№ 5 - 2001
Muskhelishvili M.
Particularistic Democracy: a View from Post-Soviet Georgia

The particularism / universalism opposition is central both for structural theories of modernization and for the study of postmodernistic transformations. Here is the main thesis of the article: the particularistic character of the social relations which underlie democracy that has shaped in Georgia (and which prove to be substitutionary liberal relations), affects not only issues of democratization, but also major transformations of the structure of society as a whole.The article consists of two parts. The first one outlines a theoretical approach to the analysis of a political regime which, as it were, meets certain parameters of democracy, but which is not, in actual fact, a liberal democracy. The contrast between formal norms and actual relations is interpreted as contraposition of: universalistic/particularistic institutions; differentiation/non-differentiation of the private and the public spheres; presence/absence of such ideological components of liberal democracy as liberalism and republicanism. The second part deals with the character of the social relations existing today in Georgia. All the post-Soviet democratization of the country is the continuation of the post-totalitarian process of a particularistic private sphere being formed and of the public sphere - producer of common (collective) good - decomposed. The process is far from coinciding with linear movement from Soviet-type collectivism to liberal individualism, its trend is directed toward particularism; which, to the author’s mind, strongly influences the character of the rather stable political system of Georgia (in all appearance, of other post-Soviet countries, too).