EU Accession and Personal Enlightenment
Everyday Sociality and Political Mobilization among Young Latvian NGO Activists
MA Thesis: University of Copenhagen, Institute of Anthropology (Specialerækken nr. 249), November 2002
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I would like to thank Thea Skaanes and Gitte Olesen for taking their time to read this thesis and offering encouragement and valuable criticism at various stages of its coming into being.
To my supervisor Finn Sivert Nielsen, thanks a lot for your good advice, open mind, highly valuable regional expertise, and a fun, active and inspiring academic life with the other members of the East / Central Europe Group at the Institute of Anthropology, Copenhagen University.
To Anna, thank you for living with me through the ups and downs of writing, while you also managed to finish your own thesis in the process.
This is a thesis about young Latvians who are active members of a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). The NGO supports Latvia's accession to the European Union, and provides young people with pro-EU information on issues of European integration.(1)
Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania make up the Baltic countries, which were part of the Soviet Union from the end of World War II until its collapse in 1991. The Latvians lauded their regaining of national independence as being also a "return to Europe", and they along with seven other East European states applied for membership of the European Union.(2) In the twelve years since the restoration of independence, the country has experienced rapid political, economic and social change from being a Soviet republic to being a nation-state, sovereign and independent but also inter-dependent with the rest of Europe.
While politicians in the West and East present EU enlargement as a historical opportunity to heal the post-World War II division of Europe, there is little qualitative research on how East Europeans actually anticipate their accession to the EU. I think anthropology has a lot to offer in this regard, especially when keeping in mind that the reality of political and historical systems depends on people constantly bringing them to life. Referring to Sartre, Jackson formulates the issue in this way:
"No matter what constituting power we assign the impersonal forces of history, language and upbringing, the subject always figures, at the very least, as the site where these forces find expression and are played out… the significant fact for phenomenology is that the passage from one objective situation to another is always mediated by subjective life - by purposefulness, practical activity, and projective and strategic imagination" (Jackson 1996: 23, 29).
I aim to show how large-scale historical and political change is "mediated by subjective life" by providing empirical description, interpretations and analysis of a group of people, who involve themselves in the EU accession of Latvia.
The youth NGO where I did fieldwork from July to December 2000 is called Klubs "Maja" - Youth for United Europe. The name Klubs "Maja" literally means Club "the House", and in everyday conversation the members refer to it as either "the club" or "the house". The NGO has existed since 1994, and the members, numbering around 200, are mainly high school or university students, aged 17 to 22. A large majority are women.
The NGO is located in Riga, the capital of Latvia, with less active branches in other cities around the country. In an attempt to counteract the alienation of the large Russian-speaking minority in Latvia, Klubs "Maja" has defined itself formally as "multicultural". In practice, however, only a few members have Russian as their first language, and all members speak Latvian at the NGO.
Klubs "Maja" works to inform people about the history and structure of the European Union from a pro-EU perspective, and about issues pertaining to a future Latvian membership. Most members of the organization see it as their goal to create an interest in the EU, an awareness among fellow Latvians that the EU is a major influence in their lives. Their basic argument is that Latvia has no choice but to join the EU, given her history of dominance by larger neighbors and her present-day economic situation. They also work with issues like social integration of national minorities, but I will concentrate on their pro-EU work. It is through this that they attract funding and cooperate with other political actors in Europe. The whole organization is a member of the Young European Federalists (JEF for Junge Europäische Föderalisten). Through JEF, Klubs "Maja" is connected to local pro-EU NGO's in Eastern and Western Europe.
The members of Klubs "Maja" direct most of their information towards other young people, sometimes children but mainly high school students. One of their activities is to organize events where the students compete in showing the most extensive knowledge about the EU. Such testing of factual knowledge is often combined with more creative approaches, as when the participants write and perform songs with lyrics about Europe and Europeans, or paint their visions of "Latvia's road to the EU". It is by reaching out to young people in this way that the NGO recruits new members.
Other activities target the general public, as when the NGO puts up a stand in central Riga, decorates it with blue and yellow balloons and EU flags, and distributes information to passers-by. Moreover, some members go to the countryside to explain the need for open markets and agricultural reform to locals, who worry about losing their jobs and small farms. For some of my informants, their work also involved going abroad, on trips to seminars and political events organized by European NGO partners.
Above I have described the activities through which society becomes acquainted with Klubs "Maja". What motivates these acts of public political participation? In this thesis I offer answers to a research question that I formulate, in its most general form, as: What mobilizes my informants to do pro-EU NGO work? I will show that by joining the NGO community and doing NGO work, my informants collectively make sense of the rapid political and historical change that their society is undergoing. They become able to see and narrate their own transition to adulthood in a way that mirrors the story of Latvia's national rebirth and return to Europe. Thus they turn political changes into something they can identify with and act upon.
They also gain the ability to take up a position within the social and political landscape of Latvia - that of being "NGO" - from which they engage in political actions in the public sphere, in the company of other young people who share their experience of personal and social transition.
In order to understand the NGO career through which the activists are mobilized to be politically active, this thesis also deals with the theoretical question of how a group's everyday face-to-face sociality interrelates with their shared orientations towards an abstract political realm. I show my informants' political mobilization to be embedded in everyday social experience, where ideological discourse is largely absent.
This thesis offers interpretations of the ways that people make sense of a political process. The "political process" is Latvia's post-Soviet transition and European integration, and the "ways" in question are those of NGO life. Clifford Geertz has described anthropology as an interpretive science "in search not of law but of meaning" (1973:5), and meaning is what I search for when I consider political life. According to Geertz, when we study meaning, we study how symbolic acts, events, relations and objects communicate a certain perception of the world (op.cit: 91). I will be considering the symbolism through which my informants perceive and communicate the meanings of building a nation and a civil society, and joining the EU.
My goal is not to discuss symbolic systems in themselves, except if that helps me to arrive at a phenomenological understanding of political action. By phenomenological, I mean understanding how a large-scale political process becomes present in people's lives through the competences they acquire, the political and social landscapes they become familiar with, and the emotions, life stories and everyday sociality in which their political and historical worldview is rooted.
My project is to understand the NGO as a space of everyday sociality within which my informants come to share a view of the world, and feel that they are connected to, and able to act upon, the historical and political process happening in their society. I describe how political realms such as civil society have a mobilizing potential because they appear to my informants as new, as a break with the Soviet past. So does a Latvian nation, state and market economy, and the process of entering the EU. I aim to describe the social spheres that they identify with (civil society, their generation, the capital city), the activities they enjoy (their everyday social life, engaging in public political manifestations), and how through these activities and identifications, they experience a Europeanization of their society and an enlightenment of themselves.
I see the phenomenological approach as one of understanding the mobilizing potential that resides in the appearance of this landscape to my informants. Thus I do not problematize the "new-ness" that my informants see in Latvian civil society and European integration. My concern is to understand and interpret their political practice by focusing on images and stories that motivate. As Jackson writes:
"Fieldwork-based writing affirms that truth must not be seen as an unmasking which eclipses the appearance of the thing unmasked, but a form of disclosure which does it justice" (1996:4).
Besides describing, I am also concerned with interpreting the interrelation between the issues my informants bring up. I see interpretation as a search for symbolic resonance between spheres that may in everyday talk, also among my informants themselves, be presented as distinct from each other. Thus I am not endorsing an impressionism that would stay content itself with recording and repeating the ideas held by informants. But the elements that I use for my interpretations, are those that they bring up as immediately important, and which I myself have observed to play a central role in their political mobilization.
What is the value of interpretation? I follow Geertz in seeing anthropological interpretation as devoted to:
"a continual effort to devise systems of discourse that can keep up, more or less, with what, perhaps, is going on… [by] elaborat[ing] a language of significative contrast" (1995:19-20).
My interpretations aim to follow how, under post-Soviet conditions of rapid social and political change, new symbolic practices appear by which people ascribe meaning to their world, and existing social divisions and symbolic forms are invested with new political content. I use well known theoretical concepts such as "totemism", and I also modify concepts used by other anthropological authors into neologisms such as the "internationalizing gaze".
The data one collects in the field are affected by various personal characteristics. I believe with Donna Haraway that anthropology offers "situated knowledge" (Haraway 1988:188). Accounting for the nature of one's position in the field "implies responsibility for our enabling practices" (op.cit:193). But it also allows the anthropologist to insist on the "embodied objectivity" of his or her ethnographic viewpoint, and to strive for empirically based "enforceable, reliable accounts of things" through "a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a 'real' world" (op.cit:187-8). I will now account for my position in the field.
I found Klubs "Maja" by contacting the NGO Centre in Riga during a pilot project visit in May 2000. Gaining entry to the field was no difficulty at all, compared to the experience of many anthropologists (e.g. Dumont 1978). Accounting for my own viewpoint, my nationality was one reason for the relative ease of my field access. I found that my informants identified me as representing the Europe that I was researching, and especially Scandinavia, which was widely seen as the peaceful and uncorrupt epitome of democracy. My gender and age also played a role. As a male, Danish researcher in my late twenties, it was relatively easy to communicate, to a group of mainly female Latvian university students in their early twenties, my interest in them and their political work.
In my relations to informants, an international dimension was always present in the basic sense that our communication was in English. They spoke good English and were eager to do so, and I did not speak enough Latvian to engage in conversation, though I learned to understand enough to have an idea of what subject people were speaking about. When on various social occasions I listened to my informants speaking together in Latvian, I would usually ask "are you talking about…?" and people would explain to me in more detail what was being said. If I started to involve myself in the discussion, they would often switch to English.
During my fieldwork I made 16 recorded and transscribed interviews with NGO members, as well as people in the networks that surround them. These interviews were mainly in English, though a few were carried out in Danish with the aid of an interpreter. Many of my data also come from informal everyday conversations.(3)
With my informants, I took part in projects in Latvia and around Europe, and at one point I did press-work in English for the NGO. I went several times with members to international events, where I was registered as a member of Klubs "Maja", but presented myself as a Danish anthropologist. During my participation in NGO projects, the age gap between me and my informants was not wider than that I could to some degree "slip into the crowd" and be seen as a young person among other young people.
I should also mention that I have a personal background in NGO activism,(4) which probably predisposed me to ask certain kinds of questions: where the motivation for political activity comes from, and how the relationship between immediate personal gain and the long-term common good develops as the activism changes the activist. My own NGO experience implied that my fieldwork took place within a political culture that was partly "at home" to me.
"Situated knowledge" also means that the reader should be able to ascertain the political bias of interpretations. Let me therefore say that I myself support the EU, and also its enlargement. But my fieldwork has made me critical towards the political rhetorics in the candidate countries which stigmatizes any scepticism towards the EU as old-fashioned socialism or nationalism.
In chapter one I present a short outline of Latvian 20th century history. I also discuss some meanings of European integration and the concept of civil society in a Latvian context.
In chapter two I describe my informants' political worldview as centered on notions of openness and inter-dependence, and a symbolism of recognition and isolation. I see their international lifestyle of NGO activism as a lifeworld in which that worldview is rooted.
In chapter three I demonstrate that while my informants are engaged in political work, the main attraction of NGO life is the everyday sociality. I propose to see their enjoyment of such face-to-face relations as a medium for political consciousness.
In chapter four I look at individual NGO carreers and a case of public political manifestation. I argue that mobilization comes about through the social experience of creating a political-symbolic presence in the public sphere.
In chapter five I discuss how my informants see themselves, as a moral actor, in relation to other groups and actors within the social and political landscape of Latvia-in-transition.
In chapter six I discuss my informants' life stories of entering NGO life and experiencing personal enlightenment, and how these narratives establish symbolic links to the political process taking place in society.
In this chapter, I place in a wider political and historical context three basic aspects of my informants' political activism: that it took place within an NGO, that it was directed towards EU accession, and that they supported the latter for reasons that had to do with national history.
When I encountered Latvian history, in official settings (such as the Latvian Occupation Museum in Riga) or in conversations with ordinary Latvians, themes of occupation, social suffering and a continuous struggle for independence and recogniti on were emphasized. Such national narratives of suffering are not unique to Latvia. They exist in many societies where people have experienced war and conquest (e.g. Nordstrom & Robben 1995). Throughout Eastern Europe, post-Soviet anthropology has shown that the theme of suffering is endemic to the national history, social memory and individual life stories (e.g. Demirdirek 1996, Skultans 1998, Verdery 1999). Nations and individuals are publicly mourned and victimized in rituals such as reburials of dead bodies (Verdery 1999:115).
My informants often evoked national history as a background for their work for Latvia's "return to Europe". They presented EU accession as a condition for Latvia's economic and political survival, and drew parallels between their own NGO work and what they perceived as a centuries old Latvian struggle for nationhood. As Nora, the president of the NGO, explained to me, "the tribes in the 13th century were also fighting against their land being taken away, like we have done ever since. They were like us".
Nora's words about "land being taken away" refer to historical instances of occupation that, as we shall see in the anthropology of post-Soviet Latvia, are vividly present in Latvian social memory. Another informant used the expression "we have been occupied for 900 years" when referring to the succession of German, Polish, Swedish and Russian empires which from the 13th century until World War I reigned the region that today is called the Baltic Countries.
However, the themes of occupation and struggle refer particularly to Latvian 20th century history and the two world wars. From 1918 to 1941 an internationally recognized Republic of Latvia existed, the "first Republic" of which today's Latvia is seen as a continuation. During World War II, Germany and the Soviet Union fought each other on the territory of Latvia, which was alternately occupied by both sides.
The Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries lasted from the end of World War II to 1991, and Latvia today is in all respects presented, by my informants and official history writing, as a contrast to and release from the "russification" and repression of that period, of which I can only sketch a few elements:
In the early years under Stalin, there were mass deportations to Siberia. Dissident intellectuals and resistance leaders disappeared, but ordinary people were also deported for no obvious reason.
As in other Soviet republics, alongside the centralization of political power there was a considerable cultural autonomy. The Soviet state supported the expression of national culture, especially in the form of folklore (Kerblay 1983: 39, Rosengaard 1996). Latvian literature disappeared after World War II, but reappeared in the late 50's, and was used as a subtle medium for political protest (Skultans 1998:177, Kerblay 1983: 49, 287).(5) The social and humanist sciences deteriorated under the effect of secterian Marxist perceptions (Kerblay 1983: 49).
Soviet central planning demanded a collectivization of almost all land into state farms. It also resulted in a heavy industrialization of the Baltic states, with mass immigration of Russian-speaking workers. Of the 2.4 million population of Latvia today, one-third have immigrated or descend from Russian-speaking immigrants during the Soviet period. While most of these were ethnic Russians, a considerable number were "russophone" Ukrainians or Belorussians (Dreifelds 1996:142 ff).(6) The migrants settled mainly in the cities and especially in the capital of Riga. By 1989, Latvians were a minority in the country's eight largest cities (Dreifelds 1996:146). Today, on the outskirts of many cities, large areas of Soviet-style apartment blocks testify to this mass immigration. In the capital of Riga, ethnic Latvians make up only 35-40 % of the inhabitants, and "the daily life of Latvians in Riga unfolds within a sea of Russian-speaking individuals" (op.cit: 148).(7)
Political repression eased in the 1970's, but this thaw was contradicted by Soviet language policies. While in its constitution the Soviet state recognized the right for people to use their national, native tongue, in practice the promotion of Russian language intensified, especially in the educational system. Latvians "required Russian if they desired to advance in life" (Dreifelds 1996:158). As described in 1983, "Bilingualism, along with everything that is conveyed or communicated by language, is inevitable for any Soviet citizen wishing to pursue his studies beyond secondary level" (Kerblay 1983: 48). Latvian was used less and less in the public sphere, in shops and offices. It became the private language of the home, and "Latvians complained that their language was described as 'a dog's language'" (Skultans 1998: 177). Russian was seen as a morally and culturally superior language, the teaching of which, according to a Minister of Education, "safeguards the effectiveness of patriotic and internationalist education, promoting the development of high moral and ideological-political qualities in school pupils" (op.cit: 176).(8)
In 1991 Latvia achieved independence from the disintegrating Soviet Union. A reversal of all Soviet policies began: Land and property were given back to their pre-occupation owners, and Latvian became the official state language. Russian is however still taught in schools, and most Latvians speak it quite well.
In the aftermath of the Soviet break-up, the Baltic states have avoided violent ethno-nationalist conflicts between the titular majority and the ethnic and linguistic minorities. But many of Latvia's Russian speakers, especially the older generation, have little wish to speak Latvian or become Latvian citizens. In the decade following independence, the Latvian state's treatment of its Russian-speaking, non-Latvian minority has been a subject of international monitoring and criticism.
The national history I have briefly outlined is very present in the everyday lives of Latvians. It materializes in sites of commemoration that are found all over the country: museums, graveyards, monuments, ruins of German and Russian military installations. It affects people's everyday life through a long list of official days of commemoration. The middle-aged mother of a Latvian friend told me that on these days, people were by law required to raise the Latvian flag, or risk being fined by the police. She also said that she felt "so very sad" on days of commemoration, and that there were far too many of them. The suffering they recalled brought a sadness upon her that would barely disappear before another day of commemoration made it return.
In the many references to the past made by my informants, they presented national history as a vivid memory, but also as something they were actively striving to escape. In their view, accessing the EU was all about breaking with the past, and their NGO work took part in creating this break.
In a review article, Wilken warns against the tendency for anthropological studies of the EU to present an abundance of organizational detail (1999:220). I will limit myself to a core principle of European cooperation, the rationale of openness and inter-dependence, which also plays a central role in the political worldview and international NGO lifestyle of my informants.
In the aftermath of World War II, European cooperation was seen a measure against war arising once more between the great powers of Europe. Europeans were securing themselves against their Other, the nationalist forces of their own past (Buzan, Wæver & de Wilde 1998:148, 179-93). The means was economic integration, as prescribed by the liberalist maxime that nation-states can realize freedom and prosperity by being inter-dependent with, rather than independent from, each other.
Since the European Community was conceived in a divided Europe, it comprised West European states (Bull 1993). After the fall of the Soviet Union, EU enlargement has come to the point where, at the time of writing, ten East European states including Latvia have been promised membership within two years. When Europe's politicians talk about this historical change, they use a historical imagery of "closing the chapter" and "healing the wound", making whole what was "artificially" divided in the past. Europe is a "family of nations" moving away from a "paranthesis in Europe's history", during which not only the Iron Curtain but "the nation-states isolated the Europeans" (Prodi in Tygesen 2000), towards "a Europe where there are national differences, not national barriers" (Blair 2000). This historical and political imagery provides legitimacy and momentum to European integration. To my informants, such images of " healing the wound" were very meaningful, and so was the idea of the inter-dependent rather than independent nation, as we sha ll see.
In the academic and political discourse about Eastern Europe's transition towards democracy, the process of opening up for broad, public political participation is often spoken of in terms of "building a civil society". Keane defines democracy as "a system in which the exercise of power, whether in the household or the corporate boardroom and government office, is subject to public disputation, compromise and agreement" (1998:8). In being the prime forum for this "disputation", civil society is "a complex and dynamic ensemble of legally protected non-governmental institutions that tend to be non-violent, self-organizing, self-reflexive, and permanently in tension with each other and with the state institutions that 'frame', constrict and enable their activities" (op.cit:6). In a political process marked by trust and dialogue, non-governmental organizations ideally confront the state and international society as partners in setting the social and politica l agenda.
The concept of "NGO" is applied to a wide range of non-state actors, from research centres to groups of specialists who work with development projects. Klubs "Maja" is the kind of NGO that offers a membership and a social life centered around political activities. Its raison d'etre is to represent the grassroots political participation of enlightened, self-organizing citizens.
The concept of "civil society" has attained a virtually global popularity (Keane 1998:33-6). And like any concept in wide use, it has different meanings in different contexts. In Latvia and other post-Soviet transitional societies, democracy and civil society are "under construction", and NGO's are represented in public discourse not only as representatives of new social orders, but as agents who build them by encouraging popular participation. In Latvia, NGO activism is, by its mere existence, an idealized representation of the historical process of "returning to Europe". An example of this idealization is found in The Annual Report 1999 from the Non Governmental Organizations Centre in Riga:
"NGO's… play a pivotal role in civil and democratic societies. They democratize the political process by transmitting values, attitudes and signals about the needs and potentials of society, and… will be indispensable when Latvia joins the European Union where NGO's play an important role in transmitting the needs and demands of ordinary citizens to the political decisionmakers" (NGO Centre Riga 1999:4).
In 1998, 2.4 percent of Latvian students aged 18-25 were members of youth organizations, according to a recent UNICEF report on Young People in Changing Societies (UNICEF 2000:110).(9) Thus, my informants are part of a young elite minority, which as a group embodies an ideal vision of the future of Latvia as a reborn European democracy. It is not surprising, then, that although Klubs "Maja" is a youth NGO, with a less serious image than more formal organizations, it receives a lot of recognition from national and international institutions in Latvian society. The Club was praised by staff at the NGO Centre in Riga as "a very good NGO", not for its EU-work in particular, but for the more general achievement of "being active" and serving as a place for young people to learn the organizational skills required in a civil society. The importance attached to the work of Klubs "Maja" is also attested to by the recognition they receive in the UNDP Latvia Human Development Report 1999, which on the subject of the European integration of Latvia says that,
"An important task for administration [and] NGO's… is to provide society with information… a public vote on an issue as significant as joining the European Union is unthinkable without a soundly based understanding regarding the situation" (UNDP 2000:64).
On the same subject, the report explicitly mentions Klubs "Maja":
"There are several NGO's in Latvia whose goal is to provide information to the public and involve the public in Euro-integration processes. The youth club Maja ("Home"), which was formed in 1995, unites young people who are in favour of a united Europe. The club organizes educational and informative events for schoolchildren and students, and holds discussions on various integration issues" (ibid: 67).
In this chapter I have brought up three issues, those of European integration, civil society and national history. In the following chapter we shall see how these issues merge in the political worldview and everyday NGO life of my informants.
In this chapter I consider the political message that my informants communicate to society and to each other: that the European integration of Latvia has to happen and is happening.
This political message might be seen as ideology; a discursive interpretation of history which the interpreter tries to universalize, to present as independent of his or her positioned viewpoint, in order to legitimize political changes.
I have decided not to use ideology as an analytical term, because my aim is not to show that my informants expound a positioned truth. I might add that as an emic term, my informants used "ideology" derogatively. They saw it as a negative thing, which they associated with the Soviet state's attempts to control people's everyday lives.
In this chapter I write about a pro-EU political worldview that I call the "internationalizing gaze", seeing "worldview" as a more suitable term than "ideology". It does more justice to the political practice of my informants if we see their actions as based, not on ways of talking or thinking about political issues, but on a shared way of seeing the world, a worldview which has an aesthetic preference for openness, cross-border links and free movement.
Furthermore, I try to grasp how this particular worldview is rooted in a shared lifeworld. My informants' conception of the meaning of history, in this case European integration, is based on living that history. This thesis is an attempt to analyse the interelation between a group's way of seeing the world, living it and acting upon it. Thus in the latter half of this chapter, I look at European NGO youth culture as an international lifeworld shared by my informants.
I begin the chapter by bringing up a conversation, where a girl talks about doing information work, and how she tries to convince rural people about the long-term rationality of EU accession policies. I did not have many conversations that were as explicit about EU political issues as the following. I could have pressed my informants more on the issue. But due to their unwillingness to engage in ideological discussions, I felt uncomfortable about asking too directly about these issues. And when I did, it clearly went against the field role that I was building by "hanging out" with people at the NGO office, talking about everyday experiences, memories and visions that were personal to them.
Anja had been a member of Klubs "Maja" for four years. During our conve rsation, she came across as one of the most pro-EU members of the NGO that I would meet. Her views were close to those found in official Latvian state declarations: the necessity of EU accession is beyond discussion, and demands far-reaching social reforms .
Anja's story of recruitment is typical: In high school she was one of the most active students, and her activities brought her in contact with youth organizations. She eventually ended up at a summer camp organized by Klubs "Maja". Like the participants I interviewed at other camps, she liked the opportunity to learn about the EU, about how to generate funds and organize NGO projects, and she enjoyed the social life with other young people with a similar orientation. So she joined the NGO.
At the time of our interview, Anja did pro-EU information work not only for Klubs "Maja", but also in connection with a project run by the EU "embassy" in Latvia, the EU Delegation. She told me how she regularly went to the countryside to explain the need for Latvia to join the EU. Her audiences were either local elites drawn from a larger rural area, or a more mixed crowd of people inhabiting a single village. No matter what kind of audience she met, however, she complained that not only the farmers but also local elites failed to face up to the new times. They rarely seemed to understand her arguments for European accession. From the questions they asked, it was evident to her that the "logical" need for open markets and agricultural reform was lost on people in the countryside. The farmers continued to worry about losing their jobs in the face of competition from the EU single market. They also feared being driven from their small farms as part of pre-accession agricultural reforms by the Latvian state and, upon accession to the Community, land purchases by foreigners.(10)
When I asked Anja "would you like to join the EU tomorrow if possible?", she said that "yes, because politically and culturally we are ready, and economically we need it now". Thus part of Anja's argument for joining the EU was economic, as she hoped that a future life within the EU would be marked by a Western level of material wellbeing. In this respect, Anja seemed to represent a post-Soviet continuation of a long-standing view of "the West as prosperous" (Kideckel 1994:135). This view existed during the Soviet period, and continues in the post-Soviet era. Especially in the early phase of the post-Soviet transition, East European visions of the new life to come were cast in terms of utopian idealizations of Western life. Kloep & Hendry talked to Albanian university students in 1991:
"What we expect from joining the West? Economic independence, freedom, weekends with friends, entertainment, discos, nice clothes, money - everything you always had and we never could have. Now we will get all this and more… In three years, we will be just as Sweden!" (1997:8)
According to Susan Gal, this "rich West versus poor East" is one of several dichotomies in East - West relations which show a continuity of symbolic form, but an ongoing change in political meaning (Gal 1991:442). Anja invested this symbolic form with the hope that trade and economic competition would be the way to attain a Western standard of living. Her economic rationale was that Latvia had to modernize through agricultural reforms and privatization, to be able to compete against other European nations while also joining them in the competition against the rest of the world. There was no other way, "we need it now" as she said.
It would be misleading however, to reduce Anja's faith in EU accession to a rational calculation of future economic gains and losses. Though my informants hoped that Latvia would receive economic development assistance from the EU, none of them were certain that this would happen. Indeed, a view I often encountered among Latvians was that even if the EU tried to aid their society, resources meant for development would never benefit the common man, because corrupt state elements would divert them towards their own pockets. And though Anja at first sight seemed to see the economic aspect as a main attraction to EU membership, she did not say in our interview that she was sure about future economic rewards. Still, "there is no other way".
So why did she and most of my informants maintain that EU accession "has to happen"?". According to Anja, the alternative to European integration was isolation, and "I don't want isolation" she said. To understand her yearning to join the EU, I will consider the historical symbolism that confers meaning upon the "return to Europe", and in particular the meaning of isolation in a Latvian context.
Anthropological research has repeatedly shown that the building and rebuilding of imagined national communities involves an ongoing reinterpretation of national identity (e.g. Anderson 1983, Herzfeld 1992). But these constantly changing social constructions do not rule out that certain themes appear continously in the way the history of a particular nation is told, though the meaning of these themes may change according to the political context in which they appear. I agree with Clifford Geertz, who refers not to Latvia but to Morocco and Indonesia:
"The continuity [of a country], to the degree that it exists, is a continuity not of event, an improbable chain of ambiguous causes, nor of essence, a fixed innerness drifting through time. It is a continuity of political task… What lasts, or anyway has for a long time lasted, is not what it is these countries are. They are still terrains on which ambitions cross. What lasts is what they are up against" (Geertz 1995: 29).
What Latvians perceive themselves as being "up against" I have described in chapter one: being occupied, suppressed and forgotten by the world - a perceived lack of, and therefore a quest for, national recognition. The fear of a historical tragedy repeating itself is evident in official depictions of Latvian history, which describe a series of recurring threats against a small, vulnerable nation, while also emphasizing that the West never recognized the Soviet occupation.
Among my informants as well, the perception was strong that national isolation is in itself a threat to survival. When Anja talked about her fear of isolation and her urgent wish to join the EU, she presented Latvia as heading towards either isolation or recognition. Several NGO members simply stated that "we cannot exist alone". What they and many Latvians strived for, due to historical experience and the geostrategic reality of Latvia being a small country surrounded by large powers, was a recognition that would bring an end to the fear of isolation. They saw national isolation as dangerous because it was a condition of insecurity, which laid the country open for conquest by larger powers. Entering the EU was by far a preferred alternative.
The concept of "international society" conceptualizes relations between states according to an ideal of mutual recognition. It asserts the rational ability of states, in spite of the absence of a supra-state monopoly on violence, to lift themselves above the Hobbesian anarchy of mutual distrust and deterrence. International society arises when actors understand the upholding of mutual recognition to be an essential, shared interest, which ties them to and protects them from each other (Bull 1977).
The notion of recognition stands as the opposite of isolation. When I speak of "recognition", I refer to a condition of being present to others. Arendt writes about the human necessity to enter the public realm and encounter "the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others" (Arendt 1958:58). Isolation means being deprived of witnesses to one's life, being excluded from reciprocity and solidarity with others, having no voice or presence to them.
Arendt writes about recognition as an existential need on the level of the individual, but the same need extends to a national level. Recognition is a crucial existential resource for individuals, groups and nation states. It is a theme in the national stories people tell, and also in their own stories. The dynamic of mutual recognition outlined above can be applied to nation states as well as individuals: In being present to each other, being defined within a shared understanding of statehood or personhood, actors achieve a status (and recognize the other) as agents with a voice, a past and a right to exist.
My theoretical point is that by focusing the analysis on the themes of recognition versus isolation, we can shed light on symbolic parallels between national and individual stories. Anthropological research shows that this symbolic parallel should be take n into regard in the case of post-Soviet Latvia:
In The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (1998), Skultans shows that a national history of conquest and struggle has made notions of isolation and recognition central to Latvian social memory. The term social memory reflects that individual memories of major historical events, such as deportations, uprisings and liberation, are not "private property". They become part of a shared linguistic realm, as themes that people use when telling stories about their lives:
"Beyond the intentions of past individuals, language absorbs and reflects history and social structure. Individual narrators draw in varying degrees upon conceptual structures derived from history and literature" (Skultans 1998:24).
Skultans gives us a sense of what Geertz refers to as the "political task" that Latvians are up against: their social memory intensifies the universal need for individuals, and the nations they build, to attain recognition and avoid isolation. I will return to this issue in chapter six, when I discuss my informants' life stories. For now, I have established recognition and isolation as central elements in the social memory of Latvians and in the political worldview of the NGO activists. They saw the quest for recognition as a task facing the nation, which they undertook in their political work to access the EU.
In the following I present my informants' belief in the "return to Europe" as an example of a political worldview that I call the internationalizing gaze . The NGO activists wanted to draw other Latvians closer to the European Union, to make them "open up" and see the EU as a reality with an impact on their everyday lives. Anja described an encounter with a woman from the countryside:
At a meeting in Liepaja, this very emotional woman stands up and says 'I will lose my small farm and the money I make, and then I can't pay for my daughter's school'. I understand that they have this short-term perspective, but it is so emotional. I mean, it's all about perspective. People will lose jobs, but they will lose them anyway. And the longer this kind of agriculture goes on, the worse the side effects, so we'd better reorganize sooner than later… These [EU-produced] goods are reaching Latvia and will do it even more.
Anja advocated further social reforms, like effectivizing the small farm agriculture which was presently a way of life among rural people. She also saw herself as confronting "emotional" and "egoistic" EU-sceptical forces. She worried that "short-sighted" fears would make old people, and particularly people in rural areas, vote no to membership. I asked
JL: Then why don't you just wait [and postpone the referendum] till all the old farmers are dead, and the more open young people of today will vote yes?
Anja: How long do you mean?
JL: Well…like 20 years?
Anja: Twenty?! No, that's just not possible. All the processes in the world demand it, everywhere countries are forming regions, they are starting to act like communities.
As we see, Anja based her faith in joining the European Union on her knowledge that there is already a process of international integration going on. As she said, "it is all about perspective", "the no-voters are reacting too emotionally, and they are not aware of their possibilities, for example students don't know which possibilities exist for them to go abroad".
The unequal confrontation between her perspective and that of the rural people examplifies how European integration privileges local actors who hold a certain kind of knowledge. In the case of Spain's accession to the EU, an anthropological study has shown that it entailed
"changes not only of political economy but of social epistemology - in how community members obtain knowledge and what counts as evidence… 'objectivity' derives from a logical and statistical format together with distance from personal experience and the observer; it is a 'scientification' of knowledge and evidence [which] has worked against the cofradias [small-scale fishery associations] whose leaders tend to present their case in rather personal and experience-based terms" (Lipuma & Meltzoff 1994: 41).
In Anja's vision, countries all over the world were joining together to form political-economical units. The EU was part of a global process which Latvia was better off connecting herself to, or rather, which Anja was afraid to be isolated from. Out there in international society, political and economic structures were being built, and the power of their inevitable reach showed in the "goods" and "possibilities" that "have already arrived" in Latvia, though this was not understood by all Latvians.
While Anja declares an urgent need to join the EU, she also perceives EU accession as something that in a sense has already happened. She presents EU enlargement as a process which is already penetrating Latvian national space, manifesting itself in the shape of "goods". In the same vein, several informants emphasized the inevitability of joining the EU, not only by referring to historical necessity, but to political effects already at work. As they said, Latvian laws are already and have for several years been written to fit the EU criteria for membership.
Thus, at the core of my informants' view of European integration, we find two perceptions. One was that EU accession has to happen to avoid the isolation they knew in the past. The other had a selfreferentiality to it: EU accession has to happen because it is already happening.
Besides NGO members I also interviewed people who were not members of Klubs "Maja", but worked professionally to promote the European integration of Latvia. Mr. Kusners was the director of the European Integration Bureau, which worked as a communication link between the Latvian government and society in the accession process. Director Kusners had a picture of the massive task ahead of him which he conveyed to me:
I want people to know this: The union is much closer than they think! These big questions about the EU, people do not care. Because Latvians do not understand that everything is linked! They do not feel the holes in the sky, though the modern world is small… The problem is, we feel too Latvian. People are still longing for their own little country house, their own little space where everybody makes his own happiness. We are closing our world to the sense of being European, while in the rest of the world countries cooperate within structures that we don't know about. Because during the Soviet times we were never told about all this. And in people's consciousness, the world is still divided into separate nations. But let us look at the big companies, it's their world. They don't recognize national borders….
In the view of my informants, to embrace Europe, people had to understand the forces that worked on their reality. This meant seeing Latvia in a larger context, as a part of global relations. Director Kusners saw Latvia as threatened by "big companies", and by the stubborn belief of the Latvian population that they could hide from global developments within a national realm. It is interesting that he attributed this ignorance to the Soviet period, but also to people feeling "too Latvian". But what I will seize on here is that both Anja and Mr. Kusners saw something happening all over the world that ordinary people could not see.
Informants like Anja and Mr. Kusners hoped to teach ordinary Latvians a different way of seeing the world, which would allow them to face the radical changes happening in their own society and in the world. In their conviction that "it is happening, all over the world and in Latvia too", Mr. Kusners and Anja saw what to them was "reality". They also worried that ordinary Latvians were unable to see everyday things in the right context. The particular worldview that my informants endorsed was not only global in its outlook, it also saw the local and nearby in a new way. People had to understand that things around them were not what they seemed. They were in fact linked to a global reality that was external to everyday life, but also penetrated it. This penetrating force manifested itself in the "goods" that "have arrived".
Löfgren writes about the growing emphasis during the 20th century on the nation as a territorial and cultural unit. There is "a thickening of the nation into a lived everyday experience, a nationalization of trivialities", a process accompanied by "the making of the nationalizing gaze" which "scan[s] the terrain for the small differences" between nations (Löfgren 1999:11,13). I believe that in the 21st century on the periphery of Europe, among members of the social elite that is strongly oriented towards an international realm, a new worldview arises. It does not supersede the national gaze, but adds itself to it. I refer to this worldview, borrowing and modifying Löfgrens concept, as the internationalizing gaze. With this gaze, Anja looked beyond her own locality into a global field of relations and processes. She was also "scanning the terrain" around her for links through which a European reality manifested itself within the horizon of her immediate experience, materializing itself in political and economic institutions, objects and persons . The internationalizing gaze, which contextualizes the local within the large-scale, is an element of what my informants see as enlightenment: the realization that European integration "is happening".
An important point here is the fundamental distinction between having a "modern" open idea of the national and an "old-fashioned" closed idea. With the distinction between open and closed, my informants distinguished between two ways of relating to the issue of nation building, only one of which had understood the reality of global inter-dependence.
The distinction between "open" and "closed" was basic to my informants' view of national spaces, and also of social groups. When they encountered people whom they saw as enlightened, as opposed to people in need of education, the open - closed distinction aligned with other oppositions, such as active versus passive, young versus old and urban versus rural. As Anja said about the rural people she had met and tried to inform: "the middle-aged people who are not ready for the EU never will be. They're a lost generation, and that's it!"
Both Anja and Mr. Kusners actualized the dichotomy of open versus closed in describing their task of informing people about the world and the future to come. Kusners denounced Latvians who were "closing our world to the sense of being European" in fear or self-sufficiency. In his view, the sense of being European would by itself take root in Latvians, if they would only "open up". The European integration of the nation was seen as an opening up, which demanded a population of enlightened individuals who were also open, or willing to open up. "Open" people had a modern, democratic mindset, and understood the value of inter-dependence.
The metaphors of "open" versus "closed" turned ideological argumentation, which they were reluctant to engage in, into a more knowledge-oriented issue of whether one understood "reality", and into a form of political aesthetics which conceptualized nations, people and ideas as open or closed.
In Geertzian terms, we can say that the internationalizing gaze shows a model of the world, "this is how it truly is", and the idealization of openness is a corresponding model for social organization (Geertz 1973:77). The model for social organization also becomes a model for the cultured person, who should be open and able to see "what is truly out there".
I have described the internationalizing gaze and a historical interpretation of isolation and recognition. These were central elements of my informants' political worldview, within which EU accession appeared attractive. But the EU was not only something they " saw". It was their lived reality, a regularly occurring, embodied face-to-face experience of being European. They had primary experience of a world where it made sense to intertwine national rebirth and nation building with European integration. This was demonstrated in the international events that my informants and I participated in. I will now look more closely at the European youth culture of NGO activism, an international lifeworld which is fundamental to the political worldview of members of Klubs "Maja".
Keane writes about different ways that civil society is lived in the world, and calls attention to international networks he calls European civilians. Like eighteenth-century cosmopolitans, Keane says, people in these networks see themselves as "true cosmopolites" and take
"advantage of an emerging European civil society comprising a macédoine of personal contacts, networks, conferences, political parties, social initiatives, small businesses and large firms, friendships, and local and regional forums" (Keane 1998: 110).
During my fieldwork, I took part when my informants went abroad and cooperated on projects with NGO activists from all over Europe, or organized international seminars and projects in Latvia. Keane points to networks like the European youth culture that my informants and I encountered at events in Latvia, France and Denmark. A culture funded by the EU, the European Council, Soros Open Society Foundation and other international sources.(11)
Within this political culture, there was a simultaneity of the international and national, which I can best describe as (inter)national. While people cooperated on projects with a strong European dimension, in their interaction they identified themselves and others according to ethnic or national characteristica. National particularities were often used to make fun of each other. When somebody got drunk, or behaved in any way that stood out, like talking too much or not at all, it was invariably seen as a characteristic sign of their national spirit. The Lithuanians said the Estonians were "silent", while according to many West and South Europeans, all Balts were introvert.
The (inter)national dynamic appeared not only in speech but in action, some of it of a very practical character, as when crossing national borders. During the bus ride to a pro-EU demonstration in Nice, France, we passed through several countries each day. It gave a very international feeling. When we entered the Schengen area, where there were no passport controls, we talked about the ease of moving rapidly through the European Union. But crossing other borders, down through East and central Europe, was a deeply nationalizing experience. Participants with "problematic" passports got an extra look from the customs official, who treated everyone as a national. The official's behaviour was, in turn, the first sign by which the character of this particular nation was judged. Each new place was closely scutinized with the "nationalizing gaze" that Löfgren speaks of. At the first stop after the border, we would talk about the price of beer in this country and whether their coffee was better than the previous nation's.
Such "staging of national exits and entries" are moments where "motion and emotion" connect in "rites-de-passage with strong symbolic and existential meanings" (Löfgren 1999:5). They were a recurring feature of these European travels, which confirmed to the NGO activists the existense of an international reality, and simultaneously stimulated a nationalizing experience.(12)
All participants emphasized their ethnic or national cultural and historical roots, but within a European perspective. At each international event, local rootedness was displayed through ritualized presentations where the participants represented their country or ethnic group. A primary example was the "European Evening", which seemed to be the standard way of "getting acquainted with each other":
Before going abroad, the organizers asked participants to bring exotic snacks or drinks that represented their nation. Mostly people brought alcohol, because the evening would also be a party. At the European Evening, each participant presented that which they brought, perhaps with an anecdote about what happened to someone who drank a lot of it, and they taught the audience to say "cheers" in their language. People also taught national or ethnic songs and dances. These were joyous scenes of transnational hybridity, as twenty people drunk on Bulgarian brandy chanted a Gaelic folk song, each with the accent of their national tongue.
The first time I myself became involved in this ritual was at an international NGO seminar and summer camp in Latvia, organized by the Club. I clearly felt the force of expectation: be national. But I also felt unfamiliar with my national role as a Dane. This distance was partly an anthropologist's job injury, partly caused by my being a Swedish citizen (who was born and has always lived in Denmark). In any case, I had not brought any national paraphernalia. In a desperate search for something Danish to display, I found myself on the floor singing the Danish national anthem while seated in the position of the Little Mermaid. It was ridiculous but sort of fun, and to my surprise, I truly felt a desire to "perform Denmark", which I regretted not having prepared for. The ritual had a nationalizing effect, it was a national experience that only made sense to me because it took place in an international setting.
The organizational culture of Klubs "Maja" offered a repertoire of acts for such meetings between the national and the international. There was a particular folkdance, accompanied by song, that my informants often taught to foreigners abroad and at home. Some of my informants, who were deeply involved in European NGO life, were expert national performers, such as Eva who was a highly skilled Latvian folk dancer.
Nora had participated in many European Evenings as described above. I asked how she had experienced them. She said:
All the JEF things are big, because they happen not in Latvia but in Europe. You go there and… You feel like you are Nora but you are also not just Nora. You represent Klubs "Maja" but also Latvia as a state… It's very important for me. You have the feeling that you have to show that Latvia is OK, it belongs in Europe, it is not something in Africa.
It clearly meant a lot to Nora to perform her nation-ness in an international setting. But why was it meaningful for her? Because in this European NGO youth culture, the historical "return to Europe" was my informants' lived reality, an idea which they themselves embodied in their performative competence. At European Evenings, they experienced themselves as Europeans with national roots. The mutual recognition of international society became a tangible fact as the participants recognized and even imitated each others' nation-ness.(13) A harmony between national identity and European integration was asserted, in that it was the very structures of European cooperation that had brought one here, allowing one to express one's national or ethnic identity.
In such rituals, and in their everyday sociality, my informants and the other NGO activists encountered the princi ples that define European integration and International Society as such. This principle is described by Billig as a "universal code of particularity": The experience of nationhood implies a certain way of thinking about the whole world, in that one necessarily perceives one's nation as "a nation in a world of nations" (Billig 1994: 61 ff). Other nationalities are different from oneself, but they are also similar because they are nationalities. Ritual occasions such as European Evening were perfect illustrations of this principle.
While my informants themselves were becoming involved in a very modern, European youth culture, they were able and even encouraged to see themselves as connected to national roots. Through their own acts, they were in effect taking on the national quest for recognition that I have described. They were making Latvia known to the world, which as Nora told us, was very important to them.
My informants and their European NGO friends seemed to share two fundament al social expectations: one was about being rooted, and the other was about realizing one's identity at a European level. It was a shared idea that collective, territorially based cultural and historical identity - whether ethnic or national, though I limit this discussion to the latter - was a fact, was valuable, and had to be realized and integrated on a European level. The building of nation-states was presented as inseparable from, in fact accomplished through, their integration into the EU.(14)
I don't think many of these young Europeans would ever endorse a European federalism that dissolved the nation. Within their European outlook, they subscribed to a community nationalism (Wilken 2001:73), which essentially merges the realization of national identity with its Europeanization. Community nationalism is, according to Wilken, increasingly the conceptual framework for ethno-national activism in Europe. My informants shared with the other young European NGO activists - many of whom were ethnic activists - the view that by achieving recognition within a European framework, the local would gain permanence and a presence to the world.(15)
We see that while my informants tried to convince ordinary Latvians of the reality of European integration, this was a process with which they themselves had immediate face-to-face experience.(16) When my informants advocated that EU accession "has to happen", their conviction derived from seeing that "it is happening to my society", but also, and ultimately, from their lifeworld experience that "it is happening to me". As a face-to-face, bodily experience, partaking in European NGO youth culture was at least as important as ideological interpretations of national history in confirming to my informants that EU accession has to happen. They felt that opening up towards Europe was imperative because ideas that are fundamental to European integration, like free movement and international inter-dependence among nations, were things that happened around my informants, and to them. Learning someone's folk dance instantly evoked the mutuality of international society.
While enjoying an international lifestyle, my informants maintained their image, in a context of Latvian social memory, as active opponents of national isolation, as people who "opened up" the nation by translating European ideas into local terms. As we see in the following, such practices may be seen as a form of modern patriotism.
My informants are, like the European civilians that Keane writes about, "citizens of the wider world", but also "loyal patriots" driven by
"wanting to enlighten and transform that little corner of the world where one had been born, or had been brought by destiny to live, work, love and die" (Keane 1998: 110).
I will consider here the aspect of patriotism mentioned by Keane. Some of my informants referred to themselves as "patriots", who through NGO work realized a moral obligation to contribute to nation building. Anita was a new member, who at the time of our interview was participating in a summer camp organized by Klubs "Maja". I asked her why she had joined the NGO. She said she saw a "responsibility" to inform herself and others, and that she would like to educate people on EU-political issues. In her view, only an informed public could take democratic decisions, including whether to enter the EU.
While NGO activism was not mentioned in the following quote, it was the issue with which this part of our conversation dealt:
JL: This feeling of responsibility, when you talk about duty and democracy and being a citizen - where did you get it from? From your parents, classes about democracy in school, or…?
Anita: Not from my parents, they simply gave me the freedom of choice and I am thankful for that. The people around me gave this feeling of patriotism. Well, I had actually only one talk about patriotism: a young man around 25 said to me 'what do you think about patriotism? Would you call yourself a patriot of Latvia?' I actually couldn't answer, but he said 'I am sure that me and my colleagues, we would go and fight for Latvia if a war broke out. I simply added 'well I as a woman wouldn't go to fight with a gun'. But then I thought 'what else can I do, well I can't fight with a gun, but I can prove my love for this country in some other way'.... This is my home, and therefore I feel responsible that the place where I live, is also the place where other people feel well... If you care about the things that go on around you, it makes you a person who feels responsibility somehow. Those who care only about their life, I would say it's a kind of selfishness.
Anita's words make sense to us when we consider that images of struggle against occupation are at the centre of Latvian social memory is (see 2.1). She saw NGO work as an act whereby she could shoulder the responsibilities of a citizen of a newly independent country. By contextualizing it within images of war, NGO work became analogous to the act of defending the nation in times of war. Her symbolism claimed a moral unassailability: in showing their "love for this country" and caring for the national home, she and the other NGO workers were heir(esse)s to ancestral struggles for independence. They were able to see themselves as engaging the quest for recognition, which I will speak more about at a later point.
Anita and other members saw a form of modern, enlightened patriotism in active NGO work. So whom did they see as unpatriotic? They did exhibit the "allergic reaction to nationalism" that Keane mentions, when they referred to their opponents as "nationalists". One day in a conversation with three NGO members, we talked about another youth NGO in Riga called "Klubs 415". This NGO was known to be anti-EU, and my informants strongly condemned it: "They are nationalist, they see Latvia nowhere, in no space, just independent and in Latvia only Latvians".(17)
To the members of Klubs "Maja", the concept of nationalism signified an old-fashioned belief that the nation can enjoy total independence by closing itself off from the world. But at the same time, my informants all declared their pro-EU political activism to be motivated by national interest. In this distinction between old-fashioned nationalism and modern patriotism, two ideologies, which both aim for national survival and empowerment, go their separate ways, by stressing either independence or inter-dependence.
My informants communicated a pro-EU political message to society which was based on a certain way of viewing the world: Looking for integration, for enlightened "pooling" of inter-dependence, openings towards the international sphere, and zones of ignorance where tendencies towards closure must be challenged. My informants based this worldview on their certainty that they saw and knew what was "really" happening.
In the everyday life of my informants, abstract ideological concepts like "inter-dependence" versus "independence" became a political aesthetic resting on opposed metaphors of "open" versus "closed". This opposition was heavily moralized. The idea of "openness" held a deep attraction to my informants, since it referred to the enlightenment of the nation as well as the individual.
Through their NGO activism, my informants managed to turn the tension between nation building and European integration to their advantage, by building an image of themselves as enlightened patriots who continued Latvia's historical "quest" through times of social and historical change. They strongly opposed the "old-fashioned" form of nationalism that wanted to "close off" the nation, and saw this point of view as a remnant of Soviet isolationism combined with Latvian peasant-mindedness.
My informants' political worldview that it has to happen and is happening was not just a question of knowing or seeing. Ultimately, they felt confirmed in their political message to society because they themselves were living it, in everyday NGO life and as members of a European NGO youth culture.
The NGO activists were part of the incipient lifestyle of the "European civilian". They and their fellow European NGO activists subscribed to a community nationalist view of the interrelation between the nation and Europe, which is increasingly widespread among local ethno-national actors in Europe, who are mobilized into a civil society that works for the inter-dependent nation.
During my fieldwork, I often wondered about the relation between my informants' political worldview, which I have described in the previous chapter, and the importance they attached to their everyday NGO sociality. In this chapter and the next, I elaborate on this relation, in light of my research question "what mobilizes my informants to do pro-EU NGO work?".
On the homepage of Klubs "Maja", the NGO presents itself as follows: "Club the House is the only youth organisation in Latvia whose aim is to popularise the idea of a united Europe". What is the relation between this overarching aim and the everyday motivations of those who carry out the NGO work and live the NGO life?
One might perhaps expect people, who popularize grand ideas about a "united Europe", to present ideology as a motivation for their political work - "ideology" in its classical meaning of universalized, value-based assertions about the relation between individual and society, oriented toward long-term political goals for the development of society. But this was rarely the case among my informants, most of whom presented the everyday social life of the NGO as the central motivation for their activism.
How is the everyday sociality of a political organization interwoven with their will to engage in public political practice? In this chapter I explore the social side of Klubs "Maja"'s political work. By drawing on interviews and discussing with Maffesoli's The Contemplation of the World: Figures of Community Style (1996), I develop this central point: that the enjoyment of face-to-face sociality is a primary motivation for NGO life, but not antithetical to more abstract political concerns. On the contrary; I suggest that we see the being-together of the group as a bringing-forth of political issues, which thereby gain presence and motivating force.
The everyday NGO sociality, as I observed it, clearly attracted people to the organization. At the time of my fieldwork, the NGO office consisted of a room in an old building in downtown Riga. It was a good place to make and meet friends. Most days when I went to the Club office, a group of members would be sitting on the couch drinking tea, eating cake or just hanging out in a friendly, informal way. Others would arrive, meet their friends and leave again. Often this coming and going was timed by the breaks between classes at the nearby university. Students would come to the office to have lunch together, hang out if they had free time, and return to the university.
In an interview I made with Vera, she told me that her own motivation for joining the NGO was to get new friends after moving to Riga from a small town. She found that in the NGO, "people care about each other". This was a very valuable and attractive thing, which defined a " spirit of 'the House'" that to her was the most valuable aspect gained through her membership. It was when she first encountered this "spirit" at a summer camp organized by Klubs "Maja", that she decided to join the NGO. Many informants told me about similar social motivations for joining.
Vera studied art and other humanistic subjects at the university, and she was reading much of the social science literature that I know from my own studies. On several occasions she commented actively on conclusions that I had arrived at in my study. On two occasions during my fieldwork, I made presentations at the NGO of "what I have found so far", and I also subsequently sent them a copy of an article I wrote a year after leaving the field (Linnet forthcoming). Vera commented on this article, in which I made references to the pro-EU views of Klubs "Maja". In her email to me, she contrasted her experience of everyday NGO life with more "rational" concerns such as ideology:
"Perhaps it's necessary for your research to stress strong ideology when you analyse the House as an NGO with very clear-cut aims… but I had the impression from your paper that the House is a propagandist organisation, and it somehow makes the club more 'flat' as it seems to me… The people in the House… want a useful and interesting way to spend their time, to do what they like. Although in some way this motivation is very concrete, it's very 'irrational' at the same time" (email on 13/01/2002).
In my article, I had described NGO life by emphasizing ideological commitment, but mainly material and existential gains. Vera found it necessary to counter the flatness of academic representation by pointing to the "irrational". It seems then, that to arrive at a fuller understanding of political activism, we must not forget motivations such as the social "spirit" mentioned by Vera.
In the previous chapter, we have seen various elements of the political worldview through which my informants see Latvia's accession to the EU. However, in their explicit patriotism and liberalism, Anita and Anja spoke in more ideological terms than NGO members generally did.
The majority of my informants mentioned "meeting new people" and "being with friends" as their main reason for being involved in NGO work, but they also said that they had become more politically aware in the course of partaking in NGO work.
When Vera told me about the spirit of the House, she was an experien ced NGO activist looking back on her first contact with the NGO. But also when I talked to people who were at the point of first contact with the NGO, their primary motivation for approaching it appeared to be social.
Most new members joined the organization after going to a summer camp organized by Klubs "Maja". Usually the camp participants had had previous contact with the NGO when it organized a competition about the EU at their school. I went along on a summer camp, the same kind as where Vera encountered "the spirit of the House". One morning at the camp, I asked a group of girls sitting around the breakfast table, all of them prospective members who had not yet joined the NGO, about their reasons for going to the camp.
A girl said "We need knowledge because we are the generation who will have to live in the EU", and another girl said: "I am here because of the possibilities for me in the future as a student, getting international contacts and so on. Maybe I am a bit egoistic, because I know that some people in Latvia will suffer in the EU, like those who work in agriculture". They saw the EU as a useful thing to know about because society is changing in a European direction, and they recognized themselves as belonging to a group which could benefit from those changes.
But what they mainly stressed was the social aspect of the camp, which they all said was their primary reason to be there. This was the summer holiday and they had nothing to do, so they wanted to spend time in the company of other young people. One or two had also decided to join the camp because a girlfriend was going. Some of the girls laughed in a slightly embarrassed way while saying this, as if they expected me to be disappointed by such pragmatic motivations.
The value to my informants of their social life in the NGO was also illustrated by a fact that became clear to me after some time in the field: that there were members of Klubs "Maja" who were to some degree EU-sceptic, and did not personally agree with the organization's official pro-EU profile. Out of my ten to twelve core informants, about half told me that they were not that positive about the EU. Some held high positions in the NGO, including one who said "I will probably vote no". Despite these reservations they had no intention of leaving the organization, and explained that the social life of Klubs "Maja" was more valuable to them than the EU-issue. This made it clear to me that the friendships within Klubs "Maja" encompassed an internal diversity among the NGO members concerning what "returning to Europe" meant, and how desirable it seemed.(18)
In the stories told by new and potential members as well as by experienced NGO activists, we see that the sociality and "the spirit of the House" was a major motivation for being an NGO activist, and, for the new members of Klubs "Maja", often their initial reason for approaching political work. In discussing my informants' social motivation, I will refer to Maffesoli's work The Contemplation of the World: Figures of Community Style. In Maffesoli's perspective, what motivates people to be members of groups is a "hedonism" turned towards the collective enjoyment of the present. People are attracted primarily by the joy of being together, sharing a certain style and image of whatever their particular community is oriented towards. And although political organizations such as Klubs "Maja" officially have a long-term political goal of effecting some sort of social change, Maffesoli analyses NGO's in the following way:
"The communitarian ideal is equally encountered in… the multiplication of 'nongovernmental organizations' and… the diverse idealisms that, without very much theory, are essentially addressed to the affective side of those who practice them. In all these instances, while the efficacy may not be evident - and it is even sometimes totally nil - nevertheless, in a more or less conscious manner, a form of being-togetherness is lived out that is no longer oriented to the faraway, toward the realization of a perfect society in the future, but rather is engaged in managing the present, which one tries to make as hedonistic as possible" (Maffesoli 1996:xiii).
Maffesoli's analysis of people enjoying the present together is a useful object of discussion. The limits of our agreement show something important about what my study is trying to show. Maffesoli problematizes the issue of motivation in terms of affect versus effect. As quoted above, he thinks that activists are motivated not so much by the effect of their political work as by the affect that they themselves derive from it. While I do not believe that reality is either-or, I think he has a point in not seeing ideology and political projects primarily as things that people "believe in" or "work for", but rather as things that they consume collectively.
Klubs "Maja" is an organization with a political purpose, and my informants did political work that may have contributed to that purpose being realized. At the same time, most of them presented their motivation for being NGO activists as centered on having fun in the here and now with other young people. They were attracted by what Maffesoli calls the "being-togetherness" of the group. As we have seen in the case of Vera, some members of Klubs "Maja" emphasized the value of NGO sociality by explicitly refuting ideological explanations for their political actions.
Thus, my data seem to confirm Maffesoli's observations of the centrality of social "presentism" and hedonism, especially among the young. The organization appears to fit his description of groups that "favor a being-togetherness not seeking an objective to attain, not oriented to the future, but engaged quite simply in enjoying the good things of this world'" (ibid:33).
I agree with Maffesoli when he critizices "modernist" assumptions about abstract rationality being the cause of political action. As I understand the modernist view, it can be illustrated with the political and moral thinking of Immanuel Kant. In Kant's view, the enlightenment of a human being is a process of elevating himself above the "empirical", "subjective" and "natural" sources of action. With his first and third categorical imperatives, in 1785 Kant formulates the ideal to be attained. The first imperative is "Act as if the maxim of your actions were to become through your will a universal law of nature", and the third "So act that your will can regard itself at the same time as making universal law through its maxims" (Malnes & Midgaard 1993:185).
Kant's moral imperatives contain a modernist theory of practice as to why people act politically and why social changes come about. The actor idealized by them is a person who acts on the basis of a rational analysis oriented towards the attainment of long-term political goals. She is oriented towards universal truths and the common good of humanity, and she joins a political "struggle " on the basis of rational analysis, with her eye turned towards the final outcome of her actions: social change and humanity's mastering of history (Lyotard 1984).
There is a retrospective reification to the Kantian view, however, because it sees an objective outcome, a social change occurring, and infers the motivation of the actor to be directed towards that outcome. The problem is that this modernist view is excluded from recognizing the emotional involvement in a shared, social present that motivates everyday practice, even of actors who self-identify as "politically active". Emotions are subjective sources of action that the idealized Kantian actor has risen abo ve.
Evidently, to understand the political consciousness of my informants requires a break with the modernist ontology of the political actor. The members of Klubs "Maja" were no doubt contributing to changes within the long-term perspective of European integration. But whether they were or not, long-term goals for society were not in the foreground of their experience. The motivation for their action resided in the present, in the immediate enjoyment of sociality and the desire to acquire the style of the group. I agree with Maffesoli and others (Lähteenmaa 1999) that we must contest assumptions about voluntary political work that stress a sacrificial attitude and a commitment to long-term goals, which cannot account for the concrete, face-to-face dimension of the mobilization and motivation of young political activists.
In spite of my agreement with Maffesoli's basic perspective, I strongly disagree when he, in refuting the "modernist" conception of political action, claims a general abandonment of the political. It is central to Maffesoli's analysis that social groups at different levels do not "any longer" gather around abstract, long-term political projects of changing the world. Instead they contemplate it in each other's company, and enjoy what it has to offer. He says that there is "a fatigue with regard to the political or rather toward the democratic ideal that developed slowly throughout modernity" (op.cit:xii). He describes this fatigue as a "saturation" of the "activist ideal" of changing the world (ibid). Announcing the demise of the activist ideal, Maffesoli posits a break between "modernity" and what we see today, the "postmodernity" which is allegedly a:
"time in which the style of seeing, feeling, loving, or being enthusiastic together and in the present wins out, without encountering any opposition, over rational representations oriented towards the future" (op.cit:15).
I see no reason to take the step from observing the role of concrete face-to-face sociality to announcing the end of activism and dispensing with the political. Let us not forget that while the closeness of social NGO life was the primary source of motivation for my informants, the political aspect was in many ways deeply meaningful. I will show that this is so, and in chapter two I have already given examples of NGO members who feel strongly about their political worldview, and we have seen Anja think in a long-term "rational" time-perspective concerning the gains and losses involved in EU accession. We have seen Anita declare herself a patriot who feels responsible for the building of the Latvian nation. Many NGO members did feel some orientation toward abstract processes and future political goals, and at times, for some informants, this orientation was very strong. They enjoyed doing things which they considered "helping society", and, motivations left aside they were carrying out political work through the projects I observed and participated in. Thus I disagree with Maffesoli's complete rejection of the political. I think it is our task instead to understand how the orientation towards an "abstract" political realm becomes an element of "concrete" face-to-face sociality.
It seems clear that social, individual and political motivations coexist among my informants. But how are the three related? To my informants themselves, the matter seemed quite straightforward. When I presented Nora, the President of the NGO, with the observation that her members were partly into NGO activism for personal career benefits and social hedonism, she reacted with little surprise:
Well, Jeppe… what you're saying is not a problem, really. Of course people want to have fun while they do something important, and some members of an organization are more serious about its work than others. That's how it is everywhere.
From Nora's perspective I was merely pointing out a practical knowledge, which she herself was using in her daily work of leading a well-functioning NGO: People want to do good for others, as long as they also get something out of it. That "something" can be the doing good itself, especially if one does it in pleasant company, and the activity signifies a moral responsibility and political enlightenment which one is attracted to. That is the case for the members of Klubs "Maja", as Nora knew well.(19)
The relation between social motivation and political consciousness has been dealt with by Jaana Lähteenmaa, who approaches it as a question of ethics, and introduces the valuable concept "hedonist altruism" (1999). Lähteenmaa also refers to Maffesoli, but she herself is more balanced in her understanding of "the possible motives of urban young people for doing voluntary work". Like my informants, her young Finnish voluntary workers emphasize "a multiplicity of motivating factors": They gain skills for the future, they enjoy "being together with other volunteers" while "doing something useful". The combination of these motivations simply gives them a "good feeling". Contrary to attempts to idealize NGO activists as "altruists", or to expose them as "self-interested", both of which are equally naive, Lähteenmaa points out that in actual, lived NGO life, what we may analytically separate into "self-interest" - including the interest in a social life - and "altruism" dialectically reinforce each other. From the actors' point of view, they become virtually inseparable:
"For the young it is not impossible to admit that when they are doing something useful, which someone else might well consider proof of a sacrificing mentality, they are in fact enjoying it… altruistic considerations of the best interests of other people and a personal sense of satisfaction are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary they constitute a dynamic association" (op.cit:28).
What Nora used as practical knowledge about leading an organization, Lähteenmaa sees as an ethics of "hedonist altruism". I approach the interweaving of motivations not as a form of ethics but as a symbolic process which I see as prior to ethics. When a political activist talks about the "hedonist altruist" experience of being together and doing good, prior to that statement I see a symbolic process whereby the political realm becomes present in social life. A social life centered on creating this symbolic presence, and bringing it forth to the public sphere (see next chapter), makes an ethics of hedonist altruism possible and meaningful.
Maffesoli is surely right in attacking the modernist moralism that devalues the role of the sensuous and emotive in "rational" political practices. But as Nora's words demonstrate, the two foms of consciousness, which Maffesoli dichotomizes as "modernist" versus "postmodernist", are two truths about political motivation that coexist in the universe of my informants, who in their everyday life experience no opposition between them. At the end of the day, Maffesoli ends up making an argument similar to that of Kantian modernism: that the hedonism of youth makes it unable to act politically and feel responsible for the common good. Ironically, he ends up reproducing the moral dichotomies of modernity, positing an unbridgeable gap, in terms of political ontology, between the present and the abstract, between hedonism and altruism. However, as long as one does not have to go along with Maffesoli's dismissal of the political, I find that he has useful points about the affect gained by the collective sharing of image and style. His critique of modernist thinking is useful when trying to understand the subjectivity of political action.
In this chapter I have called attention to the interweaving of everyday sociality and "abstract" political awareness. In chapter four, I see "political mobilization" as a process of socialization, through which my informants simultaneously involve themselves in everyday social relations and make their entry into the political sphere.
Nora's story about joining Klubs "Maja" is similar to what we have heard a few times now: First she had nothing to do in the summer, so she went to a camp and liked the people. Then, after moving to Riga from the small town of her childhood, in order to enter university, she decided to join the NGO. What led her towards NGO activism was primarily her need to meet new people, and since it seemed useful to learn about the EU, she chose Klubs "Maja".
When we did our interview, it was three years since Nora had been at her first camp. The girl who sat across from me now had become a very busy and effective president of the NGO. What had happened?
Actually my point of view has changed, because when I started I just saw one thing happening at a time, just one project. Now I have to think about all the things together, not just one project and what will happen next month, now I have to think about the whole year, about JEF, things going on in Latvia and in Europe. I have to think about the money, of course, how can we bear our expenses. Actually it's a dramatic change in my point of view, because when I started I thought that it was not that hard work, there was not a lot to do, just fix some letters and that, but actually it is hard work. It takes a lot of time, my free time, my personal time. If I could earn money on this, it could be my profession.
So of course it has changed, my motives have. Now when I am president, I have to think not just about my own motives, I have to think about the other people whom I am responsible for. For example if I want to go and visit my parents, I often have to choose Klubs "Maja" instead. It is not an easy choice, because of course, family is family, and - actually, right now Klubs "Maja" has become like another family.
Obviously, Nora's experience of doing NGO work had changed since the camp, and so had she. It was still about having fun, but she had attained a position which involved a lot of work and responsibility, and demanded a broad range of competences. Informants in and outside Klubs "Maja" praised her work as president. Evidently, Nora's leadership was a large factor in Klubs "Maja" carrying out EU information projects that brought them positive attention. But as she herself said, her workload was wearing her out, economically and in terms of time. Why was she doing it?
As I got to know Nora, I understood that she was very involved in her friendships within and around Klubs "Maja". When she and other members travelled abroad to seminars and political events, or organized international NGO events in Latvia, Nora always emphasized "the good company" of these events as much as their political content. She had made friends with people all over Europe. Also in our interview, Nora presented the social aspect as a large part of her motivation for doing NGO work:
"Working in Klubs "Maja" you don't have any salary, you don't get, I mean, material things. You get new friends of course, experience of course, but not money or something like that. Sometimes it is really difficult, because you have to eat, you have to pay for your room. But still it's really interesting to meet all these people, to make the plans, to make the projects".
Like other university students, Nora received a meagre state scholarship.(20) Meanwhile, as Latvian society was making its transition to a market economy, much wealth was being displayed around her. In Riga, expensive shops with French fashion and German cars were appearing, and a get-rich-quick mentality dominated commercials and media. The cost of living and going out was high for university students like Nora. This was the context when she emphasized that her personal, immediate gains from NGO work were primarily social, never material. This indicated to me the scope of her dedication to NGO life.
I asked Nora how her studies and future career plans related to her NGO work.
"Actually, I like to live for today and do things I like to do now, not just start thinking all the time what's going to happen".
Her words confirm that young voluntary workers have no problem with " admitting" to personal gain. Nora perceived NGO work as a self-realization and an enjoyment of the present, achieved through everyday social relations of friendship. By stressing non-material gains, she communicated to herself and society that she and her NGO friends were "altruist hedonists" who wanted to be with other people and do something useful for society, even if it did not pay economically.
In the previous chapter I brought up the issue of social affect versus political effect, with Maffesoli claiming that the former, the being-together, was "winning out" over "the activist spirit". While social hedonism was a crucial element of my informants' motivations, to Nora the political effect of her work was also important. When once I asked whether she thought NGO activism had any actual political consequences, she replied that "you mean if I believe that we can do something, that we change something? Yes I do, I really do!". Clearly, for my informants the chance to believe in a political effect was in itself a gain made from NGO activism.
What I want to capture in Nora's story is her process of mobilization - her socialization into political activism. What she tells me is that political mobilization is experienced as personal responsibility for a growing load of work. This can be stressfull, but also offers a strong sense of personal growth and achievement, as well as recognition from one's friends and partners. She also makes clear that the social satisfaction of sharing this work with good friends remains a central motivation. In Nora's story, I see two main elements of mobilization: the friendships she has made, and the work she has engaged in with her new friends.
Nora had joined a group of young people whose everyday being-together included political work. As she herself took on more work, she rose in the ranks of the organization, and extended her social networks in Latvia and abroad. As I understand Nora and my informants in general, their own growth as individuals, and the enrichment of their social life, developed in parallel with their political motivation. What gave impetus to this process was the capacity of political work to generate a motivation for more work. In the effort required to do political work, there was a principle of expansion that led them to acquire new skills and build social networks. Political work in the company of friends became an intensely social experience, and an experience of personal growth.
As we have seen earlier, Nora saw both the "serious" and the "fun" aspects as necessary for the work of the NGO. In her way of relating to NGO life, there was a unity between the NGO as a group of friends and as a political actor oriented towards public political manifestations. NGO-political work was friendship-in-action.
Above I have outlined a process of political mobilization: My informants develop a political consciousness, an orientation towards the political realm, because political work offers them a way of being-together. This interrelation between the political and the social is also seen in the history of the organization as such. Liena was a founding member of Klubs "Maja". She told me how the NGO came into existence:
In 1994 they were a group of friends from the University of Latvia. Some were students of journalism and involved in the trilingual European youth magazine das Haus/the House/la Maison. The magazine still exists, and Klubs "Maja" is still involved with it. It is published two to three times a year by changing European youth NGO's, who get funding from organizations like the EU or the Council of Europe, to bring young people together for an editorial conference. I took part in such a conference with Klubs "Maja", and the spirit was youthful, friendly and international.(21) This is the sort of spirit, and the sort of funding, from which Klubs "Maja" has come into existence.
The main reason why Liena and her friends were involved in writing for the magazine, she said, was that they could travel for free to editorial conferences in European countries. During these events they built social networks with other young Europeans, and in 1994 they decided to host a conference in Riga themselves, and invite their European friends to come. They realized that in order to attract funding for the conference, they needed a name, a bank account, stationery with a printed logo. They needed to organize themselves as an NGO.
In our interview, Liena emphasized several times how important they were to her, the group of friends with whom she organized the conference in Riga. One person in particular had a lot of energy and made things happen, and as she said with an amused look, "I would have followed Andrejs into any kind of organization. If he had formed an environmental or maybe even an anti-EU organization, I would have joined that" . Now, because of his organizational energy and another girl's political interest, the EU was chosen as the focus of the new NGO called Klubs "Maja". A lot of early activities had to do with human rights. But as it turned out, the EU topic gave a clearer organizational profile, that made Klubs "Maja" different from other Latvian youth organizations, and it also gave access to funding.
While organizing the conference, the group became even closer friends. Liena described it as an intense experience: "It was a game, we were young and we did it in our spare time. We had a friendship and there was this atmosphere, we ate and drank together and had Ritma's apartment as our meeting place, while everyone else was living with their parents. It was the people that made it into an NGO".
Klubs "Maja" was established as an organization with the sole purpose of hosting this editorial conference, and thus it was named after the magazine. But after the event, Liena and her friends were reluctant to let go of their social life together. Nor did they want to lose their recently strengthened networks with NGO friends in Europe. Today, Klubs "Maja" is in its 8th year of existence.
The point of Liena's story is that already existing social networks were formalized into an organizational structure, which was "filled" with political content. I think this substantiates my interpretation of Nora's story, that the sociality around political work is a central mobilizing factor. The basic drive behind the establishment of Klubs "Maja" was and is the will to be with people, within a friendship that is dynamic because it is geared towards the creation of public, political events. For the creators themselves, organizing and carrying out such events are intensely social experiences.
The history of Klubs "Maja" shows us a principle central to its organizational culture: people expect their friends to be NGO members very much for social reasons. But they know their friends in a way which, for want of a better term, I call also-political, because "being active" is an intrinsic quality of the friendships and the everyday sociality. During an NGO career, the friendships one acquires remain attractive as friendships, but they also have a potentiality to them because an orientation towards political action in the public sphere is immanent within the everyday face-to-face sociality of the NGO. The value of friendship, or any other personal gain made through NGO activism, cannot be separated from this political potential.
I will now return to my interview with Nora. After she had told me that her point of view had changed during three years of NGO activism, I asked:
JL: Do you think it generally changes people, the way they think and behave, when they are active members of Klubs "Maja" for some time?
Nora: Of course. There are some very active members, and a larger part is not so active, and even for them I think it changes something in their lives. Every event I think, every summer camp, every seminar is a chance to change inside… my friends who are active say that 'yeah sure, Klubs "Maja" changes people'".
Based on her experience as an activist and an NGO president, Nora asserted that the change which happened to her was also likely to happen to others. In chapter six I bring up examples of informants who describe such change as a significant turning point in their lives. Their stories, and my own experience of participating in projects with Klubs "Maja", give me reason to believe that the experience of personal change is common among my informants, and important to them.
When Nora said that anyone could change through NGO activism, she was not only referring to the members of Klubs "Maja", but to people active in NGO's as such. She told me that she saw a large difference between a person who was "just a student" and a person who was an active member of any organization. Dividing the active from the passive, she even gave credit to active members of EU-sceptical organizations:
Nora: "They are active, and we can see that they are different from those who are not members of any organization. Maybe it's because of all these activities, and your participation in organizing them".
Nora's words show the extent to which my informants saw a basic difference between people who were active and those who were not. These young people, who were involved in steep social climbing, experienced that personal change happened to themselves and others as they acquired a new social life and new skills. Organizing NGO projects gave them a feeling that the circles of important people and international money, which they had hitherto experienced as incomprehensible or hostile, had suddenly become accessible. It was something they started to approach, pragmatically, to get the NGO work done. Then one day they would realize, maybe from the way the new members looked at them, that they had become part of that world themselves.
I have outlined a process of entering the political through the social. Nora experienced this process happening in her life, and she suspected that it would happen to anyone who engaged in similar activities. In the following, I discuss elements of this process by presenti