Integration in Latvia: a success story?

ABSTRACT

Since Latvia restored her independence 30 years ago, numerous studies of Latvia’s inter-ethnic relations have been published, each with specific analytical and periodic frames. This article covers demographic data and naturalization issues, language and educational policies, political representation, the attitudes and perceptions of population subgroups, and last, but not least, the influence of Russia. The latter has become especially important following Russia’s exploitation of minority issues in Ukraine since 2014. More than ever, ethnopolitics in the post-Soviet region cannot be analyzed without assessing international contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Latvia
• minorities
• integration
• belonging
• ethnopolitics
• influence of Russia

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Here I follow the arguments of Chandra and Wilkinson (2008, 517).

2. The CSBL (2020) data is based on a logistic regression model using data from more than 40 different state administrative registers. The data from the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs is based on the information of the Population Register, where every person is obliged to declare his or her place of residence to ensure that every person is reachable in terms of legal relations with the state or local government. According to the OCMA, on 1 January 2020, there were 525,965 people with Russian nationality living in Latvia.

3. This was noted by a popular ‘citizen initiative’ that collects signatures in order to request action by the parliament: https://manabalss.lv/jauniesu-diskriminacija-darba-tirgu/show. See also: Kārkliņa (2012).

4. The author is familiar with the anecdotal case of the three-year old daughter of a neighbor who could not find a place in a Latvian kindergarten and ended up in a Russian-speaking one. After a while this girl started speaking Russian at home, a language which her siblings did not at first understand.

5. Typically, new parties are organized before each parliamentary election. More recently new parties such as the ‘New Conservative Party’ and ‘Development/For’ have appeared to compete for Latvians’ votes.

6. These observations rely on the author’s personal experience as a Saeima deputy between 2010 and 2013. As noted, the issue of changing voting blocs and how deputies vote is very much under-analyzed by local or international scholars.

7. Voting on whether this and other laws about the secrecy of votes has been open and on the subject of openness was typically opposed by deputies of ‘Harmony’ and the ‘Farmers and Green’ Party.

8. The controversy is summarized in Eng.lsm.lv (2014). For the full text of the Constitution, see: https://www.saeima.lv/en/legislative-process/constitution.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rasma Karklins

Rasma Karklins (aka Kārkliņa) is professor emerita of political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and currently lives and works in Latvia. Most recently professor Kārkliņa participated in an interdisciplinary EU-funded research project at the University of Latvia. Over the years she has published widely on ethnopolitics, transitions to democracy, civil society, and comparative political corruption. Her most recent bookThe System Made Me Do It: Corruption in Post-Communist Societies (M.E. Sharpe, 2005) has been translated into Latvian, Russian, Polish, Serbian, and Bulgarian. Rasma is a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies and served as a member of Latvia’s parliament between 2010-2013.