Living In Latvia
WORDS: Dace ?altāne /?
Hello! My name is Dace and I am 24 years-old (or young). I am Latvian but I am currently residing in the capital of Macedonia - Skopje.
Latvia is commonly confused with Lithuania and sometimes Estonia. When I was an Erasmus exchange student in Sweden the immigration authority sent me a residence permit with Litauen (which means Lithuanian in Swedish) printed on it.?
Latvia is also not in Russia, though we have been a part of the USSR for 50 years. We do not speak Russian, though we have a substantial minority of Russian speakers and my generation and older are fluent in it.?
Latvian and Lithuanian are the only survivors of the Baltic language group, which is sometimes widely drawn as the Balto-Slavic branch of languages, identifying a historical similarity in structure than any real resemblance.?
Estonian is a relative to Finnish and both of them belong to the Finno-Ugric language tree. Hence, we do not understand Estonians naturally, but surprisingly we do not understand our brothers the Lithuanians either.?
Even if you pick a word you know, you cannot be sure if it has the same meaning because black in Latvian means blue in Lithuanian and the word which sounds like run means fly in Lithuanian. If our fathers and mothers spoke Russian, now we speak English.
I was born in Riga on April 24, 1983. The Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic was still an integral part of the USSR, but the wind of change had already started to blow. I reckon that I was born in a very interesting time and had a chance to experience the transition from the Soviet Union to the European Union.?
Though there was a lot of populist rhetoric relating these two unions just before Latvia joined the EU I, as a representative of the young generation have benefited from it.
I am representing the first generation that could fully benefit from different EU programs for youth. In 2001 I studied German for one week in Berlin and worked in a study firm in Hartha, halfway between Dresden and Leipzig, within the Leonardo da Vinci programme for vocational education.?
In 2004 I spent a semester abroad at the Baltic Business School in Kalmar, Sweden within the framework of the Socrates/Erasmus program for student exchange.?
At the moment I am doing my European Volunteer Service, which is part of the European Commission's Youth in Action program. I will spend 9 months in Skopje, working at a local youth information center.
In addition I have used all the different possibilities to travel cheaply around Europe and benefit from easy border crossing. I am one of those crazy Eastern European hitchhikers who flooded Western Europe after the visa regime was cancelled.?
I have also taken part in several seminars and international projects by different organisations, such as CISV, AEGEE, and International Workcamps. The arrival of Ryanair and Easyjet to Riga has made travelling around Europe affordable for wider range of people and in this way brought the Western Europe closer.?
It is not uncommon to go shopping one weekend in London and the other one in Berlin. While talking with the young people from the Balkan countries, I can feel their jealousy sometimes because I do not need any visas to travel around Europe and it is so cheap for me.
Joining the European Union did not change my life overnight. Some of the changes had already taken place before, like the non-visa regime and access to the EU projects and funds.?
But the most substantial changes which are affecting us involve the people of the new member states (further: EU-10 and EU-2), and have happened after the accession or are still to come about.?
Among these changes are labor and academic mobility, Schengen area, and the common currency Euro. All the aforementioned things bring along both positive and negative impact.
Maybe at first the positive one is more visible; the tip of the iceberg. For instance, I can go to Ireland and work in a supermarket and earn much more than being a teacher in Latvia.?
I can go to study in the Netherlands and obtain higher quality education for the same cost and when we get Euros, I do not need to care about what to do with those many Hungarian coins I am stuck with after visiting Budapest.
Nevertheless, we have also started to feel the negative effects. I agree with the economists who say that liberating the labour market is actually a bigger challenge for the new member states than for the old ones (further: EU-15).?
Immigration is a very sensitive topic that the politicians of EU-15 can use, but emigration and brain drain is now a big problem in EU-10 and EU-2, especially such small and open countries as are the Baltic States. In the state of a lack of workforce employers need to increase salaries to keep employees and fight for new employees.?
As productivity cannot be increased without major investments and retraining and it takes time, wage increase is mirrored in inflation.
Increased competition in education sector as in many other sectors will hopefully result in higher quality and competitiveness of the service, but it will also not happen overnight and requires higher initial involvement of our government.
There are many challenges for the EU. I will not say anything new. First of all, we stand at very different levels of economic, political and social development. Maybe it is because I am an economist, but for me the economic challenge seems the most threatening because cultural differences are not so major and young people as me are already developing this so-called European identity.
Of course, we come with diverse luggage but we see a common future. However, when it comes to money, everybody is sitting on their pot of gold and it can be disputable how much the EU is a charity fund and how much developing your neighbours actually benefits yourself.?
Many compromises need to be made and we all know that a compromise is the worst solution as it does not satisfy anybody's needs. The problem is that Europe is still comprised of autonomous states with different bargaining powers.?
Moreover, there is still a big gap between the so-called old Europe and the new member states. I used abbreviations like EU-15 (members before 2004), EU-10 (accession of 2004) and EU-2 (Bulgaria and Romania) myself in this article, partly because of necessity, but also partly to make a point.
I have a scientific interest to see what will happen with the EU in ten or twenty years, how the politicians will manage this impressive heterogeneity to the benefit of all.?
I am thankful for the opportunities I have been given and the confidence that it does not matter where and how, but I will manage alright. Maybe because I am from a generation of turbulent change, I am not accustomed to making long-term plans.
