Parliament Speaker: for Georgia, becoming member of European Union not about entering exclusive club but long-overdue reunion

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Monday said the recent years’ geopolitical upheaval revealed that cultural identity was crucial for defining the future of the European Union.

In his address at the Conference of Speakers of Parliaments of European Union Member and Partner Countries in Budapest, Papuashvili noted that while the other regions of the world were outgrowing Europe economically, expanded their populations and military capabilities, Europe’s response should be rooted in the common heritage, values, and the persuasive vision for the future.

“Therefore, the common vision of the European future should rest not on contrived ideological constructs but time-tested civilizational values. The discussion about the future of Europe should be a two-way movement, not a unilateral preaching about the virtues that only part of Europeans understand and agree”, the Speaker said.

“Unfortunately, this is what we see, sometimes, in some European countries’ and institutions’ stance towards some of its members and candidate countries. The paradigm of this attitude is that some countries should be trained towards becoming ‘truly European’, according to the standards that are, by definition, essentially contested. As newcomers to European Union politics, we clearly see that there is a certain hierarchy of ‘Europeanness’ inside the Union. However, nobody should have a monopoly on that matter”, he continued.

Papuashvili further added that Europe was always evolving, and its current institutional form - the European Union - did not represent Europe in its entirety, therefore, in his opinion the European Union should listen to wider Europe, new, old, and the oldest.

He also noted that in the case of Georgia even if the country regained formal independence in 1991, Georgia had had an extensive history of national governance for many hundreds of years, and a unique culture that spanned millennia.

“The seeds of our parliamentarianism can be traced back to the same time as the signing of the Magna Carta, when Georgia witnessed the first attempt of curtailing the rights of absolute monarchy. We are also co-creators of modern democratic Europe. I represent the Parliament which was first elected democratically in 1919, which had the first ever, internationally unprecedented, progressivesocial-democratic majority, and which ensured women’s full electoral rights, including 5 women parliamentarians being elected, 106 years ago”, the Speaker added.

Papuashvili stressed that all this indicated that for Georgia, becoming a member of the European Union was not about entering an exclusive club but a long-overdue reunion.