| One Soviet legacy which demonstrates continued ethnic fragmentation in Latvia is the existence of two parallel school structures---one using Russian language instruction and the other using Latvian. Established during the Soviet period, these schools served to ensure ethnic enclosure, partitioning, and ranking, while enabling an effective surveillance of ethnonationalistic sentiments in the titular republics. Putting Russian-speaking students at certain political, economic, and social advantage during the Soviet period, Russian schools came under attack but were not eliminated in the early 1990. Whereas the dichotomous structure of the school system has not substantially changed since the collapse of the USSR, education discourse about separate schools underwent a great transformation. Russian schools moved from being associated with "sites of occupation" in the early 1990s to "symbols of multiculturalism" by the end of the decade.; This dissertation traces the shift of public discourse in Latvia in the globalization context. Based on press review, document analysis, and expert interviews, it illustrates that the emergence of a new discourse was accompanied by a fusion of collective memories of the independence Latvia enjoyed between 1918--1940, Soviet institutional legacies, and more recently, international pressures for Europeanization. Using the interpretative frameworks of globalization and education "borrowing," this dissertation argues that the transfer of global discourse did not necessarily ease ethnic tensions in Latvia, but instead re-conceptualized the problem using West European rhetoric. This new re-conceptualization of ethnically separate schools became useful both for Latvian- and Russian-speakers in the context of Latvian integration into the European Union. On the one hand, it provided an opportunity for Russian minorities to externalize the autonomy issue to gain international support for their local demands. On the other hand, application of the "new" discourse to the "old" education structures contributed to a "re-ethnification" of various ethnic groups, thus allowing for a more effective management of the ethnic question by the "nationalizing" elites. In the case of post-Soviet Latvia, the transfer of global discourse on multiculturalism was skillfully used by local actors to reach other ends, including a reconciliation of international pressures for democratization and "multiculturalization" with local politics of Latvianization. |
