Between the West and Russia: mapping out Georgia's formal, informal, official, and unofficial pathways to foreign policy-making

Abstract

The study of the foreign policy of small states, including that of Georgia, is often approached from structural standpoints, which tend to analytically silence the complex dynamics that go on within the state. As such, the multi levelness nature of foreign policy is often ignored. In Georgia, important linkages with both the West and and Russia exist. The way in which such influences permeate the state, and feed complex dynamics both between actors domestically, and between local and international actors, in turn feeding foreign policy action, is the focus of this paper. Rather than engaging in the establishment of causal patterns, it aims to improve structural readings of foreign policy, by looking at the constitution of multi-level, cross-border interactions in GD-led Georgia, and building a set of hypotheses for future research. The concepts of official/unofficial, formal/informal foreign policies are put forth. The concept of “linkage” is mobilised in order to highlight the cross-border ties of the various elements of the polity (leadership, political parties and civil society organisations) It is reinvested in order capture the decentralised making of foreign policy, and the dynamic interaction between transnational connections and foreign policy. Further, a hypothesis on the leadership’s, multi-level balancing is introduced on the basis of Morar and Dembinska (2021)’s “Power Broker” framework, which conceives of the elite as actors seeking to maximise their agentive power. This has one main implication: they seek to balance both domestically and internationally, navigating a complex web of connections. The propensity of such trends, in turn, affecting foreign policy line is explored in the final section of the paper.