Politics of waiting: Workfare, post-Soviet austerity and the ethics of freedom

By Liene Ozolina

This book is an ethnography of politics of waiting. While the global political economy is usually imagined through metaphors of acceleration and speed, this book reveals waiting as the shadow temporality of the contemporary logics of governance. The ethnographic site for this analysis is a state-run unemployment office in Latvia, serving as a vantage point from which to observe how welfare programmes use acceleration and waiting as forms of control as well as to compare Western and post-Soviet welfare policy designs. The book is therefore a timely sociological critique of the forms of statecraft that have emerged in the aftermath of neoliberalism.

The key audiences for this book are students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, social policy, and social and political theory, as well as policymakers and activists with an interest in welfare reforms and comparisons between Western and post-Soviet welfare designs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526126276

Book preview

Politics of waiting

POLITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY

The Political Ethnography series is an outlet for ethnographic research into politics and administration and builds an interdisciplinary platform for a readership interested in qualitative research in this area. Such work cuts across traditional scholarly boundaries of political science, public administration, anthropology, social policy studies and development studies and facilitates a conversation across disciplines. It will provoke a re-thinking of how researchers can understand politics and administration.

Previously published titles

The absurdity of bureaucracy: How implementation works Nina Holm Vohnsen

Politics of waiting

Workfare, post-Soviet austerity and

the ethics of freedom

Liene Ozoliņa

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Liene Ozoliņa 2019

The right of Liene Ozoliņa to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2625 2 hardback

First published 2019

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Series editor’s preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Waiting as an organising logic

2 Temporalities of austerity

3 The anxious subject

4 The will to live

5 Spaces of the expelled

Epilogue: Waiting for freedom

References

Index

Series editor’s preface

Ethnography reaches the parts of politics that other methods cannot reach. It captures the lived experience of politics; the everyday life of political elites and street-level bureaucrats. It identifies what we fail to learn, and what we fail to understand, from other approaches. Specifically:

1. It is a source of data not available elsewhere.

2. It is often the only way to identify key individuals and core processes.

3. It identifies ‘voices’ all too often ignored.

4. By disaggregating organisations, it leads to an understanding of ‘the black box’, or the internal processes of groups and organisations.

5. It recovers the beliefs and practices of actors.

6. It gets below and behind the surface of official accounts by providing texture, depth and nuance, so our stories have richness as well as context.

7. It lets interviewees explain the meaning of their actions, providing an authenticity that can only come from the main characters involved in the story.

8. It allows us to frame (and reframe, and reframe) research questions in a way that recognises our understandings about how things work around here evolve during the fieldwork.

9. It admits of surprises – of moments of epiphany, serendipity and happenstance – that can open new research agendas.

10. It helps us to see and analyse the symbolic, performative aspects of political action.

Despite this distinct and distinctive contribution, ethnography’s potential is rarely realised in political science and related disciplines. It is considered an endangered species or at best a minority sport. This series seeks to promote the use of ethnography in political science, public administration and public policy.

The series has two key aims:

1. To establish an outlet for ethnographic research into politics, public administration and public policy.

2. To build an interdisciplinary platform for a readership interested in qualitative research into politics and administration. We expect such work to cut across the traditional scholarly boundaries of political science, public administration, anthropology, organisation studies, social policy, and development studies.

Why is anyone interested in an unemployment office in Latvia and training programmes that encourage people to take charge of their lives? The answer is as simple as it is important. We are interested because it is an example of the forms of state control under austerity in post-Soviet economies. In a phrase, the case speaks to big issues.

I was drawn to this book by the image of swallowing a toad. The Latvian economy had suffered badly because of the global financial crisis yet there were no protests about austerity. To swallow a toad means to put up with something unpleasant. It is an act of acquiescence chosen because it is the only available response. It is an image that epitomises the ‘Latvian mentality’. Liene Ozoliņa asks why Latvians acquiesced in austerity. She is sceptical about the claim that Latvians have internalized neoliberal beliefs about responsibility and freedom of choice – the present-day version of false consciousness. Rather, in the classic ethnographic way, she paid attention to how her informants – the trainers, the policy makers, the civil servants, and the trainees – understood austerity.

The fieldwork involved observing the everyday implementation of workfare programmes, especially the seminars on ‘Competitiveness-raising activities’. There were various specific seminars on, for example, writing a CV, behaving at a job interview, and finding a new job as well as more general seminars on improving one’s self-confidence, and working on oneself. Liene Ozoliņa attended two or three sessions a week for two months, observed registration for the seminars, conducted formal and informal interviews with people she met at the seminars. There were 46 recorded interviews. She spoke also to several former directors and other top-level civil servants of the Employment Agency. Finally, she interviewed former and current policy makers at the Ministry of Welfare, welfare policy analysts, and a former minister of employment affairs.

The first three chapters focus on the ways in which austerity worked and the role that time and waiting played as forms of present-day state control. She explores the politics of waiting as a tool of state control. The analysis then shifts away from the state to actors and the ways in which trainers and trainees understood their everyday working practices.

At the beginning of the research, Liene Ozoliņa saw the workfare programmes as a cynical state initiative because it focused on individual responsibility when the unemployed confronted a shrinking labour market. By the end, she saw the seminars as a genuine space for both self-examination and meaningful interaction with other trainees. The seminars became a space for working on the self, and a way of carving out a life that is ‘livable’. The seminars were no longer about the use of waiting to exert social control but about self-formation and speaking and listening in a public sphere. In other words, workfare programmes began as a tool of the coercive state but became popularly legitimated in everyday practice. The workfare programme both disciplined the unemployed but also served as a space for practicing an ethics of freedom.

Ethnography is about giving voice to the silent and opening new research agendas, and Liene Ozoliņa does both successfully. She points us towards exploring the forms of statecraft emerging in the aftermath of neoliberalism and to the individual quest for a meaningful life in this aftermath.

Professor R. A. W. Rhodes

University of Southampton

Series editor

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to all the people in Latvia who shared their time and their stories with me, often during difficult periods in their lives. This includes the people who worked at the Latvian Employment Agency and who invited me into their offices and classrooms and were so generous with their time. This book is first and foremost a result of what I learned from all of you.

My academic journey has allowed me to meet a number of people whom I have had the privilege to consider my mentors. At the Latvian Academy of Culture, I first learned how little I knew. Anda Laķe and Silva Seņkāne showed me how sociological research was one way of searching for answers. At the University of Amsterdam, Rob Hagendijk taught me about the intersections between social theory and ethnographic writing and set an example of being not only a good academic but above all a good person. Thomas Blom Hansen’s work and advice were an early inspiration for a number of ideas that later shaped this book. At the London School of Economics (LSE), Manali Desai provided intellectually rigorous guidance through the ups and downs of the research process. Though she never used those words, her mentorship embodied for me the British mantra ‘Keep calm and carry on’. Victor Seidler has offered intellectual inspiration and emotional support throughout the writing process. Finally, George Gaskell provided the necessary encouragement at the right moment to submit the proposal for this book.

The LSE’s Department of Sociology has been my academic home since 2010, and I would like to thank Nigel Dodd and the rest of the faculty for making it such a supportive one. I have always thought that the best thing about being at the LSE is being surrounded by so many talented and inspirational colleagues and students. I would particularly like to thank Angela Marques Filipe, Antonia Dawes, Katherine Robinson, Kristina Fuentes and Nabila Munawar for sharing the trials of starting an academic career and for their friendship. I would also like to acknowledge my LSE Writing Group colleagues, who gave generous feedback on parts of the draft manuscript. The London School of Economics, along with the Economic and Social Research Council, provided essential funding for this research project.

My gratitude extends to people in many other institutions and places. My colleagues at the NYLON writing group have provided the most supportive forum throughout the past six years for developing my ideas. Lynne Haney provided crucial feedback for turning an initial version of the manuscript into this book. Previous versions of these chapters were presented at conferences in Stockholm, Riga, New York, London, Miami, New Orleans and Berlin. I express my gratitude to the audiences at these gatherings for their comments and critique, which have helped this work evolve and take its present shape. A special thank you, also, to Sally Eales for a perceptive and caring editing of a version of this manuscript. At the final stages of the writing process, Anthony Mason and Robert Byron at Manchester University Press have been indispensable in helping this manuscript become a book. I am particularly grateful for the anonymous reviewers’ careful engagement with my ideas, and I have done my best to honour their feedback. I would also like to thank the British Journal of Sociology for permission to republish a version of my 2016 article as Chapter 2.

And finally, I am grateful to my dear friends Ieva, Iveta, Rita, Sandra and Zanda for the past and the present that we share. I wish to thank my mother, who, ever since I was six years old, has been encouraging me to work less but who also never thought that a six-year-old was too young to talk to about history and politics. And I thank my husband, Benjamin Francis Fitzgerald, for all the love, for all the cooking and for making me laugh. This book is dedicated to our son Kristians, who is about to arrive into this world.

London, August 2018

Introduction

Riga v. Athens

As I arrived in Riga in the autumn of 2011 to start my fieldwork, the Occupy movement was springing up in many cities across the world. Protests against austerity were spreading across Europe. Citizens’ movements were soon to turn into anti-establishment political parties across the Mediterranean. Latvia was one of the countries worst hit by the global financial crisis in the world. By the time of the beginning of my fieldwork, the austerity regime had been in place for two years. It had meant slashing government spending on welfare, education and healthcare; cutting public sector wages; and raising taxes to balance the national budget and regain the competitiveness of the economy.¹ As a result of the crisis and the austerity regime, the national economy shrunk by 25% between 2008 and 2010. Unemployment had gone up to 21% at the worst point, and unemployment benefits were being cut as part of the austerity measures. Queues for registering for and receiving welfare assistance were getting longer.

Yet, I recall noticing the absence of any echoes of Occupy in Riga. The contrast between Greece and Latvia was particularly stark. Here were two countries on the margins of Europe that both saw similarly harsh austerity measures following the 2008 crisis. They experienced similar drops in the levels of GDP. Greek protests were rit was not what my informants wanted seported for months in daily news across the world. All was quiet in Riga, however.² People were merely bitterly joking about the austerity being not so much about ‘tightening the belts’ as ‘tightening the other’s belt’. They meant that those who came up with the post-2008 austerity policies, such as reducing unemployment benefits or cutting teachers’ salaries by one-third, did not design any similar measures for themselves. As governments were being toppled across Europe, the Latvian public re-elected the austerity government. While the Spaniards and the Greeks were mobilising at home and building international alliances between anti-establishment social movements, no populist movement ever emerged in Latvia. The country has stayed on the neoliberal course, ‘fiscal discipline’ remaining a constant policy goal.

The Latvian story captured the attention of top economists. Paul Krugman had several of his New York Times columns dedicated to debating whether Latvia was going to have to default on its debts and declare bankruptcy, like Argentina had a decade earlier. Krugman and others were perplexed when the Latvian government chose the radical strategy of cutting budgetary expenses rather than devaluing the local currency. The national government chose a form of tackling the economic crisis that shifted the burden to the ordinary people. How come the drop of 25% in GDP that followed saw no major protests?

On beginning my fieldwork at the unemployment office, I became even more puzzled. I was expecting the people who had lost their jobs in the aftermath of the crisis to be deeply critical of the ‘lean and mean’ welfare state.³ My plan had been to study how the welfare state had been reconfigured as part of the post-Soviet social and economic transformations, and I started with participant observation of one of the key workfare programmes⁴ for the unemployed, called ‘Competitiveness-Raising Activities’, which consisted of a range of one- to four-day seminars. I was expecting people to resent the fact that the support when one lost a job was offered in the form of a couple of seminars on communication skills, while the cash benefits that were essential for paying rent or buying food were meagre and had even been shrunk. Yet, the people I met expressed little critique of austerity politics. Instead, I found a lot of excitement about these seminars that focused on psychological techniques of self-examination and raising self-confidence. Many of my informants were embracing the language of needing to ‘work on oneself’ to find a new job. Some of them blamed themselves for the loss of employment; others spoke of it as a ‘normal’ thing to happen or even an ‘opportunity’ that life had given them to start anew. I was ready to do what some have recently called an anthropology of suffering – ‘the minute description of individual experiences of exclusion, violence, illness, and poverty’ (Laidlaw 2014: 31). But it was not what my informants wanted to talk about. They were telling me about the importance of taking charge of one’s life and the power of positive thinking. Where there was a critique of austerity, it was expressed in the form of occasional bitter remarks about ‘the state not thinking about the people’.

As I soon found out, the seminars had such high attendance figures because the employment agents who registered job seekers actively encouraged signing up for them. This was, in fact, the biggest social assistance programme in the post-crisis years in terms of the number of people involved. The state made this low-cost programme widely available to the unemployed, while signing people up to wait for longer and much costlier vocational training programmes. But I also noticed that many of the unemployed, once they attended one seminar, tried to attend more, and some would go every week to a session by a particular trainer even though that was not formally required by the State Employment Agency. In fact, civil servants were trying to regulate how many seminars a person was allowed to attend per month so as to manage the numbers, although I often saw people subvert this rule by not putting their signature down on the attendance list. As several of the people I met at these seminars became my informants whom I would speak with regularly over the course of the fieldwork, I got to follow their experiences of navigating unemployment. As I will show in detail in the empirical chapters of the book, the language of self-improvement, work on oneself and individual responsibility was a constant in the many different life stories I heard. There was bitterness about the economic hardships and the government’s perceived inaptitude, but there was also general agreement with the thesis of ‘living within one’s means’ and ‘taking responsibility for one’s life’. How to make sense of such apparent popular embracing of the austerity?

How to swallow a toad

A few years after the crisis, in 2014, a couple of Latvian animators created a film called How to swallow a toad. This short animation feature tells a story about a fictional town where a group of citizens discover that another group has a strange habit. They eat toads. The animation shows in graphic detail the first group watching with disgust as boys stuff large meaty toads in their mouths and, with some effort, gulp them down. The plot of the animation plays with a Latvian saying. To swallow a toad means to put up with something unpleasant. It is an act of acquiescence, resented but chosen as the wiser, the better or sometimes the only available response. It was an artist’s commentary on the Latvians’ acceptance of the crisis and the austerity that followed. This was ‘the Latvian mentality’. Such an explanation was common in the public sphere. Of course, my sociologist’s ear turned sceptical when hearing about such a ‘national mentality’ that essentialised ‘Latvianness’. Yet, this story about the toads, and the wider narrative it was part of, raised intriguing questions – how had it become part of the national self-image? Why were so many Latvians ready to swallow the toads? How did people make sense of the austerity? Why was there no Occupy movement in Latvia? How come my informants were often blaming themselves for the job losses?

An alternative reading of this acquiescence has framed the stark contrast between Latvia and Greece as due to the weak civil society in post-socialist societies. Weak trade unions and the Soviet heritage of low civic engagement and political apathy mean that citizens are unable to launch a successful challenge to the austerity (Sommers and Woolfson 2014; Ījabs 2017). Was it simply that Latvians did not have the kinds of organisational structures needed to mobilise and protest? Was it really due to the weak trade unions, I pondered as I sat in the waiting room at the unemployment office and joined in for tens of the ‘competitiveness-raising’ seminars with my informants. It did not seem a satisfactory interpretation. While there is certainly some truth to this reading, it operates with(in) an analytic of lack that has plagued a lot of sociology and political science of the post-socialist region and the Third World (see e.g. Mamdani 1996; Chabal and Daloz 2006). This analytic of lack means taking Western⁵ liberal democracies as the norm and analysing ‘non-Western’ societies in terms of the extent to which they are approximating the norm.⁶ While such a perspective may be useful for a certain kind of macro-level comparative study, looking at what is not there will not help to understand the kinds of relations of power that do structure and underpin the ‘non-Western’ socio-political realities.

The third possible interpretation draws on an established tradition in sociology and anthropology. Studies following post-structuralist and constructivist paradigms have traced the processes of ‘making up’, ‘producing’ or ‘constructing’ neoliberal citizens (e.g. Rose 1996; Ong 2006). Individual internalisation of the neoliberal rhetoric of responsibility and freedom of choice is the ultimate triumph of neoliberalism and the key target of such critiques. Was this indeed a case of successful neoliberal subjectivation, i.e. internalisation of neoliberal values of individual responsibility for one’s hardships in life, documented by many sociologists and anthropologists in various contexts across the world? Was this, to put it in Marxist terms, a case of false consciousness, as Latvians embraced the neoliberal rhetoric of self-blame while being disciplined, stigmatised and dispossessed by it?

As Ghassan Hage (2018) has recently observed, if we look through a Marxist or a feminist lens, it is always a question of who did what to whom and who is the victim. Yet, he points out, paradoxically the answer is always already known. Trained in post-structuralist social theory and familiar with sociological critiques of neoliberalism, I was initially interpreting the fact that so many of my informants embraced this language of ‘work on oneself’ as a particular local expression of global neoliberalisation. Yet, participating in these seminars, speaking with the participants and trainers, left me with a feeling that I was getting it wrong. It was as if I already knew who had done what to whom in this whodunit. The post-structuralist subjectivation paradigm, just like in Hage’s comment, had already provided the answer before I had even properly begun the fieldwork. The neoliberal state was trapping the citizens in this rhetoric of competitiveness and individual responsibility, which was actually against their true interests, while they were not economically or sociologically savvy enough to realise it. Over time, I became increasingly uneasy with this reading, not least because my critical stance and my informants’ accounts differed so starkly. What kind of a sociology was it that would make me dismiss the perspectives of those I studied?

Staying with this dissatisfaction and pondering over it has eventually led me