RIGA – Its beautiful women, its picturesque views, its virgin nature make Latvia perhaps a unique nation in the European Union. Latvia declared itself a unique country where the laws of physics and economics do not apply.
“Latvia is a unique country in that the state institutions have done everything that we would look the worst compared to others,” Prime Minister Ivars Godmanis said in a September interview to Dienas Bizness, responding to claims that Latvia has one of the largest government apparatus in Europe.
After Standard and Poor’s lowered Latvia’s credit rating to near junk, Finance Minister Atis Slakteris told reporters that credit ratings agecies are “inconsequential.”
To strut its uniqueness, the government continues to pay for the construction of a-half-of-billion-lat Castle of Light, Latvia’s national library, at a time when the government is forced to save money and live within its means.
The West simply does not understand Latvia’s unique position in the world. Other countries cannot fathom that this swathe of land near the Russian border as a mysterious place where natural laws of physics and economics are suspended in the air. Foreigners cannot understand how unique Latvians are because Latvians had suffered through the years of oppression and abuse by foreign powers.
We take pride in our uniqueness. And we’ll strut it around this holiday weekend on Latvia’s 90th birthday.
Until recently, the government touted its forecast that the unique economy will grow by 2 percent of the gross domestic product. At a press conference at the SEB in Riga devoted to the recent macroeconomic outlook forecast for Eastern and Central Europe, a reporter asked why SEB’s downbeat forecast of shrinking economy contradicts the government’s estimates. The local economist’s answer embraced this idea of uniqueness, urging to ignore opinions of their own economists, who sit in Stockholm and do not know the true state of affairs in the promised land.
For a while, some, including myself, thought that Latvia is no Iceland and that the international credit crunch will pass us by because we’re such a small unique and insignificant country in the world. Alas the storm has hit us.
Now, Latvia is just one of the countries hit by the global credit crunch. But we still have the beach, the lakes, and the women.