"But we cannot rely on foreign help indefinitely"
About this Quote
Spoken by Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian leader and former Soviet foreign minister, the line distills the dilemma of a small, crisis-stricken state in a turbulent neighborhood. Emerging from civil war and economic collapse in the 1990s, Georgia survived on loans and grants from the IMF and World Bank, on programs from the US and the EU, and on humanitarian deliveries that kept lights flickering during winters when Russian energy leverage bit hard. Gratitude coexisted with a sobering calculus: donors come and go, priorities shift in distant capitals, and assistance arrives with conditions. A state that cannot fund its own budget, police its borders, or heat its homes has sovereignty in name more than in practice.
Shevardnadze pressed for treating outside help as a bridge, not a foundation. Long-term security would require rebuilding tax collection, taming corruption, professionalizing the army and police, and diversifying energy routes through projects like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The statement also carried a geopolitical warning. Reliance can harden into dependency, and dependency invites pressure, whether from Moscow’s monopolies or from Western benchmarks and fatigue. Agency returns only when domestic institutions work well enough that external aid becomes supplementary rather than existential.
Coming from a diplomat who had overseen the Soviet Union’s retrenchment and later courted Western backing for an embattled Georgia, the line balances pragmatism and pride. It acknowledges that help was necessary and often lifesaving, yet insists on an expiration date. The deeper ethic is responsibility: use the window of outside support to make oneself unnecessary to it. Where that effort stalls, as it often did under Shevardnadze amid endemic graft and political fragmentation, the warning becomes a self-critique. The observation reaches beyond one country’s travails, offering a durable lesson about the limits of assistance and the hard work of building resilience from within.
Shevardnadze pressed for treating outside help as a bridge, not a foundation. Long-term security would require rebuilding tax collection, taming corruption, professionalizing the army and police, and diversifying energy routes through projects like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. The statement also carried a geopolitical warning. Reliance can harden into dependency, and dependency invites pressure, whether from Moscow’s monopolies or from Western benchmarks and fatigue. Agency returns only when domestic institutions work well enough that external aid becomes supplementary rather than existential.
Coming from a diplomat who had overseen the Soviet Union’s retrenchment and later courted Western backing for an embattled Georgia, the line balances pragmatism and pride. It acknowledges that help was necessary and often lifesaving, yet insists on an expiration date. The deeper ethic is responsibility: use the window of outside support to make oneself unnecessary to it. Where that effort stalls, as it often did under Shevardnadze amid endemic graft and political fragmentation, the warning becomes a self-critique. The observation reaches beyond one country’s travails, offering a durable lesson about the limits of assistance and the hard work of building resilience from within.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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