The Geopolitics of Higher Education and National Sovereignty: Why Georgia Needs a Realpolitik Strategy in Education

Authors: Ketevan Jincharadze, Zaza Rukhadze

Introduction: Higher Education as a Frontline of Sovereignty

In the 21st century, knowledge is no longer neutral. Higher education has become a domain of global contestation-a frontline where cultural hegemony, institutional norms, and strategic influence are forged and contested. Joseph Nye’s theory of soft power has gained renewed relevance as universities evolve into tools of geopolitical positioning, not merely transmitters of knowledge but architects of identity and agents of policy diffusion.

For small, geopolitically vulnerable states like Georgia-situated at the crossroads of empires, ideological systems, and digital dependencies - this transformation demands more than passive participation. It calls for strategic recalibration.

This blog makes a conservative-realist case: Georgia must adopt a realpolitik-based higher education strategy. This approach must combine openness to selective global cooperation with a firm commitment to state sovereignty, constitutional integrity, and civilizational continuity. Rather than emulate Western ideological paradigms uncritically, Georgia must design a higher education system that localizes global pressures while cultivating resilience, identity, and strategic autonomy.

1. Universities as Instruments of Power: The Global Context

Since the Cold War, the role of universities has shifted profoundly. Institutions of higher learning now function as key players in the geopolitics of soft influence. Anglo-American academic models, exported under the banners of modernization and democratization, have shaped the educational trajectories of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet sphere (Rhoads & Torres, 2006).

Internationalization initiatives such as Erasmus+, Fulbright, and Horizon Europe do more than promote mobility-they carry embedded normative frameworks: liberal governance principles, post-national values, and epistemological assumptions about modernization (Marginson, 2011). These frameworks are often absorbed by recipient institutions without adequate local filtration or calibration.

In states where epistemic traditions have been fractured - as in Georgia, following Soviet intellectual repression - these dynamic risks a form of epistemological dependency or "academic mimicry," wherein institutions simulate modernity without achieving real sovereignty (Beridze, 2021). The result is a university sector that is administratively globalized but substantively incoherent.

In contrast, countries like France, China, and Iran have proactively defended their academic sovereignty. France’s insistence on maintaining French as the dominant language of scholarship, and China’s Confucius Institutes as cultural emissaries, are not anomalies—they are manifestations of realpolitik within academia. Georgia must adopt a similarly assertive stance, one grounded in its own linguistic, historical, and constitutional traditions.

2. Georgia's Strategic Exposure: Education as a Soft Vulnerability

Georgia’s geopolitical positioning-bordering Russia, Turkey, and the Black Sea — renders its institutions susceptible to both overt and subtle forms of external influence. Beyond conventional threats to territorial integrity, Georgia also faces institutional penetration in education through international aid, donor agendas, foreign accreditation bodies, and metrics set by global ranking systems.

The Bologna Process, while facilitating structural compatibility with the European Higher Education Area, has introduced homogenizing pressures that often ignore the specific pedagogical, cultural, and strategic needs of Georgia. For example, the uncritical adoption of European quality assurance mechanisms has prioritized bureaucratic form over academic substance.

Unlike Estonia, which embedded education reform within a digital sovereignty framework, or Turkey, which selectively engages with international standards based on national objectives, Georgia has lacked a protective epistemological doctrine in its education modernization process.

This absence has left its institutions exposed to strategic drift and soft conditionality—subtle pressures that restructure national curricula, governance, and even values in directions that may not align with Georgia’s long-term interests.

3. Realpolitik in Higher Education: Principles and Strategic Vision

Realpolitik, often misunderstood as cynical opportunism, is in fact a pragmatic philosophy of statecraft. It recognizes that all public policy-including education, must reflect the realities of power, identity, and institutional self-preservation.

For Georgia, adopting a realpolitik paradigm in higher education would mean building an academic architecture that is:

• Resilient to external normative pressures.

• Context-sensitive to Georgian civilizational legacies and regional priorities.

• Sovereign in its strategic orientation and knowledge production.

Three strategic pillars are essential:

1. Critical Knowledge Ecosystems: Universities should cultivate curricula that restore Georgian historical literacy, legal-philosophical thought, and civilizational narrative continuity. This mirrors Israel’s model, where higher education is aligned with national service, identity consolidation, and technological self-sufficiency (Avnon, 2020).

2. Elite Institution Building: Georgia must establish flagship academic institutions - akin to Singapore’s National University-that specialize in strategic fields such as governance, cyber defense, regional diplomacy, and innovation diplomacy. These institutions should not merely chase global rankings, but serve national priorities.

3. Filtered Internationalization: Engagement with global academia must be selective and reciprocal. Hungary’s recalibrated partnerships, based on national benefit and academic coherence, offer a useful model (Patai, 2020). Georgia should welcome international collaboration only when it reinforces, rather than dilutes, its strategic and civilizational identity.

4. Operationalizing a Realpolitik-Oriented Education System

Moving from concept to implementation requires institutional innovation. A realpolitik framework must be institutionalized through concrete instruments and policy mechanisms. The following actions are proposed:

• Sovereign Curriculum Development Commission: A national body tasked with designing mandatory core courses across disciplines in Georgian constitutionalism, philosophy, and history. These curricula will form the intellectual spine of higher education and reinforce national cohesion.

• Academic Cybersecurity and Knowledge Protection: Universities must implement protocols to safeguard academic databases, intellectual property, and strategic research outputs from foreign surveillance or unauthorized transfer. Estonia’s model of digital sovereignty offers practical templates.

• Sovereignty Audits for International Partnerships: All international MOUs, donor agreements, and academic exchanges should be reviewed through a sovereignty filter — evaluating alignment with Georgia’s strategic priorities, reciprocity, and national benefit. This echoes India’s recalibration of its global higher education partnerships post-2020.

• Strategic Public Think Tanks and Research Hubs: The state should fund and mandate policy-oriented research centers on topics such as Black Sea security, hybrid warfare, Eurasian integration, and constitutional reform. These think tanks will ensure that academic discourse informs statecraft directly.

Conclusion: From Passive Imitation to Strategic Sovereignty

The global architecture of higher education is not neutral. It is shaped by asymmetries of power, narratives, and normative systems. For Georgia, passively adopting external models or measuring success by external criteria is not a path to modernization—it is a path to dependency.

A realpolitik strategy in higher education does not require isolationism. It demands strategic selectivity. It insists that knowledge systems must be embedded within national priorities, protected against epistemic colonization, and directed toward civic empowerment and state resilience.

Georgia’s universities must reclaim their historical role—not only as centers of inquiry but as guardians of national identity, laboratories of statecraft, and instruments of geopolitical clarity.

References

• Avnon, D. (2020). Democracy and the Political in Israeli Higher Education. Israel Affairs, 26(1), 101–118.

• Beridze, T. (2021). Academic Dependency in Post-Soviet Georgia. Caucasus Journal of Social Sciences.

• Marginson, S. (2011). Higher Education and Global Public Goods. Higher Education Quarterly, 65(4), 411–433.

• Patai, R. (2020). Cultural Sovereignty and Higher Education in Hungary. Journal of National Policy, 5(2), 78–95.

• Rhoads, R. A., & Torres, C. A. (2006). The University, State, and Market: The Political Economy of Globalization in the Americas. Stanford University Press.

• Tan, J. (2019). Strategic Education Planning in Singapore. Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 39(2), 127–144