Political liberalism in Europe is in crisis. The recent years have seen the rise of illiberal democracies in a number of east European countries and the turn towards increasingly nationalist, radical rightwing rhetoric in the “old” west European democracies. The new book by Dace Dzenovska, School of Europeanness, can be read as a genealogy of this crisis. It tells a story about liberalization projects in post-socialist Latvia, aimed at the promotion of “tolerance” as a liberal political virtue. These projects, often curated and funded by the European Union, were part of the country's “return to Europe” after the collapse of the USSR. Though the book is based on fieldwork that began in 2005, when both political liberalism and economic neoliberalism were arguably in their heyday, Dzenovska argues that her analysis “provides some insight about the unfolding of the current crisis of political liberalism before it had come into full view” (xii). The ethnographically rich account traces the activities of “tolerance workers”—professionals and activists from civil rights organizations and liberal non-governmental organizations—and how these activities to promote tolerance of various ethnic and racial Others were received by the Latvian public. Taking us across state institutions and non-governmental organizations and using a few themes—minority politics, borders, language, critical thinking—as anchors, Dzenovska shows with rich ethnographic detail how political liberalism was taught to the Latvian public.

While tolerance promotion projects in post-socialist Latvia are the empirical focus of the book, the author's theoretical sights are trained on “Europe” as a political and moral space. Dzenovska argues that, by looking at the “core of Europe” from “a marginal European space” (203), the contradictions and tensions inherent in the “actually existing post-cold war liberalism” (119) become visible. As eastern Europe is positioned as an analytically strategic space for surveying and critiquing the European political and moral landscape, the book offers a new take on the relevance of east European studies. Among other, this viewpoint helps expose “the paradox of Europeanness,” namely “the importance to profess and institutionalize the values of inclusion and openness while at the same time practicing—and also institutionalizing—exclusion and closure” (3). For example, migrants and refugees’ rights are avowed while also investing considerable efforts at keeping them from crossing the borders. Eastern Europe provides a useful vantage point because it serves the liberal Europe as a “spatial fix” that enables “the reassertion of the moral goodness of liberal Europe by dislocating Europe's vices, such as nationalism and intolerance, to marginal people and places” (12). East Europeans are one category of such marginalized subjects, easily cast “as racializing and backward Europeans who could and should benefit from … Europeanization” (18). To give one example that Dzenovska discusses in the book, while Latvians clumsily express pride of their own, albeit small, seventeenth century colonial missions, western Europe can appear as dealing with its own colonial past in a much more “progressive” manner.

As the chapters unravel the various manifestations of the European paradox, the book as a whole “puts forth a critique of institutionalized political liberalism” (xii). Here also comes its contribution to understanding the current crisis in Europe. Many analysts have been ascribing the recent growth of nationalism and rightwing populism in Europe to the social ruptures brought about by decades of economic neoliberalism. Dzenovska argues persuasively that it is also the failures of political liberalism that are to blame for the current European predicament. She regards this crisis as “a significant disjuncture between institutionalized forms of political liberalism and the politics of significant numbers or “ordinary people”” (110). In Chapter 4, Dzenovska conceptualizes this problem in terms of public reason and embedded reason. As the former is prioritized over the latter in Europe's political institutions, important ethical questions have been left lingering for the European subjects both in “the East” and “the West.” How to live with difference in an interconnected world but also with a sense of historical and cultural embeddedness?; “Is it possible … to wish to maintain some form of emplacement or coherence of the self?”; “How much displacement is too much?” (171). I was left with a sense that the concepts of public and embedded reason had more analytical potential here and could have been developed and integrated more centrally in the book's conceptual framework. On the whole, though, Dzenovska's School of Europeanness has valuable lessons to teach us about the paradoxes and failures of post-cold war political liberalism.