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Fortress Countries, Neighbourhood Counties, El Dorados: Where Does Georgia Fit In ? MUSIC

Winchester Cathedral, England

1. Multiple Identities in a Time of Change

Visa and immigration policies reflect a country’s view of itself and are also conditioned – more invisibly – by its peculiar character.

The comings and goings between nations, which are least as old as the Code of Hammurabi, have always required special thought to be given to the rights and obligations of foreigners.

In our own age, with a highly mobile and globalized society seeking opportunities for trade, mutual advancement, and

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technological transfer at every opportunity, people, nations and organizations acquire multiple identities, simply as a result of the increasing complexity of social organization.

Law-makers may work off less sophisticated baselines. If we try to examine the sociological thinking behind any national policy making, we are likely to find that it is governed by unexamined assumptions deeply ingrained into the mind-set of the country and culture in question.

For example, in the new Georgian law on the legal status of aliens, we read that those marrying a Georgian citizen – provided that this is not done with the intention of securing residency – have automatic access to residency rights in a relatively short timeframe.

In the time Sardanapalus, Babylonian law stated that groups of up to twenty foreigners were free to enter the city at once; and that a foreign woman, once married to a Babylonian man, could not be enslaved.

The thinking behind these approaches is surely that a willingness to be assimilated to a dominant ‘home’ culture is a culturally to be welcomed stance for a foreigner to take; the corollary being that a foreigner interacting with the ‘home’ culture not to become assimilated to it but rather to change it away from its historical wadi – or riverbed of flow – is to be treated with suspicion.

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Enter my distinction between fortress countries, neighbourhood countries and El Dorados.

2. Fortress Countries

Ogaki Castle

A ‘fortress’ country may be defined, firstly, as one whose culture contains an historically long-dated, rich, and well-preserved heritage of practices, beliefs and behaviours which the county instinctively believes it vital to preserve, more or less as a totem of its very identity.

China, Japan, Israel… would fall into this category. These are countries which outsiders cannot in any normal sense ‘join’, but countries which they may assist within permitted parameters, to the benefit and satisfaction of both parties.

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Fortress countries may be geographically isolated from traditional world business and financial hubs, and so develop identical economic power structures in their own regions. They may then come to lead these new initiatives in their own right, thus developing a plurality of identity in the process. So we will see Japan wearing an American hat, and then Japan wearing a Japanese kimono.

Such countries may particularly welcome the foreigner for certain key skills he or she may bring, but perhaps also because these countries may have developed an ‘evolved’ view of the dangers of xenophobic insularity, and wish to avoid its pitfalls.

Thus they may recognize that a certain heterogeneity of mix is to be welcomed. This certainly was not the case in the English village of Lustleigh, to which my parents retired in 1993 (although not for this reason!) Here, there was never a black or brown face to be seen unless you drove halfway across the county…to Exeter maybe, or Bristol. This generated in me, at least, and for a long while, a distinct feeling of unease, whenever I visited.

The best I ever did to combat it (although my guest – a true guest in Vaja Pshavela’s terms – was greeted with bemusement by my aging parents!) was to bring a shell-shocked Spanish ferry Steward here for a short respite after he had run into personal and work difficulties while serving on the P&O Channel fleet… I remember that this act of mercy

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involved a trip to Reading, where we had previously lived, in order to deliver the ailing colleague onto a coach to Heathrow Airport for his return to Madrid; and a visit to Winchester Cathedral, where I stumbled upon an ancient University mentor, then Dean; and explained my mission to him; having been forced to temporarily and expensively abandon my car in that historical city’s station car-park for a day or two, as I succumbed, in my own turn, to the fatigue and stress attendant upon any genuine odyssey…

(Winchester, of course, was once the capital of England…this was at a time when even the residents from two hundred miles away, eventually bringing in their skills in sculpture and illumination from further afield, would have been regarded as foreigners…!)

My ‘Lustlegh intuition’ was vindicated later, when in Belfast in 2010, in one of my more successful career experiences, I acted as an English Language Tutor to a highly able Somalian refugee, a former herdsman. This gave me, above all, a first-hand experience of the unquantifiable value of the foreigner within a uniform and standardized culture: and I was able to see, from the home country’s perspective, how refreshing a leaven the foreigner can be to the mix, if the entire country is not to succumb to a kind boredom of which the Tesco supermarket – for all its merits – might be regarded as emblematic…

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Whether Georgia has an ‘evolved’ view of the dangers of insularity at the present moment, and a view of ‘heterogeneity of mix’: this is a moot question. (It fortunately does not as yet have a Tesco’s; though it tried to have Debenhams; and Debenhams failed… It has Subway, now, and the inevitable MacDonald’s to take up the slack…And a quite out of character Carrefour, which is the most un-Georgian thing I have seen in Georgia so far…!)

3. Neighbourhood Countries

Street in Lille, Northern France

Quite different are ‘neighbourhood countries’. These countries, perceiving between themselves and their neighbours many common interests and similar tastes and preferences, pool a certain invisible quantum of nationhood in the collective project of pragmatic co-operation. The EU is the prime example of this mode of international organization.

The UK’s hesitations on this score have passed into legend; while the glass bead game which arises from such a collaborative project has both its swings and roundabouts.

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On the apparently positive side, you can drive through borders at a reduced speed under camera surveillance; and if in fact you are simply a frontier resident venturing a few miles into the next country to collect some yogurt, there is not that suffocating sense of penetrating a new nation, with all its paraphernalia of document checks, vehicle inspections, and a pervading atmosphere of suspicion.

On the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland, for example, you don’t find gantries, searchlights, rising ramps, barbed wire, and high metal palings: but you do find these at Northern Ireland’s police stations…

This in itself suggests that international policy may be in advance of reality; and that we may be paying the price for a too-speedily-introduced ideal…which of course it’s far too late to do anything about now.

History proceeds by jerks, just as a football is kicked way into the opposition half and only thereafter returned to the real nexus of play near the centre line.

Both Schuman and Stalin can be seen as effective footballers in this perspective…

Soviet dreams, European dreams, Georgian dreams…

But a downside for the ‘neighbourhood countries’ has been the consequent ‘vacuum effect’ in employment markets.

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For example, the newly empowered and highly mobile (because local) East European workforce, largely unskilled but highly persistent and committed, was between about 1995 and 2010 able to dominate the UK and Irish job market to such an extent that a much more restrictive immigration policy was rolled out as one of the earliest, keynote, actions of the Cameron administration.

And at this moment, vigorous new measures are being implemented in the UK to reduce the amount of money paid in job seekers’ benefits to EU nationals by adjusting the terms of their entitlement (at the time of the greatest levels of migration from Eastern Europe, incomers were cushioned by a relatively generous benefits policy). But at the same time the UK is seeking to attract young international talent by a system of incentives, thus strengthening its status as an ‘El Dorado’ nation.

4. El Dorado Nations

Muisca Gold Raft, Bogota

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El Dorado, ‘the golden’ was a term used by Europeans to describe a legendary Columbian chieftan; and the term can now be used to denote any much desired or longed for location. Edgar Allan Poe defined it thus:

Gaily bedight,A gallant knight,

In sunshine and in shadow,Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old—This knight so bold—

And o’er his heart a shadow—Fell as he found

No spot of groundThat looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strengthFailed him at length,

He met a pilgrim shadow—‘Shadow,’ said he,‘Where can it be—

This land of Eldorado?’

‘Over the MountainsOf the Moon,

Down the Valley of the Shadow,Ride, boldly ride,’

The shade replied,—‘If you seek for Eldorado!’

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America, Switzerland, and now the UK can be seen as ‘El Dorado’ nations. Maybe Canada, Hongkong, Dubai, Singapore, Australia, too... Here, to settle, for the outsider, is perceived as being very hard. These are elite places where only the elite is welcomed. They represent a rather worrying development in human history, whereby policy making is increasingly blind to the cultural intangibles in the human DNA, which only chance and a lack of surveillance can nourish. Not that I am not sympathetic to the pressures under which such protectionist regimes evolve. But the only solution is to stimulate local and regional cultures and try and make for some ‘evenness of hub’; a getting away, somewhat, perhaps, from European and Anglo-American dominance in world affairs: if that is to some extent possible. Thus Georgia’s recent regional policy, with links sought with all and sundry, seems to have been spot-on, in the longer-term perspective; and the clause in the new immigration legislation which defines a freelancer as,‘conducting an activity in individual or public interests’ is extremely enlightened and encouraging.

5. A Solution for Georgia?

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Georgia has an intact, intriguing, world-class, traditional, culture and an ancient language which – but for an accident of history, might have rivalled that of Greece. This language is still largely unknown worldwide, and it has in front of it a great future; if cultural diversity, and the displacement of hubs from their traditional economic loci will be – as we may expect, and I certainly hope – a feature of our young, but as yet somewhat directionless twenty-first century.

She would therefore seem to qualify as a fortress country, one which desires external expertise, but does not seem to wish for complete assimilation with the foreigner.

Georgia may of course be shy of affirming to herself as much; but elements of this may be true. Maybe it’s better to look in the mirror and be honest, and see the reality with which one has to deal; and then frame a policy to match.

Georgia’s role as a ‘neighbourhood’ country is more questionable. Her nearest European Union neighbours are Bulgaria and Greece, more than two hour’s flying away. She is not facing incursions of over-numerous migrants from Poland, nor huge queues at border controls, as – for example – has been the case between Ukraine and Poland.

Her adoption of a Schengen-style visa regime has been made opportunistically, and to signal her ‘good European’ intentions; and – who knows – maybe to send a signal to

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Russia, with whom she is nonetheless, and evenhandedly, happy to trade.

Thus the visa laws, as a political decision, may not be too unsound. But as a PR move, they have been disastrous.

Scotland has, by contrast, recently given us an example of a wrong-headedly applied ‘fortress’ approach: and it unwound badly. Scotland was four million votes short, not of having visas or border controls, but perhaps of a notional and suitable decorated border post; and the ability to issue its own currency. When pregnant anthropological ideas get into the popular mythological consciousness they can have great force. But in the end, Scotland has had to remain a ‘decorative country’; the UK flag and title will remain as they are; and Britain’s El Dorado status is strengthened yet more…the more so, perhaps, for continuing to be able to include within its borders scenic Scotland…

Georgia, similarly, must not get too obsessed with being a European neighbourhood country: Europe’s not bothered.

Only strong and somewhat isolated countries can be fortress countries: Scotland is just a subsidiary ‘neighbourhood country’ now – and one somewhat politically neutered. Wales, in about 1250 AD, had to sacrifice its equivalent pretentions. It embraces its ‘decorative’ destiny with enthusiasm, and in fact is the closest parallel we have with Georgia today, although with a 750 year time-shift. In the

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time of its apogee, with gold, palaces, and trade, it would naturally have been a Babylon of the age.

This is not pejorative. A small country with unique and splendid traditions, which in spite of its brilliance must find a modus vivendi with the outside world, if it is not to be invaded by it: that Wales was then; and that is Georgia now.

How can Georgia, with its living tradition, but somewhat shallow ‘neighbouhood’ status, evolve a self-definition which matches its truest character?

Here, I think the example of Taiwan might be of interest.

6. Post-Fortress Countries

Taipei, ROC

Taiwan has a visa and residency regime which is tough and liberal at the same time. There are stringent medical tests; and Temporary Residence Permits must be applied for within fifteen days of arrival; but re-entry permits are available

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within the territory to those with a continuing commitment to the country, who have obtained the Alien Permanent Residence Permit. Possession of this status entails a commitment to reside in Taiwan for a minimum of 183 days, or else the migrant’s permit will be revoked. But he or she is free to come and go in the remaining half of the year.

Georgia, too, might consider herself as a ‘post fortress’ country: seeking to attract talented foreign workers, and wishing to be quite clear about what they are doing and where they stand. But elements of liberality can nonetheless be built into such an arrangement, in just such a way as that which Taiwan has pioneered (with, for example, the second half of the year of stay being available for external travel…)

Other, and better, ideas will doubtless dawn on people too…

http://www.orseek.com/article/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9

Such an evolution of Georgia’s profile need not be in conflict with her Schengen commitment. ‘Georgia is not an EU member state and does not have a candidate status to become an EU member state,’ writes the EU Commision – in answer to my enquiry – somewhat bluntly. This would imply that Georgia may follow Schengen if she wishes; but in fact has all the time in the world to fix her immediate economic needs by a more creative and innovative visa policy, without losing sight of her EU aspirations or causing them any hurt.

But for the moment, on the basis of historic European credentials which outshine those of probably all the members of the EU bar

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Greece and Italy, Georgia can relax and be herself. Her time has come, and if she does something rather inspired, it will be universally applauded.

She may not be the most influential country in the world, but she could be one of the most crucial. The brilliance of Chavchavadze, Rustaveli and Galaktioni should yet be able to inspire her to law-making every bit as rich as that of medieval Wales or Babylon in the 18th century BC.

This is not intended as a joke; although jokes are never too far below the surface in Georgia: when they are missing, it’s a sure sign Georgia is copying and pasting from some revered crib somewhere else, as ill befits a country of this grandeur and antiquity.

Her Asiatic and her European identity will remain, and her rapprochement with the foreigners who love her with a devotion which is unusual if not unique will, on this basis, surely be a resounding success.

Hammurabi’s Code, ca 1780 BC Schengen agreement, Luxemburg, 1995