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Organization (NATO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Eurozone) has provided the organising logic of the post-Soviet state project in Latvia. Every one of these targets promptly replaced the previous goal once membership was achieved, giving a new stimulus for reforms and a way of sustaining this familiar tempo. The idea of a ‘2-speed Europe’, occasionally pronounced in Brussels, is permanently hanging in the air as a threat that, despite all the efforts, ‘the East’ is not going to keep pace with ‘the West’.2 This temporal lag is an idea that
likewise a political decision made by the government, in consultations with international experts, 56 Politics of waiting to organise the state revenue and redistribution system in particular ways and not in others. As shown in the previous chapter, factors such as undoing ‘learned helplessness’ and joining the Eurozone played a role here. Waiting and expecting in post-socialism This paradox of activation and waiting gains an extra dimension in the postSoviet context because of the historically and geopolitically formed moral valuations of the different