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

Liene Ozoliņa

Journal of Baltic Studies, 2019, vol. 50, issue 4, 515-531

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.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1080/01629778.2019.1635174

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