Letter from Riga June 2014
World history, local level
How Latvia beat the odds after the Cold War.
The Anglosphere is inclined to congratulate itself on its commitment to free speech, free markets, the rule of law, opposition to tyranny. And quite rightly. But a few weeks in Latvia or its Baltic neighbors might cause one to wonder if the Anglosphere is as unique in those respects as it thinks. In living memory, the Baltic peoples have risked their lives for those freedoms in ways that English-speaking people have not had to do. Today, a visitor to Riga, in Latvia, and the other Baltic capitals—Tallinn, Estonia and Vilnius, Lithuania—finds cities where freedom is assumed and exercised but valued more explicitly than in the West.
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