Ethnicity,decentralisation and the fissile state in Georgia

This article addresses the problems entailed in decentralising a successor state of the former Soviet Union. On many different scales, Georgia should be a wealthy country. The population is well educated, there is rich agricultural land, a thriving wine industry, several mineral extraction industries and access to oil. The central argument of this article is that it is governance, or rather the failure of governance that is at the heart of many of Georgia's problems—in particular, a failure over a number of years to find a balance between the considerable ethnic diversity of the country and their aspirations regarding self‐government, and the need for the assertion of central power from Tblisi in occupying the power vacuum left by the demise of the Soviet Union. The structure of the article moves through an analysis of the context of decentralisation, into a brief survey of the major ethnic groups and the nature of the local government system, paying particular attention to the attempts by Tblisi to provide a coherent glue for a state that is liable to break apart. The concept of the ‘fissile state’ is used to convey this brittle context within which institutional reform needs to take place given the pressures from below and the pressures exerted by external actors as Georgia seeks to move closer to the European polity. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.