2014/01/01 by Martin Demant Frederiksen
paper · doi:10.5612/slavicreview.73.2.307
In the wake of the 2003 revolution in Georgia, the speed of reform in the sphere of psychosocial aid meant that a range of international donors left the country, believing that the services provided by local NGOs, whom they had been supporting, were now taken over by the state. However, many of the reforms and institutional changes officially initiated during this period were never implemented. Hence, an array of present-day problems remained unresolved or untreated because they would be addressed by the state “in the future.” In this article, I refer to this as a would-be state: the condition of that which will be in the future and a state that gains its legitimacy by promising a better tomorrow. By rendering certain issues as unproblematic in future, the Georgian state has managed to make them appear to be unproblematic (and thus absent) in the present. I use this framework to engage in a wider discussion of the measures of success in eastern Europe's new democracies.