Georgian Parliament Speaker calls for prudence on path to EU

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Wednesday said the country’s aspiration for European Union membership was driven by the goal of ensuring a “safer and more secure” future, but warned that the journey must be approached with prudence rather than haste.

In his social media message, Papuashvili noted that “before one reaches the destination, one must first tread the path. Knowing the safe haven’s coordinates means little if one throws the ship and the passengers into the storm”.

He stressed that Georgia’s survival throughout millennia was due to foresight rather than rushed decisions. In today’s turbulent global environment, he argued, the priority must be safeguarding the nation during the EU integration process.

“It was the foresight, not the hurriedness that enabled the Georgian people to survive through the millennia. Therefore, in today’s crazed world, our primary concern, on the path to the European Union, is to not damage and destroy ourselves to the extent as to have nothing left to secure after reaching the EU”, the Speaker said.

Papuashvili emphasised that while the EU was founded as a peace project, peace itself was not automatically guaranteed.

“To be a peace project means to be a responsible force. Europe should not give in to self-indulgence. We Georgians know all too well that peace is never more than a blink away from extinction. What the EU’s Georgia Mission’s well-trodden propagandistic campaign tells us is that they cannot or do not realize what the Georgians’ main concern is, and what it means to lead the Georgian state and Georgian people into the storm”, he continued.

Criticising what he called the EU Mission’s “propagandistic campaign”, he argued that Brussels fails to grasp the core concerns of the Georgian people and leadership. He laid out several conditions for a genuine peace project:

• In the heat of the war, one should not, as Brussels did, demand from a nation who recently lived through three wars, to escalate with Russia;
• One should not fund extremism, as Brussels did;
• One should not interfere with the elections, as Brussels did;
• One should not slander the entire nation, as Brussels did;
• One should not rummage wrongly in Georgians’ millennial values, as Brussels did.

“These things are easy to say but they proved too difficult to be done, because it does not suffice to be a cover-page European but requires possessing true Europeanness, i.e. prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance”, he concluded.