“The recent years’ geopolitical upheaval reveals that cultural identity is crucial for defining the future of the European Union,” the Georgian Parliament Speaker, Shalva Papuashvili, remarked during his address at the Conference of Speakers of Parliaments of EU Member States and Partner Countries in Budapest.

Papuashvili noted that as other global regions outpace Europe in economic, demographic, and military terms, Europe’s response must be grounded in its shared heritage, values, and a unifying vision for the future.

“While the other regions of the world outgrow Europe economically, expand their populations and military capabilities, Europe’s response should be rooted in our common heritage, values, and persuasive vision for the future.

Therefore, the common vision of the European future should rest not on contrived ideological constructs but time-tested civilizational values. The discussion about the future of Europe should be a two-way movement, not a unilateral preaching about the virtues that only part of Europeans understand and agree.

Unfortunately, this is what we see, sometimes, in some European countries’ and institutions’ stance towards some of its members and candidate countries. The paradigm of this attitude is that some countries should be trained towards becoming ‘truly European’, according to the standards that are, by definition, essentially contested. As newcomer to European Union politics, we clearly see that there is a certain hierarchy of ‘Europeanness’ inside the Union. However, nobody should have monopoly on that matter,” Papuashvili stated.

He stressed that the EU must engage with ‘wider Europe’—both old and new, including ancient cultural legacies.

“Europe was always evolving, and its current institutional form – the European Union – does not represent Europe in its entirety. Therefore, the EU should listen to wider Europe, new, old, and the oldest.

In our case, even if we regained our formal independence in 1991, Georgia has had extensive history of national governance for many hundreds of years, and unique culture that spans millennia. The seeds of our parliamentarianism can be traced back to the same time as the signing of the Magna Carta, when Georgia witnessed the first attempt of curtailing the rights of absolute monarchy. We are also co-creators of modern democratic Europe. I represent the Parliament which was first elected democratically in 1919, which had the first ever, internationally unprecedented, progressive social-democratic majority, and which ensured women’s full electoral rights, including 5 women parliamentarians being elected, 106 years ago.

Therefore, for Georgia, becoming member of the European Union is not about entering an exclusive club but a long-overdue reunion,” the Speaker concluded.