Mikheil Kavelashvili reminded me in New York last week, Christian Georgia has been around for a lot longer than the EU and confidently expects to be around for a long time after it, writes the author of the article, published by the Responsible Statecraft.

“The European Union expects Georgia to change radically to accommodate the EU. The Georgian government expects the EU to change radically to accommodate Georgia.

The latter may seem an absurd proposition given the relative size of the two sides (and it will certainly be regarded as such by the EU Commission) but as the Georgian President, Mikheil Kavelashvili reminded me in New York last week, Christian Georgia has been around for a lot longer than the EU - almost 1,700 years longer - and confidently expects to be around for a long time after it.

In the years after the Georgian Dream government was elected in 2012, relations with the EU were excellent.

The previous United National Movement government of President Mikheil Saakashvili (now in jail for alleged misappropriation of state money), though it had carried out radical economic reforms (backed by copious Western aid), had become increasingly brutal and authoritarian, and had been criticized for this by human rights organizations.

Moreover, though they rarely talk about this in public, Western officials had come to see Saakashvili himself as a reckless and dangerous figure whose actions had brought on the Georgian-Russian war of August 2008, in which Georgia suffered a catastrophic defeat”, - writes the author.