However, alongside swelling state coffers, better-working institutions, a stronger military, the restoration of state sovereignty in the autonomous republic of Achara, and greater government legitimacy came alongside a process of what we might call de-stating. Under Shevardnadze, corruption and insolvency prevented the state from providing elementary services to its citizens, but under Saakashvili, the withdrawal of the state from the economy was ideological, drawn from the philosophies of Hernando de Soto, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan. Driven by the global orthodoxy of de-regulation, privatization, and free trade, under the militant leadership of Kakha Bendukidze – the state minister for economic reforms who declared he would sell everything except Georgia’s “conscience” Georgia experienced a paroxysm of privatization. Everything went under the hammer from railways and hospitals to ports and hydro-electric generating dams. The privatization crusade led to increased foreign investment and growth (8 to 10 percent a year), but a proposal for decreased welfare support (with the notable exception of pensions), job reductions in the public sphere (the state is still the largest employer), and reduced state control over minimum wages.

These tensions between a strengthened state and exceptional economic growth on the one hand, and a weakening society and continuing poverty on the other, is no surprise to students of post-communism but rather is a common pattern in post-communist states. It generally results from four factors: the reaction to the economic and political collapse that followed the destruction of the USSR, the legacy of hierarchical Soviet structures, a weak civil society, and Western imposition of tough conditions for financial stability. The combination of these four factors often leads to a one sided interpretation of the meaning of state power. For new state builders in a hurry, state power is often viewed as the state’s ability to coerce and direct from above. This is what Michael Mann in his work calls despotic power.

The term despotic power needs some explanation because it should not be taken literally. Mann distinguishes between two forms of state power, despotic and infrastructural. Both forms, he argues, coexist in all states – democratic, authoritarian, strong, and weak. Despotic power is power that comes through the autonomous institutions of the state exercised by ruling elites. It does not require state elites to undertake “routine, institutionalized negotiation with civil society groups.” Infrastructural power, in contrast, is “the power of the state to penetrate and centrally coordinate the activities of civil society," and ensures citizen compliance through coordination and cooperation between civil society and government institutions and services. Democratic capitalist states, according to Mann, employ both forms of power, but are strong because their infrastructural power is penetrative and more extensive.

In Georgia, reform since 2003 has centered on increasing the state’s despotic power; witness the constitutional amendments in February 2004 that enhanced presidential power over parliament, the revision and reduction of Achara’s autonomous powers in July 2004, the elimination of local self governing units in 2005, and the administrative (rather than judicial) punishment of corrupt businessmen. Add to this Saakashvili’s style of administration – abrasive and youthfully dismissive of groups and interests associated with the Shevardnadze regime or the opposition – and the militant advocacy of an unregulated free market, and there lies a situation in which extra-parliamentary resistance based on popular dissatisfaction becomes likely, if not inevitable. In the last four years as the Rose Revolutionaries focused on rebuilding the state and energizing the economy, they ignored the need for popular participation, coordination with civil society, and economic protection, including elementary labor rights and employment opportunities in the backward provinces and impoverished countryside. In other words, infrastructural power was neglected.

To be fair, the Georgian government was not entirely one-sided in its approach. Educational reforms which introduced parent-teacher boards and communication projects that promoted the integration of isolated provinces including those inhabited by national minorities, and anti-corruption campaigns (despite the liberal regulations that accompanied them) all extended the state’s infrastructural power or its ability to govern through its contacts with interest groups, associations, ethnic communities, and businesses. But overall, neither Saakashvili’s optimistic rhetoric, nor fantastic annual growth rates of 10 percent or above, nor the transformation of Tbilisi’s cityscape from dirt and decay to splashy apartment blocs, elegant fountains, and pastel colored shopping centers, could hide the widening gap between the governing and governed. The state was revitalized, electricity was restored, and corruption diminished, but the government – like the astronomers on Jonathan Swift’s floating island of Laputia – was following an experiment that made little sense to the majority of Georgia’s citizens.

The Rose Revolution’s achievements are impressive, but its goals and methods exposed the tension between the simultaneous processes of re-stating and de-stating.

The result was a citizenry that, despite its approval of a more visibly assertive state (unity with Achara, an improved army), was alienated by the state’s invisibility in their own lives (the lack of intervention on unemployment, minimal support for an ailing agriculture, the continuing withdrawal from health service provisions, and minimal intervention over prices for housing and food). This is what led in large part to the protests on November 7, 2007.

Final Acts

The final act of both protest movements in 2003 and 2007 was determined by government foolishness, not opposition ingenuity. Sir Lewis Namier reminds us in Vanished Supremacies (1962) that revolutionaries rarely make revolutions, governments do. In both 2003 and 2007, the crises could have turned out far better for the government if it had listened to its own constituents, engaged the opposition, and made concessions. On the day that he resigned, Shevardnadze could still have reversed his long series of mistakes by declaring the parliamentary elections null and void and setting new ones. But he was not willing to concede and there was no option of resistance. All had deserted him except for a few loyal bodyguards. Likewise, in 2007, the denouement was determined by the government. The opposition cannot avoid some of the blame for the brutal events on November 7, but it was the government’s choice to use despotic power rather than dialogue that ultimately led to the constitutional crisis.