3 principles for a small country to survive great-power competition (Part 2)

Hi all, this is my long-overdue part 2 of the Georgia travelogue. With the mid-autumn festival holiday going on and Typhoon Bebinca raging outside my window (believed to be the strongest typhoon to land in Shanghai since 1949), it’s now the perfect timing to finish the job.

Just to recap, in Part 1, I documented why, how, and with whom I traveled to Georgia last month. With a group of friends old and new, I visited the beautiful city of Tbilisi, Stalin’s birthplace Gori, and the breathtaking mountains in the Caucasus. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, please take a look at it before reading this one. It’s important to condition yourself with the right sensing before going onto the more brainy stuff.

For Part 2, I will try to answer the question in the main title of this two-part travelogue: How should a small country survive and prosper in a world defined by great-power competition?

I don’t come from a small country, but I have the feeling that the hearts and minds of the small powers and middle powers of the world, not just the great powers, will define the trajectory of our century. At the same time, non-US readers, many of whom come from a small country, account for more than 68% of my readership. So I guess it should be a relevant topic for many of you.

Important disclaimers: I am not an expert on Georgia’s history and culture. I am at best, a tourist. So this essay is by no means my actual policy advice for Georgia for what they should or should not do. Simply treat this as a thought exercise that I carried in my mind when I traveled, and what I am about to do is no more than sharing it, using Georgia as a living example, with my own biases and limitations.

With those disclaimers said, let me lay out my 3 principles for a small country.

Principle #1: Have a clear plan for national identity

Any nation in the world that can have a slight chance at success must build some form of national identity. This is easy to understand. It’s like running a company: for the people who otherwise don’t know each other, who don’t care for each other, who might even kill each other to come hand in hand to work together, to live together, and to build a society together, you will always need to develop a common story that explains common roots, describes common mythology, and points to a common mission ahead. This common story, to me, is what national identity is all about.

Georgia has a great headstart in this regard. As I described, Georgia is not an “artificial country.” Couched by the Caucasian mountains and protected from big Persian, Turkic and Russian empires all around it, its unique language and culture have been well-preserved through the millennia. A common language and a long history of continued survival make it very easy for Georgia to build a strong national identity. Georgians have no problem understanding what being a Georgian means. The tall monument Georgians built to chronicle their history can only be built by a country that does not doubt its own identity.

Such is not the case for many other countries. For instance, whenever you see the straight border lines of many Middle Eastern or African countries artificially drawn by the colonizers, you know that’s a sign of trouble.

When in 1916 the two gentlemen from Britain and France drew the Sykes-Picot line to partition the Ottoman territories, the fate of future “Syrians” and “Iraqis” was randomly sealed.

Let’s take Iraq as an example. What does it mean to be an Iraqi? Can the Shiite Arabs, the Sunni Arabs, the Kurds, the Assyrians, and the Yazidis who were randomly grouped together by the colonizers all agree to be first and foremost an “Iraqi”? I doubt about it. I also don’t think it’s plausible for Iraqis to build the equivalent of “Chronicles of Georgia”, as there is little of its common mythology to chronicle about. The lack of a clear national identity is, in my opinion, the root cause of both the cruel dictatorship built upon Saddam’s cult of personality and the post-Saddam political and sectarian violence in that country. There is no doubt that both scenarios are not good for growth and prosperity.

Map signed by Sykes and Picot

The main challenge, however, for a country that happens to have a very strong national identity, such as Georiga, is how to deal with ethnic minorities living inside its borders.

Ideally, you would want to have every nation-state based perfectly on its ethnicity, so that Germany only has “Germans” and Russia only has “Russians”. But that ideal stage is almost impossible to happen because historical habitats of ethnic groups do not follow Westphalian logic. A key dilemma of the modern world is thus how you can balance the unequivocally drawn national borders, as defined by the Westphalian system, and the physical presence of multiple ethnic groups living within those borders, which have been more or less formed by historical forces.

Except for Ukraine and some Balkan areas, Europeans have almost finally fixed this problem. Westphalia was their invention anyway. But even they did not finish the task until more than 300 years of wars after Westphalia. They even started two world wars because of this issue. Today, few remember the back-and-forth of wars between Germany and France over Alsace-Lorraine, or Hitler’s ambition into Sudetenland, or Stalin’s carving of eastern parts of Poland into today’s Ukraine and his simultaneous carving of eastern parts of Germany into today’s Poland, or how Königsberg, once an old citadel of the Prussian nation and birthplace of Immanuel Kant, is now the Russian territory of Kaliningrad. Long story short: it used to be a huge mess, even in Europe.

(In this light, China’s remaining border problems, as well as almost all border disputes in the Global South, are precisely the historical process that younger nation-states have to go through in order to fit into the West-defined system.)

Georgia has developed a poor record here. It never managed to make the minority Abkhazians (who also have a unique language) and South Ossetians (Iranian people) feel at home, to the point that the two regions have become de facto break-away regions. (I also learned this time that Georgia, despite its overall pro-US stance, is one of the very few countries in the world that Taiwanese people can’t travel to. Georgia does not recognize the Republic of China passport, because both Abkhazia and Taiwan are members of UNPO, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization.)

The Georgian experience proves one point: a small country has to be absolutely clear that there is no middle ground when it comes to national identity issues. These issues can’t be just left there, hoping they can be solved on their own. They will never be solved on their own.

On my flight to Georgia, I was reading the book Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok. According to the book, one key misstep that contributed to the Soviet Union’s eventual dissolution was Gorbachev and his leadership team’s naivety regarding the national question. They assumed that everyone in the Soviet Union would happily embrace the Union, and allowed different republics to develop their own political identities. As soon as the process was set in motion, however, ethnic violence broke out. Abhkazians fought against Georgians, calling Georgia a “mini-Empire”. Azeries and Armenians fought each other in Nagorno-Karabakh, a geopolitical hotspot to this day. Chechnya and Tatarstan, inside the Russian republic, became hotbeds for secessionist desires.

There was another episode that carries a huge implication for today: people in 1991 were already worried that Crimea and Donbas (which was “given” to Ukraine by the Soviet Union to balance Ukraine nationalism) if not given back to Russia, would cause future wars between Russia and Ukraine. And lo and behold, future wars we are watching now.

Yeltsin, pressured by the expediencies of the time, gave up on these lands without asking for anything in return, but many in Russia already felt it was an “unequal treaty” back then. I work in business. In any deal, the feeling of unfairness of any side is best to be addressed ASAP. It needs to have a way out, sometimes leading to creative solutions. In politics, however, it seems it’s just very likely for grievances to be brushed to one side, hidden below a doormat, and never talked about, only until one day it exploded on a much bigger scale.

I can’t help but think of my own country here. The modern history of China contained one episode when we almost gave up on the national question, if only for just a split second. When nationalists started the Xinhai Revolution to topple the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the original core agenda of Sun Yat-zen was actually “驱除鞑辱恢复中华Chase away the barbarians, re-instate China”, which begs the question: who are the “barbarians”? If Sun had his way, today’s China would only be as large as the so-called “China Proper”, where Han Chinese are mostly concentrated, while the vast border regions would become hotbeds of conflicts and geopolitical rivalry. It was conceivable at the time that if Qing was smashed up like this, Japan would control Manchuria (they still eventually did), Mongolia and Xinjiang would fall into Russian hands, and Tibet would be controlled by British India. Yuan Shikai saw the danger in this. So when he forced the Qing Court to step down, he made sure that the newly formed Republic of China inherited the lands of all five major races—Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui, and Tibetan, which was codified in the “清室退位诏书Imperial Edict of the Abdication of the Qing Emperor”. Sun Yat-zen quickly pivoted in his thinking as well.

The fact that the national question can’t simply be brushed away is true for big powers, but it’s even more true for a small country, because national division always breeds weaknesses, and rest assured those weaknesses will be exploited by external powers. This was precisely what Yuan Shikai was afraid of. And Georgia today is no less a victim of that: without Russia’s backing, the super-tiny powers of Abkhazia and South Ossetia would not dare to break away at all.

So, how do you solve the national identity problem, barring civil wars and genocides? I can only see 2 possible options.

One option is to break up the country along ethnic lines. This was what Malaysia did when they kicked Singapore out of the union, fearing that their country would be dominated too much by the ethnic Chinese. However, the partition of Malaysia and Singapore was one of the rare peaceful cases, but most partitions were very painful. The breakup of the Soviet Union produced violence that lasted until this day, and just ask Indians and Pakistanis about their experience of partition following the end of British rule.

The second option, which I think is the better option, is to impose a strong national narrative, through education (softer word than indoctrination) and unrelenting policy-making in this direction. Let’s again take Singapore as an example. One thing Singapore is famous for is its very strong enforcement of ethnic harmony. An example is the Ethnic Integration Policy, which dictates that a fixed quota has to be allocated for each ethnicity in any apartment, thereby avoiding the occurrence of ethnic enclaves. Through policy like this, there is no doubt that in Singapore, you are first and foremost a Singaporean, whether you are ethnic Chinese, ethnic Malay, ethnic Indian or ethnic “others”.

Is this kind of policy too draconian? Does it run too much against human nature? Ethnic harmony is indeed against human nature. If we all have to choose with freedom, it’s only natural for people to cluster around others with similar looks, similar languages and similar cultures. It’s only natural for whites to cluster around whites, blacks to cluster around blacks, Hispanics to cluster around Hispanics, Chinese around Chinese, Japanese around Japanese, and Indians around Indians. Also, when you embark on this kind of policy, the external powers will always exploit your internal differences and make unfair criticisms, so there will be a lot of pressure, both internal and external to stop you from this kind of policy.

But like I said, the national question can’t be left there to be solved on their own. Like Lee Kuan Yew once said, “This is not a game of cards”. Without the willpower to solve the issue, there will be no peace, and the country can not even pass the basic threshold for success.

#2 Use great powers for your own benefit

A key difference between the great-power competition of our century and the Cold War is that at least one side, which is China, is not asking for a military alliance.

What do I mean by that?

There is still a NATO, but to date, there is not an equivalent of the Warsaw Pact centered around China, and I don’t think there will ever be one. You might not notice, but China actually has exactly zero treaty obligations to other nations to provide defense to. We just care too much about money-making to get ourselves into this kind of stuff. (The US, in comparison, has over 50 treaty allies.)

Back in the Cold War, the Soviet Union funded revolutionaries in Cuba, or conflicts in Africa. But to which conflict does China fund now? The Soviet Union and China are just two different animals (I have argued long ago, that China is not an “insecure-expansionist” power like the Soviet Union.)

Since at least one side is not forcing you to take a side, the implication for a small country amid this new type of great-power competition is simple: don’t take sides.

Instead of taking sides, the best strategy will be using great powers for your own benefit. Make yourself available for all courtiers, and take the best offer from the highest bidder.

In Vietnam, this is called “bamboo diplomacy”, a metaphor for being “firm and flexible”. I have documented several high-profile interactions between Vietnam and China in the last 12 months alone in this newsletter. At the same time, the US-Vietnam relationship has also reached new heights.

In Georgia, I observed a similar “bamboo diplomacy”. The overall mood there, at least in the capital city of Tbilisi, was decisively pro-West. There was even a large building representing EU and NATO interests right in the heart of the Freedom Square. In its national museum, most of the exhibitions are poorly organized (they are worse than even many county-level museums I have been to in China), but one section that’s actually well-designed was the one on the sufferings from “Soviet Occupation”.

But despite this historical animosity against Russia, the trade between Russia and Georgia was also huge, as I witnessed on the highway to Mout Kazbek. I checked statistics later and found that Russia still remains a top destination for Georgian exports. It’s especially true for the Georgian wine, an excellent variety yet unknown to the outside world. Most of the Georgian wine exports are enjoyed by Russians. So it’s no surprise that with so much trade going on, and also because Georgia is too small, Georgia has resisted repeated calls from the West to open a “second front” against Russia after the Ukraine War broke out.

The Chinese construction sites I have observed were also a testament to Georgia’s “bamboo diplomacy”. The US would not be happy about this, but why should Georgia care? If someone can come in and dig a great tunnel into our mountains with a relatively low price and high efficiency, why not?

And this relationship will deepen further. Just a few days ago, Georgia and China came together to sign an agreement on developing the so-called “Middle Corridor”, a trading route under development that will go from China to Europe through Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Türkiye. It is in the “middle” between the northern route, which mainly goes through Russia, and the southern route which is the sea route.

Just like a while ago when we at Baiguan published a popular article about how the rest of the world can actually benefit from US-China decoupling. This great opportunity is open for all countries to grab.

#3 Invest all you can into human capital

A small country, by definition, has a small population and limited natural resources.

A small population means there is no chance of building a large manufacturing base and a complete industrial supply chain on its own.

A small country may have good natural resources, but oftentimes those countries fall into a “resource curse”, as poor governance and lack of human capital turn resource abundance into a breeding ground for corruption, inequality, and domestic conflicts.

In fact, a small country only has one card to play: the quality of its population, or in other words, its human capital.

This will be especially true for Georgia. A Christian country, sandwiched between Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab world, while spiritually connected with the West, Georgia has a great shot at becoming a Eurasian trading, financial, and technological innovation hub: if they can get the human capital right.

In this respect, Georgia has a clear headstart compared with other former Soviet republics. The literacy rate in Georgia is a whopping 99.6%. I believe the high level of civility I observed there was a direct result of this. Another interesting note is about corruption, Georgia ranked 49 out of 180 on Transparency International’s index which is not great, but quite good already. (As a comparison, China is only 76th according to this ranking.) One of my travel companions, the Professor can confirm this point. He has traveled to the neighboring Armenia before, where he was quite openly asked for bribes at the immigration. In Georgia, his car actually ran into a mini-car accident, and the police arrived to only to deal with the issue smoothly and cleanly.

But if it’s up to me to make an advice, (again only in my capacity as a tourist) Georgia can do more in this regard. One example is that, to my surprise, most of the people I talked to in Georgia couldn’t speak English, even in high-end restaurants. But you can’t be a serious trade and financial hub without a large body of English-speaking people. Also, I don’t remember any prominent Georgian universities that rank high in the world in terms of scientific discovery.

And Georgia is not a resource-poor country. In fact, it has a huge abundance of hydropower resources and one of its export products is electricity. There are also even larger untapped hydropower resources that could electrify the whole country and export much, yet for my week over there, I saw exactly 2 electric vehicles. Both were Teslas, presumably driven by some rich people. (One thing I don’t like about Georgia is the strong smell of gasoline and diesel on the streets, which is very different from Shanghai where I live. Our streets are almost completely electrified now.)

After doing some light research, I found that although Georgia is keen to develop hydropower, a lack of strategic planning makes the project met with strong opposition. There is also ongoing concern about whether benefits from the development of hydropower can be properly enjoyed by all stakeholders. So it seems although theoretically there should be ample resources the country can channel into building human capital, so far it has not found the right way to do that, and the final results are sub-optimal.

Conclusion

I understand that, with the exception of perhaps Principle #3, the first 2 principles can sound controversial to some of you. Solving the national question can often be unpalatable, while Principle #2 is basically asking small countries to take a selfish, moral-less view of the world.

But again, “This is no game of cards”. It’s no easy matter for a small country to grow to its full potential in a world where rich countries already sit at the top of the food chain. Everyone will sound as if they care, but few will shed a tear for you if you fail. It’s much better to think about what works, rather than what’s palatable.

Please be civil in the comment section. With that, I finally conclude this travelogue.