Abstract
This chapter offers a rich, discursive account of the significance and the layers of meanings of the concept of Europe in post-Soviet Georgian political and societal processes of modernization, and the hesitant moves towards a liberal democratic system and a market economy that the Europe of the European Union has promoted. Taking a historical and conceptual approach to the way in which Europe has been understood and articulated in the modern Georgian context, namely, as geopolitics of the Great Powers, as the source of modernity, progress and socio-economic alternatives for national development as well as the locus of high culture, civilization and identity, this chapter argues that Europe plays a defining role in the post-Soviet Georgian modernization discourse.
That defining is the concept, particularly as linked to the role of the EU, that Georgia's modernization discourse has become synonymous with the Europeanization one. Although its significance is central, steps taken by post-Soviet Georgia towards this end goal have been marred by a mixed sense and experience of security and insecurity, of pleasure and pain, as well as of pride and prejudice.