The Gentler Claim: On "Shared Space" and the Limits of Mirror Nationalism
A response to the Tbilisi interview with Malkhaz Toria on Georgian and Abkhaz stereotypes. The Ingorokva theory is said to be retired from serious Georgian scholarship. The claim it was built to serve is very much alive, and so, in plainer places, is the theory itself.
There is a temptation, reading Malkhaz Toria, to argue with the wrong man. He is the reasonable one. He gives up the Ingorokva theory without a struggle, calls it popular rather than serious, and notes that in today's Georgian academy it is no longer good form to defend it. He reaches for the phrase "mirror nationalism" and turns it on his own side. He is candid about Gali. Anyone looking for a crude Tbilisi chauvinist to knock down will not find one here, and that is precisely why the interview is worth answering with care. The strongest version of an argument is the one that deserves a reply.
I want to begin, though, with the claim he makes most confidently, that the Ingorokva theory does not define Georgian historical knowledge and has drifted to the margins. The trouble is that his own testimony will not support the quarantine he attempts to apply. In the same interview he concedes that there are scholars who agree with the theory even today, that it gained a second life with the national movement of the 1980s, that it penetrated everyday life from political circles, and that its ideas still travel through Georgian society, social media included. The interviewer goes further, describing the division of Abkhaz into "real Abkhaz" and "resettled Apsua" as a perception prevalent in Georgian society. A theory held by working scholars, revived by a national movement, woven into everyday speech and still circulating online is not a marginal theory. It is a marginal theory only in the seminar room, and only on a generous afternoon. In the place where it does its work, the national imagination, it is robustly alive. And the imagination is what acts.
The point can be put more sharply, because Toria himself supplies the apex example without naming it. On the eve of the war, the first president of independent Georgia gave public voice to the proposition that the Abkhaz nation did not exist. That is not Ingorokva muttering in a seminar in the 1950s. That is the head of state, within living memory, at the instant it most counted. One cannot describe the theory as marginal to Georgian politics in the same breath that omits this. The theory was marginal in the journals and central on the podium, and it was the podium, not the journal, that armed the column.
Set the marginality claim aside, then, and look at the thing that survives in Toria's account after Ingorokva has been let go. Whatever school he describes, one formula stays constant. Abkhazia and the Abkhaz, he says, belong within a "shared Georgian historical, cultural, and political space." He traces it to Simon Janashia and Niko Berdzenishvili, and he plainly regards it as the mature position, the grown-up alternative to Ingorokva's story about 17th century Adyghe newcomers who stole a name. It is more respectable than Ingorokva. It is also the same destination reached by a better road.
Consider what each version concludes. Ingorokva says the Abkhaz are guests, latecomers in a borrowed identity. Janashia says the Abkhaz are a distinct people, with their own language and their own ethnicity, who nonetheless belong inside a Georgian space. For a nation whose entire argument is about whether it exists on its own terms, the second sentence is gentler in tone and identical in effect. It still places the centre of gravity in Tbilisi. It still makes Abkhaz history a chapter within Georgian history. Discard Ingorokva, keep Janashia, and you have surrendered the insult while retaining the claim. The Abkhaz reader notices the courtesy. He also notices that the conclusion has not moved.
This is what undoes the idea of mirror nationalism, which is the frame upon which Toria builds the interview . It is elegant, and it has real content. There is Abkhaz nationalism, it is institutionally reinforced, and it does fashion an enemy out of the Georgian. None of that should be denied by anyone serious. But a mirror reflects equals, and I would ask what stands on each side of this one.
On one side is a small people insisting that it exists: that it has a language, a territory, a past, and a right to govern itself. On the other is a far larger national project that, in its hard form, said that people did not exist at all, and in its soft form said they existed but belonged to someone else. Those are not reflections of one another. When the weaker party says "we are not you" and the stronger party says "you are really part of us," describing both as nationalism erases the one fact that decides everything, which is which of them held the power to act. Symmetry of rhetoric is not symmetry of consequence. Both sides may speak in the grammar of nation. Only one of them closed the other's schools.
Here the interview offers its own best test, and I am glad to accept it. Toria argues, rightly, that the task of history is not to deliver a verdict but to describe, as fully and from as many angles as possible. Then let us describe, and let us do it from Georgian sources, since those are the ones a sceptic cannot dismiss.
The organised settlement of Georgians and Megrelians into Abkhazia did not stretch back into a shared antiquity. It followed the emptying of the country after the end of the Great Caucasian War in 1864 and the expulsions that came with the war of 1877 and 1878. Once the land lay vacant, the question of who should fill it was discussed openly, in print, by Georgians. Iakob Gogebashvili, the eminent educationalist, devoted an 1877 article in Tiflisskiy Vestnik to exactly that question, "Who should be settled in Abkhazia?", and answered that the Megrelians would make the best colonisers. That is the very word he used. Georgi Tsereteli, writing in the Tiflis newspaper Droeba, was blunter still. In 1873 he asked whether the whole Caucasus was not "our land, our country." In 1879 he urged his readers that it was time to "grab new territories in the Caucasus," and to spread across the vacant Caucasian lands before, in his phrase, foreign tribes arrived to settle them first. This is the settler-colonial project, named and advocated, not by an Abkhaz polemicist, but by leading Georgian intellectuals in the Georgian press of the day.
Demographic change in Abkhazia 1897–1989. (Conciliation Resources)
+ Who should be settled in Abkhazia? By Jakob Gogebashvili (1877)
+ Georgii Tsereteli (1879): It’s time that we grab new territories in the Caucasus
+ Three Extracts from the Georgian Newspapers Droeba and Iveria
+ Revelations of forgotten voices
+ The solitude of Abkhazia, by Douglas W. Freshfield
What was urged and begun in the 1870s reached its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, and the executors recorded it themselves. A 1940 report from the Abkhaz Gosplan to the government praised the resettlement, begun on the initiative of Beria, of thousands of farming households from land-poor districts of Georgia onto land in Abkhazia described as abandoned for centuries. A 1941 report by the chairman of the Abkhaz Council of People's Commissars called the same Beria-initiated resettlement, started in 1937, one of the major achievements of Soviet power in Abkhazia. Eleven new collective farms, sixteen hundred and fifty households in the first wave, a target of over five thousand by 1944. These are not the grievances of the settled-against. They are the boasts of the settling state, in its own minutes.
Around the same machinery ran the rest of it. In 1945 and 1946 the Abkhaz-language schools were closed and replaced with Georgian ones. The Abkhaz alphabet was changed to a Georgian base. Abkhaz surnames were rewritten into Georgian and Megrelian shapes in the church and civil registers: Achba became Anchabadze, Inal-ipa became Inalishvili, Marshan became Marshania, Maan became Margania, Eshba became Eshbaia, frequently without the knowledge of the person whose name it was. In 1947 three Abkhaz scholars, Dzidzaria, Shinkuba and Shakryl, set all of this down in a letter to the authorities, at considerable personal risk.
These are not interpretations. They are administrative facts, preserved in the decrees that ordered them, the reports that celebrated them, and the appeals that protested them. The "shared space" thesis is not a description of this record. It is a frame laid across the top of it, one that turns a documented project of settlement and erasure into the appearance of a family disagreement. If history is description, the description is the newspaper column, the Gosplan report, the altered register, the closed school, the letter of 1947. The frame is what survives only by looking past them.
Toria's treatment of Gal deserves a direct answer, both because it is the most forceful thing he says and because he is partly right. The pressure on Georgian-language instruction there, and the drift toward Russian-medium schooling, are real. An Abkhaz writer who simply brushed them aside would be performing the very mistake Toria identifies. I will not brush them aside. Where the Abkhaz state narrows the education or the civic standing of its Georgian residents, that is wrong, and to say so plainly does not weaken the Abkhaz argument. It is the Abkhaz argument, consistently held to. A people that endured Georgianisation and then practises a smaller version of it on a smaller community has failed to learn the lesson written into its own history.
+ The Ibero-Caucasian hypothesis and the historiography of Abkhazia, by Kevin Tuite
+ The value of the past: myths, identity and politics in Transcaucasia, by Victor A. Shnirelman
+ The Georgian–Abkhaz War of 1992–1993: Recognition, Agency, and the Politics of Narrative Power
One of Toria's complaints, though, should be turned over and looked at from the other side. He objects that the Abkhaz try to replace the Georgian identity of Gal with a Megrelian one. Set the motive aside for a moment and look at the fact underneath it. The population of Gal is, in its majority, Megrelian. The Megrelians are a distinct people with their own language, several hundred thousand strong, and inside Georgia that language has no official status, is taught in no school, and is drifting, on present trends, toward extinction. Georgia has declined even to sign the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which would oblige it to acknowledge that Megrelian exists at all. So when Tbilisi insists that the Megrelians of Gal are simply Georgians, it performs the very act of identity-absorption that Toria fears, only in the other direction, and at home. It is a strange thing to charge someone with erasing Megrelian identity from the capital that has spent a century declining to recognise it.
What honesty asks in return is that the proportion be kept. Toria invokes Fanon, the postcolonial insight that the formerly oppressed take up the master's instruments. It is a sharp observation and there is truth in it. It also quietly inverts the order of events. Those instruments were used on the Abkhaz for decades, at the scale of an entire republic, by the machinery of Soviet Georgia, long before any Abkhaz administration existed to use them on anyone. To introduce Fanon at the Gal end of the story and not at the Beria end is to start the clock at the moment most convenient for the conclusion. If the master's tools are the theme, then we are owed clarity about who was the master, for how long, and over how many.
I will end where Toria ends, on dialogue, and I mean it without reservation. He is right that nothing in this world is permanent, right that the conversation should begin somewhere modest, with transport between Zugdidi and Gal, with medicine and sport and the ordinary traffic of neighbours, long before it arrives at status. There is no quarrel from this side with any of that. The single request is that the conversation begin from the document rather than from the frame. Recognise the Abkhaz first as a people who exist in their own right, and not as the distinct but belonging junior partner in someone else's space, and the dialogue he wants becomes possible. Retain the frame, however softly it is phrased, and what looks like an invitation to talk is in fact an invitation to concede, in advance, the very thing the argument is about.
The retirement of the Ingorokva theory, where it has genuinely been retired, is welcome, and Toria is an honest narrator of much of this. The deeper task is to notice two things at once: that the theory is far less buried than the seminar room imagines, and that even its respectable replacement keeps the conclusion the crude version was built to reach. A small nation can live alongside a larger one as an equal. It cannot live inside it as a chapter. That, in the end, is the whole of the difference between a shared space and a shared border, and it is the difference the documents have been recording all along.