Watching the unfolding story in Georgia has left me with a depressing sense of déja vu. I've been trying to understand why watching and reading about the drama in the Central Asian republic has brought on such a rush of anxiety that I can feel the dead weight of history pressing on my brain.
What triggered all this apprehension was the extraordinary footage that captured the terror on Eduard Shevardnadze's face as the Georgian president was literally swept out of office by a surge of people power. What troubles me about that moment was my reaction to the footage; instead of being caught up in the revolutionary euphoria of the hat-in-the-air moment, I found myself worrying about Mr. Shevardnadze.
I've been trying to rationalize my response. I think the footage triggered an impulsive concern for the safety of an old man whose expression obviously betrayed a fear of what an angry mob might do to him. But it's more than that.
You see, I am of the generation that emerged into adulthood just as the Berlin Wall came down. I can still vividly remember the euphoria of those days, when it really did feel as though the old world order was being dismantled brick by brick. The end of the Cold War promised so much; in short order, poets would become politicians and self-determination would redraw the map of Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Old-world strongmen who had been propped up by Cold War geopolitics suddenly felt the chill of people power and began a stampede to the ballot box or exile. It really did feel like the end of history for my generation, and bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.
But then reality started to take big mouthfuls out of our futures. The death of Yugoslavia. The first U.S. Persian Gulf war. Genocides in Rwanda. In no time, the promises of that era evaporated into the thinning ozone layer. When I look back over the past 15 years, it is amazing how all the optimism I felt about the future has given way to a grim acceptance of the natural disorder of things.
And I suspect that's why Mr. Shevardnadze's fall from grace troubled me so much. I remember him as the subtle Soviet foreign minister from 1985 to 1990, whose liberalism let us see that we'd been spoon-fed far too much Cold War propaganda about Soviet leaders. To see him as a broken old man as his administration was toppled was like watching the death of one's youth condensed into a few seconds of film.
But what really bums me out about Georgia is that it seems to prefigure the imperfect future being charted for our world by our leaders. And you can almost sum up that story in one word: pipelines.
It is hard to imagine anything duller than oil pipelines — but the unfortunate fact is that oil makes our world go round and that oil is often found in places that are inhospitable and require pipelines to deliver us our daily energy bread. Like the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The BTC is a $3.6-billion (U.S.) pipeline down one of the routes through which oil from the Caspian Sea can flow from Azerbaijan through Georgia to Ceyhan in Turkey. BTC is the route favoured by the Americans to get an estimated 20 billion barrels of oil to the market. The Americans have been propping up the Shevardnadze regime with good old-fashioned “military aid,” ignoring the fact that much of that military aid was being siphoned off by Mr. Shevardnadze's cronies.
The U.S. got mad when it became clear that the wily old man was playing games. As The Globe's Mark MacKinnon has reported, Georgia's future went pop! when Mr. Shevardnadze signed a secret 25-year deal to “make the Russian energy giant Gazprom its sole supplier of gas” and then had the nerve to sell the electricity grid to another Russian firm — muscling out AES, the company that the U.S. administration had backed to win the deal.
The whole episode stinks of oily geopolitics. Think of a conflict and you can be sure that a pipeline is not far away. Of course, most of us, if we're lucky, won't be directly affected. At worst, we might get despondent that 14 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we're back to the good old days of power games between Russia and the United States.
