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Certain things are sort of clicking into place here. The biggest is why France has traditionally been so… um… engaged, with Francophone Africa. That never made much sense to me. I mean, France’s economic and strategic interests here are pretty minimal. But now I see it. If you’re French, it must be incredibly refreshing to be in a place where French is the language of learning and prestige, where everyone who matters speaks French, and where there’s no need to break out the English for clarification. If I were a French businessman, diplomat or military officer, this would make me really interested in these countries.

Another interesting point: they speak good French here. The accent can get funny sometimes, but it’s clear and precise and uses all those wiggly bits in the subjunctive.

Also… I’m not sure how to put this… educated Burundians have a whole host of tics that I associate, correctly or not, with Francophone Europeans. I met with a former minister today, who kept numbering his topics and writing them down on pads while stabbing the air with his pen. Remove the melanin, and he could have been an enarque sitting in a Directorate office in Brussels, explaining a new initiative on standardization.

English is creeping in. Like everywhere, it’s the language of crappy action movies and pop music and fun. And one day, it may do more than creep. Burundi is a little unusual in that everyone speaks the same native language, Kirundi. (As compared to, say, Senegal or Nigeria or Kenya, where there are two or three or four major local languages plus lots more little ones.) So, French isn’t needed as a common language to bind the peoples together. They could switch to teaching the kids English tomorrow; the only thing that’s keeping French in power is tradition and inertia. On the other hand, tradition and inertia are pretty powerful, so Burundi might stay Francophone for a long time to come.

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It’s kind of a crappy article. The scary-looking graphic omits several countries (Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania) because they don’t fit the pattern; Romania’s growth has been accelerating, while the other two have been constant. It ignores the non-EU part of Eastern Europe, which — excluding Russia, but including Ukraine — is most of it. And even just focusing on the EU members, it fails to note that of the region’s three largest economies (Poland,Czech Republic, and Romania), two seem to be doing just fine.

And when it talks about Poland? Check this out:

In the biggest economy, Poland, things look better. Growth in the first quarter of 2008 was a sprightly 6.1% on a year earlier. Many Poles who left to work in Britain and Ireland are coming home, tempted by higher wages. Unemployment, which was 20% in 2003, has all but vanished in most parts of the country. But growth is now likely to slow, particularly if interest rates keep rising: they were 4% in 2007 and are 6% now, with another rise likely. That will strengthen the zloty further; it has risen against the euro. That may be a reason why Poles are returning from Britain, but it hurts Polish exporters.

So we have a bunch of good news — fast growth, rising wages, pretty much zero unemployment — but rising interest rates are strengthening the zloty! Oh horrors.

I dunno. I’ll freely confess that I slept through a lot of my Macroeconomics of Development class, but I seem to recall that rising interest rates are fairly common in a rapidly growing middle-income economy. (When you have fast growth, rising wages and low unemployment, it’s either that or allow inflation. There are pretty good historical reasons for the Polish central bank to choose this instead of that.) As for the zloty, again, absent a peg a rising currency is almost de rigeur. I realize there’s not much room for analysis in a ~500 word article, but this is really underwhelming.

Also… take a look at the graph again. Even the worst performers are still projected to grow around 3%, and most are between 4% and 5%. Those are still growth rates that would make a Western European Finance Minister weep with joy. Of the EU-8, only two seem like plausible candidates for a crash or a recession in the next two years; the others are looking at, at worst, growth slowing to “merely fast”.

Eastern Europe has problems, no question. The region as a whole is running a huge current account deficit. Interest rates are rising. Corruption is a problem, especially in the two newest members. Public investment, especially in infrastructure, lags badly. At least one economy — Hungary — looks like it could suffer a serious crash in the next couple of years. And looming over all is the demographic crisis… not an issue at the moment, but set to start contracting labor pools and raising dependent-to-worker ratios in just a few more years.

But still: we’re talking about a region that hasn’t seen a contraction, a recession, or even a slowdown in seven years. Where growth rates of 5% or 6% have been common, even normal. Where income, productivity and wages have been rising steadily for most of a decade. In the long term, of course growth rates are going to drop. That’s inevitable. The interesting questions are how and when… and at a macro level, whether (say) Romania will stabilize at an income level 50% of the EU average, or 75%, or more.

But meanwhile, the 00’s are shaping up as Eastern Europe’s golden decade, when they closed a big chunk of the gap with the EU-15.

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The state of relations between the two peoples is such that, when a rumor arose that the Russians were using Armenian air bases to bomb them, it was immediately and widely believed by the Georgians. (It wasn’t true.)

At the same time, most Armenians have warm feelings towards Russia. Which warm feelings are not entirely requited — Russians don’t view Armenians with a lot of affection and respect — but that’s another story. Imperial Russia rescued them from the Turks, after all, and then the USSR allowed Armenia to industrialize and Armenians to rise almost to the top of the Soviet hierarchy.

There’s a widespread belief in Armenia that Russia tilts their way in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute… probably not true, but there it is. More to the point, there are a couple of thousand Russian soldiers in Armenia; it doesn’t get a lot of publicity, but they’ve been there since the 1990s, quietly watching Armenia’s border with Turkey. Drive south from Yerevan, and you’ll see their bases, Russian flags and all.

And then of course, there’s Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenians are grimly determined to hang on to NK. So they have a strong interest in seeing some post-Soviet boundary changes. If Russia claws off South Ossetia and Abkhazia, not just de facto but de jure, that’ll be a powerful precedent in Armenia’s favor.

All that said, Armenia’s position in the recent conflict has been… nuanced. You see, Armenia’s borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan are closed. They have a land border with Iran, but it’s short, and crossed by a single two-lane road that closes every winter. So, pretty much everything that goes in or out of Armenia — including the single rail line, the single highway, the single fiber-optic cable, and the microwave phone link — goes through Georgia. 90% of their imports come in through Georgia, and about 95% of their exports go out that way. The Georgian port of Poti is Armenia’s window on the world. Simply put, Armenia is a man trying to eat, drink and breathe through a fairly narrow hose. If the Georgians were to become sufficiently annoyed, they could devastate Armenia’s economy overnight.

So, while Armenian public opinion is firmly on Russia’s side, the Armenian government is playing it safe. They’re a friendly neutral to Russia, coolly correct to Georgia.

Over in the Balkans, a similar situation prevails in Serbia. Though for somewhat different reasons. The Serbs think of themselves as having a special relationship with Russia. This is partly for historical reasons, but mostly because the last two governments have banged the “Russia will come to our rescue!” drum really hard. Russia has backed Serbia firmly on Kosovo; the Russian veto is not the only thing keeping Kosovo from general international recognition and a seat in the UN, but it’s by far the most important.

So, Serbian public opinion is pretty pro-Russian… but the current Serbian government is a lot more circumspect. That’s because the current Serbian government is (I am simplifying here) pro-Western. In a Serbian context, that means they’re… not anti-Russian, but a lot less pro-Russian than the previous government or the current opposition.

One odd thing: logically, the Serbs should be supporting Georgia, since Abkhaz or Ossetian independence, never mind their annexation by Russia, would be a real threat to their legal and political position in Kosovo. If Russia seriously tries to convince the world that Abkhazia should be independent, it’s going to be noticeably harder to insist that Kosovo shouldn’t be. Looking down the road a few years, it’s not hard to imagine a grand bargain by which Russia sells out Kosovo in return for general recognition of its territorial claims in Georgia. A few thoughtful Serbs have pointed this out, but at the moment their voices are being drowned out by the chorus of “go team Slav”.

Russia has other friends on this issue: Mongolia, Belarus, some of the central Asian states. But that takes us out of Europe, and anyway this post is long enough. Key point: while most of Europe is viewing Russia’s actions askance, not every country is seeing things in the same light as Poland or Estonia.

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That didn’t work out so well. Bulgaria’s northern neighbor Romania jumped on Bulgaria’s back taking the opportunity to grab a couple of border provinces. In the south, the Turks counterattacked to recover some of their losses. Meanwhile the Greeks and Serbs rolled the Bulgarians back.

When the dust had settled, Bulgaria had lost some thousands of soldiers and almost all the territory that had been gained in the earlier war. They lost half of Thrace, southern Dobrudja, and almost all of Macedonia. If Balkan geography isn’t your strong point, let’s put it this way: they lost almost everything they had fought for, including stuff that really should have been theirs.

And they never got it back. Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in the First World War, hoping to make good the losses of the Second Balkan War; they were able to grab Macedonia and Dobrudja, but once the war ended they lost all that territory and more. Then in 1940 they joined the Germans again, and once more they got back Macedonia… only to lose it a third time, this time for good, in 1944. They did eventually get back a bit of Dobrudja, but the rest of the lost lands were gone for good.

Bulgaria today is about two thirds the size it would have been if they hadn’t tried that surprise attack in June 1913. Skopje and Adrianople would be Bulgarian, and Lake Ohrid, and much of the northern coastline of the Aegean. If you’re Bulgarian, you’ve probably spent some time in mournful reflection on this.

Of course, lots of countries have lost territory in wars. Germany, Hungary, Turkey and Russia all came out of the First World War a lot smaller than they had been. Then Germany lost more territory in the Second World War, as did Italy and Poland and Romania. In the 1990s, the Russians saw much of historical Russia carved off into Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States. Just a few months ago, Kosovo declared independence from Serbia. But most of these were the result of long, protracted, conflicts — World Wars, the Cold War — or of large, long-scale demographic and social trends, like differential birthrates or economic decline. What makes the First Balkan War unusual is that it was the result of a single bad decision… a single stupid, unnecessary bad decision that ended up doing permanent harm to the nation.

So, here’s my take: Georgia has just had a Second Balkan War. They tried a surprise attack to resolve a dispute over land that should “rightfully” be theirs… and they lost. The Bulgarians were shocked when the Romanians betrayed them and the defeated Ottomans turned around and bit back; in retrospect, these things seem obvious, and historians have spent most of a century arguing over how the Bulgarian leadership could have been so goddamn stupid. The Georgians were shocked… oh, you get the idea.

Anyway, here’s the thing: the Second Balkan War poisoned Bulgaria’s history for two generations. It sucked them into two World Wars, caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, destabilized the country and stunted its development. Interwar Bulgaria developed a remarkably evil terrorist organization devoted to regaining the lost territory — and, of course, killing anyone who wasn’t sufficiently dedicated to that cause.

I’m inclined to doubt that Georgia will go the same way; most obviously, it doesn’t look like there’s going to be another World War any time soon. But losses of national territory are hard for any nation to accept. Almost a decade after the 1999 war, Serbia’s politics are still being distorted by the tidal pull of Kosovo — and Serbia has the European Union on its border, pulling it hard in a different direction. Georgia has nothing to keep it from indulging in a protracted spasm of victimized nationalism. We can certainly hope they won’t go that route, but I’m not sure why they wouldn’t.

More informed opinions are, as always, welcome.

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Because he was a complete jackass.

All across Eurasia, in the early 1990s, you had a first generation of post-Communist leaders taking power. And by and large, it wasn’t a very promising crop. You had drunks (Yeltsin), slimy connivers (Iliescu), petty, mean-spirited nationalists (Tudjman), slimy connivers pretending to be petty, mean-spirited nationalists (Milosevic), corrupt thugs (Lukashenko, Smirnov), guys who had no idea what the hell they were doing (Izetbegovic, Berisha) and just plain lunatics (Niyazov).

But in terms of sheer damage inflicted upon his hapless country, nobody — not Yeltsin, not Berisha, not even Milosevic — came close to Gamsakhurdia.

There’s a whole long backstory about Gamsakhurdia, and if you like you can go and read it. Briefly, he was the son of a very important Georgian family (his father was one of the nation’s great literary figures) who grew up to be an intellectual, anti-Soviet dissident, and fervent Georgian nationalist. As a teenager, he got thrown in a Soviet psychiatric ward for a while; as an adult, he did some time in jail; meanwhile, he built a career as a writer and translator, circulated a lot of samizdata, and feuded viciously with other Georgian intellectuals. There’s a whole book to be written on his early life — it’s a very Soviet story — but suffice it to say that he was in and out of trouble for over thirty years before emerging as leader of independent Georgia.

Whereupon he promptly led the country into disaster. Gamsakhurdia led the drive to revoke South Ossetia’s autonomy in 1990, which led directly to the Ossetians counter-seceding and calling on Russian — later Soviet — help.

It’s possible that South Ossetia might have seceded anyway. On the other hand, maybe not… the Ossetians didn’t love the Georgians, but they didn’t hate each other, and in 1990-1 it wasn’t obvious that going with Russia was an alternative. An emollient policy towards the minorities might have worked; failing that, there was always the possibility of delaying a confrontation until Georgia’s embryonic military was ready to roll. Certainly it’s hard to imagine a worse policy than Gamsakhurdia’s “we’re revoking your autonomy — suck it up!” without having either the guns or the political clout to make it stick.

Gamsakhurdia then mismanaged things so badly in Georgia itself that within a year he’d been ousted in a coup. Here’s a summary from a (sympathetic!) article on his tenure:

Nor can the fall of Gamsakhurdia be explained as the struggle of dictatorship against democracy. Gamsakhurdia’s anti-democratic programme was clear from the very beginning… Gamsakhurdia was simply not qualified to be a president. He knew how to address rallies, how to appeal to the public, how to find active supporters; but his paranoid suspiciousness made him unable to keep his supporters on his side. He was obsessed with the problem of personal loyalty and failed to develop rational political behaviour. He did not master the art of making a temporary deal with less dangerous opponents in order to get rid of more dangerous ones. He was able to turn friends into enemies, but not the reverse.

He also managed to trash Georgia’s economy pretty thoroughly. Not that anyone was doing such a great job of managing a post-Soviet economy in the early 1990s, but Gamsakhurdia had absolutely no idea what he was doing, and so managed to make a whole bunch of stupid-to-disastrous decisions in very quick order.

So the Georgians — or rather, a disaffected coalition of Georgia’s elites — kicked him out, and replaced him with former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Gamsakhurdia sulked in neighboring countries for the next couple of years, then invaded Georgia just at the height of Georgia’s campaign in Abkhazia. In fact, he crossed the border just as the battle for Sukhumi, Abkhazia’s capital, was reaching its height. It’s an open question whether the Georgians would have lost anyway, but Gamsakhurdia’s invasion made it a sure thing: Sukhumi fell to the Russian-backed Abkhaz forces just three days later, and the Georgians were expelled from the province within weeks.

It didn’t do Gamsakhurdia much good, because the Russians, having won the key battle in Abkhazia, abruptly decided that they didn’t need him any more. In a move so cynical that it’s still rather startling to contemplate, they threw their support behind Shevardnadze — who’d been up at the front lines in Sukhumi just a few weeks earlier, trying to rally Georgia’s forces to hold against Russia’s Abkhaz clients — and pulled the plug on Gamsakhurdia.

Gamsakhurdia never did much of interest after that. He continued to insist he was the rightful President of Georgia for a few years, and then he died in obscurity and exile. (Mysteriously, of course.)

So what does this have to tell us about Georgia in 2008? Well… maybe that’s best left as an exercise for the reader.

But here’s a personal note. Like a lot of people, I had high hopes for Saakashvili and his new regime. The Rose Revolution, you may recall, involved the overthrow of a Shevardnadze government (still in power over a decade after Gamsakhurdia’s expulsion) that had grown intolerably sluggish, sclerotic and corrupt.

Saakashvili was young, energetic, and started off making all the right moves. Does anyone remember when he fired all the traffic cops? That was brilliant. And then there was the whole Ajaria thing. Hardly anyone has mentioned it, but Saakashvili managed to finesse one separatist region back into the fold without bloodshed. And he made a major dent in corruption — which is to say, it dropped from “universal and crippling” to “nearly universal and a huge problem”. And he said all the right things about liberalization and modernization and planting the seeds of European values in the stony soil of the Caucasus.

But then…

The first straw in the wind — the first thing that made me say ‘uh-oh’ — was his treatment of the Armenian minority. There are two or three hundred thousand Armenians in Georgia, and they’ve been there since forever. They’re not very assimilated, but they are very well integrated — bilingual, tend to be educated and employed, don’t make a lot of problems. They’re no sort of threat to the state: they have no separatist ambitions (for one thing, they’re too geographically dispersed), and Armenia has made it clear that it wouldn’t support anything like that. They did have some modest and negotiable requests: more autonomy, Armenian-language schools, the usual minority stuff.

Well: Saakashvili just dumped on them. Gave them nothing. Smacked down their requests — treated them as borderline treasonable — and tightened the screws on small but symbolically important stuff like bilingual testimony in court, double citizenship, and the use of the Armenian alphabet in public. Basically made it clear that he wanted them to assimilate or get the hell out to Armenia.

That was the first thing. The second thing had zero practical impact but, for me was a huge red flag. Combined with the treatment of the Armenians, it’s what made me say “okay, wait a minute, I think there’s a problem here”.

The second thing was when Saakashvili rehabilitated Gamsakhurdia as a national hero. Which is the official line today: Gamsakhurdia was the noble, misunderstood father of free Georgia. Sure, he made mistakes, but his intentions were always the best! And it was evil outside (Russian) influences that brought him down.

Sometimes the symbolic isn’t symbolic enough, you know?

And that’s my bit of Caucasus history for today.

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