When Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili was a child, his home country was just beginning to recover from decades as an impoverished Soviet satellite.
High level corruption, civil war and lingering economic malaise were Georgia’s reality.
Now, he is the youngest head of Government in the world and is focused on developing closer economic and political ties with the European Union while laying the groundwork for eventually joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Garibashvili said in an interview to Foreign Policy.
"I really want to transform my country into a real, modern, democratic, European state," he told FP, choosing his words carefully. "That's my dream."
Settling relations with Russia and keeping close ties to Europe will make the Georgian Prime Minister's "dream” come true.
Russia reacted with fury to closer European moves, and Garibashvili was well aware of the risks of pushing Moscow too hard, FP journalist John Thys stated.
Meanwhile, Georgia’s former President Mikheil Saakashvili spent his final years in office futilely trying to persuade the West to help reclaim the lost provinces, while the new Government had a different strategy towards its northern neigbour Russia, Garibashvili said.
Georgia’s integration into the European Union would be favourable to citizens of the country’s breakaway region.
Garibashvili predicted within the next five years, Georgian citizens will be able to travel through the E.U. without visas and the country's economy will be rapidly expanding because of growing trade with Europe.
He believed residents of the breakaway regions would also want to experience those perks for themselves, the FP article stated.
"They will see the difference in living standards," Garibashvili said.
"They will see how they live in Abkhazia and Ossetia, and they will see how the rest of Georgia lives."
The journalist emphasized Garibashvili, who spoke like the businessman he was before he became a politician, also boasted that his country offered political stability, a cheap labor force and a pro-business regulatory structure.
In the interview, Garibashvili said he expected his country's economy to grow by at least 5 percent in 2014.
He was concerned by the installation of barbed wire fences on the Georgia-Russia border and said Russia’s president could not forget old resentments.
Garibashvili said the Russian forces had begun building 30 miles of barbed wire fencing along the border with South Ossetia. The work stopped in December, weeks before the Sochi Olympics started, however on Tuesday, just after the closing ceremony, the work resumed.
"That's crazy, right?" he stated in the interview.
Now, Georgia had a chance to become a member of the EU, if Garibashvili succeeded, the journalist stated.
"We want to be an example," Garibashvili said in the interview. "We want to show the way."