Mikheil Saakashvili opened one of the most important topics of discussion of Forum 2000 – Democracy and the Rule of Law.
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure and an immense honor to address you today.
I must admit that I am always reluctant to leave Georgia in October.
There, October is my favorite month.
We enjoy bright sun, luminous and warm days… We can still swim, while starting to ski. We are celebrating the harvests. And French Presidents are coming to deliver amazing speeches in front of 100 000 people…
I love October in my country.
But, when Vaclav Havel is the inviting power, there can be no hesitation.
For anybody who grew up on the wrong side of the Wall dreaming about freedom, for pro-democracy activists or for reformist leaders, the name of Vaclav Havel resonates more than any other.
I use to say that there were two ways of leaving communism behind and reentering in History, the way of tolerance and liberal-democracy, and the way of ultra-nationalism and corrupt authoritarianism.
The way of Vaclav Havel and the way of Slobodan Milosevic.
Coming to the subject of our panel today, the first way is actually a combination of legality and legitimacy, while the other one is the absolute opposite of both.
In transitional countries, the political legitimacy comes precisely from the instauration of legality, the building of transparent public institutions, the development of a society based on something that can seem natural to old democracies, but that is still a fragile dream in so many parts of the world: a society based on the rule of Law.
Dear friends,
As most of you know, eight years ago, Georgia was basically a criminalized failed state, a dying economy, a country shackled by corruption.
In November 2003, a peaceful revolution brought to power a young team of reformists that I was fortunate enough to lead.
From one day to the next we were in charge of a fragile country — with an increasingly revisionist Russian Federation at our door.
Our program was clear: the edification of a European democratic State in Georgia.
Slogans, roses, flags, and policy papers—the tools we used as opposition and civil society leaders—were no longer efficient.
After one day in office, we discovered that revolutions are not only, not even mainly about the crowds gathered in the streets, they consist essentially in the long and difficult process of reforms and institution building that follows the uprising.
And this is precisely, Ladies and gentlemen, the challenge that Tunisia, Egypt or Libya are facing as we speak.
The legitimacy of the street has to be followed by the implementation of a comprehensive legal revolution.
Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, enthusiasm will be replaced by cynicism.
And then, the extremists might take over.
The fantastic pictures on CNN of people celebrating their victory on Tahrir Square or of Libyan citizens dancing in Gaddafi’s palaces are inspiring, but the success of the Arab revolutions will depend on what happens after the Western TV lights have been turned off.
In Georgia, when CNN left, we initiated this radical transformation of our society described by The Economist as a “mental revolution”.
Of course we did not succeed in everything—we had significant shortcomings and we made mistakes.
But, as the father of European cosmopolitism—Emmanuel Kant—wrote more than 200 years ago: “You cannot be ready to be free until you are free.”
What Kant meant is that there is no book to teach you in advance how to govern or even behave in freedom, that you can only learn this from your own successes and failures.
Kant was right.
In Georgia, we found no handbook to guide us towards the establishment of legitimate institutions.
And there will be no operating manual for our Arab friends, either.
But there were experiences, successes, and failures that we could study and that we did study, like the Czech, the Estonian and the Polish experiences.
And today, regional policy or opinion makers—including some Russians, as surprising as that might sound—come to Georgia in order to understand our successes in building totally new institutions.
Recently, Tunisian and Egyptian activists and journalists came to Tbilisi to explore our transformation, starting with the first comprehensive reform we have launched: the complete transformation of our law enforcement bodies.
Indeed, we almost started my first term as President by firing our entire traffic police forces in one day.
Georgians lived for three months without traffic police. Amazingly, during this very period, crime rates went down by 70%. Why?
Not only because police was responsible for most of the crimes, but also because people felt that they were part of a common adventure, that they had a stake that they were living this very specific moment of one nation’s history, when everything seems possible, when values become the basis of politics, when you have the feeling of inventing your own future.
A moment of legitimacy.
This widespread feeling is the true motor of History and I am sure it can be found in any newly liberated place in the world.
But it is a fragile feeling and it has to be entertained.
In Georgia, we managed to keep it alive until now by having clear benchmarks and inventing constantly new concrete objectives.
Thanks to radical changes in our police and in all our other bureaucratic structures—and thanks to this widespread feeling among people that they owned these transformations—we have made greater progress on Transparency International’s Corruption Index since 2003 than any other state in the world.
We have built a highly favorable investment climate based and we are now ranked as one of the easiest places in the world to do business, according to the World Bank: 12th in the world and first in Central and Eastern Europe.
The 2011 EBRD survey on countries in transition singles out Georgia as the most successful country in our region in terms of institution building, at par with Baltic States.
For the first time in independent Georgia, the institutions are legitimate. And they are legitimate first and foremost because they have imposed legality.
There is still a lot to be done, obviously, and we are more committed than ever to keep building a democracy at gunpoint.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
Our model combining legitimacy and legality is neither perfect nor necessarily transferable to Arab nations or even other countries of our region, but everybody can find in our experience a general message of hope: radical changes are possible.
And I do think that it is our duty to share our experience of transitional democracy with our friends in the Arab World and elsewhere.
If I had to sum up:
First, as I said, no matter how beautiful and moving the popular uprisings are, the real revolution consists more in the long and difficult process of reform that follows.
Second: only a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to reform can bring tangible, enduring results. The reforms of the judiciary, police, tax collection, customs, political class, electoral code, or education system should not be implemented individually, but as part of a complete project of social transformation.
Third, and here we might encounter differences with the Middle East, one of the things that matters most in Georgia is this: Our people are united around the common goal of joining the transatlantic, democratic community of states—of membership in the European Union and NATO.
This overwhelmingly shared objective gave further legitimacy to our legal revolution.
It was, it is and it will always remain the horizon of our revolution.
Thank you,