United Neutral Georgia: Final liberation from Euro-illusion is essential, and Georgia must bring new discourse on neutrality into international agenda

“The expectation that the European Union will change and that we will enter a union of the kind we envisaged decades ago is an illusion. It is likewise mistaken to expect that Georgia will derive any benefit from EU membership,” reads the statement by the United Neutral Georgia party.

As stated in the party’s announcement, “the European Union is at the peak of a values-based degradation, which is confirmed daily by the developments taking place there, the laws adopted, and the strategic documents and resolutions drawn up.”

“The declared purpose behind the founding of the United Neutral Georgia party was to free the issue of the country’s European integration from political hostage-taking and, when defining our foreign policy priorities, to introduce rational reasoning in place of dogmatic frameworks, since dogmas and an agenda imposed from outside have inflicted serious harm on Georgia over the past decades and have significantly hindered the development of our country’s economy and political institutions.

We can say that the minimum programme has been achieved; we have succeeded in de-sacralising an issue that had been elevated to the status of a religion, and today the Georgian Dream government itself is asking the question: what is the point of EU membership if the principal benefits and levers of membership are taken away from the outset? What matters here, however, is that not only are the authorities asking this question belatedly, but the answer itself has long been clear.

First and foremost, it must be said that the expectation that the European Union will change and that we will enter a union of the kind we envisaged decades ago is an illusion. It is equally mistaken to expect that Georgia will derive any benefit from EU membership, whether in economic, security, or values-based terms. In our statements, we have repeatedly described in detail the reality within today’s European Union, and we have consistently emphasised that every indicator pointed to a further deterioration of the situation. We also stated clearly, at the time, that Brussels’s bureaucratic attitude towards Georgia would not shift towards greater objectivity either.

The fact is that the European Union’s share of the global economy has been shrinking since 2008, falling from 26% to 14%. This trend is becoming ever more irreversible against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war, since EU member states are allocating billions of euros to prolong the proxy war, while at the same time increasing military expenditure. In 2024, the EU’s total militarisation budget stood at EUR 343 billion; in 2026, it is set to rise by more than EUR 110 billion, reaching EUR 454 billion. What matters most here is that this rise in the budget is not being driven by economic growth, on the contrary, it is happening against a backdrop of economic stagnation, at a time when major enterprises are leaving EU countries one after another, cheap energy resources are gone, and there are no longer any technological breakthroughs, all of which is driving the rapid deindustrialisation of the European Union.

Alongside this economic decline, the EU’s utterly suicidal migration policy has turned public safety into one of the main challenges facing its member states. To give just one example, according to a single year’s statistics, 402,000 criminal acts were committed by migrants in Germany: violence, theft, rape, terrorist attacks, and so on.

While the population of the European Union is growing, its indigenous population is shrinking, indicating a gradual demographic shift. None of this prevents the EU bureaucracy from continuing to keep LGBT propaganda as one of its top priorities. This year stood out in particular for the holding of so-called LGBT pride events, which the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, hailed as a great success.

On July 25, the Netherlands opened its so-called Junior Pride week, aimed at children under ten. Meanwhile, that same country’s parliament is debating legislative changes that would allow same-sex couples to have a biological child in common. Taken together, the European Union is experiencing a profound moral decline, as evidenced daily by ongoing developments, newly passed laws, and emerging strategic documents and resolutions.

Today, instead of being a democratic global player with a strong economy, the European Union has become a suppressor of dissenting opinion, a militaristic bloc engaged in open war with Russia and in tariff and sanctions confrontation with both the United States and China. Despite it being plain to see what has brought the European Union to such dire consequences, its ruling elite, which is entirely subordinate to the ‘deep state,’ continues to pursue the very same policy with even greater zeal across every direction, and intends to impose all of this on potential member states in such a way that it does not even leave them the right to vote.

Our party issued a warning on June 17 concerning the proposal by Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos, who became the first official to raise the prospect of restricting voting rights for incoming EU members.

According to the German Foreign Minister, 12 countries are already backing the abolition of the consensus-based decision-making rule and the restriction of new member states’ voting rights on foreign policy, security, budgetary and other key issues.

The European Union has long since begun, in practice, attempts to suppress any dissenting opinion and to restrict a country’s right to govern itself in line with its own national interests. The clearest example of this is Georgia. For years, Brussels has been trying to punish our country simply because we refused to comply with its directives, which ran contrary to our country’s interests and would have led to the destruction of our own country by our own hand. They openly demanded that we take these steps, justifying their position that we must unconditionally submit to their rules and conditions, since we wish to join their club. Our country, through the greatest of efforts, managed not to submit to blackmail and pressure, which meant we had to repel several attempted revolutions. But we must understand that, hypothetically, were we to become members, this very ability to decide our own country’s fate for ourselves would already be stripped from us de jure.

For this reason, now is truly no longer the time to be asking questions, since asking a question cannot change the status quo; we remain trapped in a paradoxical state of affairs, we have a constitutional dogma, the government’s foreign policy priority remains the expectation of a reset in relations with that same European Union, with the prospect of eventual membership that can bring our country no benefit whatsoever, yet which, without giving us the right to state our position, would impose obligations that would prove devastating for our country’s economy, security and identity.

That is why final liberation from the Euro-illusion is essential, and why Georgia must bring a new discourse into the international agenda; one concerning the country’s neutrality. By retaining candidate status and maintaining a course towards the EU, we remain part of that camp, which places us in isolation and prevents us from pursuing a fully flexible, multi-vector policy, the optimal path for our country to preserve peace, achieve economic development, ensure security, achieve territorial reunification, and continue living according to traditional values,” the statement by United Neutral Georgia reads.