President Saakashvili and President Yushchenko met for a summit in Georgia to discuss and make the announcement of a new grouping of nations whose sole purpose is to secure the principles of democracy for their people. It will be called the Commonwealth of Democratic Choice.

12 August 2005 — The Ukrainian and Georgian presidents today called for the setting up of a new regional alliance that would champion freedom and democracy in their countries and throughout the region.

Ukraine’s Viktor Yushchenko and Georgia’s Mikhail Saakashvili said in a statement that the Commonwealth of Democratic Choice will become a powerful tool for promoting human rights.

Meeting at the Georgian spa town of Borjomi, the two leaders said they were aiming to promote “a new era of democracy, security, stability, and peace across Europe, from the Atlantic to the Caspian Sea.”

They said the new alliance would be inaugurated at a summit in Ukraine this fall and invited the United States, the European Union, and Russia to attend as observers. The two said that the new grouping would unite democracies of the Baltic, Black Sea, and Caspian regions, but wouldn’t elaborate which specific nations could join.

I’m going to go out on a limb and make a wild generalization about which countries will be involved in this new grouping, though they make it pretty obvious by specifying which regions would be included. This is reminiscient of the GUAM alliance, involving Gerogia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova, in which the new purpose of the alliance announced a few months ago was to forward the security, energy independence, and democracy agendas of the four countries.

The CDC will likely carry these same purposes but involve a greater number of countries and a lot more cooperation. The member countries will be those on the fringe of Europe bordering Russia and other undemocratic states. For example, Belarus is a dictatorship that sticks into the belly of Europe. Neighborhood states like the Baltics, Poland, and Ukraine surround it and are constantly looking to put pressure on Lukashenko. Other nearby developing democracies like Moldova and the countries of Central Europe may be involved as well. Developing democracies will actually likely make up the core of the group. Georgia is a given, but Azerbaijan and Armenia would also be up for consideration.

The US, EU, and Russia are invited to observe, and Russia is the country that needs to do so the most. Yushchenko and Saakashvili’s words are not necessarily meant to describe simply that member countries will include all of the above, but that their aim is to extend democratic governance and alliance with the West all the way through the Caspian around Russia.