Embracing austerity? An ethnographic perspective on the Latvian public’s acceptance of austerity politics

ABSTRACT

Latvian austerity policy following the 2008 economic crisis has been touted as a success story by some and critiqued as a socially costly experiment by others. It has remained a puzzle, however, how such harsh socio-economy policies were possible without causing sustained popular protests. Drawing on ethnographic research at an unemployment office in Riga in the aftermath of the crisis, this article considers austerity as a political and moral phenomenon. I argue that welfare policies played an important role in disciplining the parts of the population most adversely affected by the crisis by framing post-crisis precarity as a matter of individual responsibility. Furthermore, this disciplining worked because it was underpinned by a particular moral discourse that I call ‘a discourse of freedom.’ Thus, this historically and culturally-shaped moral economy helped not only secure the implementation of post-crisis austerity in a way that yielded little sustained public resistance but also helped legitimate it.

KEYWORDS:

• Austerity
• political ethnography
• activation
• workfare
• moral economy
• moral individualism
• neoliberalism
• Latvia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Interviews

Sarmīte, trainer, author interview, Riga, 19 December 2013.

Žanete, unemployed vocational teacher, author interview, Riga, 12 December 2011.

Svetlana, unemployed nurse, author interview, Riga, 23 November 2011.

Aivars, unemployed engineer, author interview, Riga, 21 March 2012, 15 April 2012.

Silva, unemployed librarian, author interview, Riga, 22 November 2011.

Notes

1. I.e. the decision-making group that was formed to assess EU member states’ bailout requests, consisting of the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

2. There was one mass protest in Riga on 13 January 2009, at the beginning of the crisis, which was estimated to be the largest mass protest since the early 1990s. This remained, however, an isolated episode that was harshly suppressed by the government. Sixty-three individuals were subsequently put on trial for various minor offences, such as throwing stones at the windows of the Parliament building. The role of this violent suppression and criminalization of the protest in squelching any further protests merits further investigation. I thank the anonymous reviewer of this paper for drawing my attention to this point.

3. From October 2011 to April 2012, I attended seminars almost every week, for many weeks, four or five days in a row. Over the course of the fieldwork, I sought to take part in a range of different seminars by different trainers, in order to become familiar with the variety of topics and training approaches they employed. Due to the large number of parallel seminars, however, I had to be selective, favoring the most popular ones in terms of attendance numbers. This was also an opportunity to get to know several of the most popular trainers more closely by speaking with them informally before and after the seminars. Additionally, I gained an overview of those seminars I could not attend by studying the written outlines that trainers had submitted to the head office of the Employment Agency. In addition to observing the implementation of this particular policy program, I also spent two or three four-hour sessions every week during October and November 2011 observing the registration process at the Riga branch office. In the waiting room, sitting next to a front desk civil servant that handed out queue numbers, I observed the interactions around the initial document check and listened to how people presented their circumstances and claims. In the registration room, my focus was on the scripted encounters between the civil servants who registered the jobseekers and their ‘clients.’ These observations also gave me an insight into the organization of temporal and spatial practices at the unemployment office. In addition to my time at the Riga branch office, I occasionally visited the head office of the State Employment Agency. One civil servant at the head office, responsible for the ‘Competitiveness-Raising Activities’ program nationwide, became a key informant whom I met with regularly over the course of the fieldwork and had the opportunity to assist with conducting the selection process for the trainers’ annual tender. This allowed a further insight into the planning and implementation of the welfare programs for the unemployed. Field notes were taken throughout the entire period of fieldwork, during or right after each stint of observation, following the established practice of ethnographic research (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). These field notes provided a key source of data for the analysis to follow.

4. Seven of the informants were interviewed three or more times over the course of the fieldwork period, to follow their experience of unemployment. I interviewed four of the trainers, both during the original fieldwork period and during a follow-up fieldwork trip in December 2013. To situate the welfare reforms historically and politically, fifteen interviews were conducted with several former directors and other top-level civil servants of the Employment Agency, former and current policy makers at the Ministry of Welfare, welfare policy analysts, and a former minister of employment affairs. All of the interviews were electronically recorded upon the agreement of the interviewees and subsequently transcribed.

5. Similarly, Lynne Haney (2002, 8) has analyzed how state welfare programs have both a redistributive function as well as interpretive functions in post-socialist Hungary.

6. One hundred lats (LVL) were equal to about £120 or €140 at the time.

7. In 2011, the program was reformed, cutting the maximum period of participation from six to four months and reducing the monthly payment to 80 lats.

8. Such large numbers of people were not eligible for unemployment benefit because they had not made regular social security contributions prior to being unemployed. Either they had not worked or had been employed in the shadow economy. According to one study, the size of the shadow economy in Latvia was 30.2% in 2011. Since 2012, the figure has fluctuated around 20% (Putniņš and Sauka 2017).

9. I provide more ethnographic data on the activation rhetoric of these seminars in Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald (2016).

10. I explore this moral and affective discourse about the state in more detail in Ozoliņa (2019).

11. Speech at the European Reconstruction and Development Bank, 27 March 2018, London.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council;London School of Economics and Political Science.

Notes on contributors

Liene Ozoliņa

Liene Ozoliņa I hold a PhD in political sociology from the Department of Sociology at LSE. In my research to date, I have studied reconfigurations of political subjectivity in post-Soviet Latvia via ethnographic case studies of the welfare system reform, civic education, and democratic accountability initiatives. My writing intersects social theory, political sociology, and ethnography of the state.