Georgia’s Trade Diplomacy: the Georgian-Russian Talks on the Accession of the Russian Federation to the World Trade Organisation – Victory or Defeat?

Abstract

The article sheds the light on the Georgian-Russian long negotiations at the Russia’s bid to join WTO. The paper discloses details and strategies of bilateral trade diplomacy, offers more in depth analyses and better understanding of reasons and circumstances which led to the long negotiations cycle and time-to-time breaking of entire Russia’s WTO
accession process. It is shown that the crisis in relations between Tbilisi and Moscow in most cases was politically motivated and often negatively affected the trade talks. The author tries to respond to speculations about Georgia’s “troublemaking” at the WTO deliberations, which was caused by the lack of information and understanding of the background the Georgia-Russia standoff and diplomatic strategies and tools practiced by the
both countries. The current work at the certain degree fills the gap in knowledge of “big country–small country” trade dispute resolution, explores better understanding of negotiations process and its peculiarities as well as outcome of 11 years of start-stop talks. The research concentrates on long pending customs checkpoint issues as well as “costs and benefits” questions and concludes that the signed Agreement on customs administration and monitoring of trade across the contested borders and the enforcement process did not meet Tbilisi’s high expectations in five years time since its conclusion.