JOURNAL: The Organization for Democracy and Development—GUAM: A road map to relevance? [section introductions]

Central Asia and The Caucasus, 3-4(51-52):75–106

A View from Georgia with Certain Personal Reflections and Conclusions
Tedo Japaridze

Preface and Some Preliminary Comments on the History of GUAM ust over ten years ago, in 1996, the Deputy Foreign Ministers of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova, deeply concerned over excessive Western concessions to the Russian Federation during the tumultuous and prolonged negotiations on the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), on the initiation of Araz Azimov, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Azerbaijan, gathered at OSCE Headquarters in Vienna. This meeting became the first informal exchange (later this unofficial discourse was transformed into a formal caucus) related to these countries’ common security interests.

We can say that the first brick in the foundation of GUAM was laid.

Although the initial steps of activities of this caucus were tense, the issues of the CFE Treaty that prompted those consultations were as much “technical” as strategic; however, these “technicalities”

and “numbers on the flanks” mattered a great deal to the independence and sovereignty of those countries.

These were turbulent and tiring nightly plenary sessions and debates concerning the future parameters of the CFE Treaty. Certain common risks and challenges were identified on how to deal not only with the Soviet legacy of conventional arms on the respective national territories in general, but also concrete problems of the CFE flank issues that were supposed to be placed in a so-called quoted regime along the whole perimeter of the former Soviet Union borders, including the sovereign territories of Georgia and Moldova.

One year later, these regular but still informal meetings concerning specific issues were transformed into a more complex and comprehensive package of security problems of mutual interests regarding bilateral (or sub-regional) cooperation, which led the Presidents of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova to transform the existing informal group of experts into an actual and formal Forum with a fancy abbreviation—GUAM.

Thus, the birth date of GUAM—10 November, 1997—was the day of the first presidential summit in Strasbourg when the presidents of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova met during the summit of the Council of Europe and, after a protracted meeting, issued a Joint Communiqué which emphasized the importance of the four nations cooperating extensively in establishing a Europe-Caucasus- Asia Transportation Corridor (TRACECA).

It also underscored the prospects for strengthening interaction between the GUAM member states, “for the sake of a stable and secure Europe, guided by the principles of respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, inviolability of state frontiers, mutual respect, cooperation, democracy, supremacy of law and respect for human rights.”

As Taras Kuzio, a distinguished American political analyst, noted, the formalization of GUAM was the result of three different foreign policy trajectories after the dissolution of the Soviet Union: (1) the inception of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and coalescing of so-called Russophiles within that Organization; (2) the instant rejection of the three Baltic States to join the CIS format and pursuing, resolutely, their own policies of re-integration into the European and Euro-Atlantic structures; and (3) the formation, within the CIS of a so-called group of Westernizers— Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova. This latter group of countries, notes Professor Kuzio, later becomes a certain core element of GUAM and their leaders—the genuine Founding Fathers of that Organization.

Thus, if we agree that the initial purpose of establishing GUAM was these CFE negotiations — the “birth mother”—then we need to acknowledge that its “foster mother” happened to be NATO.

However, a special role in this process belonged to the representatives of the United Government— I would call them GUAM’s “baby-sitter”—who, along with other Euro-Atlantic experts, were engaged in the inception process of GUAM from the very beginning and continue to do so currently (though maybe with less enthusiasm) with one aim: to develop ideas or concepts, certain aspects that are practically viable and attractive, to strengthen the security, stability and capacity of the GUAM member states.

However, I would like to slightly disagree with Professor Kuzio regarding some components of GUAM’s history. As Professor Kuzio noted above, the emergence of GUAM was the result of a certain clash of strategic interests between the Russophiles and Westernizers that took place within the CIS, and GUAM itself was a product of disagreements within that Organization.

Being either a long-time “insider” or an up-close observer of the process of inception of almost all the regional organizations within the huge Eurasian land mass—the CIS, BSEC, GUAM, and certain other formats—since the early 1990s, I must emphasize that GUAM appeared on the political landscape not as an internal and dissenting fraction within the CIS (or against the CIS) with the aim to contradict or hamper the Organization’s proceedings, procedures, and strategic goals, as certain die-hard critics of GUAM try to maintain today.

GUAM, as noted above, became an Organization in 1997 due to the existence of certain strategic vectors and factors that are interconnected with each other on the vast territory of the former Soviet Union (the FSU) and, for all intents and purposes, due to a certain amount of experience in dealing with the totally ineffective CIS structures, specifically those trying to cope with unresolved conflicts and certain security issues. And more than that: by the time GUAM was transformed into a regional organization, it already had its own ideology, political agenda, and strategic goals and was composed—at least formally and according to certain official declarations and statements—of truly Western-oriented member states.

On the other hand, we need to find an answer to another, and much more important, strategic question: how these noble goals identified in the Joint Communiqué of the first summit of the GUAM member states were supposed to be realized, or how the Organization itself was going to become a presentable, qualitatively viable, productive, and prestigious entity in the eyes of the outside world and the entire international community?

In this article I shall try to analyze certain achievements, obvious and visible setbacks, and some of the perspectives on the earlier and ongoing developments within GUAM, its relations with other international organizations in the Wider Black Sea/Caspian Basin Region and beyond them,5 as well as the prospects for GUAM’s development in the future. Some of those predictions and expectations are real and some of them, in my opinion, are just wishful thinking and exaggerated.

But there is, at least, one solid fact that should be acknowledged: GUAM, which was initially organized, as noted above, with the specific purpose of discussing concrete security issues of mutual interest and finding solutions to them, according to Paul Goble, a distinguished American expert on Post-Soviet issues, has created absolutely new sets and forms of integration within the FSU, marking the final stage in the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

However, we all thought that GUAM would instantly become an active element within the FSU and beyond, creating certain positive dynamics and causing resources to consolidate and accumulate an appropriate amount of synergy among the member states. In the long-term perspective, and according to our judgments, it was to help the newly-born states navigate, more or less safely, through the painful and bumpy post-Soviet transition/transformation phase, making their state-democracy-building process more efficient and effective and thus strengthening their capacity, independence, and sovereignty.

By that time, the GUAM member states were not only emerging from the wreckage of the Soviet Union, but were also at the formulating stages of their own nation-state-building and determining their own democratic and governmental institutions. And specifically now, looking back and analyzing those developments through the prism of those ten tumultuous years, we need to acknowledge that we were all slightly naïve and overcharged with too much uncurbed enthusiasm in this regard.

Ten torturous years passed before GUAM, at last, succeeded in becoming a real institutional (and capacity-building) process with a structural and organizational skeleton and the ability to identify, more or less, a solid strategic agenda on how to make GUAM a functioning entity, efficient and productive enough to become visible and with the capacity to be plugged into the affairs of our “globalized”

world.

Of course, there were certain objective or subjective factors and tendencies within and beyond GUAM that hampered its proper development. It usually takes, as the saying goes, a certain amount of time to build a village. Naturally, it takes much more time and energy to build a new organization, specifically an international one, even despite the fact that GUAM, as we said above, was comprised of friendly states and strategic allies.

But with its inception, and despite certain drawbacks and zigzags, GUAM delivered one, in my opinion, very important psychological message to the international community. As certain experts accurately noted, the GUAM member states declared resolutely and loudly that they wanted to be treated like sovereign and independent countries and act independently on the international arena in accordance with their national interests and goals.

As these experts also admitted, the member states agreed in GUAM’s basic documents to negotiate, share information, and join approaches and strategies rather than acting against each other.7 A strategic goal was identified: to become normal and functioning states, bearing all the elements of sovereignty, and as defined by Kenneth Waltz, an American political scientist, to decide for themselves how they would cope with internal and external problems.

Why do I emphasize those issues?

By the time GUAM was initiated, the international community was used to referring to all post- Soviet countries—with the exception of Russia— as newly independent states, and I need to admit that this clumsy definition is still alive and used frequently and actively today by certain Western experts and analysts.

Naturally, the inception of GUAM did not fully destroy these warped and distorted perceptions or stereotypes of the Cold War legacy, but at least it initiated certain dramatic and turbulent retuning in the mindsets of international policy-making and the expert community; it made them look at the developments within the FSU space not only through a so-called Russian filter, a die-hard habit of the post-Cold War period. If not fully, the inception of GUAM impacted and has shaken certain established visions and patterns of strategic thinking.

Thus if we assume, as certain analysts contend, that “perceptions are reality,” the emergence of GUAM, even in its embryonic and clumsy format, has dramatically, though still on a subconscious level, impacted all these perceptions or misperceptions, either in the West or in the East.9 However, now is the time for GUAM itself to turn these perceptions into a new reality. Will it be possible? We shall discuss this issue bellow.

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GUAM: The Georgian Perspective
Thea Kentchadze

The pursuit of effective mechanisms for developing regional cooperation has become one of the major dimensions of Georgian foreign policy. A fundamental attribute of such mechanisms should be a responsiveness to the interests of the parties involved and the ability to contribute to the promotion of stability and development in the respective region. In an effort to boost its European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations, Georgia is more actively looking into the opportunities that emerge from forging viable partnerships with like-minded countries. First of all, this refers to those sharing a common history with Georgia and facing many similar challenges characteristic to the process of post-Soviet transformation. Georgia is gradually distancing itself from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which has long discredited itself as a worthy international organization.

At the same time, strengthening ties with those CIS members that declare adherence to the same democratic values and have a common understanding of the existing geopolitical environment and the role they have to play in it is an important element in Georgia’s foreign relations.

In many respects, by building strong alliances amongst its regional partners, Georgia will maximize its chances for securing successful integration into the larger European and Euro-Atlantic family.

This paper looks at the opportunities that rise for Georgia from its membership in the Organization for Democracy and Economic Development— GUAM (hereinafter GUAM). Established on 23 May, 2006 as a regional organization GUAM signified a joint effort on the part of the original group of four—Georgia, Ukraine Azerbaijan, Moldova—to breathe life into a decade- long, but futile, cooperative framework that originally united these countries around the common interest of fostering security and political and economic cooperation.1 This article seeks to assess the opportunities that revitalized GUAM provides its members, particularly Georgia.

In addition, it will attempt to analyze the possibility of GUAM escaping the danger of being merely a “talk shop” and the chances for its development into a valuable forum for building common approaches toward the most crucial issues facing its member countries.