School of Europeanness

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Following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, economic and political liberalization projects were rolled out in Latvia and across Eastern Europe. While economic liberalism was welcomed, political liberalism was contested. Many in Latvia insisted on the importance of the nation alongside individual liberties and respect for diversity. From the perspective of liberal Europe, this often led to the conclusion that Latvia’s residents exhibited too much socialist mentality or nationalist sentiment and thus required lessons in political liberalism in order to become fully European. This ethnography examines the efforts to extend lessons in political liberalism to Latvia’s residents. The book argues that, rather than viewing Eastern Europe as falling behind, it should be viewed as the laboratory for forging post-Cold War political liberalism in Europe. It shows that Europe’s liberal democratic polities are based on a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. The book provides insight with regard to the current crisis of political liberalism from a moment in time when it was still confident and from the perspective of a place and people that were thought to have never been liberal.