Politics of waiting

Workfare, post-Soviet austerity and the ethics of freedom

Liene Ozolina

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526126276
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa orientale

This book is an ethnography of politics of waiting. While the global political economy is usually imagined through metaphors of acceleration and speed, this book reveals waiting as the shadow temporality of the contemporary logics of governance. The ethnographic site for this analysis is a state-run unemployment office in Latvia, serving as a vantage point from which to observe how welfare programmes use acceleration and waiting as forms of control as well as to compare Western and post-Soviet welfare policy designs. The book is therefore a timely sociological critique of the forms of statecraft that have emerged in the aftermath of neoliberalism.The key audiences for this book are students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, social policy, and social and political theory, as well as policymakers and activists with an interest in welfare reforms and comparisons between Western and post-Soviet welfare designs.

1

Waiting as an organising logic

The seven fat years

‘We have seven fat years ahead of us’, said the Latvian prime minister (PM) Aigars Kalvītis in his New Year’s Eve speech to the nation. The years ‘that we have been dreaming about’. He said these words on 31 December 2005, only for the economic crisis to hit three years later. The biblical reference to Joseph’s travails in Egypt, enduring seven years of hunger to arrive at another seven of abundance, fitted the ceremonial tone of the speech. The PM’s address on New Year’s Eve is an established political genre in Latvia where we can pick up key nodes of the normative discourse. In a famous example of this peculiar home-grown genre, the PM Andris Šķēle said on the eve of 1996 that Latvians had to start brushing their teeth and washing their pants if they wanted to succeed in the new market democracy. His was a blunt way of condemning the post-Soviet subjects’ alleged passiveness and reluctance to take their fate into their own hands.

These words about the seven fat years coming were alluding to the recent growth of the economy and people’s wages, following the long 1990s when harsh neoliberal restructuring had plunged large parts of the population into poverty. A few years before the crash, people’s patience seemed to be finally bearing fruit. There was a construction boom and a crediting boom, as families bought homes and consumer goods – cars, washing machines, wide-screen TVs – or treated their apartments to eiroremonts (‘euro-renovation’). In 2000–2007, the Latvian economy grew on average by 8.8%, and the unemployment rate dropped from 14% to 6% in the same period (Blanchard, Griffiths and Gruss 2013: 330). Kalvītis was suggesting it was his government that was finally leading the nation out of waiting and into the European prosperity that was longed for. One of his government’s ministers had used the phrase ‘Pedal to the metal!’ (gāzi grīdā!) to describe the approach to running the economy in the years prior to the crisis. Speeding up seemed the right response after years of getting by. It felt as if, at last, the waiting had ended and life was getting better. The PM’s optimism was reflecting this general sentiment. Then, of course, the global financial crash hit, plunging Latvia into yet another economic crisis and precipitating yet another wave of austerity.

The PM’s words, while failing to be prophetic, did reveal something crucial about the post-Soviet state project in Latvia. These words spoke of and were spoken within a particular temporal regime that has characterised it. As I will show in this chapter, waiting has been both a target of the neoliberal socio-economic and political reforms as well as, paradoxically, their pre-condition. The temporal politics I am going to examine here throw a light on the economic crisis and how it played out in Latvia. I consider time as a form of control that the state can exercise upon the citizen but also as a narrative that becomes part of the national identity, as well as an organising logic¹ that states themselves can be subdued by in the global geopolitical and economic order. This analysis draws on the sociological premise that time is political and that it often works as a tool of power (Thompson 1967; Schwartz 1975; Verdery 1996; Bourdieu 2000, 2014). The state, in particular, plays a central role in organising our experience of time in big and small ways (Bourdieu 2014). Yet, our experience of time also depends on certain kinds of longer-term cultural and historical narratives that the state can tap into. The temporality of modernisation, in both its Soviet socialist and Western capitalist versions (acceleration! progress!), interacts, in the case of Latvia, with a national narrative of ‘lagging behind’. Specifically, I examine in this chapter a paradox at the heart of the post-Soviet temporal regime. I will show how the ‘waiting subject’, imagined as an obstacle in ‘catching up’ with Europe, has been a target of reforms; yet, how harsh neoliberal austerity measures were possible as a solution to the economic crisis only because people were used to being patient. The government stigmatised waiting but relied on this familiar temporality to administer ‘internal devaluation’. The post-crisis austerity, by imposing more delayed time, was relying on this waiting subject, stigmatised all the while as a Soviet relic and/or a carrier of ‘passive Latvian mentality’. Thus, I trace in this chapter the Latvian national narrative of living in delayed time and how it has fitted into the global neoliberal turn.

The story that I will tell reveals something important also about the global rhythms of neoliberalism. First, it shows how the temporal logic of waiting works as a form of control not only at the level of state–citizen relationship but also at the level of the global political economy. Through ideas of catching up, development and fiscal discipline, time works as ‘pressing rather than merely passing’ (Herzfeld 2009: 111) for entire communities and nation-states. Secondly, the Latvian story brings up sociological questions about the temporal, ethical and affective regimes that governance reconfigurations rely on. Austerity and the neoliberal reconfigurations of the welfare state need to be considered not only as the implementation of neoliberal economics or class hegemony (the Marxist argument), or neoliberal technologies of governmentality (the Foucauldian argument), but also as policies and state logics that are enabled by particular temporal regimes that are historically and culturally shaped and interact with global organising logics in historically specific ways. To understand the architecture of neoliberal austerity, and public reactions to it, we need to understand the broader temporal horizons that act as organising logics within which individuals perceive social reality.

Waiting rooms of history

Eastern Europe is one of those regions of the world that can be characterised with Chakrabarty’s words – always in the waiting room of history (2000). The post-socialist transformations have been studied and critiqued in detail in the sociological and anthropological literature, and I do not wish to rehash them here. Rather, my interest here is to highlight the macro-temporality at play. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe was seen as ‘backward in time’ (Dunn 2004: 4). Its development was seen as delayed by the 50-year detour into socialism, and it needed to get ‘back on the road to a capitalism identical to that found in the West’ (Dunn 2004). Given this imperative to catch up, the shock therapy of the 1990s was all about speed (Buck-Morss 2000: 266). When Jeffrey Sachs and other experts were advising Poland and Russia, they were insisting on a rush while also invoking patience. As one of the advisors put it, ‘patience is vital. The harsh economic medicine will ultimately have the desired effect’ (Michael Mandelbaum cited in Buck-Morss 2000: 267). Furthermore, the desire to become ‘fully modern’ and to ‘return to Europe’ (Eglitis 2002, 2011; Rausing 2004; Ozoliņa 2010) legitimated this narrative of being patient while catching up. Such a temporality of catching up, accompanied by anxious subjectivities, has played an instrumental role in integrating the former socialist countries into the global political economy.

In Latvia, historians speak of what the economic development could have been had the aberration known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) not happened. The fact that the Latvian economy was indeed doing well in the 1930s has reinforced this narrative. Comparisons with Finland are often made in the public domain, noting how both countries had similar levels of prosperity in the 1930s and how significant the difference between Latvia and Finland is now (Laganovskis 2015). The imperative to join various Western institutions (European Union (EU), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Eurozone) has provided the organising logic of the post-Soviet state project in Latvia. Every one of these targets promptly replaced the previous goal once membership was achieved, giving a new stimulus for reforms and a way of sustaining this familiar tempo. The idea of a ‘2-speed Europe’, occasionally pronounced in Brussels, is permanently hanging in the air as a threat that, despite all the efforts, ‘the East’ is not going to keep pace with ‘the West’.²

This temporal lag is an idea that precedes the post-socialist decades. Eastern Europe was constructed as one of Western Europe’s ‘Others’ in the eighteenth century (Wolff 1994). There are parallels between the construction of the Middle East as the Orient and Eastern Europe as another Other, even if more ambiguous because ‘scientific cartography seemed to contradict such fanciful construction’ (Wolff 1994: 7). The spatial image of the West and the Orient had a temporal connotation to it, in the case of both the Middle East and Eastern Europe. As Wolff documents, the eighteenth-century travellers constructed the ‘east of Europe’ (‘l’orient de l’Europe’) as backward in time: one eighteenth century French traveller felt he ‘had moved back ten centuries’ upon crossing from Prussia (current German territory) into Poland (Wolff 1994: 6).

The Latvian national identity was constructed in the nineteenth century in direct conversation with Western European (as well as Russian) models. The so-called New Latvians, who were the early promoters of Latvian national culture while the territory was still part of the Russian Empire, often studied in Western Europe and were inspired by Herder and other German national romantics. They brought home ideas about the future of the nation’s development and, along with those, a sense of lagging behind. The entire ‘New Latvians’ movement was initially a cultural project of imbuing the Latvians with a sense of agency and promoting educational and cultural development. A nation had to be made out of mostly uneducated peasants and serfs. They believed that the Latvian culture and language, having survived through centuries under foreign rule, was the rich basis for constructing a European nation. The Latvian national epos, Lāčplēsis, was modelled on the Finnish and Estonian national sagas. If all European nations had an epos, Latvians needed one too. The decades of 1860s–1890s are indeed known in Latvian history as ‘The First Awakening’. When an independent Latvian state was established in 1918, this became known in the collective imagination as ‘The Second Awakening’. The Latvian nation was asleep and needed rousing. A popular nineteenth-century verse expresses this sense of lagging behind. It starts with the following lines:

When will the time come for Latvians

That other peoples are already seeing?

When will the darkness pass

That is covering people’s eyes?

When will a refreshing wind blow

And illuminate the nation’s crown?

Kad pienāks latviešiem tie laiki

Ko citas tautas tagad redz?

Kad aizies tumsība kā tvaiki,

Kas ļaužu acis cieti sedz?

Kad pūtīs vējš, kas spirdzina

Un tautas kroni mirdzina?

(Jānis Ruģēns, cited in Ērmanis 1935: 230)

This nineteenth-century verse reflects well the particular temporal horizon that shaped the emerging Latvian national identity and political subjectivities. It captures the ‘generic time’ (Herzfeld 2005: 22) that came to organise the national self-image. Furthermore, it is also an early intimation of what has since become an ambivalent but hegemonic discourse.

Soviet temporalities

The end of the Second World War was the beginning of Soviet rule over what was now the Latvian Socialist Republic. The Baltics were annexed by the Soviet Union, following a secret deal with Hitler’s Germany dividing zones of influence in the Eastern regions of Europe. Time, again, played a central role as a political instrument, now in the hands of the Soviet state. As Susan Buck-Morss (2017) argues, the Soviet project was one of modernisation and it relied upon a narrative of acceleration and progress. In this, the Soviet and the Western modernisation projects were similar. Both East and West shared ‘the utopian dream that industrial modernity could and would provide happiness for the masses’ (Buck-Morss 2000: xiv). Thus, modernisation was ‘a race against time’. The Soviet Union, perceiving the technological and industrial superiority of the United States, introduced plans of accelerated industrialisation to catch up with the capitalist world (2000: 35–39). As Buck-Morss writes,

The rapid industrialisation of the First Five Year Plan was conceived as historical ‘acceleration’ (uskorenie). … Under Stalin, ‘speeding up by force became the cure-all.’ … The present was an obstacle to be overcome, a continual sacrifice for the sake of the communist future. (Buck-Morss 2000: 37)

Though the discursive framing was that of acceleration and progress to achieve utopia in the near future, the lived present was one of delayed time. The idea was to be ‘building communism’, while for the time being living in socialism. The future required planning and sacrifice, as exemplified by the five-year plans. As philosopher Costica Bradatan (2005) put i...