The Washington-based think tank The Quincy Institute has published another article on Georgia, examining the process of Georgia’s integration into the European Union, its current difficulties, and recent developments.

According to the author of the article, Almut Rochowanski, EU accession is “an arcane process, so it’s important to clarify what actually happened and what didn’t”.

“EU accession is an arcane process, so it’s important to clarify what actually happened and what didn’t. After eight years as an EU associated country (a sort of half-way house for Europe’s periphery), during which GD adopted a raft of EU regulations at a faster clip than its peers, Georgia was allowed to apply for full EU-membership in March 2022.

The EU presented a list of broadly formulated “priorities” - conditions Georgia had to fulfill to obtain candidate status. There were poison pills in the small print: GD would have to share power with the opposition, let EU-appointed foreign experts vet senior judicial appointments, allow NGOs agitating to get the government sanctioned and deposed to participate in law- and policy-making, and more. Another priority - “de-oligarchization” - turned out to violate the EU’s own civil rights norms. After an unresolved tug of war over these priorities, Georgia was granted candidate status in December 2023.

In recent years, EU accession has morphed from a technocratic-managerial process into an extended obstacle course, in which at every stage arbitrary new demands may be introduced. Georgia may have won candidate status, but accession “negotiations” (a misnomer for supervised adoption of the EU’s entire body of law) do not follow automatically. The government must still accept those same old priorities that GD considers incompatible with the country’s sovereignty.

On top of that, the EU declared in June and again after the elections in October that it was “halting” Georgia’s accession indefinitely, citing Georgia’s laws on foreign funding for NGOs and on the “protection of family values and minors” as reasons. And that it would cancel EUR 121 million of budget support. So even before PM Kobakhidze’s shock move, Georgia was in an accession purgatory unprecedented in EU enlargement history”, - reads the article.