The Role of Russian and Western Soft Power Competition in Post-Soviet Georgian Nation-Building, 1991-2024

Abstract

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. As a result, already since the 1990s, Georgia has been a soft power ‘battlefield’ between the collective ‘West’, the USA and the EU, in particular, and the Russian Federation, seeking to keep its dominance in the former Soviet space. As this research demonstrates, what is at stake here is not only the reshaping of international power-relations around Georgia in the post-Soviet era, but also the development of Georgians as a nation. Indeed, given that soft power competition between Russia and the West in Georgia has been ostensibly for the ‘soul’ of the Georgian body politic, this struggle has decisively shaped Georgia’s self-construction as a nation. The present thesis is an in-depth study of how this soft power rivalry has unfolded, and what its impact and role in the development of Georgian national identity has involved in the period between 1991 and 2024. The findings of the study suggest that this rivalry in decisive ways contributed to the Georgian national identity crisis which stems from Georgians’ antagonistic interpretations of their national self.