The first is Parag Khanna’s May 2024 essay “The Coming Entropy of Our World Order.” Two years on, it’s safe to say entropy is no longer coming. It has arrived. Khanna argues that at every level of modern geopolitics, systems trend toward disorder: as time passes, change occurs, energy diffuses, and centralised power shifts through horizontal devolution. This is what we commonly refer to as global fragmentation. In the short term, that means volatility and uncertainty. But disorder also creates the opportunity for reorganisation: self-determination for those previously subjugated, the emergence of regional power centres, new international coalitions, and genuine post-colonial futures.

The second text we’ve been working with is Thomas Friedman’s November 2025 New York Times piece, “Welcome to Our New Era. What Do We Call It?” Where Khanna builds his account of the modern world order on entropy, Friedman uses a different descriptor: “The Polycene.” He traces the same underlying shift through a different lens, and offers a framework for how actors can survive and thrive within it. In the Polycene, Friedman argues, the most resilient and successful organisations will be those that build horizontal connections and inclusive coalitions across sectors—government, business, media, education, and civil society alike.

Together, Khanna and Friedman gave us the analytical frame for research that also informed a strategy consulting engagement for a Topouria Group public sector client: a way of reading the instability of world order as an opportunity to re-position and enhance one’s unique “competitive identity”.

Competitive identity (CI), as conceptualised by the “nation-branding” pioneer Simon Anholt, describes the coordinated use of public diplomacy, trade, tourism, and culture to shape how a country is perceived and trusted on the world stage.

Read alongside Khanna and Friedman, the stakes become clearer: in a fragmenting world order where everyone is competing with everyone else, relationships and narrative matter more than ever. A strong, credible reputation makes everything a country undertakes on the internationally stage easier, and that matters most precisely when new opportunities emerge to build coalitions, assert one’s identity, and help redefine the terms of cross-border engagement.

Although some of the language around CI (“reputation management” chief among it) carries a whiff of superficiality, the framework is actually the opposite. CI treats reputation not as something achieved through advertising and PR, but through the gradual, accumulated experience of people encountering a country through different channels. CI is rooted in consistent, cohesive action: policies, businesses, institutions, communities, and individuals all reinforcing a country’s image and values over time. In this sense, effective CI strategy promotes democracy, transparency, and inclusivity, because it depends on distributed leadership and self-organisation rather than top-down messaging.

Anholt captures this with the “CI virtuous circle”: a country makes progress, which increases its visibility; visibility changes its image; and a changed image supports further positive action, and so the cycle repeats. Anholt identifies six channels through which this happens: tourism, exports, investment and immigration, policy, people and diaspora, and culture.

This article distills our research on four compelling cases of competitive identity strategy: Estonia, Norway, Costa Rica, and Ireland. Despite their varying geopolitical circumstances, resources, and histories, each case reveals the power of Anholt’s framework for countries looking to punch above their weight in a changing global order.

Estonia: “Succeeding at change is our superpower”

Perceptions of the messenger usually precede the message itself. Thus, the main challenge of Estonia’s public diplomacy was detaching its identity from the toxic perceptions created by the legacy of Soviet rule. After restoring its independence in 1991, “De-Sovietisation” became both state policy and a brand management strategy through which Estonia asserted its westward orientation, aligned itself more closely with its Scandinavian neighbours and their positive associations abroad, and positioned itself as a forward-looking, tech-savvy society.

These measures made change and innovation central to the country’s brand, ultimately producing the national tagline: “Succeeding at change is our superpower.”

Enterprise Estonia (EE) has been the primary engine behind its consistency. In 2002, Estonia hosted the Eurovision Song Contest, backed by infrastructure investment and coordinated promotional campaigns, which gave local businesses a real platform and left visitors curious about the country. EE has since focused on entrepreneurship, helping domestic companies scale internationally, and on propelling Estonia’s digital society: its e-Governance capacity earned Estonia international praise and helped secure the EU’s decision to headquarter eu-LISA, the agency for large-scale IT systems, in Tallinn. The e-Residency programme extends this further, letting entrepreneurs worldwide establish and manage an EU-based company entirely online—a policy that has built a loyal “digital” community among British and Japanese entrepreneurs, in turn validating Estonia’s identity as a serious technology hub. The proof is in the numbers: with a population of just 1.4 million, Estonia has produced more unicorn startups per capita than any other country in the world, a list that includes companies like Skype, Bolt, Pipedrive and Wise.

EE even offers a public access nation-branding guide through Brand Estonia, which gives ordinary citizens the tools and language to represent the country consistently themselves: ”everything you need to speak about Estonia clearly, consistently and confidently.” This digital identity adds a premium to Estonia’s exports: precision goods like electrical equipment and phones benefit from an implicit Nordic country-of-origin effect, connecting Estonian products with an image of ingenuity.

At the same time, Estonia balances its high-tech identity with a softer cultural register, natural beauty, sauna culture, and traditional song and dance. With that, it reinforces its appeal as a place where Nordic, Russian, German, and Baltic influences meet: quiet, friendly, safe, exotic but not too much. The tourist board’s decision to rebrand its spring flood season as a “fifth season” (a natural wonder to canoe through rather than a nuisance to endure) captures this instinct for turning a liability into a defining feature. It worked: both National Geographic and the BBC have covered it as a distinctly Estonian experience.

Finally, Estonia is investing in its diaspora relationship as its population ages and shrinks. Through the Global Estonian programme, the government funds participation in Estonian cultural life abroad, supports professional pathways back to the country, and recognises those who promote Estonian identity internationally, treating the diaspora not as a loss but as a distributed extension of the brand itself.

“Fill your Heart with Ireland”

Ireland’s competitive identity strategy demonstrates the power of integration. Rather than treating diplomacy, trade, tourism, culture, and diaspora engagement as separate, Ireland folds them into a single national narrative, so that progress in one channel amplifies all the others.

The Global Ireland 2025 initiative is the clearest expression of this. Instead of running parallel and siloed campaigns for tourism, trade and diplomacy, the government treats these as interconnected fronts: expanding embassy and cultural-centre presence abroad, deepening ties with the Irish diaspora, and increasing Ireland’s visibility within international institutions all serve one shared identity, captured in the brand line “Fill your Heart with Ireland.”

Tourism is where this integration is most visible to the public. The Wild Atlantic Way doesn’t market individual towns or attractions in isolation; it strings them into a single recognisable route that gives visitors a story to move through, connecting dramatic landscapes to local communities of heritage, food, and hospitality. The result is less a checklist of sights and more a lived narrative of Irish identity.

That narrative travels well beyond Ireland’s borders because of its diaspora. Emigrant communities and people of Irish descent—actors, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs, and political figures alike carry Irish identity into global conversations most small states never reach. St. Patrick’s Day is now a globally recognised celebration; that same familiarity carries through Ireland’s outsized presence in music (Hozier, U2, Sinead O’Connor, The Cranberries) and film (Cillian Murphy, Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, Liam Neeson, Collin Farrell) alongside a literary legacy running from James Joyce and Oscar Wilde to Sally Rooney today. Few countries Ireland’s size achieve this level of familiarity. Even people who’ve never visited readily associate the country with a distinct culture and people. Ireland ingrains this awareness domestically too: the Global Ireland Schools Programme brings diplomats, peacekeepers, and development workers into classrooms to describe Ireland’s role abroad, cultivating the next generation’s stake in the country’s international identity.

The same integration logic extends to Ireland’s economic reputation. Alongside legacy exports like Guinness, whiskey and dairy, Ireland has built a modern identity around technology, pharmaceuticals, and financial services. Ireland has positioned itself as a natural home for multinational investment by emphasising connectivity, skilled English-speaking talent, and as gateway economy into the EU single market.

Ireland ranks 7th on IMD’s Economic Competitiveness Ranking, 5th for attracting talent in the Global Talent Competitiveness Index and 12th on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, underscoring that its economic pitch rests on governance credibility as much as talent. Crucially, this modern economic identity doesn’t replace the traditional cultural one, but sits alongside it.

“Essential Costa Rica”

Costa Rica’s competitive identity strategy shows the power of a single idea, communicated consistently across every channel. Costa Rica distilled its identity down to one concept, pura vida—the national ethos of simplicity, contentment, and living well. Then they built the institutional apparatus to carry it into every channel, formalising it under the “Essential Costa Rica” country-brand platform.

The National Parks System, expanded through the 1970s, is where the reality behind that idea begins. Long before “ecotourism” became a marketing term, Costa Rica was protecting vast areas of biodiversity and forest, and its Payment for Environmental Services (PES) programme gave landowners direct financial incentives to conserve rather than clear land, reversing decades of deforestation. This wasn’t a branding strategy, but policy that happened to produce a brandable reality, which is precisely why pura vida could later attach to it credibly rather than as a PR overlay.

Costa Rica then built Essential Costa Rica specifically to carry that idea into every sector at once. Rather than treating tourism, exports, and industry as separate branding exercises, the platform folds them under one certification mark and one shared story: sustainability, social progress, and Costa Rican identity as a single package. In tourism, this shows up as the Certification for Sustainable Tourism (CST), which requires hotels, tour operators, and other businesses to measure and improve their environmental practices, turning sustainability from a marketing message into an operating standard the industry is actually held to. At the export level, the same Essential Costa Rica mark now travels with coffee, agriculture, and manufactured goods wherever they’re sold abroad. Whether a visitor encounters pura vida through a national park, a certified hotel, or a product on a shelf overseas, it’s the same idea, carried by the same institutional platform. Recognition as the World’s Best Wildlife & Nature Destination in 2019, and consistent top rankings among global ecotourism destinations since, reflect an image that matches lived visitor experience rather than outpacing it.

More recently, Costa Rica has extended Essential Costa Rica into a second register. Its Digital Transformation Strategy (2023–2027), building on an earlier 2018–2022 strategy, is modernising government, business, and society through AI, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things, serving as evidence that pura vida, at its core, is really a story about deliberate, values-led development, one that applies as naturally to a data centre as to a rainforest.

The 2024 Environmental Performance Index, where Costa Rica ranks among global leaders, functions as external validation of this whole approach: measurable proof that sustainability is policy, not slogan. Costa Rica also ranks first in Latin America on reputation (RepCore) and 4th globally on the World Happiness Index.

Norway: “We are stronger together”

Norway’s competitive identity strategy places public diplomacy over brand management: in other words, the country’s brand speaks through the actions of their people. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs works alongside organisations like Innovation Norway (the country’s investment and trade agency) to ensure business, government, and other national stakeholders communicate a coherent image of Norway at home and abroad. To accomplish this, Innovation Norway fosters the global reach of domestic business, helps international companies access the domestic market, and provides brand development resources.

Using the Norwegian brand is attractive to domestic companies because it represents wealth, ingenuity, strong governance, and humanitarian leadership. These associations matter even for commodities like oil. In Norway’s oil industry, a strict regulatory climate and mixed development model have fostered institutional competence, technical excellence, and humanitarian leadership. Thus the premium attached to the "Made in Norway" label extends even to a commodity whose reputation elsewhere is anything but clean.

Norway’s success is what Anholt would call a “virtuous circle,” a kind of positive feedback loop: Its Sovereign Wealth Fund illustrates the value of long-term industrial policy and strategic reinvestment over reliance on FDI incentives alone, which is a strategy that, ultimately, attracts FDI anyway. Humanitarian leadership strengthens Norway’s international identity, although immigration continues to challenge the construction of a national identity beyond ethnicity.

Norway’s cultural diplomacy reflects the same instinct. The country leverages cultural exports—Viking history, folklore—to anchor its diaspora. Nothing has demonstrated this more vividly than the Viking Row, the rowing chant that swept Norway's 2026 World Cup campaign. Conceived by a single fan just months before the tournament, the chant spread from stadium terraces to Boston train stations, Times Square, and even the Norwegian Parliament. It was picked up by opposing fans and eventually featured in the World Cup final's halftime show—a piece of invented tradition that became one of the most recognisable expressions of Norwegian identity on the planet, entirely without state involvement.

What made the Viking Row travel so effortlessly is the same instinct that makes Norwegian culture legible abroad: it draws on imagery the world already associates with Norway. Visit Norway’s initiatives sit on the same foundation: kos, the Norwegian attitude toward cosiness, warmth, and community, is a unique, authentic story about how long winters shape a culture that turns toward connection rather than isolation. Language, dance, and song traditions carry that story internationally through UNESCO recognition, and cultural diplomacy extends it further through art installations worldwide.

Architecture, hospitality, and culinary tradition all revolve around the same relationship to nature, reinforcing Norway’s identity as environmentally conscious and captivating. But the historical imaginary of vast rugged landscapes, Vikings, and native culture packaged into Norway’s folkloric appeal warrants real scrutiny: it trades on ideas of cultural novelty that are not without cost. While the state’s relationship with the Sámi has become more equitable since the 1980s, there is no undoing the exploitation of culture now deeply embedded in Norway’s national identity—a caution for any small state building its brand on indigenous or historical heritage.

Conclusion

The above case studies are where Khanna’s, Friedman’s, and Anholt’s frameworks meet the evidence. If world order really is fragmenting—trending toward the horizontal devolution Khanna describes, or the Polycene’s demand for resilient, cross-sector coalitions that Friedman traces—then Anholt’s “Competitive Identity” offers smaller states a way to turn that instability to their advantage.

A strong reputation cannot replace hard power, but it can extend a smaller state’s visibility, strengthen its diplomatic relationships, and give it greater room to manoeuvre in pursuing its own economic and foreign policy objectives. Estonia, Ireland, Costa Rica, and Norway each show that punching above one’s weight starts with identifying what distinguishes a country, building policies and institutions that reinforce those strengths, and communicating that identity consistently to the world. That reputation opens opportunities well beyond marketing and tourism. Even without the economic scale, military capability, or population of larger powers, these countries can still become the ones others choose to partner with, invest in, and trust.

Chloe West is a junior at the University of California Berkeley, passionate about the intersection of post-colonial history and economic development.

Brandon Peluffo is a senior at the University of California Berkeley, with an interest in political theory and human rights.

Minding the Gap

There is a category of cultural products that arrive in foreign markets burdened by the weight of their own origin stories. Some goods have a history that is so rich, so particular, so entangled with the fate of a people, that it becomes difficult to determine whether that history is their greatest commercial asset or the most persistent obstacle to their wider reception. In the beverage industry, Japanese sake, Mexican mezcal, and Greek wine come to mind as recent examples: drinks whose complex identities and market positions proved difficult to articulate internationally, but whose audiences eventually found them after years of coordinated effort.

Georgian wine also belongs to this category.

The oldest winemaking culture on earth. Over 500 indigenous grape varieties rivalling Italy in terms of pure biodiversity. A UNESCO-listed qvevri tradition. A viticultural heritage nearly destroyed under Soviet mass production and only partially recovered since independence. These are among the elements that make up the deep, complex history that has shaped the identity of Georgian wine, how it is made, what it tastes like, and why it is so frequently misunderstood by the Western consumer who is only now beginning to encounter it. What Georgian wine lacks is not raw material, but a coherent identity in the minds of its most desired audiences.

The customer base is growing regardless: sales in the UK alone grew 72 percent between 2024 and 2025. The question is whether the industry can articulate a narrative that will capitalise on that momentum.

Simon Anholt, a pioneer in the field of nation-branding and the creator of the Good Country Index, maps what he calls a country’s ‘competitive identity’ across six pillars: tourism, exports, government, investment, culture and heritage, and people. He argues that a country’s external image (or reputation) functions as a form of equity that is accumulated through sustained, coordinated action across all of those channels simultaneously, and undermined not by bad communication, but by incoherence between them. Where those channels pull in different directions or signal contradiction, the result is a value discount applied to everything the country produces.

Georgian wine illustrates this dynamic with uncomfortable precision. The quality exists. The story exists. But the coordination remains inadequate.

It is this gap, between what Georgian wine is and what the world currently understands it to be, that formed the animating concern of a tasting and panel discussion hosted by Topouria Group in collaboration with Les Caves de Pyrene at Saperavi Social in London on 1 July, 2026. Widely regarded as the world’s most competitive wine market, London is certainly the right place for this conversation. If Georgian wine can earn its place here, it can earn its place anywhere.

Our Panel

Moderated by Liam Spindler (Founding Partner at TG), the panel brought together three professionals whose combined experience spans the full range of what the Georgian wine trade currently requires:

Douglas Wregg—sales and marketing director at Les Caves de Pyrene, the UK’s largest importer of Georgian wine—noted at the outset that Georgia itself is the most powerful argument for its wine. It’s impossible to visit the country without falling for its wine culture, making tourism the single most effective conversion mechanism the category has.

Paul McSharry, a brand strategist and the founder of MAZE Drinks, currently works with the Georgian producer Ikano Estate. His opening observation was that the 8,000-year history, the qvevri, and the natural wine connection are all powerful hooks, but they are not the full story. The challenge is to extend the narrative without abandoning what makes it compelling.

Davit Berulashvili, owner of Saperavi Social alongside his brother Giorgi, is both an importer and distributor of Georgian wines and a direct embodiment of what Anholt calls the people pillar: a Georgian in London, making the case for his country’s wine through the daily practice of running a restaurant and personally sourcing its cellar.

The panel, joined by fifteen representatives from London's wine trade and press, sampled and discussed eleven wines over the course of the afternoon: three “European-style” whites, four skin-contact qvevri wines (a white, two ambers and a blend), and four qvevri reds.

Subscribe now

*Unless marked otherwise, all wines presented in the tasting can be purchased at Saperavi Social at 212 Essex Road, Islington, London, N1 3AP*

Flight I: The Fresh Whites

1. Igavi Wines, Tsolikouri 2023, Lechkhumi, Tsolikouri 100%, Aged in Georgian acacia barrels, ABV 10% (from Les Caves de Pyrene)

2. Churi Chinebuli, Krakhuna Mtsvane 2022, Imereti, Imeretian Krakhuna 50% Kakhetian Mtsvane 50%, ABV 13.5%

3. GK Winery, Rkatsiteli 2023, Kakheti, Rkatsiteli 100%, Aged on lees, ABV 12%

A country’s export brands function as ambassadors, each bottle carrying the national image into the market, either reinforcing it or contradicting it. The three whites that opened the tasting illustrated what the export channel for Georgian wine could be communicating and the degree to which it currently falls short.

Aged in Georgian acacia barrels, the delicate and pleasantly acidic Igavi Tsolikouri 2023 from the mountain region of Lechkhumi (northwest Georgia) brings a pure cool-climate minimality that signals a new direction in Georgian winemaking as much as it evokes an ancient one. The 2022 Krakhuna Mtsvane by Churi Chinebuli, with its tropical fruit notes, beautifully marries the denser character of Kakhetian Mtsvane with the levity of Imeretian Krakhuna. The 2023 Rkatsiteli from GK Winery is crisp, clean, herb-flecked, with a refreshing finish that asks nothing of the drinker in terms of prior context.

Three glasses that represent three distinct regional registers and four grape varieties most British consumers could not name. Yet, this is the version of Georgian wine that maps perfectly onto what the modern British wine drinker is already reaching for. The story is not being told effectively enough.

Georgia’s international profile has been constructed almost entirely around Kakheti’s output (particularly the qvevri-aged amber wines) leaving the regions that produced two of these three wines largely invisible. But this is not due to lack of distinction, but because the infrastructure of communication that would allow them to function as additional signals in Georgia’s national identity has not been built.

The flight also surfaced a corrective to a narrative gaining currency in wine trade commentary: that Georgia’s diversity of altitude gives it a structural advantage over struggling European wine regions. Wregg pushed back. Two Georgian vintages in the last five years were very nearly lost to extreme climatic events; very few vineyards are planted on slopes that would offer mitigation. The honest picture is of a country facing the same disruptions as its counterparts, with less institutional capacity to respond.

Flight II: A Spectrum of Skin Contact

4. Natia Chekhurishvili’s White Mulberry Winery, Tsitska 2024, Imereti, White, Tsitska 100%, Qvevri, ABV 12% (from Les Caves de Pyrene)

5. Qvevris Mze, Kakhuri Mtsvane 2022, Kakheti, Amber, Mtsvane 100%, Qvevri, ABV 11.5%

6. Begaso Family Winery, Mtsvane 2022, Kakheti, Amber, Mtsvane 100%, Qvevri, ABV 13.5%

7. Pheasant's Tears, Poliphonia 2024, Kakheti, Blend of 140+ white, pink, red and black skinned varieties, Qvevri, ABV 12% (from Les Caves de Pyrene)

All four wines in this flight were fermented and aged in qvevri, and so a brief demystification is in order: The qvevri is a large clay vessel buried to its neck in the ground, where the surrounding earth regulates its temperature throughout fermentation and ageing. It is one of the most distinctive identifiers of Georgian wine and one of the most misunderstood. Unlike oak, it imparts no flavour of its own. What it does contribute is texture, a particular kind of oxidative complexity, and a stability that winemakers in Georgia have relied on for millennia. In the West, qvevri is often conflated with amber wine, as though the vessel and the style were synonymous. They are not. The four wines in this flight were made with varying durations of skin and stem contact and markedly different techniques, which is precisely why they taste so different from one another. Understanding what a qvevri does, and does not do, is essential to understanding how the same vessel can produce such divergent results.

We opened the flight with Natia Chekhurishvili’s Tsitska 2024, characterised by the purity and minerality that defines traditional Imereti-style wines: full-bodied, bright and flowery, with yellow fruit notes and a long mineral finish. This a light skin-contact white that challenges what the amber category is assumed to mean.

The two distinct Kakhetian Mtsvane expressions that followed drive this point home. Qvevris Mze Kakhuri Mtsvane 2022 is pale and restrained, with a savoury, nutty and gamey complexity and a strong tannic grip. It would pair well with any aged hard cheese or Georgian Guda if you can get your hands on it. Begaso Family Mtsvane 2022 is deeply amber, bone-dry, its nose reaching toward dried apricot and burnt caramel, with a smokey complexity that lands closer to cognac or scotch than to anything the word ‘amber’ is conventionally associated with.

The explanation for the difference came from Berulashvili: Begaso’s winemakers sun-dry the grape stems before adding them to the qvevri alongside the must, a technique that contributes the additional depth of colour, the smokiness, and the particular texture that makes the wine so memorable.

The same variety, aged in the same vessel, yielding two entirely different wines. This is why, as both McSharry and Wregg argued, one should resist the impulse to colour-code wine: the complexity and diversity of what the qvevri produces is precisely its selling point, and ‘amber’ is too blunt an instrument to carry it.

The final wine of the flight was Pheasant’s Tears Poliphonia 2024, a blend of more than 140 white, pink, red and black-skinned native varieties vinified together in qvevri. Although perfectly drinkable, it is perhaps better understood as a manifesto than an expression of terroir. It is a conceptual celebration of the country’s viticultural diversity. That this wine exists at all is a statement about the scale of what was nearly lost under Soviet rule.

The collectivisation of agriculture not only standardised and industrialised Georgian wine production, but also deliberately reduced the country’s viticultural inheritance, clearing land for a handful of high-yielding varieties at the expense of hundreds of others. Of course, commercial winemaking outside the centralised system was outlawed, so the only factor preventing total obliteration was that a large proportion of Georgian households continued producing their ancestral wines for their own consumption, which kept many varieties alive, often without knowing their names. Other varieties survived in vineyards that were simply left untended.

The recovery since independence has drawn on all of these sources: the memory of village producers, the identification of surviving specimens, the patient work of genealogical research, and the work remains incomplete. Poliphonia serves as a kind of record of that ongoing excavation.

The Globalisation of Qvevri

The exchange of knowledge around the qvevri has not been unidirectional. The dominant narrative of the Georgian wine renaissance—where winemakers are reclaiming a tradition that Soviet rule suppressed—is largely accurate, according to Wregg. But what it sometimes omits is the inverse flow: winemakers from Europe, the Americas and beyond have made the journey to Georgia specifically to study a tradition that predates their own, returning not only with knowledge but with the vessel itself. Meanwhile, the presence of outsiders has allowed Georgian producers to interrogate and refine European winemaking techniques while simultaneously deepening their understanding of their own traditions.

The qvevri is now visible across winemaking cultures from Friuli, Italy to Slovenia and even South Africa, where it is being used to produce varieties like Chenin Blanc. All of this is a validation of Georgia’s heritage pillar in its competitive identity, and perhaps its most unexpected one.

The challenge is that this adoption is happening faster than Georgia is building the institutional infrastructure to ensure that qvevri remains both a protected designation of method and a marker of Georgian origin. Methods that powerful cultures fail to protect have a habit of becoming generic, and the qvevri is already showing early signs of that drift. Some producers have begun labelling wines as “qvevri” on the basis of skin contact alone, detached entirely from the vessel, the method, or the country that originated both.

Current regulatory protections in Georgia are not just inadequate, but actively counterproductive: existing laws have sacrificed designation integrity in exchange for short-term commercial interests, permitting mass-produced wines to capitalise on qvevri labelling in ways that erode the very distinction Georgia should be building its global identity around.

So, if the qvevri label devolves into a loose stylistic descriptor rather than a protected designation of origin and method, Georgia loses a core feature of its wine identity that no other country can replicate.

Subscribe now

Flight III: Rich Qvevri Reds

8. Sad Meli Winery, Aleksandrouli Mujuretuli 2022, Racha, Aleksandrouli 50%, Mujuretuli 50%, Qvevri, ABV 14%

9. Wine Thieves, Saperavi 2020, Kakheti, Saperavi 100%, Qvevri, ABV 13%

10. Periani Winery, Saperavi 2022, Kakheti, Saperavi 100%, Qvevri, ABV 15.5%

11. Gotsa Winery, Saperavi Budeshuri 2020, Kartli, Saperavi Budeshuri 100%, Qvevri Red, ABV 15%

The red flight opened in Racha, in Northwestern Georgia, with Sad Meli’s Aleksandrouli Mujuretuli 2020—a 50/50 blend of two varieties almost entirely unknown in Western markets, from a mountain wine region that produces some of Georgia’s best reds. Medium-bodied with vibrant red fruit notes, low tannins and strong mineral finish that reminds us of its cool climate, high altitude origins. The semi-sweet expression of this same blend is known as Khvanchkara, whose commercial identity remains strong in the Russian market, where tastes still tilt toward the industrial, semi-sweet wines that were the staple of Soviet mass production.

(Khvanchkara and Kindzmarauli, the semi-sweet expression of Saperavi, are both claimed as Joseph Stalin's favourite wines, which is a distinction that remains commercially active in Russia today, where consumers often find bottles bearing his likeness on the label—an act of kitsch that is deeply revealing about a market Georgian wine has historically depended on.)

Sad Meli’s dry qvevri interpretation is a conscious act of reclamation.

The gap between those two versions of the same blend is the gap between how Georgian wine has historically been consumed in Russia and the post-Soviet space and how it is being sought in Western markets like the UK and USA. However, with over 60 percent of all Georgian wine exports still destined for Russia, over-reliance on a market that absorbs volume on its own terms actively pulls the category away from the story its best winemakers are trying to tell.

The Aleksandrouli Mujuretuli was a useful prelude to what followed: three versions of Saperavi and a question about how one grape can become the entry point through which a nation’s entire wine culture can be discovered.

The analogy put forth by McSharry is that of Malbec, Argentina’s most famous grape. Malbec did not merely give Argentina a flagship variety; it gave the international market a point of attachment specific enough to be memorable and simple enough to repeat, and in doing so opened a door through which the broader complexity of Argentine wine eventually followed.

Saperavi offers Georgia something comparable. It is a grape with a distinctive, immediately recognisable character: bold acidity, deep cherry fruit, structured tannins, black fruits and sweet spice on the nose, a firmness and fullness that rewards time in the glass, as well as a capacity to age that few red varieties can match.

Wine Thieves Saperavi 2020 is a boutique expression from a single vineyard in Kvareli, which shows the variety at its most precise, full-bodied and refreshing in equal measure. Next, Periani Winery’s Saperavi 2022, at 15.5% ABV, demonstrated how the variety, even at its most concentrated and powerful, can carry that weight without showing it, the alcohol absorbed into the structure so completely that it registers as richness rather than heat.

However, if Saperavi is pressed too hard as a national identifier, it risks becoming the ceiling it was meant to open. Gotsa Winery’s Saperavi Budeshuri 2020 made this argument without needing to state it. A rarer biotype with smaller berries and thinner skin, biodynamically farmed in Kiketi just outside Tbilisi by the Gotsadze family (among the pioneers of Georgia’s natural wine renaissance), it is deeper, inkier, and more savagely fruited than a traditional Saperavi, with dried plum emerging as the dominant note. Similar to Periani, its 15% ABV is absorbed into the wine’s velvety texture. It is the kind of wine that renders the question ‘what is Georgian red wine?’ unanswerable in any satisfying way, which is precisely its value at the end of a long and diverse tasting session.

When it comes to Georgian reds, Saperavi is certainly the gateway, but what lies beyond are beautiful varieties like Aleksandrouli, Mujuretuli, Budeshuri, Shavkapito, Tavkveri and those that don’t yet have names familiar enough to print on a label in London.

Recommendations: Articulating a Coherent Competitive Identity for Georgian Wine

What the afternoon at Saperavi Social confirmed, flight by flight, was that Anholt’s diagnosis applies with precision to Georgian wine: the six pillars of the country’s competitive identity are not coordinating. Until those signals cohere, the discount remains and no amount of quality in the bottle compensates for incoherence in the channels that carry it.

The commercial and logistical realities are not trivial either. Berulashvili described importing once a year in a single container, navigating compounded logistics costs, and paying upfront before vintages are released simply to secure allocations. Wregg’s view on price is sound: a good Georgian wine at a premium is not at a disadvantage. The quality justifies the cost. But it presupposes a consumer already equipped with the reference points that prompt an enthusiastic purchase. Building those reference points is the strategic communications task and it cannot be left to importers and restaurateurs alone.

The following takeaways emerge directly from the afternoon’s conversation:

1. Name the narrative and hold to it. The category’s core story is twin-pillared: unique heritage and diversity of varieties. The idea of “8000 vintages” signals both the depth of history and the vastness of choice. That combination translates directly into commercial range: from the fresh, accessible whites the modern Western palate is already reaching for, to the full spectrum of the qvevri, to the structured, age-worthy reds that run from Saperavi as an entry point to an entire world beyond it. This story exists. It needs to be stated clearly, consistently, and from a single coordinated voice across every channel.

2. Put Georgia’s best producers at the centre of communications. The most credible version of Georgia’s wine story does not come from a trade body or a government campaign. It comes from the hands that make the wine. A coherent communications strategy must distill a competitive identity that is grassroots in origin, built around the producers who are doing the most interesting work, rather than imposed by commercial or institutional interests. The reward is a message that is truthful, authentic and aligned with Georgia’s inherent identity.

3. Establish Saperavi as the flagship variety. Saperavi is bold, accessible, and easy to pronounce. It performs the function Malbec performed for Argentina: a variety legible enough to anchor the category in a new market, distinctive enough to hold attention once it gets there. Its strategic value is not in Saperavi alone, but in what it makes possible: Aleksandrouli, Mujuretuli, Budeshuri, and hundreds of further varieties that Western markets have barely encountered.

4. Protect the qvevri before it becomes generic. The vessel is already being adopted globally faster than Georgia is building the institutional protection needed to keep it tethered to its origin. On a domestic level, Georgian legislators must restrict qvevri labelling to wines actually fermented and aged in the vessel, and revise the current loopholes that permit mass-produced, skin-contact wines to appropriate the designation for commercial gain. A wine that has never touched a qvevri has no business carrying its name. This is primarily a legislative task, but communications can build the public and trade pressure that makes legislators act.

5. Build institutional infrastructure for small producers, not just for volume exports. Georgia’s finest wines come from small, independent producers working with indigenous varieties, in the diverse terrains across the country, largely without access to the capital or support structures that would allow them to scale sustainably. The current institutional architecture rewards volume production optimised for the Russian market. Redirecting that support—through targeted grants, technical assistance, slope planting incentives, and protected designations with enforcement—would do more for Georgian wine’s long-term reputation than any campaign. The story is in these producers. The investment must reach them.

6. Treat the Russia dependency as the strategic vulnerability it is. Over 60 percent of Georgian wine exports are still destined for Russia, a market whose tastes pull commercial incentives in precisely the opposite direction from the category’s best work. Although the scale of that market is commercially tempting in the short-term, it reinforces Georgia’s strategic vulnerability by shaping what gets made, what gets funded, and what story Georgia tells about itself. Diversification into Western markets is not simply a commercial opportunity. It is the condition under which Georgia’s most distinctive producers can survive and grow.

7. Remove structural barriers to Western markets through policy, not marketing. Lower import duties, protected designations with teeth, and coordinated export facilitation in the UK and US are policy responses to a structural problem and should be treated as such. No campaign compensates for the friction that compounded logistics costs, upfront allocation payments, and the absence of trade support impose on importers who want to bring Georgian wine to Western shelves. The infrastructure has to be built before the story can travel at scale.

8. Take the long view and commit to it. The producers most likely to define Georgian wine's global reputation are not necessarily its largest. Institutional support, export infrastructure and communications resources must reach the small, quality-driven producers whose wines are already earning recognition in the markets that matter. They should not concentrate around volume players whose interests lie elsewhere. This also means thinking 10, 20, 30 years ahead: investing in climate resilience, replanting on appropriate slopes, preserving varietal diversity before more of it is lost. Above all, it means establishing a shared vision for what Georgian wine can be in the world and building everything else around that. No category has ever found its audience by accident. The ones that did it well knew early what they were trying to become.

Georgia is not an ‘emerging’ wine region. It is the cradle of viticultural civilisation, re-entering a conversation from which it was violently excluded for most of the twentieth century. Reputation, as Anholt insists, is not built in one campaign cycle. It is built over years of coherent, consistent action across every channel that carries a country’s signal: its exports, its culture, its institutions, its people. And then, one day, it is simply there. The afternoon at Saperavi Social was one small instance of that patient, necessary work.

Forms and Contents is the official Substack publication of Topouria Group, a public relations and communications agency that helps brands from Eastern Europe and South Caucasus build visibility and trust in Western markets.

Subscribe now

Wars are often framed as the inevitable outcome of forces already in motion, shaped by pressures and threats that leave no room for alternative action. In Russia, this framing has become the dominant way of understanding crisis. Over time, this shifts from explanation to limitation, restricting how events are questioned, understood, or resisted. In December 2022, Putin insisted that he wanted this war in Ukraine to end and yet in 2026 it wages on. According to Putin, it’s actually the West who started the war and is forcing it to continue; this war is something that happened to Russia, not something they chose. Faced with an aggressive, hypocritical West using Ukraine as a proxy, they had no alternative but to invade. The war was inevitable and determined by forces greater than them. Putin can’t do anything, the rest of the government can’t do anything, and you certainly can’t do anything. So who can?

No one, and that’s the point. Exercising power sometimes consists of controlling and shaping the structure of what is possible in terms of other actions. This is the exact approach that Putin and his regime have taken to ensure that their citizens remain as passive, uninterested, and compliant as possible during their invasion into Ukraine. Power, in this context, does not rely solely on coercion and instead it operates by quietly redefining the boundaries of possibility. When the space of alternatives is systematically compressed, obedience is not necessarily a result of believing but is oftentimes a logical adaptation to a landscape in which other options seem inaccessible.

The idea of crisis as destiny within Russia is not a new concept and has been deployed many times especially in the Soviet Union to limit agency during difficult times. Both their invasion into Afghanistan and the Chernobyl disaster are stark examples. For Afghanistan, the regime’s narrative framed the conflict as a just, heroic, and necessary war. Thousands of citizens volunteered to go fight in Afghanistan only to discover that what their government was telling them did not match the horrific reality of what was actually happening. One veteran explained to Belarussian author Svetlana Alexievich in her oral history Boys in Zinc, “how did I end up here? It’s very simple. I believed everything they wrote in the newspapers.”

Similarly with Chernobyl, the Soviet authorities framed the man-made disaster as an unfortunate but unavoidable tragedy that occurred due to reasons that did not need to be discussed or investigated. Citizens were mobilised through narratives of sacrifice and heroism while accountability was all but forgotten. Firefighters and clean-up “volunteers” were celebrated as patriots fulfilling a historic duty, while systemic failures were obscured behind appeals of unity and resilience. The narrative was clear: this was a moment for obedience and questioning was not welcome. In casting disaster as destiny, the regime narrowed the space for agency, encouraging passivity by presenting events as beyond the reach of individual influence or political change.

Modernisation of regime narrative

The same approach is being taken today with the war in Ukraine, only it is more sophisticated, more layered, and far more pervasive. The state constructs an environment in which alternative interpretations gradually lose visibility. Independent outlets such as Echo of Moscow and Dozhd were shut down or pushed into exile within days of the invasion. The 2022 “fake news” laws introduced prison sentences of up to fifteen years for reporting that diverges from official Ministry of Defence statements. The terminology itself is regulated such as describing the invasion as a “war” rather than a “special military operation” can result in prosecution. When language is tightly managed, the range of publicly expressible thought narrows with it, and political debate contracts accordingly.

Responsibility is also redistributed in ways that dilute individual agency and take a more deterministic approach. Mobilisation is framed as limited, necessary, and heroic; economic hardship is attributed to Western sanctions; battlefield developments are filtered through official briefings that emphasise strategy and control. After protests followed the February 2022 invasion announcement, thousands were detained, and state media characterised demonstrators as influenced by foreign interests. These actions combine legal enforcement with narrative framing to shape behaviour. The environment signals that participation in opposition carries high personal risk while offering little expectation of systemic change.

The digital sphere reinforces this structure. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram were restricted, Western news sites blocked, and domestic search engines prioritised state-aligned sources. At the same time, patriotic symbols such as the “Z” insignia, Victory Day imagery, and school programmes on “traditional values” circulate widely across public and educational spaces. Through repetition and saturation, these signals normalise war as part of regular life. Political possibility and individual opinions become compressed into a narrow channel of approved positions. Within that environment, passivity emerges as a logical adaptation to the constraints that have been carefully put in place.

Weary but still obedient

It is not that citizens are naive. They understand that their agency is constrained by the regime and that state-controlled media often distorts the truth. However, the alternatives are perceived as so futile and exhausting that meaningful resistance feels pointless. Over time, this sense of inevitability has hardened into a deeply embedded narrative of determinism which has become normalised. When political outcomes, whether its electoral results, neutralisation or imprisonment of opposition figures, or constitutional changes that further entrench executive power, are constantly framed as fixed and unchangeable, disengagement becomes rational. The result is not ignorance but depoliticisation. It leads to a population that is aware of its constraints yet increasingly detached from the belief that participation can change them.

This mindset is vividly captured in Alexievich’s oral history Voices from Chernobyl. In one account, a Chernobyl clean-up worker reflects on the surreal symbolism of repeatedly raising the Soviet flag over the contaminated reactor:

(J)ust four days after the catastrophe the red flag was already flying over the fourth reactor. It blazed forth. In a month the radiation had devoured it. So they put up another flag. And in another month they put up another one. I tried to imagine how the soldiers felt going up on the roof to replace the flag. These were suicide missions. What would you call this? Soviet paganism? Live sacrifice? But the thing is, if they’d given me the flag then, and told me to climb up there, I would have. Why? I can’t say.

He explains an internalised fatalism in which obedience no longer needs justification and persists despite clear awareness of danger. The state’s insistence on symbolic victory (seen here as “defeating” radiation) coexists with an implicit understanding that the task is irrational, yet the absence of perceived alternatives renders compliance inevitable. His fate, in his own words, seems determined not by personal choice but by what the state demands of him.

As already discussed, this pattern has not disappeared. In contemporary Russia, major political developments are similarly framed as unavoidable responses to external pressures rather than discretionary policy choices. Citizens may privately doubt official narratives, but the perceived costs of opposition being legal risk, social isolation, economic insecurity, or exile renders resistance both dangerous and exhausting. As a result, obedience persists because agency feels structurally constrained and the effort required to challenge the system appears overwhelmingly futile.

Potential paths forward

Yet this analysis also reveals something crucial: if narrative can be used to constrict agency, it can also be used to restore it. Power operates through the structuring of possibility, and narrative is one of its most effective tools. When the state repeatedly presents events as predetermined or externally imposed, it narrows the range of imaginable alternatives. But when individuals and communities articulate their own interpretations such as when they reframe events as debatable and politically constructed they reopen that space. Agency can be reclaimed through the ability to name circumstances and situations differently. Narrative can also function as a tool of independence. To construct an alternative narrative like describing war as war, corruption as corruption, and political consolidation as choice rather than fate is to reassert that history is made by decisions, not destiny. This does not immediately dissolve structural constraints, nor does it eliminate risk. But it disrupts determinism and in turn allows for some agency. By reclaiming the language through which events are understood, individuals reclaim the conceptual space in which action becomes imaginable. Agency, then, is exercised through protest and participation, but it begins with interpretation. In resisting imposed inevitability, narrative becomes the foundation of autonomy.

Since the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian government has presented a consistent and disciplined communications strategy aimed at mobilising international support and sustaining domestic morale. Ukraine’s external objectives have been clear: to secure military, financial, and political support from friendly countries. Although striking a chord with key audiences by presenting themselves as victims of unprovoked aggression, not all global audiences have been receptive to this messaging, and sympathies have gradually waned as a state of crisis has given way to protracted conflict.

The Ukrainian case offers valuable lessons on how effective narrative building and messaging can deliver rewards in times of crises but also warns of the risks of narrative fatigue and losing control of perceptions as events evolve over time.

Narrative strategy amidst crisis and effective leadership

Ukraine has consistently framed itself as a small nation under assault from a vastly more powerful neighbour. While this narrative has deeper historical roots, it accelerated following Russia’s occupation of Crimea and support for separatist movements in Donbas and Luhansk in 2014. However, the Invasion in 2022 marked a clear fissure in European Security, providing Ukraine the opportunity to embed its messaging with a more potent moral element. Conflict with Russia was no longer positioned simply as a local issue or territorial dispute, but as a contest between freedom and totalitarianism. The effect was to simplify complex historical and cultural factors into a moral dilemma and story that could be quickly understood and emotionally processed by external audiences.

This framing has been largely centred on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself. In the opening days of the war, he reinforced his decision to stay in Kyiv by publishing a series of video messages alongside senior military and civilian leaders, a powerful act of leadership which conveyed authenticity and demonstrated personal bravery, rallying the Ukrainian population to resist. His adoption of military fatigues played a key visual role in cementing his brand as a wartime leader, which along with the now famous remark to Joe Biden, ‘I need ammunition, not a ride’ becoming emblematic of wider Ukrainian national resistance.

Lesson 1: In times of crisis, detailed analysis should give way to simplicity, clarity and moral messaging. Or, In the words of Ronald Reagan, ‘if you’re explaining, you’re losing’. When audiences and stakeholders are confronted with uncertainty and shock, they respond better to simple narratives, and are inspired by leaders that assume risk. Ukraine’s successful communications strategy demonstrates that in such moments, narrative clarity does not merely shape perception, it leads to tangible results, in this case: military, financial and diplomatic support.

Adapting while remaining consistent

Between March and July 2022, Zelensky made a series of virtual addresses to the legislatures of key countries. While these speeches maintained a consistent core message: Ukraine was the victim of an invasion of its sovereign territory, and required military, political and financial support; the president and his advisors masterfully tailored their approach towards each audience.

• The first address to the European Parliament highlighted the aspirations of the Ukrainian people to enjoy the same rights as other Europeans.

• When addressing the House of Commons, Zelenski quoted Churchill and Shakespear, also compared Ukrainian resistance to Britain’s defiant spirit in the second world war.

• Later, addressing Poland’s Sejm, Zelenskyy drew on the country’s catholic traditions an quoted Pope John Paul II.

• While speaking to American law makers, Zelensky urged Congress to remember Pearl Harbour and the 9/11 attacks and linked the aspirations the of Ukrainian people to the provision of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness set out in the Declaration of Independence, going on to use the language of civil rights movement and quoting Martin Luther King Jr.

• When addressing the Bundestag, he deliberately made use of historical trauma and memory politics, connecting past Nazi crimes to events in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy would continue to make addresses throughout the war, later appearing in person in several legislatures. Following these speeches, Ukraine received large financial aid packages and deliveries of advanced weaponry such as battle tanks, fighter jets and missiles; even if president was often disappointed with the speed at which military assistance was provided.

Lesson 2: Effective communications require retaining a consistent core message, and a thorough understanding of how to tailor it to target audiences. Zelenskyy’s addresses proved to be highly effective in winning over publics and policy makers to the Ukrainian cause by adapting a core message to his audiences’ national symbols and stories.

The internal-external feedback loop

Within Ukraine, there has been a reaffirming and reframing of Ukrainian identity, simultaneously as an organic social change and due to top-down government policies. Many first language Russian speaking Ukrainians have increasingly adopted Ukrainian as their primary language, while the state has made efforts to sever symbolic links with Moscow, including reducing the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church. Similarly, the uniqueness and separateness of Ukrainian culture have been greatly emphasised. The cultural realm has been merged with a clear Ukrainian historical narrative – both to domestic and international audiences. Sovereignty and identity have gone hand in hand to present the contemporary and historical resistance of the Ukrainian people to Russian imperialism, also being quick to emphasise war crimes and abuses committed by Russian forces. More controversially, Ukrainian officials have stated that Russia is committing genocide. While this framing may have proved powerful in moral and symbolic terms, it was also highly criticised in legal and academic circles. This reveals the difficult balance to achieve in communications between using moral based messaging without risking credibility by moving beyond established definitions or evidence.

At the same time international attitudes towards the war in Ukraine have varied sharply. In Europe, publics have been largely sympathetic towards Ukraine, which along with state security concerns have led to substantial levels of political, economic, and military support. A prominent example being Sweden and Finland abandoning decades of neutrality to join NATO. The Baltic states, Poland, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries have emerged as some of Ukraine’s strongest supporters. However, support has been tempered in many countries by economic pressures, energy dependence, and domestic political divisions, with some European far-right parties remaining sceptical or hostile. Hungary has consistently obstructed European and NATO initiatives, Serbia has resisted alignment with Western policy, and Belarus is in effect a Russian satellite.

Outside Europe, Ukraine has received strong assistance from countries such as the USA, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. However, most states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have remained formally neutral. Ukrainian and European narratives have often struggled to resonate, shaped by accusations of Western double standards and by historical grievances linked to Western interventions. Many countries also maintain economic, security, and political ties with Russia and are reluctant to sever these links. For many non-Western actors, the war has been perceived less as a moral struggle between democracy and authoritarianism and more as a traditional conflict between rival powers. As a result, Ukraine has not succeeded in gaining wider global sympathy or in isolating Russia diplomatically to the extent it had hoped.

Lesson 3: Narratives are most effective when they combine legitimacy with internal and external messaging - so long as they remain selective. Instead of aiming to please or convince everyone, communication should be aimed at audiences whose interest and sympathies can align with yours.

Diminishing returns of moral framing

As the war progresses, global perceptions of Ukraine have shifted. Early sympathy has given way to narrative fatigue, with repeated messaging losing its impact. Political dissent within supporting states, alongside the high economic and political costs of backing Ukraine have reduced public willingness to sustain support. Ukraine’s narrative success has always depended on domestic political climates and audience reception. As the war has become prolonged, international support has waned, and the conflict is increasingly perceived as ongoing rather than existential. While Ukraine remains widely recognised as a victim of aggression, the strength of its early wartime narrative has diminished.

Lesson 4: This evolution demonstrates that moral framing is most powerful in moments of rupture and shock, but difficult to sustain over time. Narratives can mobilise, legitimise, and inspire, but cannot (indefinitely) override interests, and domestic or international political realities. As moments of crisis transition to a permanent situation, narratives are increasingly overtaken by pragmatic calculation and structural limits. Narrative communication must adapt to changing circumstances and perceptions to remain effective.

Conclusions

Ukraine’s narrative strategy since 2022 represents one of the most sophisticated and effective cases of modern wartime communication. Through disciplined messaging, effective leadership, and cultural adaptation, the Ukrainian state successfully constructed a powerful moral and political narrative that resulted in mobilising its people to resist the invasion and gather international support. It also serves as a case study for how narrative power can wane over time, demonstrating that communications must be continuously readapted to fit changing circumstances.

Ultimately, the war in Ukraine illustrates that modern conflicts are fought not only on battlefields, but in the contested spaces of meaning, memory, identity, and perception. On this front, victory is never final, attitudes are constantly shifting through time, audiences, and political contexts.

East vs. West

Radical change is seldom triggered organically from within. It comes about as a reaction to objective circumstances that force one to think critically about current models of operation and then adapt to meet new realities. However, well-intentioned impulses toward change and adaptation do not guarantee success, especially if familiar forms of implementing change are inherently flawed, misguided, and destructive. This is the overarching dynamic that characterizes the final years of the Cold War from the Soviet perspective, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms after 1986, the end of the nuclear arms race with the United States in 1989, the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and reunification of Germany in 1990, and rapid collapse of the USSR in 1991—the culminating moment after 45 years of East-West hostilities. In this essay, I will defend the argument that these monumental events were triumphs of Western policy on two levels.

On a relational level, U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union during Ronald Reagan’s presidency proved effective in achieving its intended practical objectives in ending of the Cold War, while on an ideological level, the Western model of operation (i.e. its political and economic system) asserted its superiority over the Soviet model. Of course, it would be incorrect to make sweeping judgements and place responsibility on a single party when discussing the intricate tapestry of causation that produced these results. Thus, this essay discusses the interrelationship between the Reagan administration’s policies and diplomacy with the Gorbachev administration’s ‘revolutionary’ political and economic reforms that ultimately spelled the demise of the Soviet empire.

Peace through strength

Just prior to his ascendance to the office of U.S. President in 1980, Ronald Reagan declared that ending the Cold War was the primary motivator for his presidential campaign. To achieve this, he was determined to take a different approach to dealing with the Soviet Union than that of his three predecessors, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. He believed that the existing framework for détente—even though it brought about increased cooperation and even an arms control agreement in 1979—was too passive and reactive and did not solve the underlying problem at the heart of the East-West conflict. Understanding the importance of the ideological dimensions of the Cold War, Reagan was more interested in being proactive and engaging with Soviets in order to fundamentally change their thinking and behavior, rather than continuing the tit-for-tat and damage-control policies that characterized much of the two countries’ relationship over the previous decades. However, engagement had to be preceded by strategic preparation.

In the 1970s, the Soviets had attempted to gain a one-sided advantage over the West by deploying nuclear tipped missiles capable of reaching all NATO capitals in Europe, and even after Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II treaty in 1979, intelligence services found that the USSR continued arms build-up as the U.S. slowed it down. Therefore, Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander Haig believed it was imperative that the U.S. build up its defense capabilities so that they could arrive to the negotiating table in a position of strength—they did not trust that the Soviets would unilaterally reduce arms in order to match U.S. levels. A key piece of security policy that emerged from this was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983, a space-based missile defense program that, in Reagan’s own words, was ‘a long-term research and development program to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles’. SDI, although purely defensive in nature, would tigger great paranoia among the Soviets and become a critical element of American leverage during arms control negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Domestic economics as foreign policy

Concerning economic measures, sanctions against the USSR proved to be a less than effective component of foreign policy. This was the case when the U.S. attempted to weaken the Soviet oil and gas sector by undermining the 3000-mile Trans-Siberia pipeline that would bring Siberian natural gas to Central Europe. In addition to exerting diplomatic pressure on European allies in order to restrict credit and investment into the project, the U.S. also imposed a unilateral embargo on sales of oil and gas equipment to the USSR. Reagan and Haig warned Europe of dependence on Soviet energy, but the efforts proved to be futile as the pipeline was constructed few years later. In another case, Reagan decided to lift the embargo on grain sales that was imposed by the Carter administration following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. These sanctions did nothing to disincentivize Soviet behavior and were causing more damage to U.S. producers than anyone else.

However, the economic aspects of the two countries’ relationship was far from irrelevant. What played to Reagan’s advantage was his almost evangelical conviction that American capitalism was superior to Soviet communism. This was reinforced by the success his economic policies of lowering taxes, tightening monetary policy, and deregulating the market. Although its long-term legacy remains controversial due to increases in wealth inequality, ‘Reaganomics’ did allow the U.S. to break free from the stagnation of the 1970s and ushered in a boom period in the 1980s while, in contrast, the Soviet economy continued to stagnate under a near-zero growth rate. In this regard, U.S. domestic economic policy became an element of foreign policy as the administration aimed to bridge the gap between American success and Soviet failure. This is exemplified by Reagan’s choice of economist George Shultz to replace Alexander Haig as Secretary of State. Shultz was to help lead the persuasion campaign founded upon Reagan’s sincere conviction that once the Soviets understood the prosperity generated by free markets, they would embrace reform and liberalize their economy. Of course this message was implicitly and explicitly reinforced among the Soviet masses by American soft power that increasingly penetrated Soviet borders by way of music, Hollywood movies, and other media. The entertainment industry was a public relations tool without equal as it showcased Western freedom and abundance and thus organically reinforced official U.S. policy directed at winning Soviet hearts and minds.

Reagan Doctrine

The American policies reviewed thus far were all centered around the core mission of Reagan’s foreign strategy, which was to ‘roll back’ Soviet influence around the world, not just contain it. He saw the Cold War as a grand ideological battle whereby communism had to be eradicated wherever it took hold. He famously referred to the USSR as the ‘evil empire’ and called communism a ‘disease’ against which Americans required ‘frequent vaccination’. Internationally, efforts to ‘reverse Soviet expansionism’ translated into the U.S. support for right-wing governments in the Philippines, Chad, and apartheid South Africa, and for anti-communist militants in Afghanistan, Angola, Grenada, and Nicaragua, the last of which culminated in the Iran-Contra scandal in 1986 that resulted in the indictment and resignation of key officials in the administration.

The aggressive policies of what later became known as the ‘Reagan Doctrine’, the continued build-up of U.S. defense capabilities, and Reagan’s unabashedly hostile rhetoric were just some of the factors that halted diplomatic negotiations between American and Soviet leaders between 1980 and 1985. Another factor was that three Soviet General Secretaries (Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko) had died in rapid succession of one another. ‘That was one of my problems, my delay in getting started in dealings with the Soviet Union—they kept dying on me’. However, with the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the USSR in March 1985, Reagan finally had a counterpart with whom he would eventually find common ground.

The degenerating Soviet system

When Gorbachev came into office there was already a crisis of confidence in the Soviet system. The country was failing to overcome Brezhnev-era stagnation which was made worse by the financial burdens of the ongoing arms race and the war in Afghanistan. The decline was not only economic. With corruption, crime, alcoholism, and drug addiction running rampant, it appeared that the USSR was in cultural and moral decay as well. It was clear that something had to change if the country were to survive. Even though the idea of political and economic reform had not originated with Gorbachev but with his mentor Yuri Andropov, it would be Gorbachev who would bring his ‘new political thinking’ into practice and implement the reforms that attempted to open up the Soviet system, democratize their politics, and liberalize their economy. However, these reforms had not yet been announced when the diplomatic summitry between him and Reagan commenced in Geneva in November 1985.

Naturally, these were the types of changes that were in perfect alignment with the American objective of changing Soviet thinking and behavior as a prerequisite to ending the arms race and the Cold War. However, as far as Gorbachev was concerned, reforms only applied to domestic policy. He has admitted that upon his appointment as General Secretary he remained ‘totally dedicated to traditional Soviet goals’ and had no intention of changing the course of his country’s foreign policy from that of his more hardline predecessors. However, as Jack Matlock writes in his definitive account of the summits, Reagan would challenge Gorbachev to ‘think differently about Soviet security, the place of the Soviet Union in the world, and the nature of Soviet society. It altered both the substance of negotiations and the way the dialogue was conducted, but it did not require the Soviet Union to compromise its own security.’

Strategic communication

Perhaps the key differentiator of Reagan’s approach from that of his predecessors, and especially that of the Soviets, was the transparency of intent that underpinned his diplomacy. This transparency was a product of both Reagan’s confidence in the strength of the American position and his understanding of Soviet weaknesses, which largely stemmed from the CIA studies he commissioned early in his administration. He knew the Soviets were desperate to end the arms race because their attempt to compete with the U.S. was straining their already wretched economy. During the first meeting in Geneva, Gorbachev’s insecurity about this reality prompted him to preemptively deny it, before the topic was even broached. Although he had the reputation of a reformer, his instincts were still that of a Party functionary. This made the Americans suspicious of his intentions and made it difficult to establish trust, the lack of which was at the core of the nuclear arms race and the larger Cold War dynamic.

Reagan was weary of Soviet history of non-compliance with arms controls treaties, which was what prompted his uncompromising attitude on two critical items on the negotiating table—on-site inspection provisions that were absent from the Carter-era START II treaty and the SDI program. Both of these items were unpalatable for Gorbachev. Even as they ultimately came to an agreement on inspection—in addition to reducing the number of nuclear warheads and the number of troops stationed in Europe—SDI continued to be a problem. The more Gorbachev pushed against it, the more important it became for Reagan to keep it. After all, the program was defensive, not offensive, and Gorbachev’s insistence on limiting it only bred American suspicions that the Soviets still fostered ambitions for nuclear superiority. Although no agreement was reached in Geneva, the groundwork for future talks had been established.

For Gorbachev, an inflection point came on April 26, 1986, when an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant rendered a large swath of territory in the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSR uninhabitable. The response from his government, which initially downplayed the severity of the catastrophe in order to protect its reputation, made the dire situation even worse. Chernobyl heightened Gorbachev’s antipathy toward nuclear weapons but also brought to light the extraordinary failures of a system where secrecy and lies were inherent in the design. His drive toward liberal reforms was accelerating.

Several months later in October 1986, he and Reagan reconvened for another summit, this time in Reykjavik. Although he was now more open to compromise than he was in Geneva, Gorbachev’s persistent intolerance for SDI led to a tense exchange toward the end of the summit. Neither side was willing to yield and talks ultimately unraveled. The meeting was considered to be a failure at the time of its conclusion, but a retrospective reassessment reveals that it in fact was a turning point in Soviet thinking about their foreign policy. Once tensions subsided, a more cool-headed Gorbachev came to the conclusion that he would have to link his domestic and foreign agendas if he wanted to end the arms race that was crippling his country.

By the spring of 1987, he was talking about the ‘humanization of our international relations’ with his Politburo colleagues and making public declarations that ‘our foreign policy stems directly from our domestic policy to a greater extent than ever before’. In December of the same year, the U.S. and Soviet Union signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty during the summit in Washington, thus taking the first concrete measure to end the arms race. Later on, Gorbachev also dropped his efforts to limit SDI, which eventually paved the way for the START I Treaty that was signed by the subsequent George Bush administration.

Soviet withdrawal

Parallel to summitry, liberal-democratic reforms in the Soviet Union were intensifying and the official view on the status of the Warsaw Pact countries was changing. Gorbachev came to think that they had become more of an economic liability than an asset to the Soviet Union, and in 1988 he made the decision to withdraw troops from both Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, leaving those governments to their own devices. What helped justify this dramatic shift to himself was the legacy of is personal hero Vladimir Lenin, whom Gorbachev viewed as having made the pragmatic foreign policy move of signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918, which ceded control over vast swaths of Eastern Europe to Germany in order preserve the Soviet regime. In Gorbachev’s conception he was doing the same, and so he framed his decision as triumph of his ‘new thinking’ rather than a geopolitical defeat. By granting self-determination to Eastern Europe, he was acting in the interest of his own perestroika revolution and in the interest of preserving the Soviet Union.

The withdrawal from Eastern Europe opened the floodgates of revolution that quickly swept across the region in 1989 and led to the fall of communist governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The only place where Soviet troops were still stationed was East Germany, where they would remain until a great powers agreement was reached regarding reunification. In November, an ecstatic crowd dismantled the Berlin Wall and opened the free flow of people, and by end of the year, 340,000 Berliners had migrated from East to West. Early 1990 saw the initiation of the diplomatic process that came to be known as the ‘two plus four’ model, which put the two German states at the center of negotiations while the four occupying powers (U.S., France, UK and USSR ) were external partners.

A breakthrough in negotiations arrived in July during a summit between West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Gorbachev, during which Gorbachev conceded to the Western unification proposal that granted Germany full sovereignty and NATO membership, as opposed neutral status that the Soviets sought, paving the way for the signing of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany in September 1990. From the point where Reagan and Gorbachev began their talks in Geneva in 1985, diplomatic negotiations around concrete policies related to disarmament and national security became tangible stands-ins for more abstract issues—the fundamental assumptions, values and ideals of their respective countries. Thus, ultimately it is a reflection of Western triumph in persuading Gorbachev to come around to an open and reconciliatory foreign policy position that made ending the Cold War and the reunification of Germany possible.

Gorbachev’s ‘Leninist’ revolution

The external factors discussed above were instrumental in setting in motion the fall of the Soviet Union. However, the seeds for its demise were planted not in the 1980s with Gorbachev, but at its conception between 1917 and 1921—with Lenin. The USSR was founded upon the pillars of Bolshevism, whose fundamental pillars rested upon the rejection of the bourgeois-democratic phase of Marxist teleology, the primacy of the political vanguard, and centralism of authority. These were in direct contradiction to the Mensheviks conceptions that favored Western-style philosophical universalism, compliance with capitalism, and decentralization of power. Strangely, Gorbachev personally identified with Lenin and thought of himself as true Leninist believer. He came into his position as General Secretary with the intention to revitalize the Bolshevik tradition, not destroy it. However, there was a fundamental dissonance in his revolutionary approach.

By taking reckless and misguided measures of liberalizing the economy and accelerate economic growth (uskorenie), opening up Soviet society (glasnost), and restructuring and democratizing the Soviet government (perestroika), he effectively removed the economic and political underpinnings that were holding the country together. This released forces that made it impossible for Gorbachev to hold onto control. He believed that relativizing the Party’s power would vitalize the Soviet polity and in turn secure the Party’s power and legitimacy. The consequences were the direct opposite. Essentially, he was attempting to achieve Bolshevik ends with Menshevik means. Moreover, he also underestimated the power of nationalism in the Soviet republics, believing that a powerful countervailing force of civic Soviet identification would trump ethnic demands. The latter Gorbachev realized the implications of his policies and tried to backtrack to authoritarianism, but it was too late. In August of 1991, Communist Party hardliners attempted to overthrow Gorbachev in a failed coup that evokes comparisons to the Kornilov Affair of August 1917, during which anti-revolutionary forces attempted to seize power of the government to prevent Bolshevik takeover. Soon, the last of the Soviet republics declared their independence and the USSR officially ceased to exist on December 25, 1991.

Never before and once again

In summary, this essay argues that, even though there was momentum toward domestic reform in the USSR upon Gorbachev’s arrival to power in 1985, the critical linkage between Soviet domestic reforms and foreign policy that paved the way to East-West cooperation and later the ‘two plus four’ talks that reunified Germany were triumphs of U.S. policy, and more specifically, triumphs of Reagan’s diplomacy in persuading Gorbachev to bridge the policy gap. On a domestic level, however, the corrosion of the Soviet system’s foundation made it impossible for him hold the country together and thus spelled the end of an empire.

In many regards, the collapse of the Soviet Union reset Russia to its situation after the fall of the monarchy and prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, that thin sliver of time between February and October 1917 when the county had a fragile opportunity to go down a liberal-democratic road. The same opportunity was presented to the new Russian Federation in the 1990s, but it was lost once again as it steadily regressed into autocratic rule under Vladimir Putin. Thus, retrospecting from our current vantage point, the Soviet experiment appears to be little more than a long and treacherous detour in history, the legacy of which continues to haunt the psychology and security of people both inside and outside Russia.

Two famous aphorisms attributed to the politician Viktor Chernomyrdin capture the Russian cynicism bred from repeated historical tragedies: ‘This has never happened before, and now it’s happening again’; ‘We wanted things for the better, but they turned out as always’.

A triumph for diplomacy

The apotheosis of the post-World War II international order was the diplomatic summitry between the United States and Soviet Union in the late 1980s, which ended the Cold War and the nuclear arms race that had overshadowed global politics during the previous 45 years. This was the culmination of a slow post-traumatic process by which diplomacy (as opposed to war) regained broad acceptance as the primary institution for the construction of the global order and brought about a period of (relative) peace and stability under the American-led unipolar order. The triumph of diplomacy was not only exemplified by successful bilateralism between two great powers but also the inclusion of virtually all nation-states as members of multilateral institutional frameworks, chief amongst them being the United Nations. The fruits of this triumph were further harvested following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ushered in a period of rapid expansion of international society through the integration of Eastern European states into the EU and NATO, as well as further integration of non-Western countries into the global economy. The diplomacy involved in constructing this international order both gives credence to and provides historical material for the English School of international relations, the principles of which will help inform our understanding about the theory and practice of diplomacy as the creative art of global ‘order-making’.

Navigating the middle road

In the English School’s view, diplomacy is the institution that elevates the ‘anarchical’ world that is determined purely by the material power of states (the realist view) to a world that is fundamentally social, that is, constructed by the interests- and values-based interactions between states. This understanding helps us bridge the gap between practical demands and moral claims in international relations. By employing diplomacy as the vehicle that enables us to navigate this ‘middle road’, we may reconcile material considerations—physical size, geographic location, military strength, and financial resources—with moral considerations, such as protection for the weak, self-determination for small states, human rights, civil liberties, social justice, etc. Thus, diplomacy serves a ‘civilizing’ function, in the sense that it provides an avenue for great powers to conduct business without the use of violence and war, while at the same time allowing weaker states to exercise influence that is disproportionate to their material power.

It is a highly limited and cynical worldview that attributes political agency solely to the materially powerful and claims that ‘might is right’. This type of deterministic view renders humans as passive objects of the world and robs most people (and states) of their agency in shaping the environment around them, thus implicitly reinforcing the flaws and injustices that characterize the status quo power structure. On the opposite side, it is an equally limited and fallacious worldview that entirely rebukes power politics on the grounds of morality, especially if this view is rooted in the misguided feeling that the weak and oppressed hold the moral high ground over those who are strong and dominant. Even more dangerous is the conviction that, in history, moral positions will inevitably triumph over amoral ones. Such ‘progressive’ worldviews tend to breed highly imperfect theories, dogmas, and ideologies for overcoming those injustices. Such attitudes also rob people of their agency by removing their grounding in objective reality in a way that turns them into instruments of a particular ideology. Diplomacy, both in form and content, serves the essential function of mediator between these extreme worldviews and thus becomes a mechanism through which ‘the truth in the middle’ is allowed to emerge organically, over time and over practice. As Aristotle famously said, ‘virtue is the mean between two vices’.

Perspectives on what actually constitutes diplomacy are wide-ranging and difficult to pin down. At the broadest institutional level, Hedley Bull defines diplomacy as ‘the conduct of relations between states and other entities with standing in world politics by official agents and by peaceful means’. For most practical purposes, this definition is satisfactory as it is limited enough to allow researchers to focus on the study of official communications and interactions between states—the fundamental political units of international relations—while at the same time, it is broad enough to allow for the flexibility necessary for qualitative studies that allow theories to emerge organically, taking scholars on a bottom-up journey from the concrete to the abstract, as opposed to the reverse method of imposing theoretical abstractions onto concrete realities. This historically ‘grounded’ approach is one of the key differentiators of the English School from other theoretical schools in international relations.

A Christian ethic

Interestingly, the underlying assumption of this methodology is the essentially Christian notion of the imperfect and imperfectible nature of material human existence. This was explicitly articulated by the School’s founding scholars, the historians Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight—both were Christians in the Augustinian tradition who subscribed to the primacy of sin in human affairs and rejected the progressive doctrine about the perfectibility of humankind. But, prior to exploring the implications of Christian theology on the study of diplomacy and international order more broadly, it is important to briefly address the issue of religious influence on historical scholarship. Awareness of such influences could make any critical reader suspicious of a scholar’s biases and the rigors of his method, or even dismiss his work on the grounds that a ‘Christian approach’ will inevitably slide into moralistic interpretations and present a highly skewed version of reality.

However, Butterfield’s earliest historiographical writings give a very different view. He himself scolds the tendency of Protestant, progressive, and Whig historians to pass moral judgements on the events of the past and to interpret history as a deterministic march toward the present, supposedly morally superior state. He rejects their idea that history is ‘the study of origins’ of events, as this implies a teleological direction toward those events. Such an approach tempts historians into imposing meaning onto history in hindsight and ultimately projecting this meaning into the future by formulating misguided progressive theories of a utopian historical ends, which runs contrary to the Augustinian view that the greatest sin is committed when people think they can establish heaven on earth—equivalent to trying to take the place of God. The implication is that, even if history indeed has a ‘meaning’, it is beyond the capacity of the flawed human mind to grasp that meaning. Any attempts to do so are not only futile but also hubristic, and will always produce dangerous and destructive outcomes. From Bolshevism to Nazism, the twentieth century saw the culmination of such intellectual hubris in their most disastrous forms.

Analytical humility

To contextualize our thinking within a broader intellectual history, it is worth noting that an important prelude to the English School was the development of analytical philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In contrast to the ‘subjective’ and ‘inward’ tradition of German continental philosophy, analytical philosophy put forth a more rigorous methodology for approaching philosophical problems, at the core of which was the analysis of the language and the terms in which those philosophical problems are expressed. The essence of analytical philosophy is captured by Wittgenstein’s milestone work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which opens with the following proposition and is then broken down into its sub-arguments hierarchically:

‘1. The world is everything that is the case.

‘1.1. The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

‘1.11. The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.

‘1.12. For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.

‘1.13. The facts in logical space are the world.’

In the face of this reasoning, a scholar or theoretician who seeks to understand the world in its completeness (and thus formulate a perfect model for it) is rendered impotent due to the impossibility of analyzing the totality of facts by which the world is determined. The only choices he is left with are to either 1) ignore this reality and go about the task of analyzing data and formulating universal theories that will forever remain flawed, or 2) take the position of humility, acknowledge his limits in the face of infinite knowledge and abandon the impulse for perfect understanding in favor of a methodical approach that seeks to uncover the truth as it existed in a particular place, at a particular time, and among particular individuals. This means studying ‘the past for the sake of the past’, not for the sake of the present—that is, looking at historical events in the terms by which the historical actors conceived of them.

What is elegant and counterintuitive about this interpretative method is that, by foregoing the dispensation of moral judgements from the present, the form of the ‘good’ emerges from history organically. This is because, along with the primacy of sin, the traditional Christian view acknowledges the primacy of grace in human affairs. Thus, what becomes evident from Butterfield’s work is that the Christian ethic governs more the form and the method of historical interpretation rather than its content and its judgements. Thus, morality is not imposed onto history artificially, but instead, human grace emerges from the grounded study of social interactions in history. By these measures, international society organically establishes itself as a moral phenomenon through intersubjective mediations by states that inhabit an anarchical and amoral material world—that is, the manifestation of grace given the condition of sin. Diplomacy is the self-reinforcing mechanism through which this social international order is constructed and maintained.

Diplomacy as spiritual labour

The Christian ethic discussed so far is not limited to the historiographic study of diplomatic patterns. It is also useful in identifying both the professional nature and the normative ideals of diplomatic practice. The Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili identifies the exertion of ‘concentration’ and ‘effort’ as the bridge between subjective experiences and their objective manifestations. In this regard, an individual who practices a labour, a craft, or a profession is engaging in the act of taking her metaphysical essence and bringing it into the empirical realm. He refers to this act as the phenomenology of the ‘event’—the experience of which elevates a person from living in nature to living in history. By the same measure, such effort delivers man from living in a deterministic world of material power to living in a consciously-constructed society. Engaging in speech and communication with other individuals is one important form of this ‘effort’, and doing so in an official capacity in the conduct of international relations is the task of diplomacy. Thus, the professional practice of diplomacy lends itself to the label of ‘craft’ that Mamardashvili talks about. When viewed through the parameters of the ‘phenomenology of the event’, diplomacy takes on the dimension of a spiritual labour, and thus, when an individual merges herself with the labour of diplomacy, she is not only engaging in a creative pursuit by participating in the construction of the world order, but also in one that is essentially Christian in its form (although not always in content—for example, if you’re a ‘diplomat’ representing the Russian state apparatus).

The normative ideals of diplomatic conduct that have emerged through diplomatic practice and tradition are also reflective of this essence. Of course, the diplomatist’s fundamental role as messenger is evocative of the role of Christ as prophet. But beyond that, the values that have become organically entrenched in the conduct of diplomacy directly reflects those preached in Christianity—moderation, humility, restraint, respect, and charity. Again, these are ideals imposed neither by theology nor theory, but rather those that emerge organically from a social reality where human interests, life experiences, and fundamental assumptions diverge and where misunderstandings are common. In order to conduct business of international relations without resorting to violence and war, the values listed above are not only preferable but absolutely indispensable.

Again, the nature of international order is fundamentally incompatible with rigid structuralist conceptions or any meanings that are imposed top-down. International order emerges out of an ancient and inscrutable history that is deeply interconnected, intersubjective and mutable. Thus, the conduct of diplomacy, that is the negotiation of agreement by peaceful means toward the active construction of the international order, demands an appropriate level of flexibility on part of the diplomatist. As far back as 1716, the Francois de Calliers distinguished the ‘negotiator’ as a profession onto itself and argues that diplomatists should never be drawn from ecclesiastical, military, or legal professions largely due to the rigidity and inflexibility of those fields.

Enemies of diplomacy

English School scholars refer to diplomacy as ‘the master institution of international society’, but to understand its primacy, we must also look at the repeated attempts to subvert the institution. Even if it is conceived in Christian terms, diplomacy often draws scathing criticism on the grounds that its practitioners often condone and engage in cold pragmatism, moral flexibility, or even outright dishonesty in pursuit of their interests. These criticisms are usually directed from highly dogmatic positions where a person views his own ideology as the only ‘truth’ and is therefore intolerant of what he perceives to be the diplomatist’s impurity of spirit, weakness of conviction, and fluidity of loyalties—whether they be political, religious, national, ethnic, or other loyalties. Agents who are most hostile toward the institution of diplomacy are those with revolutionary dispositions, and they are most likely to use ‘diplomat’ as a term of derision. For example, Leon Trotsky viewed traditional diplomatists as aristocrats who had their own interests beyond those of the nation and as having a separate society of their own parallel to the international society. His other objections were to the secrecy by means of which they conduct business and their susceptibility to contamination and compromise by foreigners with different ideologies. And even though he served as the first Secretary of State of the U.S., Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward diplomats was not much different,

The underlying trait of all revolutions—from the English (1688) to American (1776) to French (1789) to Russian (1917) to Chinese (1949) to Iranian (1979)—is a revisionist disposition toward the international order, which is a byproduct of what the revolutionaries perceive to be their providential mission of globally exporting and universalizing their own revolutionary ideologies. (This does not mean, however, that there is moral equivalency amongst them). These efforts always begin with attempts to subvert and undermine the ‘corrupt’ or ‘impure’ institution of diplomacy that creates obstacles for implementing the revolutionary mandate. However, history has repeatedly shown that such attempts ultimately end up being futile, or even backfiring, and revolutionary states, time and time again, have been forced not only to make peace with the primacy of diplomacy in international politics, but also to develop and master the art of diplomacy so that they are better able to construct the world according to their own vision. The aggregate of all these competing visions and diplomatic mediations throughout history amounts to an image of the global order as a collectively-created, living piece of art that is always changing and is never complete, but also ingrained with deeply layered themes that, taken together, reveal the true meaning of human history.

Sounds almost romantic, until you remember all the nukes.

Whose truth?

The most consequential sentence that Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili ever uttered in his life was ‘Truth stands higher than homeland’. He said this during a speech in front of the 1989 party convention of the People’s Front, one of the many newly-formed nationalist parties that had emerged in the Georgian SSR at the height of the Glasnost period leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. His words were quickly rebutted by a ‘How dare you?!’ from an impassioned member of the audience, after which the order of proceedings deteriorated as more hecklers emerged and drowned out the scattered claps of support in the auditorium.

The incident proved to be a fateful moment for Mamardashvili as it determined the general attitude toward him in Georgia thereafter. A populace captivated by nationalist euphoria quickly labeled him a traitor, that is someone who sold out his country in exchange for ‘truth’, a word that had become devoid of any real value given the cynicism of the average citizen who was a daily witness to the degenerating charade that was late Soviet life.

Moreover, the ‘truth’, as most Soviet citizens were taught to understand, had always been readily available for anyone who was willing to sit down and familiarize himself with Communist Party doctrine. It was cheap. ’Homeland’ on the other hand, that is a sovereign nation-state for Georgians, was something that almost everyone thirsted for, a dream that had evaded them for generations.

The rupture

The collective memory of the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia—established in 1918 by Georgian Mensheviks following the Bolshevik Revolution but forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union in 1921 —served as a rallying cry for the independence movement in the late 1980s, but it was not until April 9, 1989, when the Soviet Army killed 21 peaceful protestors in Tbilisi, that the National Liberation Movement became the dominant force in Georgian political life.

It was in this charged atmosphere that Mamardashvili, who had spent his career as a professor of philosophy at Moscow State University and worked exclusively in the realm of philosophy of mind, addressed his countrymen directly through lectures at the Georgian Academy of Science while also stepping into his duty as a citizen, participating in public affairs, and adding a political dimension to his philosophical thought.

Over three decades later, his famous line has returned to mainstream public discourse in Georgia, perhaps because it so well encapsulates the dilemma that is faced by the independent republics that endured Soviet rule, the lingering shadow of which people are still unable to escape.

Post-Soviet dilemma

The difficulty of reconciling national liberation with universal truths presents itself as a central problem in the process of decolonization and the struggle for self-determination. For citizens in post-colonial and post-totalitarian countries, resolving this dichotomy is a critical step toward delineating where subjugation ends and emancipation begins. However, the colonialist forces working against its resolution are even stronger than they were immediately following Soviet collapse. The center of gravity for this phenomenon is of course Russia.

The manifestations are obvious: dictatorial rule of a Tsar-like figure, a depoliticized and passive society debilitated through ideology and fear, widespread cynicism and low value for human life, imperialist aggression against its neighbors and occupation of their sovereign territories.

These phenomena are not much different than they were for most of Russian history or from the Stalin era in which Mamardashvili grew up and began to develop his philosophy. Thus, this essay takes the axiom—‘truth stands higher than homeland’—as a starting point for analysis and look at the forces that shaped Mamardashvili’s thinking during his career in Moscow to address the question: ’How did experiences in the imperial metropole shape ideas of post-colonial citizenship?’

Ideology as suitability

Mamardashvili’s mode of thought emerged as a response to the oppressive ideological circumstances of the Stalin and post-Stalin eras. By his own description, there was no such thing as philosophy in the Soviet Union, at least not in any way that was independent of the ideological apparatus of the state.

Amongst his colleagues at Moscow State University, the typical experience was to take Marxism-Leninism as the starting point and walk along the deterministic path of dialectical materialism. Of course, there would come the inevitable clash with reality that caused disillusionment with the perceived distortion of ideals, at which point, any critical attitudes that developed would always lead back to questions of how to restore the purity of Marxist-Leninist theory.

This ideological loop was preserved by people who were unable or unwilling to distinguish purity of ideals from their own self-interest because preserving this structure of thought also preserved their own material well-being.

For Mamardashvili, this is the most significant feature of ideology: ‘The voice of ideology is that which hangs precisely upon that which suits us, that which suits our body that has assimilated to a certain way of life… the sound of that which suits me is not my own voice. […] But it is difficult to discern this because we think and recognize and act according to those things which are comfortable for us, which suit us, and which will save us from that situation where we must dare to see reality.’

‘Atypical experience’

With the Khrushchev Thaw and De-Stalinization, the professional philosophers whom Mamardashvili talks about continued their intellectual activities with the renewed purpose of correcting those distortions of ideals and advancing progress within Marxism. This was in line with Khrushchev’s new approach to building communism ‘in the main’ by 1980, which meant that many of Mamardashvili’s colleagues found appointments to newly-created idealogical posts within the party apparatus.

What Mamardashvili refers to as his ‘atypical experience’ in this ecosystem is his disinterest in following along this path and his disinterest in the ideals which others had bequeathed from the revolution. As he puts it, he had neither the ambition to improve Marxism nor the ambition to improve society.

Revolutionary dispositions toward life are tied to ideology, and a deterministic ideology at that, whose conception of history is the movement in the direction of inevitability. Mamardashvili equates such ideological dispositions to ‘sleep’, ‘death’ and ‘passivity’ wherein causation is attributed to things in humans that are not humane, that is, determinant of a natural and material world which is alien to the essence of our inner conscience.

Forms and contents

The topological approach to philosophy that he articulates is one that arrives to this essence, or truth, by changing the topological structure, or the form, of thought rather than the information, or the content, of the thought. The mind-bending abstractness of this approach is self-evident, but thankfully the descriptions of its methodology are beyond the scope of this paper. The implications of it are relevant, however: ‘If we are talking about conscience, we are talking about that which is given intrinsically and for which there is no empirical foundation. Thus, there is no proletarian conscience or bourgeois conscience. […] To remain within the essence of conscience requires attention and strain, the effort to gather oneself in totality.’

On the Kantian foundation of essence, Mamardashvili rebuts the Marxist notion of class conscience while also putting emphasis on a key element of his own philosophy—‘effort’. That is effort in the classical, heroic sense (think labours of Hercules), where an individual arrives at insight by way of concentrated labor of thought, remains inside of his essential experience, and then merges himself with a conduit (a labour, a craft, or a symbol) that allows him to realize this experience in the world, and therefore in its completeness.

This is what Mamardashvili calls the phenomenology of an ‘event’, the experience of which elevates a person from living in nature to living in history. This spiritual hero is liberated from ideology and acts independent of deterministic circumstances in the world around him. He is the real embodiment of freedom, vitality, truth, agency and completeness. In the next section, this model is placed within a post-colonial, post-Soviet and post-secular context, wherein ethnicity, nationality and religious symbolism become a dimension of analysis.

Russia-Georgia entanglement

During the years that he spent in Moscow, Mamardashvili maintained a somewhat mythic conception of Georgia in his imagination. He believed his country to be fundamentally antithetical to Russian-Soviet society and perhaps immune to the detrimental ideological forces that haunted the Russian mass mentality. But his repatriation in 1981 shattered this myth: ’For thirty years I lived and believed that we Georgians are not as ignorant as Russians. […] I returned and realized that this was an illusion, that the process of mental, psychic, linguistic decay was too far gone.’

In one of his lectures, Mamardashvili cites the Russian philosopher Vasily Rosanov’s summative life work, titled Apocalypse of Our Time (1919)—which Rosanov wrote at the height of the post-revolution Civil War in a state of destitution and hunger that ultimately led to his death—and relays that:

‘…in Russian culture exists a certain force—and it was precisely this force that brought about this [apocalypse]—that is a constant anticipation of some sort of salvation from the outside, […] that is founding everything else upon the extent to which an outside force will help me, save me, rather than filling the space and time of my life with my own effort, in order to create within myself something for which I am able to respect myself. […] You all know the extent to which this disrespect was widespread in the tens and twenties of this century, and which later on was established as the supreme trait of the Soviet mentality and Soviet system. To the same extent, this trait also established itself and caught on amongst us, amongst Georgians.’

This is at the core of what Mamardashvili refers to as a ‘damaged relationship with life’ and an internal sense of incompleteness that defines Russian people and, thus, Homo sovieticus as their derivative. It is a circumstance where the topological structures of thought, that is the ideology, which are active within the mentality of the colonial power is transposed upon that of the colonial subject. This phenomenon is perhaps the most lasting imprint of Soviet rule. However, he stops far short of ethnic determinism (i.e. racism) for such circumstances.

On the contrary, Mamardashvili puts forward the notion that perhaps the greatest victims of colonialism are the Russian people themselves, for their minds are colonized by an imperial ideology wherein the price of being dominated is the permission to dominate others. It is ‘not an empire of Russian people but an empire by means of Russian people’. Thus, long after Lenin and Stalin, we continue to ‘see millions ready to give themselves lovingly to the same force.’

From subject to citizen

Moving further, we bridge the gap between the individual conscience and the public realm of political participation—from the thinking subject to citizen. As Nemtsev and Faybyshenko note, political aspects of Mamardashvili’s philosophy ‘emerged out of his “social metaphysics,” as applied to the general problem of individual self-determination,’ and what brings this metaphysics into the the realm of politics is the criterium of ‘publicity’. Publicity is what makes the ‘event’ (described earlier), compatible with law and ethics. This means that the realization of an event in the public realm brings a subject’s essence out of the ‘realm of shadows’ and into the open common space (res public) of political participation.

By this measure, citizenship becomes the individual’s heroic effort to come into absolute consciousness of freedom, merge himself with a universal symbol and bring his experience into completeness in the world. In the Georgian national context, Mamardashvili establishes that the Christ symbol is the conduit through which the thinking subject is connected to the universal. This is not a theological statement but a stand-in for the universality of essential truth.

This symbol is what liberates the thinking subject from the determinism of his body and allows him to live in history and not in nature, and by the same measure, live in history and not in an ethnos. ‘For if we Georgians are a Christian nation, that means we are the sum of personalities who in their Georgian ethnic body completed these spiritual acts and thus were born as a nation and not as an ethnos.’

By the same means, the Georgian nation connects with the universal community of other nations, those which emerged as a nation by merging themselves with the Christ symbol—that is European nations. Through this logic, Mamardashvili reconciles the national with the universal, bringing him to his fateful conclusion—‘truth stands higher than homeland’.

‘Citizen of an unknown country’

Mamardashvili died of a heart attack at the age of 60 on November 25, 1990, several months shy of Georgia declaring its independence from the USSR on April 9, 1991. Today we look to him not only to understand his philosophical thought but also his personal experiences so that we may gain a normative ideal for a model of emancipated citizenship. What makes him a profound figure is that he lived the entirety of his life in the totalitarian ideological darkness of the Soviet Union and died before he could witness its demise, yet he embodied that which constitutes the heroic post-Soviet citizen ideal.

His freedom was independent from the empirical, ideological or legal nature of the state under which he lived. Rather, Mamardashvili compared the philosopher to a spy and referred to him as a ‘citizen of an unknown country.’ Ultimately, his story is a tragic one, that of a man who never found a sanctuary in his homeland and to a large extent remains misunderstood there.

His disposition about the painful topic of his country is best summarized by what he wrote in the preface to his last published work, a compilation of his lectures on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: ’We belong to each other and this will never happen. I am Georgian and I never was.’