When does a gift become a crime? Georgia’s recent legislative initiative — requiring government approval for receiving foreign grants, with criminal penalties for unapproved acceptance — raises this question not just in legal terms, but in philosophical, cultural, and historical dimensions. Though framed as a matter of national security, the measure proposed by the ruling Georgian Dream party is, in fact, part of a long-standing global tension between sovereignty and civil society, between foreign aid and domestic autonomy, between trust and control.
This article explores what it means for a government to insert itself between donor and recipient — not just bureaucratically, but ideologically — and how the regulation of gifts reflects deeper anxieties about identity, power, and influence in modern nation-states.
The Anthropology of the Gift: What Happens When Giving Is Regulated?
In 1925, French sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote The Gift, a groundbreaking study that still underpins how we understand the act of giving. Mauss argued that no gift is ever truly free. Gifts create obligations; they bind people together in networks of reciprocity. A gift received may require a counter-gift, or at the very least, a form of recognition and allegiance.
Georgia’s proposed law, seen through Mauss’s theory, is not merely a financial regulation — it is an ideological firewall. By requiring government approval for any foreign grant, the law attempts to intercept this invisible social contract and reassert the state as the sole arbiter of legitimate relationships. In Maussian terms, the government is attempting to control not just the flow of money, but the web of social obligations it creates.
But who, then, is the true recipient: the NGO, the scholar, the artist, or the state?
“Foreign Agents,” Familiar Rhetoric: A Global Pattern of Civil Society Suppression
This isn’t the first time a post-Soviet state has tried to criminalize or suppress independent actors funded from abroad. The precedent comes chillingly close from Russia’s 2012 “foreign agents” law, which required organizations receiving foreign funding and engaging in “political activity” to register as foreign agents — a term deliberately invoking Cold War paranoia. Since then, the law has expanded, targeting individuals, journalists, even artists.
Hungary, under Viktor Orbán, enacted a similar law in 2017 — later struck down by the European Court of Justice — that stigmatized NGOs funded from outside the EU. In both cases, the stated rationale was to protect national interests and prevent undue foreign influence. But the effects were systematic weakening of civil society, shrinking of public discourse, and entrenchment of authoritarian power structures.
Georgia’s proposed amendment follows this global script — cloaked in the language of sovereignty but aimed squarely at institutions that foster pluralism, accountability, and critique.
Democracy as Suspicion: When Civil Society Becomes the Enemy Within
Political theorist Hannah Arendt warned of the dangers when democratic governments begin to view their own citizens as potentially subversive. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she describes how regimes consolidate power not through brute force alone, but by dismantling the “intermediary institutions” — the associations, clubs, press, universities — that connect individuals to the political world.
In Georgia, many of these intermediaries are precisely the recipients of foreign grants: media organizations, watchdog NGOs, human rights defenders, cultural institutions. To treat such actors as security risks is to enact a culture of suspicion — one in which pluralism is recast as instability, and critique as foreign meddling.
Law as Symbolic Gesture: What Kind of State Imagines This Law?
Legal theorist Pierre Bourdieu often spoke of “symbolic violence” — the imposition of meaning by those in power, disguised as neutral law or policy. The Georgian grant regulation, whether heavily enforced or not, performs symbolic work: it declares that trust no longer exists between the state and independent civic actors.
Moreover, the law attempts to redefine the very concept of public good. Grants for social research, artistic experimentation, climate advocacy, or LGBTQ+ rights — often funded by European or American institutions — are reframed as suspicious, subversive, or destabilizing. This not only chills public engagement; it narrows the imagination of what kind of society is possible.
Sovereignty or Self-Sabotage? A False Dichotomy
Supporters of the bill may argue that no sovereign state can allow uncontrolled foreign influence, especially in a turbulent geopolitical context. But this argument often conflates two different things: transparency and obedience. Grant systems can be made transparent — through public registries, oversight mechanisms, and impact evaluations — without criminalizing or centralizing them.
By inserting a 10-day approval process with no right of effective appeal, the proposed law creates a veto point not based on ethics or performance, but political convenience. It risks turning scientific cooperation, educational exchange, and cultural development into arenas of strategic paranoia.
And ironically, the very goal the government claims to protect, national sovereignty, may be undermined by its methods. Alienating the EU, silencing grassroots actors, and stigmatizing democratic infrastructure damages Georgia’s credibility and diminishes its soft power globally.
Cultural Memory and Post-Soviet Trauma: Why This Feels Familiar
The post-Soviet landscape is haunted by the specter of centralized control. For many Georgians, memories of the Soviet komissar who decided what was ideologically pure — what could be published, performed, or supported — are still vivid. The grant approval law echoes this past not only in its bureaucratic logic but in its epistemology: the state decides what counts as knowledge, what counts as help, and who counts as trustworthy. This is not a fight over money, it is a fight over legitimacy — over who gets to define the social good, and under what conditions.
The urgency of the moment calls for more than protest. It requires cultural theorists, legal scholars, historians, and civil society actors to connect the dots — to show how this law fits into a broader erosion of democratic norms. It requires the press to resist the framing of grants as merely financial instruments, and instead restore the discourse of intellectual freedom, moral courage, and civic imagination.
Above all, it requires a reassertion of trust — that civil society is not a threat to sovereignty, but its expression.
By Ivan Nechaev
