The concept of Europe as a unity of various peoples sharing a standard historical past may be traced again to the third century BC, when Apollonius’ Argonautica – composed by the Head of the Alexandrian Library – first challenged the Greek behavior of labelling all non-Hellenic peoples as “Barbarian”. By explicitly naming Medea’s native Colchian a Kartvelian language, Apollonius acknowledged the variety of the world past Greece, together with its linguistic plurality.
That is the place Europe’s democratic tradition of coexistence inside a multilingual world finds its roots, representing probably the most superior paradigm achieved thus far. European civilisation displays, at each stage, the enduring stress between rights, freedoms, beliefs and lived realities of numerous teams, nations or associations throughout totally different instances and areas, alongside the continuing seek for types of coexistence and connections.
By no means in its historical past has Georgia been a full-fledged member of this area. Moderately, it has remained on the periphery, striving to combine and contextualise itself throughout the European area – this most intriguing networking membership – with various levels of vigour relying on historic circumstances.
The EU Candidate standing granted to Georgia on 14 December 2023 is the very best place our nation has ever held in relation to Europe all through its historical past. It’s subsequently paradoxical that Georgia’s European perspective has turn into more and more contested simply because the nation has reached its closest level to Europe. Human rights, institutional autonomy, tutorial freedom and different founding rules of democracy are below growing stress.
In early Could, Marci Shore, a professor of mental historical past at Yale College specialising in Central and Japanese European mental historical past, delivered a public lecture. A scholar of Ilia State College was arrested proper on the steps resulting in the college, on her option to the lecture. She was accused of standing on the pavement whereas collaborating in a protest. Below these circumstances, it’s significantly related that this 12 months’s Debates on Europe was held in Tblisi, in a metropolis that’s witnessing steady protests for EU integration.
Tblisi, June 2026. The principle entrance to the Ilia State College. The horizontal black banner says “Not on the market!” | Picture ©GpA
Georgia’s lengthy European thought
The European thought has a steady historical past in Georgia. In line with previous Georgian historiography, as early because the 5th century, King Vakhtang Gorgasali, the founding father of Tblisi, launched a radical shift within the strategic affiliation of his up to date Georgia (or extra particularly, Kartli), leaving the orbit of Iran (and therefore, Zoroastrianism) and directing his nation in direction of the Japanese Roman Empire (therefore Christianity). King Vakhtang’s will expressed loyalty to the “Greek path” – a phrase that decided not solely the nation’s faith but in addition its international coverage and its aspirations in direction of the West.
The need grew to become the founding precept of Georgia’s political agenda within the 8th century: a buffer state of the Japanese Roman Empire – or because the Eighth-century chronicler Iovane Sabanisdze described it, the sting and periphery of the medieval Christian world – Kartli nonetheless embodied all of the traits that pertained to the centre.
Georgian rulers from David the Builder to Queen Rusudan sought to anchor the nation inside Europe by dynastic ties, diplomacy and cultural trade. The autumn of Constantinople interrupted this course of for hundreds of years. Georgia skilled a chronic interval of political fragmentation and cultural decline earlier than reform efforts resumed below Vakhtang VI and Erekle II, who labored on dismantling previous feudal constructions in Georgia.
By the top of the 19th century, this course of culminated within the European-style modernisation venture led by Ilia Chavchavadze and the Society for the Unfold of Literacy, which in the beginning of the 20th century, earlier than the Soviet occupation, introduced the nation three years of independence, together with probably the most superior requirements of democracy.
The post-Soviet interval has been neither simple nor beneficial, when it comes to European integration. The current radical reversal in politics, tradition and significantly training is inflicting irreparable harm to the European perspective of our nation’s democratic growth, and its future generally. These opposed processes jeopardise the alignment of the Georgian greater training system with the European one; infringe upon tutorial freedom and institutional autonomy which might be to be assured by regulation; and extra particularly, threaten universities with efficient closures.
Below a authorities decision, tutorial programmes and scholar numbers at Ilia State College – which obtained the very best score from worldwide consultants – have been lower by 92% for 2026.
Latest years have seen numerous expressions of steady assist for the European thought – each factual and statistical, in addition to symbolic and metaphorical: 80-85% of the inhabitants voices sturdy assist for the European future, and the EU flag has flown from Tbilisi’s streets by years of protest.
But enthusiasm for Europe has lengthy coexisted with a structural weak point: the truth that Georgia was not a part of the historic course of that introduced in regards to the college, one of many oldest and most strong European establishments and a significant component on the core of the fashionable impartial democratic European society, was detrimental. The nation was absent from this growth till 1918.
A important examination of this hole or its options in our historic growth could, to a sure extent, assist us perceive plenty of circumstances that beforehand appeared inexplicable. In fact, historic retrospection can not present a direct reply to our query in regards to the deeply controversial European agenda. But, it may provide a clearer understanding of how the thought of college developed in Georgia, why we discover ourselves the place we’re immediately, and why the immediate, clean adoption of finest practices into the post-Soviet interval, already spanning thirty-five years, seems so difficult.
A missed stage in medieval historical past
The medieval Christian East and West developed totally different approaches to training, authority and data. These variations formed contrasting understandings of the college and its function in society.
Options and chronology of modernity within the Christian East are additionally debatable. Parts of modernity emerged within the Christian East centuries sooner than within the West with the gradual emancipation of vernacular languages because the latter penetrated all spheres of social life, in the end turning into literary languages. By the 5th century AD, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Georgian and Caucasian Albanian languages had established themselves as literary languages with their very own alphabets.
Whereas vernacular languages flourished, non secular authority remained tightly managed within the Japanese Roman world. Monks had been prevented from designing the content material of sermons on their very own, impartial interpretation of scripture was discouraged, and solely the Holy Fathers’ homiletical work was for use in preaching, thus limiting types of mental debate that might later contribute to the rise of universities in Western Europe.
This meant that important parts had been banned within the Japanese Roman Empire: the studying and comprehension of non secular texts; kind of free, particular person interpretation; reflections, rewriting and revaluation. Actually, the Japanese Roman Empire restricted what gave rise to Studium Particulare and Studium Generale – the precursors of the medieval western college – within the West, the formation of medieval western universities because the company of scholars and masters.
These two non secular bans triggered appreciable divergence within the growth of the medieval East and West, the outcomes of that are obvious immediately: sturdy tendencies of medieval ethno-nationalism, ethnic conflicts, privileged state religions within the nations of the previous medieval Christian East, and the university-based values, reminiscent of Tolerance, Equality, Human Rights and Democracy within the nations of the medieval Christian West.
It’s subsequently unsurprising that the medieval Christian East developed not universities however a classy system of Byzantine non secular training centred on academies, foremost amongst them the Academy of Mangana and its main branches in Alexandria and Antioch. Though some fashionable encyclopaedias describe Mangana – established as a philosophical faculty as early as 425 – as a college, its standing as such stays extremely contested.
The identical sample may be noticed within the buffer states of the Christian East, together with medieval Georgia. Moderately than giving rise to universities, their traditions of upper studying produced tutorial centres modelled on the non secular academies of the Byzantine world.
When the Academy of Mangana was shaken by a wave of non secular repression that led to the exile of Neoplatonic students and their followers, two Georgian college students, Iovane Petritsi and Arsen of Ikalto, returned house and performed a key function in founding the Gelati and Ikalto academies. Little proof survives about how these establishments functioned, aside from often-contested historic traditions. Nevertheless, the works written, translated and copied at Gelati and Ikalto recommend that Georgia’s centres of upper studying intently adopted the mannequin of the Academy of Mangana.
In Georgia, as in Byzantium, the thought of knowledge-based religion suffered a bitter defeat. The tendencies that contributed to the emergence of universities within the medieval West had been lastly extinguished in 13th-century Georgia when the Church declared a warfare in opposition to the best work of Georgian literature of all instances, The Knight within the Panther’s Pores and skin by Shota Rustaveli. The poem was so persecuted that none of its earlier copies has been preserved.
Thus, the omission of the basic stage of college formation within the Center Ages, along with the processes following the autumn of Constantinople, created a long-term hole in our European perspective.
Related paths in numerous historic contexts
It was no sooner than the 19th century that Georgia might re-embark on the European path and, just like the smaller European nations, start its European venture of modernisation. In 1918, this laid the muse for the creation of an impartial state, excellent for its degree of democracy at the moment. Simply months earlier, the primary college in Georgia, and within the South Caucasus, had been established. At the start of the 20th century, heated debates arose between the technical and mental elite over the principal mission of college because the central architect of information society.
For the primary time in Georgia, the college and its founders drew round themselves a self-organised group of European kind, bringing collectively the political elite and governing teams with radically differing ideological preferences, who nonetheless managed to share widespread duties primarily based on democratic rules.
Some three years later, the primary Democratic Republic of Georgia confronted historic circumstances altogether totally different from these of the smaller European nations. Furthermore, because of Soviet and post-Soviet isolation, Georgia was excluded from the very framework wherein their growth was described, although between 1870 and 1921 the nation had handed by the phases of nation-state formation outlined by the historian Miroslav Hroch in his comparative research of smaller European nations.
The identical destiny befell Georgia’s first college, whose founders had been ousted, subjected to trial or executed.
By way of greater training, the post-Soviet interval proved no much less difficult, marked by the deconstruction of all beforehand present requirements. The modernisation of college in Georgia started in 2005, when the nation joined the Bologna Course of. This era signalled the start of probably the most troublesome path in direction of the standardisation of college training in Georgia, in addition to in direction of the strengthening of its missions – training, analysis and the so-called “third mission”, below which the college as an establishment is known as upon to foster civic tradition and public consciousness.
It was on this context of European integration that Ilia State College was based in 2006. From the outset, it sought to mix training, analysis and public engagement, reflecting the broader effort to align Georgia’s tutorial establishments with European requirements. In doing so, the college has tried to hold ahead the legacy of Ilia Chavchavadze, who noticed training as the muse of each nationwide growth and European modernity. As he famously wrote: “Schooling, data, and scholarship are forces that nothing can counter immediately: neither fist, nor sword, nor the multitude of a military.”
As within the case of Ilia Chavchavadze’s European venture, so too in up to date Georgia, the college – and universities extra broadly – ought to be an agent of change, an establishment aiming at fostering a public area that has been considerably narrowing not solely in Georgia however all through the world; an area wherein fashionable multidimensional pluralistic societies could come collectively to debate and in the end agree upon the types of their networking.
This essay is printed in partnership with Debates on Europe, on the event of the Debates in Tbilisi, held in June 2026.
