... conflicts with each other. Grant (2009) comments that these ancient Abkhaz and Georgian identities were so strongly felt that Russia “never entirely convinced…[these people] that they were full partners alongside the rest” of the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Georgia‘s current President, Mikheil Saakashvili, “took a holy oath” as part of his presidential inauguration ceremony at Gelati, where the “greatest Georgian king of the eleventh century…is buried. By receiving the blessing ...
... new state entities have complicated and often openly hostile relations with one another, and most of all with the centre of former military, economic and political power, which is now embodied by the Russian Federation as the legal successor to the USSR. Of the 15 former republics of the Soviet Union, four have no diplomatic relations with one another (Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia and Georgia). Unregulated border disputes are the bane of practically all Central Asian states. Russia and Ukraine have not broken diplomatic relations formally, but relations between the two countries are at their lowest ebb since December 1991.
The new ...
... than one of conflict. Georgia’s relations with Azerbaijan is an example of this.
It would be wrong to put the blame for the failure of Shevardnadze’s multi-vector policy on Russian intransigence. In the early years after the collapse of the USSR, the United States pursued a unipolar policy that caused resentment on the part of all the other civilizations, including Europe. It took the Russian-Georgian war to realize that the alternative to a bipolar world was a multipolar – not a unipolar – world. It was only under President Obama that the United States shed this political euphoria.
To sum up, Shevardnadze was an outstanding politician,...
