promises individual advancement while simultaneously normalising the unequal spatial distribution of opportunities characteristic of (semi-)peripheral economies. In this way, mobility becomes not only a social practice but also a political-economic mechanism through which peripheral integration into global capitalism is reproduced.