Government reforms: extraordinary achievements needed

A year ago, on September 23, 2010, the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, said in an interview for Tabula that his government needed extraordinary achievements to survive. He said that Georgia must become a European centre of the region, not a suburb of Europe: “The shortest route from Central Asia and China to Europe goes through Georgia - we should take the advantage of the reality that we are like Europe but at the same time we can understand Turkey, Iran, China and Central Asian countries.” To this end, Georgia signed a European Union Association Agreement, taking another step towards NATO integration and EU membership.

Moreover, he advocated a balanced Constitution with no concentration of power in the hands of one entity: opposition parties should also evolve. “The smaller and the swifter the government, the higher is the benefit to the population,” he said. Many countries, not just those of Europe in the throes of the global crisis and austerity measures, or Middle Eastern countries in the throes of the Arab Spring, are looking at government reforms to further enrich democracy and governance, government efficiency, and the fight against poverty. Saakashvili adds, “A society having no compassion towards disadvantaged fellow citizens is not a society,” and added that poverty reduction is a top priority for his government.

Freedom is a key component of his government’s reforms, of which he says of Georgia, that has a vestige of Soviet totalitarian thinking, “the degree of its freedom is rising day after day.” He sees freedom as an evolution and has introduced courses on critical thinking in schools, and promoted democratic values such as tolerance and human rights, to raise citizens “who value both personal freedom and freedom of the state.

Although, as Saakashvili says, “the global crisis has weakened the chances of small countries like Georgia [to set reforms of regional importance], extraordinary achievements are needed to survive. In the space of a year, it is not just small countries like Georgia, but all countries, that need extraordinary achievements to survive.

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