Georgia is not likely to get NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) at the alliance’s summit next year in Warsaw, Deputy Foreign Minister, Davit Dondua, said.

He made the remarks while speaking at a meeting with opposition lawmakers from Free Democrats (FD) party in the Parliament on October 9.

Noting that the next year’s NATO summit will be held just few months before the parliamentary elections in Georgia, the Deputy Foreign Minister said that NATO’s failure to grant some kind of meaningful tool, instead of MAP, for eventual membership will be damaging for pro-Western political forces in Georgia.

According to him the Georgian officials and diplomats’ rhetoric abroad in communication with NATO partners is different from messages they try to use for domestic consumption in Georgia.

He said that although knowing that there is a little chance for MAP, Georgia is still pushing the issue intensively in its talks with NATO partners as a “bargaining” tool in order to then get at least something; but domestically, he said, the authorities do not want to prioritize MAP in order not to create false expectations, because it will then cause frustration, which will be exploited by the “Russian propaganda” in Georgia.
 
“I will tell you directly – diplomats do not speak with 100 percent about anything, but we can say with high probability… that there will be no MAP for Georgia at the summit,” said Dondua, a career diplomat who served as Georgia’s NATO ambassador in 2000-2005.

“How it will be perceived by the society [in Georgia]?.. We should be very careful; it is very important to keep the right temperature and to have a right narrative in order to avoid a serious problem – I don’t mean a problem for a governing political force, I mean a problem for all those political forces, which see Georgia’s future in Europe. That’s exactly how the Russian propaganda works – their main message is: ‘no one in Europe and NATO needs us [Georgians], so let’s give it up’,” the Deputy Foreign Minister said.

“So we are telling Europeans and NATO that one of the reasons – it’s not the main reason, but it’s one of the reasons – why we need to keep permanent dynamism in our relations is to make our people understand that… [NATO] is ready to deliver on what it has once promised,” Dondua said, apparently referring to 2008 NATO Bucharest summit decision, which said that Georgia will become a NATO member.

But at the same summit NATO decided that MAP should be the next stage on country’s path towards eventual membership. Georgia has been denied MAP since then.

Senior Georgian officials have said for multiple times that NATO should either grant Georgia MAP or declare in its decision at the next summit in 2016 that MAP is no longer a precursor to eventual full membership.

Deputy Foreign Minister Dondua told lawmakers from FD party that in terms of the EU signing of the Association Agreement, including the deep and comprehensive free trade component, and hopefully visa free rules in the Schengen area from next year represent “very good messages to demonstrate that our European policy delivers.”   

“We are requesting the same from NATO – ‘ok, if there is no MAP, there should be something that will demonstrate to our people that we are not idle. [Absence of such message] would be damaging for NATO itself and would also be a wrong message to our population,” he said.
 
“Now we have a strategy for a period leading up to December, when there is a foreign ministerial meeting [of NATO member states]. Externally we have a message different from the one we use domestically. Externally we permanently speak about MAP – and we will do so at least till December, not because we have high hopes that we will be granted MAP [at the Warsaw summit], but because for bargaining purposes in order to have something significant – that was the case ahead of the previous [NATO] summit [in Wales in September, 2014], when although there was no MAP we were given ‘substantial package’ [of cooperation],” the Deputy Foreign Minister said.

“So if you don’t hear us speaking loud about MAP domestically, it does not mean that the same is happening externally. Domestically we do not want to increase expectations,” Dondua said.

In this context he pointed out at the timing of the Warsaw summit in July, which will come just few months before the parliamentary elections in Georgia.

He suggested that over-inflated expectation will cause frustration, which in turn will be damaging for “Georgia’s European policy.”