No Russian and no Russians: Ukraine invasion has supercharged Latvian nationalism - NP
RIGA, Latvia — I meet Nils Muiznieks, a former Latvian cabinet minister and Amnesty international’s European director, in a warm and cozy café at the edge of Riga’s Old Town. It’s packed with students chatting joyfully in a mixture of English, French and Latvian. The waitress brings me a cappuccino and a poppyseed cake. I pay in Euros, a gesture that reminds me that we are very much in the comfort zone of the Europe Union. To most people, that observation would seem trivial. But not for me who set foot in Latvia for the first time since the Soviet collapse. And certainly not for Nils Muiznieks, the son of refugees who fled Latvia in the 1940s to escape Soviet rule, which saw tens of thousands of his countrymen shipped off to the Gulag.
Since the war in Ukraine, almost everyone in Latvia feels like Nils – hyperaware of the fragility of their way of life. In Riga, the war feels very close and immediate. The Russian and Belarusian borders are only a few hours away by car. Despite the presence of a battalion of Canadian NATO soldiers on Latvian soil; despite Latvia’s membership in the European Union; Latvians know how easily Russia could swallow up their tiny country and extinguish their political freedoms. Their government is providing all it can in terms of arms and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. “Per capita, we are probably the state that gives the most weapons to Ukraine so that they can fight for us,” Nils Muiznieks tells me.
But what also worries Nils, a former minister of integration of Latvia, are the ethnic tensions being fanned by the conflict in Ukraine. This little Baltic nation of three million has struggled for decades to avoid conflict with its Russian-speaking minority, which accounts for a third of the population. Now, everything is fragile.
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Kommentaarid on kirjutatud EWR lugejate poolt. Nende sisu ei pruugi ühtida EWR toimetuse seisukohtadega.
e m rootsis16 Jan 2023 00:11
To Latvian patriots.
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state.
As a movement, it tends to promote the interests of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland to create a nation-state.
It holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power.
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