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School of Europeanness
InSchool of Europeanness, Dace Dzenovska argues that Europe's political landscape is shaped by a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. Nowhere, Dzenovska writes, is this tension more glaring than in the former Soviet Republics.
Using Latvia as a representative case,School of Europeannessis a historical ethnography of the tolerance work undertaken in that country as part of postsocialist democratization efforts. Dzenovska contends that the collapse of socialism and the resurgence of Latvian nationalism gave this Europe-wide logic new life, simultaneously reproducing and challenging it. Her work makes explicit what is only implied in the 1977 Kraftwerk song, \"Europe Endless\": hierarchies prevail in European public and political life even as tolerance is touted by politicians and pundits as one of Europe's chief virtues.
School of Europeannessshows how post-Cold War liberalization projects in Latvia contributed to the current crisis of political liberalism in Europe, providing deep ethnographic analysis of the power relations in Latvia and the rest of Europe, and identifying the tension between exclusive polities and inclusive values as foundational of Europe's political landscape.
eBook
From Eastern Bloc to European Union
More than 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, European integration remains a work in progress, especially in those Eastern European nations most dramatically reshaped by democratization and economic liberalization. This volume assembles detailed, empirically grounded studies of eleven states—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and the former East Germany—that went on to join the European Union. Each chapter analyzes the political, economic, and social transformations that have taken place in these nations, using a comparative approach to identify structural similarities and assess outcomes relative to one another as well as the rest of the EU.
eBook
The Case for Latvia. Disinformation Campaigns Against a Small Nation
What do we know about Latvia and the Latvians? A Baltic (not Balkan) nation that emerged from fifty years under the Soviet Union - interrupted by a brief but brutal Nazi-German occupation and a devastating war - now a member of the European Union and NATO. Yes, but what else? Relentless accusations keep appearing, especially in Russian media, often repeated in the West: \"Latvian soldiers single-handedly saved Lenin's revolution in 1917\", \"Latvians killed Tsar Nikolai II and the Royal family\", \"Latvia was a thoroughly anti-Semitic country and Latvians started killing Jews even before the Germans arrived in 1941\", \"Nazi revival is rampant in today's Latvia\", \"The Russian minority is persecuted in Latvia...\" True, false or in-between? The Finnish journalist and author Jukka Rislakki examines charges like these and provides an outline of Latvia's recent history while attempting to separate documented historical fact from misinformation and deliberate disinformation. His analysis helps to explain why the Baltic States (population 7 million) consistently top the enemy lists in public opinion polls of Russia (143 million). His knowledge of the Baltic languages allows him to make use of local sources and up-to-date historical research. He is a former Baltic States correspondent for Finland's largest daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and the author of several books on Finnish and Latvian history. As a neutral, experienced and often critical observer, Rislakki is uniquely qualified for the task of separating truth from fiction.
eBook
Ethnic politics in europe
This detailed account of ethnic minority politics explains when and how European institutions successfully used norms and incentives to shape domestic policy toward ethnic minorities and why those measures sometimes failed.
Going beyond traditional analyses, Kelley examines the pivotal engagement by the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council for Europe in the creation of such policies.
Following language, education, and citizenship issues during the 1990s in Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania, she shows how the combination of membership conditionality and norm-based diplomacy was surprisingly effective at overcoming even significant domestic opposition. However, she also finds that diplomacy alone, without the offer of membership, was ineffective unless domestic opposition to the proposed policies was quite limited.
As one of the first systematic analyses of political rather than economic conditionality, the book illustrates under what conditions and through what mechanisms institutions influenced domestic policy in the decade, preparing the way for the historic enlargement of the European Union.
This thoughtful and thorough discussion, based on case studies, quantitative analysis, and interviews with nearly one hundred policymakers and experts, tells an important story about how European organizations helped facilitate peaceful solutions to ethnic tensions--in sharp contrast to the ethnic bloodshed that occurred in the former Yugoslavia during this time. This book's simultaneous assessment of soft diplomacy and stricter conditionality advances a long overdue dialogue between proponents rational choice models and social constructivists. As political requirements increasingly become part of conditionality, it also provides keen policy insights for the strategic choices made by actors in international institutions.
eBook
Strategic Calculation and International Socialization: Membership Incentives, Party Constellations, and Sustained Compliance in Central and Eastern Europe
This article uses a rationalist approach to explain the international
socialization of Central and Eastern Europe to liberal human rights and
democracy norms. According to this approach, socialization consists in a
process of reinforcement, and its effectiveness depends on the balance
between the international and domestic costs and benefits of compliance
over an extended period of time. EU and NATO accession conditionality has
been a necessary condition of sustained compliance in those countries of
Central and Eastern Europe that violated liberal norms initially. The
pathways and long-term outcomes of international socialization, however,
have varied with the constellations of major parties in the target states.
Whereas conditionality has been effective with liberal and mixed party
constellations, it has failed to produce compliance in antiliberal
regimes. In the empirical part of the article, these propositions are
substantiated with data on the development of liberal democracy in Central
and Eastern Europe and case studies on Slovakia and Latvia.For useful comments on earlier versions, I thank
the participants of the IDNET workshop seminars, especially Jeff Checkel,
Matthew Evangelista, Judith Kelley, Thomas Risse, and Marianne van de
Steeg. In addition, the anonymous reviewers and the editors of IO
made excellent suggestions for improving and clarifying the argument. The
research for this article was supported by a grant of the German Research
Foundation (DFG), 2000–2002.
Journal Article
The European rescue of the Washington Consensus? EU and IMF lending to Central and Eastern European countries
The global financial crisis has transformed the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU). Until the crisis, the IMF had not lent to EU member states in decades, but now the two organisations closely coordinate their lending policies. In the Latvian and Romanian programmes, the IMF and the EU advocated different loan terms. Surprisingly, the EU embraced 'Washington Consensus'-style measures more willingly than did the IMF, which much of the contemporary literature still portrays as an across-the-board promoter of orthodox macroeconomic policies. We qualify this stereotypical characterisation by arguing from a constructivist perspective that the degree of an organisation's autonomy from its members depends on the interpretation of its mandate. IMF staff viewed the Fund's technical mandate as an opportunity to react rather flexibly to the challenges of the latest crisis. By contrast, European Commission, as well as European Central Bank (ECB), staff interpreted the vast body of supranational rules as necessitating stricter adherence to economic orthodoxy. Thus, IMF lending policies were more flexible and, at least on fiscal issues, also less contractionary.
Journal Article
Export and productivity in global value chains
This paper investigates the effect of exporting on productivity, often referred to as “learning by exporting”, in the context of global value chains (GVCs). Although the rise of GVCs raised hopes that it would facilitate knowledge transfer from technologically advanced foreign buyers, empirical evidence on its role in learning by exporting is scant. We use data of Latvian and Estonian firms to observe how learning by exporting differs across types of exports associated with different kinds of participation in GVCs. We find that productivity gains resulting from export entry are significantly larger for specific types of exports, such as exports of knowledge-intensive services, intermediate goods and re-exports. These exports correspond to activities that generate high value added within GVCs. Our findings indicate that the intensity of interactions with global buyers alongside exporters’ room for technology catch-up define the extent of learning by exporting in GVCs.
Journal Article
Family farms through the lens of geopolitics: rethinking agency and power in the Baltic borderlands
This paper examines the role of geopolitics, including armed conflict, in family farming. Drawing on critical approaches to geopolitics in geography and anthropology, we situate the dynamics of family farming in the context of multiscalar struggles over territory and political sovereignty. Our historically and geographically situated approach shows how geopolitical positionality engenders vulnerabilities as well as political potential for alternative development by shaping labor and gender dynamics in farming households. Empirically, our research provides an illustrative example of the Baltic states, especially Latvia and Lithuania, which have been situated within geopolitical fault lines for centuries. Focusing on four different historical periods, we demonstrate how the dynamics of family farming in the Baltic states—characterized by the persistence of smallholder family farms and specific land ownership patterns with women owning almost half of farms—are partly a result of the multiscalar geopolitics manifesting itself in violent colonial histories. Our analysis also reveals how various geopolitical power interplays in borderlands can lead to devastating consequences, while simultaneously creating pathways for alternatives to the capital-intensive, environmentally destructive, and socially exploitative corporate food regime. Overall, our research underscores the complex ways in which geopolitical (in)security undergirds labor and gender in farming households.
Journal Article