Description
Book SynopsisIn School of Europeanness, Dace Dzenovska argues that Europe's political landscape is shaped by a fundamental tension between the need to exclude and the requirement to profess and institutionalize the value of inclusion. Nowhere, Dzenovska writes, is this tension more glaring than in the former Soviet Republics.
Using Latvia as a representative case, School of Europeanness is a historical ethnography of the tolerance work undertaken in that country as part of postsocialist democratization efforts. Dzenovska contends that the collapse of socialism and the resurgence of Latvian nationalism gave this Europe-wide logic new life, simultaneously reproducing and challenging it. Her work makes explicit what is only implied in the 1977 Kraftwerk song, Europe Endless: hierarchies prevail in European public and political life even as tolerance is touted by politicians and pundits as one of Europe's chief virtues.
School of Europeanness shows how postCold War l
Trade Review
Dzenovska employs a deceptively simple, yet illuminating, tool for her study of the well-worn subject matter of the last thirty years of Latvia's political and social relations.... her masterful book belongs on the shelves of academics from many disciplines.
* Slavonic and East European Review *
Dzenovska's critique is worth bearing in mind as increased migration has led to arise in right-wing nativism in Europe and the United States.
* Foreign Affairs *
Dzenovska's ethnographically rich discussions show how nationalism and a liberal form of statism are also intertwined in identifying and disciplining subjects who are not-yet European enough, in the context of a Europeanizing Latvia. The conceptually driven analyses provide larger insights beyond Latvia for anyone working on liberal values, nationalism and the minority question in Europe.
* PoLAR *
Table of ContentsPreface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Pride and Shame
2. The State People and Their Minorities
3. Knowing Subjects and Partial Understandings
4. Building Up and Tearing Down
5. Language Sacred and Language Injurious
6. Repression and Redemption
Epilogue
Notes
References
Index
