ABSTRACT
The tortured process of post-Soviet Georgia’s attempt at state-building can only is partly traced back to its political, economic and social inheritance from the USSR. A central drama of post-Soviet politics is that of fostering a broadly shared outlook, sense of unity, and common purpose—in short, a new national identity. In Georgia, due largely to its elites’ encouragement of a romanticized, chauvinistic, exclusive national identity, the nation is divided and the integrity of the state itself is now seriously threatened. The former Soviet republics were suddenly granted statehood without the prolonged period of development that enabled Western Europe to resolve social and economic problems and to nurture their national identities more or less organically. Decades of Russification and Sovietization, of tacit or explicit praise for the imperial enterprise and denigration of national strivings—whether of the tsarist or Soviet periods—leave these newly independent states searching for their nationhood in the imagined, romantic past.
