The recent years’ geopolitical upheaval reveals that cultural identity is crucial for defining the future of the EU, Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, underlined in his address at the Conference of Speakers of the European Union Parliaments in Budapest, Hungary.

As he highlighted, 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 the 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 2-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 EU politics, we clearly see that there is a certain hierarchy of ‘Europeanness’ inside the Union. However, nobody should have monopoly on that matter.

Europe was always evolving, and its current institutional form – the EU – 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, unique culture that spans millennia. Seeds of our parliamentarianism can be traced back to the same time as the signing of Magna Carta, when Georgia witnessed the 1st attempt of curtailing the rights of absolute monarchy. We are also co-creators of modern democratic Europe. I represent the Parliament which was 1st elected democratically in 1919, which had the 1st ever, internationally unprecedented, progressive social-democratic majority, which ensured women’s full electoral rights, including 5 women parliamentarians being elected, 106 years ago.

Therefore, for Georgia, becoming member of the EU is not about entering an exclusive club but a long-overdue reunion”, - said Shalva Papuashvili.