Burjanadze at CSIS

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk by Nino Burjanadze, Chairwoman of Georgia's Parliament and star of the Rose Revolution, at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. You can listen online to the whole event. Burjanadze spoke a great deal about the situation in Abkhazia, referring to the Georgian government's proposed roadmap for settlement, and to the fact that a new roadmap on settling the situation in South Ossetia would be forthcoming - and indeed, it was circulated in the Georgian Parliament just yesterday. One interesting talking point she had - Georgia is prepared to offer South Ossetia more autonomy than North Ossetia (which is part of Russia) has from the federal center in Moscow.

My favorite comment of hers was in response to a question from CSIS's Cory Welt, who was chairing the event. Welt asked about Russia's use of "soft power" instruments to try to convince the Georgian public that NATO accession will be detrimental to Georgia's attempts to resolve the so-called "frozen conflicts" in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Burjanadze had a long response, including the insight that "soft power is soft from here [DC] - it doesn't look soft from Ukraine and Georgia."

For more on Russia's use of "soft power" in its near abroad, see Fiona Hill's piece, "Moscow Discovers Soft Power," from last fall and Nicu Popescu's brief on "Russia's Soft Power Ambitions" from around the same time; see also this recent lecture by Andrew Wilson, and Ivan Krastev's article from a year and a half ago.

On a lighter note, I arrived a bit late and was seated at the very back next to one of Burjanadze's security guys (I can only assume, as he was a big guy who answered his cell phone in Georgian and had no interest in the talk whatsoever). Throughout the event, he was reading a well-worn copy of a Russian suspense novel - Akvarium, by Viktor Suvorov (full text available here).

I have to say that I was very impressed with Burjanadze. She spoke in English with practically no difficulties, sounded convincing about the reforms underway in Georgia, and managed to be unequivocal about Georgia's NATO aspirations without making it sound too much like the country wants or needs to suck up to the United States. My point of comparison for this was a speech by Eduard Shevardnadze that I attended back in 2001 at the Kennedy School of Government. At the time - just after 9/11 - I remember being almost alarmed at the degree to which Shevy seemed to be cozying up to the US. At the same time, the event summary still on the KSG website shows that the Silver Fox did still have some powers of prediction, even if his forecast was a few years off:

Shevardnadze, who has expressed hopes that Georgia will ascend to NATO membership by 2005, offered his endorsement of further NATO development and expansion, saying, "aspiration toward NATO membership is the inviolable right of every democratic nation in Europe."

Another interesting moment in that 5 1/2-year-old transcript/summary is a question from someone identified as "Paul Joyle," recently more famous under his actual name, Paul Joyal, as someone targeted by either carjackers or Chekist henchmen in suburban DC.