Introduction: Dreaming of War

Latvia's military spending has more than doubled since 2015. The defense budget reached 2% of GDP in 2018, meeting the NATO requirement for the first time since 2004. The Latvian Parliament is debating a renewal of conscription, following Lithuania's example. Existing military bases are being significantly upgraded and new ones are being built. Twelve hundred NATO soldiers have been stationed in Latvia since 2014, joining another 5,800 NATO active troops across the Baltics, Poland, and Romania. Military training is taking place with increasing frequency. The rationale is increasing military readiness: “Just like a surgeon needs to regularly perform surgeries [to maintain and develop their skills], a soldier needs to shoot,” one news article reports.Footnote ² “[NATO and Latvian troops] are able to play in tune [after recent training exercises]; now [they] need to learn to play jazz,” says a NATO commander.Footnote ³ New soundscapes are materializing as NATO columns of heavy military equipment regularly trudge along highways moving from the Riga airport to the periphery. The rumbling sounds of heavy artillery startle sleepy inhabitants of rural towns as military units arrive on quiet weekend mornings for exercises. As the existing military bases are expanded, the sounds of shooting exercises become a matter of contention between the Ministry of Defense and the residents whose houses are now bordering these growing territories. Not only humans but also birds are disturbed. A new base has been opened by the Baltic Sea coast in a national park but, after environmentalists' protests, will only be utilized for shooting during the months when the birds that live there emigrate to the south of Europe.

There are also new dreamscapes of war emerging as Latvians' collective imaginaries become saturated with anticipation of future threats. Media plays a key role in forming these anxious imaginaries. Over the past three years, there have been regular reports of Russian war ships, submarines, and military planes spotted near the Latvian border. In the news, I read about a sculptor opening an exhibition of his latest work called baidies (“be afraid”), spelled provocatively in Cyrillic.Footnote ⁴ One of the artworks is comprised of tens of small grayish-brown concrete boats drifting in symmetrical lines in an imaginary sea (See Figure 1). They evoke memories of World War II, when thousands of Latvians fled from Soviet troops by crossing the Baltic Sea in flimsy boats headed for Sweden. They also quietly ask how one would escape now if there was a need. Perhaps they are actually not boats but ships, war ships headed for the Baltic shores. “Be afraid,” they warn. The threat of war is a part of everyday life. A poll conducted in 2017 showed that sixty-two per cent of Latvians were afraid of a possible military conflict with Russia.Footnote ⁵ A Latvian friend asked me last summer, with a wry smile, whether I would take her family in if war broke out. They have decided that they will get on the first plane to London if an attack happens. Recently, her 6-year-old daughter inquired whether children also have to go to war. When asked why she thought so, the girl said Latvia was small and, in case of a war, everyone would need to help. Several other friends have told me about the dreams they have had about war breaking out. In one of them, my friend is panicking, trying to think of some personal object to put in the pocket of her coat so that her body could be identified.

Figure 1.

An artwork by Egons Perševics. Source credit: Egons Perševics.

While anxiety about the military tensions at the border is palpable, the recent militarization is revealing deeper tensions in the symbolic border zone between the state and the citizen. As I will show with the help of two recent controversies in Latvia, the government's rush to militarization initiatives appeal to the loyalty of its citizens, but they are also proving controversial following several decades of postsocialist neoliberalism. The dismantling of the welfare state, growing inequality, social insecurity, and ensuing mass emigration, escalated by the austerity regime that followed the 2008 economic crisis, have all weakened the very idea of the state. Furthermore, the military nationalism that is summoned is at odds with the liberal “European” identity that post-Soviet Latvians have been so eager to secure since the 1990s. Is one to defend the state that is being blamed for widespread social insecurity and mass emigration? Can one be a “patriot” and a “liberal European”? I will argue, therefore, that the recent militarization brings into sharp relief socio-economic and political tensions created by postsocialist neoliberalism.

To the extent that we observe here the corrosive social effects of neoliberal politics as well as the contemporary reconfigurations of state and political subjectivity, we can consider the Baltics as not only geopolitical, but also analytical borderlands.Footnote ⁶ The backlash against ever-growing socio-economic inequalities and social insecurities has recently prompted a re-emergence of nationalist politics in various parts of the world. Some argue that the neoliberal state in the west has morphed into a law-and-order state, shrinking welfare and social policies and strengthening punitive measures like workfare and prisonfare.Footnote ⁷ In the Baltics, where the neoliberal project was particularly radical due to the outright rejection of their Soviet past and where nationalist rhetoric can be easily incensed, contemporary political reconfigurations can be observed particularly sharply. As I will show, new forms of state-led nationalism are emerging in Latvia that signal a potential future shape of a nationalist law-and-order state. The Baltic war frontier thus emerges in this essay as, not only a geopolitical border zone, but also a zone for theorizing current reconfigurations of the state and of political subjectivity in the aftermath of several decades of neoliberalism.

Controversy No 1: They Fled. We Would Flee.

In the summer of 2016, thousands of refugees arrived on the shores of southern Europe. As European governments grappled with the issue, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHRC) Regional Representation for Northern Europe organized a campaign in Latvia and the other two Baltic states to highlight the plight of the refugees. A local advertising agency was hired to create the campaign in Latvia. The result was a set of posters, each featuring the face of a Syrian and a Latvian individual side by side, with a caption “We [Syrians] fled. We [Latvians] would flee” (See Figures 2 and 3). When the posters appeared on the streets of Riga and on national television under the campaign slogan “We Would Do the Same,” they provoked a stir. Intended to raise compassion for the refugees trying to escape the Syrian war, this campaign was interpreted by the Latvian government and parts of the public as sending the wrong message to Russia. The slogan seemed to publicly declare that Latvians would flee if Russia invaded.Footnote ⁸ The media reflected the split in public opinion. Some insisted that Latvians, as proper, tolerant Europeans, were supposed to welcome refugees. Others denounced the authors and supporters of the campaign. Rumors started circulating that this was a Russian conspiracy to promote the image of Latvia as a failed state.Footnote ⁹ After all, what kind of a state is it if its own citizens are unwilling to defend it? The Latvian government issued a formal protest to the UNHRC central office in Geneva, demanding that the posters be removed.

Figures 2 and 3.

Posters from the campaign “We Would Do the Same”. Source credit: UNHRC Regional Representation for Northern Europe.

This curious public scandal exposes several layers of anxieties enveloping this new war frontier. First, what is seen as vulnerable is not so much the geographic border as the symbolic space formed by the state-citizen relationship. Security experts and politicians claim Vladimir Putin is unlikely to attack Latvia with military force but rather through subterfuge, spreading propaganda to portray Latvia as a failed state. This narrative posits that if Latvians think of their own state as weak and unsuccessful, then Russia is winning. This is information warfare, unfolding through media narratives in the trenches of Facebook and Twitter. What needs to be secured, then, is not only (or not even) the physical border but rather the idea of the state. Yet, after several decades of radical neoliberal restructuring, culminating in the harsh post-2008 austerity measures that put the burden of economic losses onto the general population, the legitimacy of the state is unsurprisingly weakened.Footnote ¹⁰ The social insecurity and the embitterment with the state now becomes a security risk.Footnote ¹¹

Secondly, this scandal reveals the anxious and potentially ambivalent relationship with oneself as a particular kind of political subject. Latvians have been preoccupied with performing a normative, “European” identity ever since the early 1990s. Welcoming the refugees, along with integrating “the minorities” (the Russian-speaking part of the population), are key elements of performing a liberal European subjectivity. Latvia's progress in this regard has been regularly monitored and measured by various European institutions (such as the EU, OSCE, and the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe). The recent escalation of the military tensions with Russia, however, are surfacing in connection to this performance. Labels such as “velkomisti” and “liberasti” have recently entered the public discourse. “Velkomisti” is a disparaging adaptation of an English word describing those who welcome refugees, while liberals are turned into “liberasti”—a derogatory neologism joining “liberal” and the Latvian word for “pedophile” together. Note the attack on normative masculinity that the latter word performs. Nationalist activists labelled the UN Latvian office staff as belonging to such “welcomers” and “liberals,” guilty of threatening the very existence of the state.Footnote ¹² This controversy reveals not only fractions in society, grappling with its various “Others,” but also a deep-seated anxiety around what it means to be a liberal, “tolerant,” “European” subject. Such anxieties have surfaced across Europe as citizens and governments grapple with concerns over immigration. For post-Soviet Latvians, the risk of being exposed as not “European” enough is always lurking. As Boris Johnson points out as I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, their very defense by the NATO partners depends on “people of Tallinn and Riga and Vilnius” being “just as European as the residents or Berlin or Paris or London.” On the one hand, NATO's defense depends on being “just as European.” On the other, such Europeanness is now at odds with the emerging militaristic patriotism.

The refugee “Others” exposed the insufficiently European nature of Latvians in yet another way. First there were major protests and discontent that the refugees would “flood in.” In 2015, Brussels decreed that 776 individuals from refugee camps across Greece and Italy would be taken in by Latvia. Even with such a small number, there was still public outrage and a proposal by the nationalist party to pass new legislation to “ban the burqa.” Then the refugees started arriving, welcomed by some local civil society organizations and a handful of maverick Christians and local anthropologists. A year later, nearly all of the refugees had left. They had moved on to Germany, Sweden, and elsewhere. The benefits that the government had approved for asylum seekers could not even cover rent in Latvia's capital of Riga. Living anywhere else provided hardly any job opportunities. Paradoxically, despite the initial resistance to letting the refugees in, their departure was taken as an insult by many in the general public. It was read as a sign that Latvia did not quite pass as “the West” the refugees had hoped to reach. The Syrians, Afghanis, and Eritreans had moved on to “the real Europe.”Footnote ¹³

Controversy No 2: Your Country Needs You … Now

In the winter of 2017, a national survey attracted a lot of attention in the Latvian public sphere by citing that only 33% of Latvians would be willing to “pick up arms and fight’’ if “a foreign army entered Latvian territory.” According to the survey data, 31% would “flee the country,” while 25% would “do nothing.”Footnote ¹⁴ Over the last few years, similar surveys have been conducted several times on behalf of Latvia's Ministry of Defense. The results are interpreted in the media as a measure of loyalty to the state among ethnic Latvians versus ethnic Russians, urban versus rural inhabitants, and people with higher versus lower levels of income and education. The government is taking a range of measures to boost Latvians' readiness to defend themselves and their country. The renewal of mandatory military service is being debated. The Ministry of Defense is proposing legal amendments that would make it a citizen's duty to resist a foreign attack and defend the national territory. The Ministry of Education has proposed to introduce military and security lessons at primary, secondary, and university levels, while the Parliament considered a legislative initiative to establish a “Soldiers Day” as a new holiday.

These moves by the state suggest attempts to summon a particular kind of political subject—a man willing to pick up arms and fight, “a man like an oak tree,” as the Latvian saying goes. The national boundary, imagined as feminized, needs “men like oak trees” to defend it. The question “will you fight or flee,” asked repeatedly, speaks to the anxiety about whether Latvians are going to defend their border. What we see on this new war frontier is a renewed nationalist project. A particular kind of a political subject is being interpellated here, hailed and constructed by the state: the soldier, the citizen ready to pick up arms and fight, the youth trained to defend themselves and the state.

Yet, these state initiatives are proving controversial. The subjects are not necessarily turning their heads when they are being hailed, as in Louis Althusser's famous example of a citizen responding to the policeman's “Hey, you!” One of the initiatives in particular stirred up a lot of tension. A new law passed in 2015 made regular, refresher training for reserve soldiers mandatory. Any man or woman who served in the Latvian army after 1991 is now legally bound to attend such training.Footnote ¹⁵ Failure to attend can result in an administrative case, a court procedure, and a fine. Since 2015, hundreds of summons have been issued, although most of those summoned have failed to attend. In 2015, the Ministry of Defense sent out 300 letters, yet only fifty-nine people attended the drills. In 2016, 966 summons were issued; 168 attended. The reasons for absenteeism are a matter of speculation and the Ministry of Defense is perplexed.

A discussion over Facebook that a wife of one of the summoned men started in August 2017 sparked public debate, shedding some light on the situation. The man and his wife who started the debate now live in the UK, just like thousands of Latvians. The austerity regime that the government implemented after the 2008 economic crisis accelerated emigration. As a result, the population was 7.7 percent lower in 2013 than it was in 2008.Footnote ¹⁶ It is estimated that about 260,000 Latvians now live abroad, or about 15% of the population.Footnote ¹⁷ To take annual leave, paid or unpaid, and buy a return flight to Riga for two weeks of training is not something that many of those now living in the UK, Ireland, or Germany are willing or able to do. The decision to emigrate was often linked to not being able to provide for one's family. Hence, many of the emigrants blame “the state” for forcing their hand.Footnote ¹⁸ The fact that Latvia now calls them back and later labels them as offenders and administers fines evokes strong reactions. As reported in the media, one man is planning to renounce his Latvian citizenship “so that [he] would not need to suffer from the constant problems that are being created [by the Latvian state] for the citizens living abroad.”Footnote ¹⁹ As I listen to the interview, the man's attempts at precise, formal language and his voice, firm and strained, seems to carry the tension gripping many Latvians' fraught relationship with the state in the aftermath of postsocialist neoliberalism. The post-socialist state project in Latvia revolved around undoing the “learned helplessness”, which was imagined as a Soviet remnant and therefore as an obstacle to “catching up with Europe.” This narrative delegitimized making social rights claims to the state by stigmatizing them as passive “waiting” for help from the state.Footnote ²⁰ Now—with the military threat escalating, war stories being told, war dreams being dreamt, planes and submarines spotted almost every week—the state is summoning these citizens back. Now it is the state that is wanting and waiting.

Conclusion: Theorizing the Frontier Era

The socially-corrosive effects of postsocialist neoliberalism—the dismantling of welfare structures, socioeconomic insecurity, and the weakened legitimacy of the state—are now a key factor in shaping the fragile politics of militarization. As Neringa Klumbytė contends in the introduction to this special issue, the emergence of this new war frontier signals the end of postsocialism as an era and as the organizing analytic for the study of the region. Yet, the frontier-era carries within it and dramatizes the socioeconomic and political chasms that were created during the postsocialist era of neoliberal politics, as the Latvian case shows. Furthermore, the way that the Latvian state summons the patriot, ready to pick up arms and fight, evidences a shift away from a liberal rhetoric towards a nationalist one. The factions in society along “nationalist” and “liberal” lines are a further manifestations of this shift. In this respect, Latvia appears to mirror the increasing polarization of the political discourse noted in recent years in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, as well as in the US and the UK.Footnote ²¹ Finally, when we are observing the shrinking of the welfare budget and the increase of the military one, along with summoning citizens for mandatory drills and punishing those who do not attend, we are potentially seeing a future shape of a nationalist law-and-order state. The Baltics are, in this sense, not only geopolitical but also analytical borderlands—a frontier zone where contemporary reconfigurations of the state and political subjectivity are brought into sharp relief.