Liberalism on the Fence

In September 2015, Latvia announced a plan to build a 2.7-meter-high fence along especially vulnerable sections of its 276-kilometer-long border with Russia, amounting to 90 kilometers of fence altogether. The building of the fence was to commence as soon as possible and be completed in 2019. It would cost about 17 million euros. The State Border Guard described this project as “arranging the border zone” (...

Building Up and Tearing Down

Chapter 4 examines critical thinking as the skill that tolerance workers understood to be crucial for cultivating tolerant selves and publics in Latvia. Tolerance workers’ belief that critical thinking would lead to the correct conclusions about how to understand and live with ethnic, racial, and religious diversity coincided with extensive projects of promoting critical thinking in the former socialist world. From the liberal perspective, the former socialist world lacked critical thinking due to the legacies of an authoritarian political system and memorization-based education. This was thought to hinder the postsocialist subjects’ ability to establish the kind of relationship to their collective past that the European moral and political landscape demanded. However, lessons in political liberalism overlooked the multiplicity and heterogeneity of critical practices of former socialist subjects and obfuscated the historical specificity and ideological underpinnings of “critical thinking” as the special truth-producing instrument of actually existing political liberalism.

The State People and Their Minorities

Chapter 2 considers whether and how Latvians took up lessons in political liberalism with regard to the most important issue at the foundation of the post-Soviet Latvian state, that is, how to handle the large number of Russians and Russian-speaking Soviet people in the making of a national state. This is one area where most Latvians—those who embraced tolerance and those who did not—converged in a belief that it is they who needed to teach rather than receive lessons. Namely, most considered that European institutions and publics did not understand Soviet history. For most Latvians, it was Soviet socialism rather than European colonialism—or even fascism—that placed moral and political demands upon their present. It is this history that necessitated the implementation of restrictive citizenship and language policies in order to ensure the survival of the Latvian nation and the state.

Paradox of Europeanness

The introductory chapter outlines the argument of the book by drawing on the first publicly debated refugee case in Latvia. It traces two public positions that emerged in relation to the case: one representing openness to difference associated with political liberalism and the other refusal of difference associated with nationalism. The chapter argues that both positions enact and defend particular regimes of inclusion and exclusion. Their emergence as morally and politically opposed positions in the context of postsocialist democratization and European integration in Latvia points to a tension that characterizes the contemporary European political and moral landscape, namely the imperative to profess and institutionalize the values of inclusion and openness while at the same time practicing—and also institutionalizing—exclusion and closure. For Latvians, then, becoming European after socialism meant learning to live inclusion and exclusion the European way. It meant learning to live the paradox of Europeanness.