Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW

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Georgia on my border

by Paul Wells on Sunday, May 4, 2008 7:33pm - 0 Comments

The first or second file on Dimitry Medvedev’s desk when he becomes Russia’s president on Wednesday will be the increasing likelihood of a border war with Georgia. A week in Tbilisi last December didn’t qualify me to decipher the competing claims of aggression and provocation now poisoning the relationship between the two countries, but for what it’s worth, Russia’s skittishness is greater than it would already have been because (a) its ally, Serbia, lost Kosovo through a UDI that Canada (eventually) supported; (b) Georgia is a candidate for NATO membership, extending the alliance right to Russia’s border. Its candidacy is supported by Canada.

For what it’s worth, I supported recognizing Kosovo’s independence and I think Georgia may, eventually, be a valuable NATO member. But the stakes are non-trivial: the whole point of NATO is that if one member is attacked all must respond, a doctrine whose potential cost the Kremlin is eager to demonstrate.

Tags: Georgia, NATO, Russia

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Tom

At the risk of being that irritating pedant guy who’s totally missing your point in the name of having a Ken Jennings moment, NATO has “extended right up to Russia’s border” since expanding to Estonia/Latvia/Lithuania in 2004.

And at the risk of being the supremely irritating pedant guy who’s really, really missing your point, I should contradict the above and point out NATO’s technically had a land border with Russia since its founding in 1949. (I guess the elite armoured reindeer cavalry divisions that secured the famed Norwegian front must exist only in my imagination.)

OK, time for a real point: has anyone tried to get some sense of what Joe Muscovite would make of sending young Russian boys to shoot at young Georgian boys—and not because of Georgia posing any sort of threat to Russia proper, but on behalf of some of the more obscure members of the Caucasus’ ethnic soup, the Abkhazians and Ossetians? Unlike the Chechyn conflict, Georgians aren’t exactly skulking about the capital, holding ballet performances hostage.
Arnav

Umm… aren’t all declarations of independence “unilateral” (as someone more learned than me pointed out to me today)? Isn’t the REAL question how pissed off people get?
Paul Wells

Unilateral secession is not the only way to do it. The other kind is negotiated or consensual: Norway and Sweden, Czech and Slovakia, Canada and Britain (!). UDIs are indeed common but international customary law is very suspicious of them, and international recognition is almost never granted outside cases of colonialism or systematic repression of fundamental rights. Kosovo got theirs because there was a war. Chechnya, even with a long and bloody war, can’t get recognition. Abhkazia and South Ossetia are kind of in between — they’re called “frozen” conflicts because international opinion prefers not to settle the question of where their sovereignty lies because it’s too much of a hassle. But the thing is, Kosovo was frozen for a long time too. Then it thawed.