The Role of International Organisations in the Georgian ‘Rose Revolution’
The Georgian ‘Rose Revolution’of 2003 had an important impact on the political developments not only in the region of the Caucasus but also on the wave of “Colour Revolutions”.
My thesis examines the link between regional international organisations (OSCE, EU, NATO, CoE) and political transformation processes. The chosen case for my work is Georgia and its so-called ‘Rose Revolution’. I consider the ‘Rose Revolution’ to be a catalyst for the Georgian transformation process towards democracy. That leads to the questions “What have the international organisations done to promote the Georgian transformation towards democracy?” and “What was their influence on the ‘Rose Revolution’?”
Methods: For analysing the case I use a triangulation with different methods. Qualitative Content Analysis helps to analyse interviews I conducted with leading experts of Georgian politics and actors of the ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia in 2005. Additional qualitative analysis of official publications of international organisations make it possible to create hypotheses about the Georgian ‘Rose Revolution’ and the role of international organisations ‘bottom up’ out of the data basis. On the other side deductive created theories of upheaval, revolution and transformation processes (e.g. John C. Pevehouse, 2005: “Democracy from above”) can be tested with the data. This triangulation helps to create a full picture of the historic event ‘Rose Revolution’ and the causal mechanisms, which are linked to international organisations.
Preliminary results: The most important factors that lead to the ‘Rose Revolution’ were (1) a split political elite, which made use of (2) the high frustration rate within the population and (3) the free media landscape to mobilize the people. International organisations contributed in different ways to this set up for the ‘revolution’. (a) Repeatedly they tried to influence the Georgian government towards democracy either by incentives of close cooperation and even full membership or they threatened the government by a cut of financial aid and cooperation. Further (b) some international organizations started to support investigative journalism which success later boosted the level of frustration within the population. And during the upheavals in Tbilisi in 2003 (c) the opposition forces used the reports of the International Election Observer Mission (IEOM) about the parliamentary elections to prove their accusations of election fraud against president Eduard Shevardnadze.
Outlook: Even while the international organisation themselves seemed to be surprised by the revolutionary events in 2003, they contributed to a variety of different factors that laid ground for the ‘Rose Revolution”. With my work I show an example, how international organisations influenced the political situation in Georgia in 2003. They could have played a similar role in other Newly Independent States (NIS). It would be interesting to compare other cases of the ‘Colour Revolutions’ with my work to get an even more detailed picture of the role of international organisation in the wave of the ‘Colour Revolutions’.
