Academics have raised fears that Georgian higher education could face “complete isolation” from the European Union after the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party claimed victory in?last month’s parliamentary elections, a?result contested by?the country’s pro-EU opposition.
The poll followed an unexpectedly tight referendum result in?Moldova, in?which voters backed EU?membership by an?exceptionally slim margin.
Diana Lezhava, a research fellow in higher education at Georgia’s Center for Social Sciences, said a fourth term for the populist GD?party could see the country at risk of “international isolation, further violation of human rights, mass emigration of young people and even harsher economic and democratic backsliding”. A broken relationship with the EU, she warned, could result in “Georgian higher education [being] cut off” from schemes including Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe, “schemes that created mass opportunity for Georgian students and scholars to study and work in European countries”.
Johannes Wetzinger, a political science lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna, told Times Higher Education that the elections were a “decisive moment for the future of the relations between the EU and Georgia”.
Georgia’s pro-EU president and former Sciences Po professor Salomé Zourabichvili has refused to accept the election results, alleging that Russia employed a “special operation” to rig voting, while top EU diplomat Josep Borrell has called for “electoral irregularities” to be investigated. The EU granted Georgia candidate status last December, but halted the process in July after the GD-controlled parliament passed a “foreign agents” law described by Professor Zourabichvili, who vetoed the bill, as “Russian in its essence and spirit”.
Universities were at the forefront of mass protests against the law, Ms Lezhava said, with many participating institutions now “under attack by the government” as a result. She pointed to Ilia State University, from which full accreditation was withheld in the summer despite its receiving a positive evaluation. “The state is trying to punish the university,” she said.
Under GD, academic freedom and university autonomy have faced “serious threats”, Ms Lezhava said. “The underfunding of research is the one of the biggest challenges. Without academic research, there is no?knowledge production, which holds back your academic system.”
In Moldova, also a candidate for EU membership, 50.46?per cent of voters in October’s referendum chose to enshrine the goal of joining the EU in the country’s constitution. Pro-European president Maia Sandu, who claimed a second term in a tense election run-off held on 3 November that was marred by claims of ballot box interference, described the unexpectedly tight referendum as the result of “[Russia’s] unprecedented assault on our country’s freedom and democracy”.
In 2005, both Georgia and Moldova joined the Bologna Process, aimed at establishing higher education qualifications of comparable quality across a European Higher Education Area. The countries are also associated to the Horizon Europe research funding programme.
Mr Wetzinger said the participation of universities from both countries in the Erasmus+ student mobility scheme demonstrated an interest across the sectors in further internationalisation, although the “actual degree of internationalisation varies” among institutions.
In Moldova, Mr Wetzinger said, “we can already observe that the process of EU approximation has direct impacts on higher education”. The association agreement between the EU and Moldova outlines priorities including “the modernisation of higher education” and “increased staff and student mobility”.
While Moldovan institutions have maintained relationships with institutions in both the EU and Russia, he added, the mounting tensions prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have forced the country to contend with “an increasing geopoliticisation of higher education cooperation”. At present, he said, EU membership remains a “longer-term prospect”.
