Agents of Reform in the Black Sea Region - National Agendas and International Assistance

First Black Sea Young Reformers Fellowship Conference in 2011, Batumi, Georgia, 31 March – 3 April 2011

08.04.2011

Downloads: List of Participants, Agenda, IRIS Discussion Paper

What a fulminant start of the Black Sea Young Reformers Fellowship’s sophomore year!

This year, the first BSYR Fellowship Conference took place in Batumi, Georgia, from 31 March – 3 April 2011. With kind support of our alumna Helen Khoshtaria and the State Ministry of Georgia on European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, the conference titled "Agents of Reform in the Black Sea Region: National Agendas and International Assistance" offered the unique opportunity for our new BSYR Fellows to figure out what it means to be a reformist in the Black Sea region and how to deal with the latest issues there concerning modernisation, nation-building, and democratization.

Our hosts, Georgian Vice-Prime Minister and State Minister for Euro-Atlantic Integration, Giorgi Baramidze, and Helen Khoshtaria, Georgian First Deputy State Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, opened the conference. Helen Khoshtaria, who participated in the BSYR Fellowship Project last year, welcomed the participants in Batumi and stressed the city’s being a symbol for transformation.

In his opening speech, Minister Baramidze pointed out the numerous cooperation agreements between Georgia and the European Union. Georgia is strongly heading the EU’s way, with a special focus on energy security and energy supply. In these sectors, the country is welcoming diversification in order to harmonise the relationship between the EU and Georgia. Baramidze stated his pride in the reforms that have been accomplished in Georgia last year, namely the police reform and the reform on tax and customs. He is strongly supporting further reforms on development and infrastructure. The idea is to create a more trustful atmosphere between Georgia and the EU by showing the country’s willingness to implement further reforms. A visa-waiver regime with the EU is on Minister Baramidze’s agenda, as well as the start for the membership talks with the EU on a deeper cooperation and trade agreement. Georgia is, in Minister Baramidze’s view, a “united, sovereign, democratic European country”.

The first plenary session dealt with the question of what it takes to be a reformist in the Black Sea region. Ghia Nodia, Chairman of the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development in Tbilisi, named the usual assumption that two things had to be reformed after the Rose Revolution in Georgia: democracy and the market. He pointed out that the Rose Revolution did not lead to helping the Georgian people in all ways. The external perception of the Rose Revolution and what it really meant for the people were not matching.

In the second plenary session, Franz-Lothar Altmann, Associate Professor for Intercultural Relations at the Bucharest State University, flowed up on Nodia’s theses and put the focus on the Civil Society in Georgia. In his view, a healthy Civil Society is indispensable for a stable political system and open democracy. However, Civil Society is often influenced from the outside, and external donors are often more curse than help because they limit the Civil Society’s possibilities. BSYR Fellow Hanna Shelest said it right when noticing that sometimes “donorism kill activism”. Ognyan Minchev added that whatever problem a country has with its Civil Society the stability of democratic systems is strongly connected to civil-societal engagement.

Oleksandr Sushko, Research Director at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kyiv, opened the third plenary session with an appeal to mobilizing the positive energy in the society. But Civil Society is not always a blessing for the public; it might also suppress it. The reasons for this are, on the one hand, the political economy (mostly in authoritarian states) that is ignoring the CS or making obstacles. On the other hand, the Civil Society in the Eastern European states somehow “laid back” after the Big Bang enlargement in 2004. The demand on the Civil Society to operate consistently, including a well-structured mechanism to be insistent and therefore successful, couldn’t be satisfied. Furthermore, a dilemma occurred when NGO’s in Eastern European countries tried to have an impact on governmental policy decision-makers and at the same time be watchdogs of their activities. Marc Cunningham from the Black Sea Trust of the German Marshall Fund of the United States therefore wanted to know what external donors could do to support the CS in an appropriate way that is helping it evolve. A productive approach, in Sushko’s opinion, would be supporting those who are able to provide an impact on the national and international stage, but then there is a danger of always supporting the same people. So the regular assessment would be to check how far these initiatives are really helpful and meet societal needs. Finally, BSYR Fellow Ana Natsvlishvili urged that NGOs should campaign more for internal transparency and be lead not only by donors but values.

The first day was closed by Serdar Sayan, Director of the Graduate School for Social Sciences at the TOBB University of Economics and Technology in Ankara, who gave an impressive overview of the economic situation in the Black Sea states and highlighted the economic size and importance of the Black Sea region.

The following conference days were designed to allow our new Fellows to network and create joint projects to be developed in the interconference period and presented at the following BSYR event in Brussels, Belgium, in the fall.

To top the conference off, on the last evening, our Georgian hosts organised a fantastic dinner at a traditional Georgian restaurant where the participants did not only enjoy national culinary delicacies but also attended a Georgian folk dance performance.

In the Media

Report in Azerbaijani Media

Report in Georgian Media (Television of Adjara)

Report in Georgian Media (Georgian Times)

Report in Turkish Media (TKA Association of Turkish Speaking News Agencies)

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