(Self-)Confidence,Migration,and the State: A Study of Emigration from Latvia

Abstract

How do Latvian emigrants’ emotional apprehensions of social and cultural change in post-Soviet Latvia, and the contrasting experience they gain abroad, affect their relationship with the Latvian state and their ongoing emigration status? By contrasting the personal narratives of 59 emigrants with the Latvian state’s public transformation discourse, we argue that the culture the sending state presents to its public—both in its official discourse and day-to-day interactions with civilians—and the emotions this triggers in people based on their everyday life experiences, deepens our understanding of the post-Soviet emigration regime. Specifically, how state discourse and interactions affect feelings of recognition and the related emotions of confidence (particularly, self-confidence), pride, and shame are important for understanding post-Soviet emigration. Exaggerated neoliberal notions of the “West” dominated both the post-Soviet civil discourse and the policies and practices implemented to guide the transition, fashioning an environment where people felt shamed, and their self-confidence was injured. However, emigration and growing confidence in receiving states helped many regain a sense of comfort, self-confidence, and empowerment.

Keywords

emotions culture migration regime neoliberalism state post-Soviet Latvia

Introduction

Regaining independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ex-Soviet states had to decide on a direction for the future. Starting in the early 1990s, the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia all undertook swift transitions from socialism to free market economies. In an effort to both distance themselves from their Soviet past and align themselves with a future as part of the “West” they wanted to join, including to eventually meet the conditions for becoming European Union (EU) members, they embraced a more “radical” form of neoliberal restructuring than other Eastern European societies (Bohle and Greskovits 2007; Sommers 2009; Ozoliņa 2019). In Latvia, part of what made this restructuring “radical” was the vehemence with which the state and ruling elite promoted these changes culturally; reframing of the role of individuals to emphasize individual responsibility and initiative (for similar processes in Estonia, see Lauristin and Vihalemm 2009; in Lithuania, see Klumbytė 2010). Whenever the world around us changes, we often feel it before we understand it (Katz 1999:332). Our focus in this article, therefore, is on how the cultural aspects of the transition impacted the emotional experience of individuals of both the transition and their relation to the Latvian state and influenced migration practices in important but underexamined ways.

Drawing on interviews with 59 Latvian emigrants regarding their experiences both in Latvia and abroad, and extending Barbalet’s (2001:82–102) theory of “confidence” to multiple, intersecting domains, we suggest that the effect of neoliberalism in the everyday lives of ordinary Latvians was to undermine their confidence, building a sense of shame, alienation, and “permanent crisis” in Latvia, often leading to emigration. Furthermore, that their understanding of these experiences became clearer after comparative experience abroad, making migrants increasingly aware of their alienation from their home state while gaining a renewed sense of confidence abroad. This often had dramatic and profound impact on their outlook and made return migration less likely.

Restructuring, Neoliberalism, and the “West”

International migration scholars have shown that economic and political changes increase the likelihood of international migration (e.g., Massey, Kalter, and Pren 2008). We hope to expand our understanding of this process by arguing that the ways in which such economic and political changes work (or do not work), and how these relate to emigration, can be deepened by examining the cultural and emotional dimensions of social transformation.

Neoliberalism, under which markets and market freedom are the core organizers of social life (e.g., Centeno and Cohen 2012), resonated well in the post-Soviet context—neoliberal principles were currently prominent in the “West” Latvia sought to join, and seen as antidote to those identified with the Soviet regime¹—namely, redistribution, state control of markets, and downplaying individual freedoms (Chelcea and Druţǎ 2016; Ozoliņa 2019). Implementing neoliberal policies more generally was also seen as the best way to inspire private investment, including foreign investment, and thus be competitive on the new international, capitalist stage (Aidukaite 2009; Block [1977] 1987:59; Kolodko 1999). More tentatively, the neoliberal turn may also have been bolstered by fears of a Soviet invasion following independence (Eglitis 2002; Mole 2012). Some Western countries, such as France and Sweden, were initially hesitant to recognize Latvia’s independence and seemed to favor the Soviet status quo (Kalniete 2011); aligning themselves with the ideas and policies advocated by potential allies who did recognize independence and were more hostile to the Soviet regime may have added yet more to the vehemence of Latvian neoliberalism.

Under neoliberalism, the “cultural trope of individual responsibility” (Wacquant 2010: 213)—present in Western culture since the Enlightenment—was exaggerated to extremes and, in areas undergoing neoliberal restructuring, was strongly emphasized to motivate people to engage in productive activity. When international advisory boards or committees recommended neoliberal principles to the ruling elites in post-Soviet Latvia, these were accepted with great rigor and confidence (Bohle and Greskovits 2007; Sommers 2009), again both distancing Latvia from its past and aligning it with the “West” and the future its leaders sought. Post-Soviet times have, thus, been shaped as times of “hyper-individualism” (Sommers 2009:128). In contrast, any mention of social redistribution and protectionism in post-Soviet Latvia ran up against both the neoliberal principles of a distorted and idealized “West,” which Latvia sought to emulate, and its own ideological aversions to the “Soviet” past.

In the everyday experience of many Latvians, however, the unintended effect of neoliberalism, particularly as its ideas emerged in official discourse or impacted interpersonal interaction when dealing with state agencies, was to alienate many people from their state. Such transformations restructured power relations not only socioeconomically, but also culturally (Jodhka, Rehbein, and Souza 2018) and emotionally. For those who emigrated from Latvia to the “West,” this alienation from the Latvian state was made clearer by their experiences abroad; these experiences shed further doubt on the official discourse and practices back home while restoring the confidence of emigrants abroad, both in themselves and in their host states, making a return to Latvia less likely.

The roots of this alienation lie in emotional processes of shaming and how these undermined peoples’ confidence in their state. For example, when banks in Latvia became insolvent after the extreme economic liberalisms of the 1990s, people struggled with the worsening socioeconomic situation, and with poverty in particular. Yet the elite commentators in Diena, the leading newspaper, did not acknowledge the people’s protests as based on real, legitimate suffering nor the extreme neoliberal policies as the potential causes of that suffering (Ķešāne 2016). Instead, they held fast to Western neoliberal ideas and spoke in ways that shamed people for not being sufficiently responsible and economically active; that is, for not being “neoliberal” enough. Since then, such rationalizing has been common (Ozoliņa 2019; Sommers 2009).

In sum, rather than too much neoliberalism in Latvia, there was never enough; its implementation was seen as blocked by people clinging to “Soviet” ways of thinking and acting. This view was particularly common within the ruling transformation party, Latvia’s Way (LC). Its leaders set the tone of discourse regarding what life in post-Soviet Latvia should be. For example, Kārlis Leiškalns, an important supporter and participant in LC, claimed,

The biggest problem with this tendency in Latvia [that people became suspicious of liberalism] is individuals’ (ordinary people, state clerks, and politicians) inability, unwillingness and lack of skill to carry out the true spirit of liberal reforms. It is because trivial values and personal interests still take precedence. Today it is said that liberalism has discredited itself in Latvia but it is not so. If we still act with the inertia of socialism—without initiative and responsibility—then it is the fault of the people themselves and not liberalism. Liberalism does not nurse illusions, this value system [liberalism] gives hope and existence. Who else is the generator and implementer of reforms if not liberal man? (Ķešāne translation, Leiškalns in Diena 1995: 2, emphasis added)

In the midst of the banking crisis when many lost their only, often modest, savings, Prime Minister Māris Gailis (LC party) addressed the readers of Neatkarīgā Cīņa, the second largest Latvian language newspaper, and shamed people for their lack of individual responsibility, attributing their traits to the Soviet past:

When the independence of Latvia was renewed, we were left with a distorted economy that was mostly oriented towards Russia, and, unfortunately, we also had distorted social relations, as well as an almost total lack of individual initiative and responsibility. To get over this won’t be easy, particularly now, when the situation in the country changes almost every day. (Ķešāne translation, Gailis 1995: 1, emphasis added)

These quotes represent a general tendency during the transition period where Latvian elites publicly dismissed or delegitimized people’s efforts and failed to recognize their struggles, rather than engaging in substantive debates about how to help groups disadvantaged by changes (for a more in-depth analysis of Latvian civil discourse during this period, see Ķešāne 2016). Many people were un- or underemployed, worked extremely long hours but remained in poverty, and had little recourse if their employers did not pay them. State actors often shamed people who turned to them for help, undermining their confidence in both their state and themselves.

In what follows we first discuss various roles of “confidence” in the transition period. In doing this, we extend and offer new specifications for Barbalet’s (2001:82–102) general theory of “confidence” as an emotion and its social bases. Next, we address the role of emotions in recent migration scholarship, concluding with a consideration of Latvia relative to the broader post-Soviet emigration literature. We then summarize our methods before presenting our findings and qualitative data.

Based on interviews with Latvian emigrants, our argument is that, in emigrating, people escaped shame, repeated challenges to their self-confidence, and a sense of “permanent crisis” in Latvia, but also came to understand these more clearly. Once in the actual countries of the “West,” they found that there was no basis for the shaming they had previously experienced (i.e., they were not “irresponsible,” “without initiative,” “Soviet,” or “inferior”). Prior to migrating, the nature of their shame or the ways in which their self-confidence, as well as their confidence in the Latvian state, were compromised, were felt but not fully nor consciously grasped. Similarly, such emotions were grounded in understandings and expectations that were often tacitly held. On both grounds, experience abroad helped clarify these experiences by offering contrasts that enabled those conditions, practices, and ideological claims to stand out more clearly in awareness. In the West, they found jobs, were paid what was agreed upon and on time, and were recognized and respected for their hard work. Such experiences abroad also helped restore their self-confidence along with a greater confidence in their host states—which provided clearer mechanisms for handling grievances, were seen as more respectful, offered unemployment benefits, and health coverage, and so forth. Their experiences both at work and with the state simultaneously cast their experiences back home in a new light, making return migration less likely. The actual West often stood in sharp contrast to the “imagined” West of neoliberal discourse that had been so forcefully presented back home.

The State, (Self-)Confidence, and Emigration

Different Bases of Confidence and the Post-Soviet Neoliberal State

Regarding such transformations, the emotion of “confidence” is both key and generally overlooked. According to Barbalet (2001:96–100), confidence is a crucial social emotion that is (1) necessary for action, (2) grounded in a “sense of acceptance and recognition” in social relationships (Barbalet 2001:100), and (3) fundamentally oriented toward the future. All three aspects are crucial for understanding the successes and failures of any major social transformation. Importantly, Barbalet also critiques the current, neoliberal mindset that “business confidence” is best promoted by a laissez-faire, hands-off approach to government by giving historical examples where direct state involvement—for example, in the development of needed infrastructure, or policies protecting domestic industries—was necessary to inspire business confidence (readily found in the developmental trajectories of the “developed” states of the “West”). What signals “acceptance” and “recognition” of business interests is, thus, historically specific, contingent upon current conditions (Barbalet 2001:98–101).

However, whereas Barbalet develops his argument primarily through the case of “business” confidence, we seek to further specify his theory to also address confidence in two new types of social relationships: “state” confidence (leaders were attuned at this moment to other states and the “West” in general) and the confidence of ordinary “citizens” (for whom the official discourse of the state, as well as their experience with both state representatives and employers were important). And we are dealing with the possibility that confidence might not be fostered at any of these levels, in which case, “shame” may instead result. As confidence is necessary for action, shame has a tendency toward inaction (Barbalet 2001:85).

Once we recognize such differences, Barbalet’s emphasis on acceptance and recognition in social relationships, combined with consideration for what happens when these are absent, helps illustrate the complexities and difficulties of such a transition. Our extension of Barbalet’s theory to include multiple contexts and relationships also introduces the possibility of contradiction across these confidence domains. The relevant social parties involved in these confidence-building (or denying) relationships are not the same for all involved.² In the next several paragraphs, we consider three salient but different “confidences” moving from the outside in.

First, on the international stage, scholars have argued that neoliberalism functions through “the logic of externalization” (Gilbert 2005; Peck and Tickell 2002). Neoliberal policies and ideas have been actively spread and legitimized through powerful international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank (WB), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and EU, as well as by influential intellectuals (Babb 2004; Centeno and Cohen 2012; McMichael 2016). External agencies and actors, thus, held the focus of national elites, providing the acceptance and recognition that grounded “confidence” (in Barbalet’s sense) for further action; the sense that they were on the right track. National elites were socialized to see neoliberalism, in the words of Peck and Tickell (2002:382), as “a naturalized” and “external ‘force’.” It is in this sense that we speak of the Latvian elites’ “externalizing” of “confidence.” For the Latvian ruling elite, neoliberalism was seen as a “natural” way forward, and they relied on neoliberal scripts coming from the West to reshape the Latvian state and Latvian society more generally (Bohle and Greskovits 2007; Sommers 2009). To illustrate this, consider the narrative of the first Prime Minister of the transformation government, Ivars Godmanis (in an interview in Diena, the newspaper with the largest readership at the time):

Prime Minister: I hope for education. People with education do not currently come to work in the government. They are going instead to commercial structures, they go to banks and other places. However, I don’t think it is going to be so forever because in every business there is satiation. In the future, people educated in the West could form a core of the government. The other option is that people who have proven themselves in business, may want to come into politics. That kind of tendency is already there. (Ķešāne translation, Godmanis 1993: 2, emphasis added)

The Prime Minister is explicit on the need to follow external, Western expertise rather than existing, Latvian expertise, which—by implication—he saw as inferior.

Second, under capitalism, states maintain fiscal stability through the attraction of private investment (Block [1977] 1987) and compete with other states to attract such private investments. States that are better able to establish “business confidence,” via a set of measures that defines the feasibility and security to do business in a certain country, can compete more successfully (Block [1977] 1987:59). As the Latvian state was very lean following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need to attract private investment was particularly strong. Baltic countries lagged behind other Visegrad countries and Slovenia in terms of the technological advancements and human skills necessary to attract foreign direct investment or FDI (Bohle and Greskovits 2007:447, 457). Neoliberal policies and scripts, as coded by the so-called “Washington consensus,” seemed sound guides for attracting more FDI (Kolodko 1999). In contrast with the other Baltic countries, Latvia, in particular, “has adopted some of the most neoliberal policies to attract foreign direct investment” (Aidukaite 2009:110).

Third, we turn to the level of everyday life for ordinary Latvians and find that this reliance on external neoliberal policies, guidance, and scripts from the West had a quite different effect. Here, the externalization of confidence in favor of “Western” ideas and expertise, the lack of state regulation that might stem corrupt business practices, and the lack of sympathy for those suffering under such practices or from social and economic change more generally served to delegitimize much that was internal to Latvia and Latvians; it worked against the confidence of its own citizens—both through their experience with the state and its representatives, as well as at work.

By extending the mechanisms in Barbalet’s theory of confidence to consider “state” confidence and the confidence of “citizens” or “emigrants” in addition to his focus on “business” confidence, we have a general contextual framework for synthesizing what are often separate foci of research. This also allows us to identify potential tensions between these levels and how those tensions play out for our primary analysis and focus on Latvian emigrants’ experiences at home and abroad and their relation with the state. In sum, in a context where post-Soviet transformations brought uncertainty and insecurities regarding what comes next, that sense of being accepted and recognized by Western developed nations and international business was particularly important for Latvian leaders—implementing neoliberal policies and ways of thinking seemed to be the path forward. Yet, symbolically, this also meant avoiding and shaming all things associated with the Soviet past. The ruling elite grabbed on to neoliberal ideas and policies from the West as a means of grounding a new civil discourse to bring Latvia into its future and distance it from its past. They did so with a confidence that regarded building a strong Western identity with the help of Western expertise as a shield against the threat of Russian invasion and a possible return to the Soviet past. Building on the case of post-Soviet emigration more generally, we argue that such externalized confidence, further structured by the emotions of shame and fear, worked at the expense of confidence from within. The ruling elite’s failure to recognize and accept the struggles of its own people shamed them, decreasing their confidence in both their state and themselves. These processes are crucial for understanding both the rising tide of emigration and emigrants’ relation to their home state once abroad (or the likelihood of return).

Emotion and Recent Migration Scholarship

The role of the emotions in migration has been recently discussed in such diverse social science fields as anthropology, human geography, and sociology. Scholars in this literature do not reject the role of conventional socioeconomic and political factors in migration but rather see these as insufficient in explaining migration and argue that emotions are important mediators between social structure and individual action (Boccagni and Baldassar 2015:74–75). This literature reveals how important emotions are to the experiences of migrants and the process of migration (Conradson and McKay 2007; Svašek 2010). The research on migration and emotion covers various themes; particularly relevant for our argument is how specific emotions define migration practice (Baldassar 2015; Mar 2005; Pine 2014; Raffaetà 2015; Vermot 2015). Scholars have illustrated how the specific emotions of hope (Mar 2005; Pine 2014; Raffaetà 2015), guilt (Baldassar 2015; Vermot 2015), and shame (Vermot 2015) relate to migration practice. Pine (2014:96), for instance, studied Polish migration in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods and argued that migration is “a symbol and an enactment of hope and of faith in the future and an act of or a reaction to hopelessness, despair, and acute loss in the present.” Vermot (2015:142–43) mentioned that Argentinean men often could not fulfill the role of the breadwinner and felt ashamed for this; through migration, these men acted either to fulfill the role of breadwinner or to transform themselves. In contrast, Argentinean women in the United States and Spain often faced questions from family members about their return, which produced feelings of guilt and often triggered the decision to return.

Similar to Vermot (2015), we identify shame as an important emotion in migration practice; however, consistent with Barbalet (2001) and others (e.g., Scheff 1988), our data reveal shame as inversely related to the emotion of self-confidence and, as such, present not only among men but also women. Shame here stems from the cultural representations of individuals and, in particular, of individual responsibility under neoliberalism. We further develop the inverse relationship between confidence/self-confidence and shame, emotions that affect our social being in important ways (Barbalet 2001; Collins 1981; Scheff 1994), and seek to show these as deeply related to the neoliberal culture and governmentality of the state. As such, they become critical in accounting for migration practice in the Latvian case. In addition, as we will discuss in our conclusion, these add an emotional dimension to existing migration regime scholarship (Horvath, Amelina, and Peters 2017; Rass and Wolff 2018) by showing how the adoption of neoliberal discourse and neoliberal restructuring in post-Soviet Latvia, and contrasting experiences abroad after emigrating, shaped emotional states and experiences of individuals, which, in turn, were central to how they made sense of ongoing socioeconomic changes and pressures and their (changing) relation to the Latvian state and, thus, shaped migration practices in neglected but important ways.

Latvian Emigration and Post-Soviet Emigration Literature

A recent estimate is that, every day, 52 people (or around 19,000 every year) leave Latvia to work and live elsewhere, mostly to the more developed West (Ālīte 2016). As in the broader literature on Eastern European emigration (e.g., Kumpikaite and Zickute 2013; Massey et al. 2008; Siska-Szilasi, Kóródi, and Vadnai 2016; Thaut 2009; White 2009), the most common explanations for Latvian emigration toward the West focus on socioeconomic and structural factors such as weak welfare states, low income, and high unemployment, including after the 2008 crisis (Hazans 2011:71; Hazans 2015; Hazans and Philips 2011:9; Indāns et al. 2006; Lulle 2014; University of Latvia 2007:Table 4.6, Table 4.18), as well as perceptions and feelings of inequality (Ķešāne 2019).

However, research on other Eastern European countries also suggests that people migrate for a variety of other reasons: better opportunities and quality of life for children and family reunification (Ryan et al. 2009; White 2009); more challenging, fulfilling, and empowering lives (Cieślińska 2012:7; White 2009) including at old age (Lulle and King 2015); as well as due to a “culture of migration” (Cieślińska 2012:10). In a recent study on Lithuanian emigration, Park (2015:414) argued that emigration was related to low trust levels in relation to various Lithuanian governmental and political institutions, low civil and political participation rates, people’s perceptions of injustice, and their lack of political influence. According to Park, people leave not only because of “economic pressures” but also “socio-political grievances.” Even though Park’s (2015) argument resonated well with the sentiments of Latvian emigrants interviewed for our study, she did not verify her argument with surveys of emigrants or the more detailed qualitative data from interviews we employ here. While economic and structural changes in Latvia did lead to increased unemployment and decreased incomes, in line with common explanations of emigration, we argue these changes were understood in relation to the state’s discourse of the transformation in a way that also intensified emotions regarding the state as crucial conditions of migration. In a recent survey of Latvian emigrants, 40 percent indicated that they wished to live in a country with a better welfare system, and nearly 70 percent indicated that they wanted to live in a stable and well-governed country, with better quality of life, and better educational and career opportunities (Hazans 2015:17). Our data allow us to further explicate such wishes with an emotional understanding of emigrants’ relation to their state, and how this relationship affected their migration practice.

Method

As we began our study, we assumed that, as members of Latvian society, emigrants’ lives, their forms of meaning-making, and their feelings would all be influenced and shaped by the dominant transformation discourse in Latvia and the culture it carried (Ķešāne 2016). According to Steinmetz (1992:505), even in situations where individuals do not take part in major historical events directly, they and their lives are still affected by the collective discourse and narratives that frame these events. Every individual is socialized in a certain moral code of the society and time in which they live. In our opening sections, we described the main aspects of this dominant, post-Soviet transformation discourse (for details on how that discourse was approached and analyzed, see Ķešāne 2016) as well as our extension and further specification of Barbalet’s (2001) theory of confidence. Here, we focus on the qualitative methods used to gather and examine emigrants’ narratives about their experiences.

Our analysis of emigrants’ emotions and experiences is based on data from 59 in-depth interviews with emigrants who left Latvia for the West in the post-Soviet era, collected by the first author between 2008 and 2015 in Ireland, the United States, and England.³ Interviews were conducted face-to-face, mostly in Latvian with a few in Russian, and with the consent of the respondents to be recorded. Interviews took place either at respondents’ or their acquaintances’ homes, in parks, or in a cafeteria. On average, interviews lasted from one-and-a-half hours to two hours. Two respondents did not consent to being recorded but did allow note-taking. Initial contacts of respondents were gained through Latvian associations and schools abroad and through the online networking sites, Draugiem.lv and Facebook.com. Respondents were also recruited through snowball sampling. In total, 23 of the respondents were men and the rest women. Most of the respondents were in their 30s and 40s, nine in their 50s, three respondents were in their 20s, and one in their 60s. Respondents had various educational and skill levels. Through these interviews, we sought to learn not only about respondents’ emigration decisions and experiences but also about their lives and views more broadly, particularly how they saw their relationship to Latvia both before and after migrating. Attention to such broader context, including Latvia’s social transformations and changes in civil discourse, is an essential source of the “sociological imagination” (Mills [1959] 2000).

Noting the discrepancies between individuals’ experiences and the framing of individuals found in the civil discourse of Latvia, especially in the wake of independence and neoliberal restructuring, was crucial in identifying key issues at stake at the more macro level. Mills ([1959] 2000) includes a recognition of the role of emotions in sociological inquiry; he writes that sociologists need to use their “cultural sensibility” or simply “sensibility” about others’ experiences and feelings as situated in a broader socio-historical milieu (e.g., Mills [1959] 2000:10–11, 14–15, 18). He stated that the sociological imagination is based on researchers’ ability to recognize “the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities” (Mills [1959] 2000:15, emphasis added). In our case, to understand and explain the emotional states of our respondents, we “stepped into migrants’ shoes”: given historical details of the post-Soviet transformations in Latvia, the civil discourse that accompanied it (described above), and concrete biographies of migrants, we tried to understand how migrants felt under these particular conditions, and why; consistently checking our emerging understandings with what our respondents told us.

In the field and in the interviews, two emotional things stood out about migrants and their biographies—first, migrants abroad seemed very self-confident and tended to be very excited about their life abroad and their opportunities there, but, second, they were also sad and resentful toward their home state and life back at home. Given these initial observations, we raised three questions, What accounts for migrants’ self-confidence abroad? Why was such self-confidence compromised at home? What else explains their resentment and sadness about life in Latvia? In selecting evidence to support our argument, we employ passages that are most poignant and illustrate the point at hand with particular clarity, while being representative of the broader themes we identify.

In our study, data on emotions were captured in both the explicit and implicit meanings: people did not always, explicitly and openly, identify how they were feeling or felt. For example, respondents did not necessarily explicitly say that they lacked self-confidence or felt anger, though sometimes they did. Some emotions were more obvious and explicit than others. Overall, emotions became visible and meaningful for our analysis by three means: (1) explicit mention by participants, (2) implicit meanings recognizable through other things participants said, or (3) via expressions witnessed through observations in the course of fieldwork. In what follows, we discuss and elaborate further the precise nature of the relationship between emotions, the state governmentality, and Latvian emigration toward the West in the post-Soviet transformation period.

Neoliberal Culture, Shame, and Confidence in Post-Soviet Latvian Emigration

The swift and radical transformations within Latvia after the collapse of the Soviet Union marked a moment of uncertainty for both the ruling elite and ordinary people. As presented above, we argue that the ruling elite managed this uncertainty by externalizing its confidence to the West and to the neoliberal ideas (culture) and policies (structure-restructuring) commonly advocated at that time by Western politico-economic experts. But any such social transformation will require often-difficult adjustments—these struggles were a common theme in our interviews with Latvian emigrants.

Emigrants’ frustrations often began with difficulties at work, but also in the Latvian State’s failure to protect or help them in the face of abuses at work. Emigrants’ stories also revealed how “self-confidence” is related to “confidence in the state” in which one resides; low confidence in the home state often worked in combination with compromised self-confidence to create a sense of “permanent crisis”—that is, that there were no future prospects in Latvia, whereas higher confidence in receiving states often emerged in conjunction with renewed self-confidence of migrants. That Latvian emigrants were able to regain their self-confidence abroad—in part, because they experienced greater recognition of their efforts and needs from employers and receiving states—made it more likely that they would remain abroad. Also important is that emigrants often did not realize just how low their sense of self and self-confidence was while still in Latvia, or the full extent of their alienation from and resentment toward the Latvian state, until after they had contrasting experience abroad. This reveals the tacit nature of much of our social understandings and expectations (Collins 1981). Furthermore, self-confidence, pride, and shame are important parts of such understandings and expectations that often work at a less than conscious level, guiding behavior in ways we are not fully aware of (Barbalet 2001:83; Scheff 1988:396). We now examine these in more detail through our interview data (italicizing passages that express common and significant themes in emigrants’ narratives).

Self-Confidence at Work—“Permanent Crisis” versus Experience Abroad

Consider the following story from a man in his late 40s, who left Latvia in 2005. He described his life, up to 1991, as good; he worked and was able to take care of his family. But that all changed with Latvia’s independence and neoliberal restructuring. In subsequent years, an increasing sense of permanent crisis regarding life in Latvia developed:

Latvia’s freedom began in 1991 and with it all crisis began. Something there and something here [no stable work]. And then we had these terrible taxes, terrible. You earn 100 Lats and 30 are taken away. I beg your pardon! And then all kind of private businesses began—one hundred for you, minimal wage goes officially and the rest goes under the table. You know this system! Everybody knows! . . . In Latvia, how they duped me in that last year. You work in one construction site. They give you 100 even though we have earned much more. In next week, they give you 100 and you already have minus 600 hundred. And eventually employer does not respond to your calls anymore, and we don’t know where he lives, so this stays up in air, so . . .

In the post-Soviet period, he was bounced from one unfair employer to another, all across Latvia. His income declined; often, he was not paid at all. As a result, he was frequently unable to provide for his family. This gnawed on his sense of pride and dignity and led to divorce. In contrast, he explained excitedly that after coming to England, he was able to cover all the debts he left behind in Latvia within two weeks of finding a job. At the start of the conversation, he asked rhetorically—“Do you know how they talk about us here and how they talked about us in Latvia?” In Latvia, his failure was seen as due to his own conduct while in England, his work was respected. He emphasized with pride that in England’s public media, Eastern Europeans are often portrayed as diligent workers.

Most of the emigrants interviewed referred to the post-Soviet transition and how it reshaped their lives and social being as important conditions for their migration experience. For some, these transformations and their experience of them generated feelings of permanent crisis—a prolonged period of unease, coupled with intensified feelings of shame and a loss of self-confidence. But this was not simply due to economic struggles per se, we argue that such feelings also reflect how people were imagined in the neoliberal discourse of the transition where ideas of individual responsibility, achievement, and hard work coincided with a downplaying of state responsibility for citizens’ welfare. Neoliberal culture affected how people were treated on a daily basis, particularly in terms of what was expected from them by their employers and by employees of the state and its institutions.

Precarious and unfair work situations in Latvia were often described—for example, not being paid what was agreed, being mistreated, being given insufficient notice for work to be done. Such experiences were reported by both wage-workers and professionals. As a result, people felt frustrated and ashamed that they could not provide for themselves and their families despite working hard and diligently. An artist who went through a series of jobs during the transition and is now a social worker in England, recalled,

I had a moment when my salary began to fall—from 1,000 to 700 and from 700 to 300 and then you don’t know what’s next . . . And then you have a moment when you sit and think—please, give me to wash toilets. . . . You sign a contract—but they pay you something different. And with additional work on weekends for 86 cents per hour in a supermarket I was still not able to feed my family . . . (Woman in her 40s, London, England; her husband, also an artist who struggled with the changes of the transition became an alcoholic and left his family)

Similarly,

You work and work and work [in Latvia] but you don’t get anything to yourself. Eventually there was no motivation to work . . . And then they [previous emigrants] instigated me. Those who were already here instigated—come, what do you do in that Liepāja, come here! (Man in his 50s, Wakefield, England)

One of our respondents who left to emigrate to Ireland in 2001 with her husband resented being continuously paid under the table in Latvia and unable to do anything about it. Such unfair practices by her employer made her feel “illegal in her own country”:

In Latvia, I was thinking that something’s wrong with me. It gave me such an inferiority complex . . . And then I came here and I have a completely different outlook. I am a worthy person! (Woman in her 30s, Dublin, Ireland)

Another woman similarly noted “how men’s self-confidence increases here”; a man now “has money and he can afford something. To buy flowers and to give it as a gift for a woman for him is not any more a problem” (Woman in her 40s, Bray, Ireland).

An Information Technology (IT) specialist who left Latvia due to burnout at work described contrasting experiences with deadlines at work: “In Latvia too often I faced situations that something had to be done yesterday . . . Here [in England] I am told in advance what is expected from me” (Woman in her 30s, London, England).

Often, these contrasts between life in Latvia versus abroad are made with an exclamation, a sense of surprise, indicating that this was not something they fully realized before migrating:

After the first three days of my work here they gave me money. They gave me 156 Irish Pounds . . . They gave me this sum for three-day’s work, I began to cry, I did not understand what is going on. This first impression was extremely good. (Man in his 50s, Balbriggan, Ireland)

Another made this even more explicit:

What is very important and what I noticed only here is that in Latvia as a manager I had to do so many tasks that I actually would not need to do . . . My work time was from 9 to 5 but . . . very often I remained after my working hours [without pay]. (Man in his 40s, Wakefield, England)

Such realizations after experience abroad were frequently implied by others.

In sum, neoliberal restructuring in Latvia often resulted in insecurity and corruption at work that ordinary people were powerless to redress. People were not paid what had been agreed upon, pay decreased over time or did not come at all, and workers were not treated with respect by their employers or by the state. This was demeaning and drained self-confidence. In contrast, when abroad, they were relatively well paid, paid on time, and respected for their work and their work ethic. This not only helped boost their self-confidence but provided a comparative lens through which to better understand and recognize what was “wrong” in Latvia.

Shame, Resentment, and Self-Confidence in Relation to the State

Respondents’ experiences abroad increased their sense of alienation from and resentment toward their home state, which was seen as not protecting them from unfair practices and precarious employment. In fact, some of these conditions were even mediated by or promoted through state programs and institutions.

I was fed up with how people were treated in Latvia . . . Look at the situation in Latvia. It is insane . . . How much can Latvian people bear? But they have low self-confidence, what can we do. (Woman in her 40s, London, England)

In post-Soviet Latvia, people were expected and increasingly socialized to deal with social issues by themselves, predominantly by working hard. Most people did exactly that and tried not to ask the state for protection. Yet if, at any point, they had to turn to the state for help, protection, or assistance, they found that state representatives responded as if this was inappropriate, and their efforts must have been inadequate. They were shamed for turning to the state and state agencies. For example, a woman in her late 40s, originally a cook in Latvia with a good salary, described losing her job during the economic crisis of 2008. When she applied for unemployment benefits, a clerk at the State Social Insurance Agency asked her irately, “You had such a big salary? Couldn’t you save up something?” Near to tears, she said she already felt humiliated by having to file such a claim because she never had to do so before. However, now she needed and had a right to this assistance to help provide for her three children who studied in the capital city. Rather than helping, the clerk further shamed her by depicting her as undeserving. After she left the agency, her first thoughts were, “I will never ever in my life go and demand a social benefit [again].” While this respondent eventually found another job in Latvia, she was underpaid and left for England in 2009 where she experienced more respectful social and work environments.

Many others described similar feelings of rejection, being humiliated, and not recognized by state representatives. Latvian officials were generally seen as unwilling to help, to explain, or cooperate:

In Latvia, they [state bureaucrats] will always find something to say that you have done wrong [. . . In Latvia,] truth is always in favor of the government. Here [in Ireland] it is completely opposite—you are the one . . . (Man in his 40s, Lucan, Ireland)

For some reason, all the time I want to blame our government since I have this impression that they only think about themselves, . . . not about ordinary people . . . Here [in England] all is opposite—here they think about the people! (Woman in her 40s, London, England)

Respondents’ resentment was also described in relation to offers they or their relatives received from the state in response to unemployment. State institutions and programs often encouraged and promoted precarious work experiences (and, thus, signaled to employers that low pay for full-time work was okay). People were angry over workfare programs offered after the 2008 crisis where jobs only paid 100 Lats per month (about $156). Some respondents also indicated that the state sometimes acted as a mediator to employers offering jobs with very precarious pay:

And then they [State Employment Office] offer me a job in Unguru peat bog for two Lats [nearly 3 dollars] per day . . . But I tell to the officer, but wait, my bus to the bog costs 20 cents, both ways 40 cents, I need to eat something, ok, I take something from home but still I have to buy it. Ok, let’s say it is something for 50 cents. Ok, I am left with 1 Lat and 10 cents. Ok, I smoke [so] I buy the cheapest cigarettes for 20 cents and I am left with 90 cents. That’s it per a full day’s work. But I have two kids, a wife and a mother, can I feed them for 90 cents per day? I am very sorry! The officer looks at me—yes, she agrees and gives a sigh . . . (Man in his 40s, London, England; the one who spoke above of “crisis”)

The state representative here at least acknowledged the man’s difficulty, but the opposite experience was more common.

The state’s policies and the ways state representatives acted, spoke, and thought (or, did not) were meaningful for respondents.⁴ However, this is often seen most clearly in retrospect. The following examples illustrate these comparative experiences:

Since 1993 I had no leisure time [in Latvia]. It was so until I came to Ireland. Now I have everything. I have leisure time, I have Internet and I see the true face of Latvia . . . the government, politics, and events are better seen once you are outside. When you are inside you [just] try to put up with your bad life, isn’t it so? It is as it is. (Man in his 50s, Balbriggan, Ireland)

The same woman who above described how she thought the representatives of the Latvian government only thought of themselves said,

Here [in England] I have a sense of stability. When I go to Latvia to visit my schoolmates then I see they are all grizzled, they are deeply sad. But they tell me that I look like I came from a vacation! [ . . . When I lived in Latvia,] I came home from work and I did not want to do anything, my heart sank and that’s it, I had no willingness to cook even. Now I do it all with joy . . .

Both of these reflect the tacit nature of such understandings and processes emphasized by Collins (1981). Self-confidence is “self-understanding, which generally operates unself-consciously, or . . . below the threshold of awareness” and ensures “a willingness to action” (Barbalet 2001:83). This “willingness to action” is nicely depicted in the second quote describing how the woman felt coming home from work in Latvia versus in England. Different life experiences in a different country served up a more conscious observation of one’s previous life, self-understanding, and confidence both back in Latvia and abroad. The experiences and renewed self-confidence migrants found in their receiving states worked to expose emotional conditions that were felt but which may have acted at a less than conscious level while still in Latvia (Barbalet 2001; Collins 1981; Scheff 1988).

However, while respondents’ self-confidence was eroded in Latvia, it was never completely lost. They retained enough to enable them to still act and emigrate—perhaps bolstered by “acceptance” and “recognition” of their struggles, including over whether or not to leave, within yet another social relationship—by “trusted” friends and relatives who were already abroad or had experience abroad (earlier, we saw those already abroad described as “instigating” emigration). While we have focused on the state and state representatives, these were not the only reference points for Latvians caught in rapid social change, others could provide “acceptance” and “recognition” grounding confidence and action.

Hoping for something better, we suggest that emigrants leaving Latvia were also denying the derogatory self-characteristics ascribed to them through the public transformation discourse and by representatives of the Latvian state. In turn, through emigration, their self-understanding and confidence rose as they found work and experienced greater recognition and acceptance more generally, and with their receiving states particularly. As new experiences abroad made migrants more cognizant of what they felt and were subjected to before leaving Latvia, the Latvian state was increasingly seen as arrogant and uncaring, and resentment increased, while confidence that their home state was capable of, or even interested in, ensuring the lives of its citizens further fell.

What I lack the most in Latvia is this sense of security . . . if you do not see it then this is awful, [it] gives a depression. This is awful. (Woman in her 30s, Wakefield, England)

As a result, a recent survey shows that, on a scale from 0 to 10, 61 percent of Latvian emigrants in England expressed zero trust in their home government (Kaprāns 2015:118).

A Russian-speaking woman in her fifties, but born and raised in Latvia, said that “the state firstly needs to think of its people, of its citizens.” At the end of the 1980s, she left Latvia with her husband, who was in the Soviet army. However, they divorced, and she returned to Latvia in 1991 where she was now rejected by her homeland. While abroad, the Republic of Latvia had replaced the Soviet Latvian Republic. Even though a native from birth, the Republic of Latvia no longer treated her as its subject but rather as an outsider. After six dramatic years in court proceedings, depicted in several articles in the newspaper Panorama Latvii that she brought to the interview, she received her noncitizen passport, followed by a naturalization procedure to receive full citizenship. Despite this, at the time, she was still confident she would never again leave. However, exploitation at work, being paid under the table, and sometimes not at all, lead to hopelessness and a great feeling of uncertainty that slowly eroded both her commitment to remain in Latvia and her self-confidence. In 2004, she succumbed to friends’ offers for her to go and work abroad. In her interview, she compared her life in England and Latvia:

The state . . . shall not belittle its citizens, it shall not only think of itself, but protect them [citizens]. For example, where shall we turn when our salaries are not paid? Yes, [in Latvia] there was nobody I could turn to . . . To go somewhere and say “my salary has not been paid,” do you think the government would care? Here in England if you would go and say that, what would happen with this employer? [. . . In Latvia,] it would be great if they would listen and protect . . ., so we could know that the government is with us. Here [in England] we do not want to sit, we work, but we know that if somebody would not treat us well, we only need to complain, and then they would get reprimanded. They will go to prison. But how could they do it with people in our Latvia? . . . We truly work. If we work, we work from all our heart . . . But it turns out we are not respected for that [in Latvia]. It is so, you understand.

Heavy taxation in Latvia led to another common response, that the state only regarded people as a means to accumulate capital:

I don’t like . . . this attitude in Latvia—they [the ruling elite] only have one goal, to take our money. They don’t have anything else to steal from and now they say—please, come back. We want to steal also from you . . . They only need taxpayers. (Man who left to the United States in 2001)

To put this in context, between 2008 and 2011, a proposal was being considered in the Latvian Parliament that would require Latvian nationals abroad to pay the Latvian state the income tax difference from their earned income abroad. Many respondents were irritated by this initiative and raised it in the interviews:

Why I have to pay this 5% difference now? What sins I have done? I was forced to come here. I know many people who came here from countryside because they lack jobs and income, they cannot afford food. They came here in order to do something. Then the state did not think and care about them. I don’t know how this initiative will end but people are very angry about this. (Woman in her 40s, Bray, Ireland)

In sum, feelings of “acceptance” and “recognition” reinvigorated and sustained peoples’ willingness to live and work abroad. The Russian-speaking woman quoted above articulates this well by emphasizing that, in England, migrants “do not want to sit, [they] work” because they feel protected by the state. In contrast, the inability to protest unfair treatment or worse, to sustain a life in one’s own country, are profound forms of alienation (Garni and Weyher 2013; Weyher 2012).

Real as Opposed to Imagined West

The irony (and tragedy) is that in the course of trying to get Latvians to act differently, the Latvian state systematically undermined the confidence of its own citizens by not accepting or recognizing them or their efforts and struggles, by rejecting them as too “East,” or too “Soviet,” and by spurning some of the very institutional means by which such acceptance and recognition could have been experienced. But confidence is necessary for action (Barbalet 2001). Thus, many Latvians had to actually make the very difficult choice to go to the West before they could find out that these welfare and regulatory institutions—rejected back home as “Eastern” or “Soviet” remnants that needed to be curbed or cut—were, in fact, part of the very “West” their state representatives back home were so enamored with. The Latvian state favored the ideological tenets of neoliberalism over consideration of actual conditions, how they related to economic practice within Latvia, and the interests of ordinary citizens.

Given the rise of migration politics throughout the West, it is important to see that it is the relative contrast that matters, not whether these states are “neoliberal” or not, or if they are welcoming or not. Furthermore, the exaggerated and imagined “West” portrayed in the discourse back home is also a part of this contrast. Through daily experiences, receiving states were seen as not only more protective, caring, and just than the Latvian state (Co-author 2019), but also than what Latvian elites’ presentation and imagining of the West (upon which the Latvian state and its expectations for individuals was modeled) would have suggested. There is no question that neoliberal programs and ideas have impacted the receiving states as well (e.g., Harvey 2007), but in contrasting their experience at home (including the neoliberal discourse of the transition) with that in the receiving state, emigrants saw receiving states as more respecting and caring toward people, including immigrants, and thus capable of providing better opportunities. Ironically, some respondents even perceived their life in the “West” as more like their life in Soviet-controlled Latvia. For example, a young man in his mid-30s who immigrated in 2009 with his wife and son to Wakefield, England, said,

I am a Soviet child. I grew up during Soviet times, my parents raised me in the Soviet times, and here I feel the same, I feel very good. Similar . . . you do your job and receive your salary, which is not small. Also in the Soviet times salaries were good, one could live a normal life. Also, here it is the same. It is all very simple. I love this simpleness . . . You have opportunities. Maybe you have to wait three or four weeks, and it depends on the season, but you have opportunities. You only have to be willing to work, it is some kind of confidence here; it was also so at those times.

In the perceptions of emigrants, the “West” was not seen as so clearly opposite the “East” or the “Soviet” as it had been portrayed in the dominant post-Soviet transformation discourse. The real West and their recollections of the Soviet past or “East” were in some ways more similar, both offering more opportunities to sustain their lives than they saw in the new Latvia.

Conclusion

Interviewer: Do you like England?

Respondent: Damn it! I came to a foreign country and they can give me what my own country cannot—What else I can even expect? How can I even say that I do not like something? (Man in his 30s, Wakefield, England)

Although scholarship on the emotion-migration nexus has expanded recently, the link between political and individual biographies is still understudied and, as our analysis suggests, this is potentially mediated in important ways by social emotions. By situating migrants’ comparative experiences at home and abroad within the post-Soviet neoliberal regime and its discourse, we suggest that post-Soviet migration is also emotionally shaped. The state’s vehement adoption of neoliberalism, which the Latvian elite pursued as a way to build Latvia’s “Western” identity and establish business confidence in the post-Soviet era, simultaneously fashioned an environment where many of the state’s constituents did not feel their needs, efforts, and struggles were recognized. We argue that this lack of recognition resulted from the exaggerated neoliberal culture introduced in the post-Soviet setting, where individual responsibility for one’s own welfare was overemphasized, and social conditions and obstacles denied. This, in turn, compromised people’s confidence in themselves and in their state and fostered shame. Emigration not only served as a way to empower oneself economically but also helped deal with injured self-confidence, an escape from shame, and a rediscovery of pride.

That self-confidence and shame are inversely related is consistent with Scheff’s (1988) influential work on the “deference-emotion system” through which social conformity results from constant, though often invisible, fluctuations of “pride” versus “shame.” For Barbalet, “self-confidence” is related to what Scheff calls “pride.” Both are grounded in acceptance and recognition in social relationships but with opposite temporal orientations—pride to one’s past behavior, self-confidence to one’s future behavior (Barbalet 2001:87). Scheff (1988; 1994) further argued that pride and shame are the key emotions in social relationships. Pride is a crucial emotion for forming “a secure bond,” whereas shame indicates a threat to a social bond (Scheff 1994:3), not just between individuals but also bonds to and between broader social groups.

According to Katz (1999:152–56), shame indicates potential isolation or alienation from a community deemed “sacred.” However, based on our analysis, we suggest that in the Latvian case, the state was simultaneously shaming itself as it shamed its citizens, by blaming them for their struggles while not recognizing how hard they were already working. This threatened the social bond while also lessening the sacred value of that bond. Hence, shame worked here to foster anger and resentment rather than conformity, and many people left.

Barbalet (2001:83) also distinguishes self-confidence also from other types of confidence such as in others or in the future. While confidence refers to a “construction of belief” in someone or something, self-confidence “refer[s] to confidence in oneself, indicating a willingness to act” (Barbalet 2001:83). Theoretically, we suggest that “confidence” per se may be a prerequisite for “self-confidence”—whereas Barbalet argues that the other two types “are derivative forms of this notion of self-confidence” (Barbalet 2001). If self-confidence depends on acceptance and recognition in social relationships, the salience of this will vary according to how much confidence one has in the party doing the accepting or recognizing. If such external “confidence” is lacking, acceptance and recognition from that party would mean much less than if such external “confidence” or “belief in” that party were strong. This seems very relevant. We suggest that as confidence in the Latvian state weakened at home, the basis for self-confidence likely shifted to other sources of acceptance and recognition making emigration more likely. Similarly, as migrants often expressed greater confidence in their receiving states, the greater acceptance and recognition they perceived abroad made staying abroad more likely.

If our often tacitly held expectations about our lives are fulfilled, we gain confidence about our lives, ourselves, and in social authorities. If they are not, uncertainty and insecurities arise, and we begin to search for ways to minimize uncertainties and gain confidence about the future (Collins 1981). Migration—both in the act of emigration and its duration (e.g., whether or not the emigrant returns home and when)—needs to be understood in this context, with emotions as a fundamental component mediating between individual migrant “projects” and the broader social, economic, and political changes they are grappling with.

In setting up the context for our main argument, we developed an extension of Barbalet’s (2001) theory of confidence not just to the relationship between individual migrants and their states (our primary focus), but to relations between states and between states and international organizations. Later, we also considered the relationship between potential emigrants and friends and family with prior experience abroad (the “instigators”). In doing so and by tentatively specifying such mechanisms of confidence for the Latvian case, we also suggested that different relations relevant for confidence may exist at different levels of social life and may be at odds with one another. While the focus of our analysis is on the relationship between migrants and the state, the other layers we develop as a context for this analysis and the tentative conclusions we derive from our overall theoretical framework need to be empirically grounded through further research. In sum, we argue that at the state level, Latvian leaders had great “confidence” in Western advisors and policy recommendations during the transition. In turn, to the extent that they acted upon such recommendations and these actions were accepted by those same advisors, advisory agencies, as well as Western states and political organizations such as the EU more generally, boosted the “self-confidence” of leaders in taking further actions along the neoliberal path—given their external orientation—which made it less likely that views and voices from below, from their own citizens, would change their course.

More generally, we suggest that identifying still other relations and layers of “confidence”-building (or diminishing) relations and exploring the tensions between such different bases of confidence as a context for action may bring new insights across an array of social questions. Our study, thus, also has relevance for larger debates on power relations and inequality. Recent scholars have emphasized “the symbolic mediation of power” (Jodhka et al. 2018:11), which indicates how meaning and value-making affect our being. We add to these the importance of the emotional mediation of power. It has been increasingly difficult for states to balance their efforts to please international and supranational organizations and businesses, on one hand, and their populations, on the other hand, thus facilitating a global environment of alienation. Although recent scholarship emphasizes that post-Soviet transformations have sought to imitate the more powerful “West” (Krastev and Holmes 2019), our findings suggest that this involved exaggeration and distortion rather than simple imitation. To a large extent, this exaggeration then accounts for the intensified alienation between citizens and their state in the post-Soviet Latvia.

Last but not least, our study also has implications for the increasingly influential concept of “migration regime” in migration studies. The term “regime” also implies that there are certain power relations and unequal access to resources (Rass and Wolff 2018:42, 42–51). However, because this term is still used in many different and even contradictory ways (Horvath et al. 2017; Rass and Wolff 2018), it is impossible to address it adequately here. Nonetheless, in general, the “migration regime” concept shares our recognition of the role of discourse as well as of situating migration in a highly complex, multilayered, and potentially conflictual context that shapes general migration practice, while regime scholars tend to place a greater emphasis on the regulation of migration via more explicit attention to migration itself by actors in different power positions. In contrast, much of our argument happens outside that, through factors affecting migration indirectly. Greater attention to potential emotional mechanisms that link discourse to the divergent practices that may emerge and, thus, shape the overall “regime” is needed. Through such mechanisms, the experiences and voices of emigrants themselves are linked with broader political developments, both domestically and internationally, whereas these are still often treated separately in migration scholarship (see Horvath et al. 2017:305, 311; Rass and Wolff 2018:45).⁵

According to a recent survey, only 16 percent of Latvians abroad have indicated that they might return within a five-year period (Hazans 2015:20). This article then suggests that any solutions considered to stem the tide of further emigration toward the West (from Latvia or, similarly, from other Eastern European countries facing similar conditions and trends) should consider and potentially embrace ways to recognize peoples’ struggles in these uncertain, neoliberal times. Current practices of shaming, which erode self-confidence, are self-defeating for states such as Latvia as self-confidence is necessary for one’s “willingness to act” (Barbalet 2001:83); precisely what they are already blaming individuals for not doing enough of. Although the state itself is a product of historically shaped (including emotional) power relations, Scambler (2019:98), nevertheless, argued that “the state . . . is the ultimate site of responsibility for the enactment of legislation pertinent to shaming and blaming.”

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank all our informants for sharing their experiences with Dr. Ķešāne, Dr. Alisa Garni for very insightful comments and suggestions on previous versions of this paper, as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for their support and helpful suggestions. for their support and helpful suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Various stages of field work were supported by a Jānis Grundmanis Fellowship from the Association for the Advance-ment of Baltic Studies; a DAAD Student Scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; and the Latvian State Research Program on “National Identity” from the Ministry of Education and Science, Republic of Latvia.

ORCID iDs

Iveta Ķešāne

L. Frank Weyher

Notes

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