New Year’s is fast approaching and I was thinking about what I am or am not going to do to celebrate (I think I might stay in this year, I’m really tired and I haven’t heard of anything particularly exciting, and also I am really cool like that) and also reminiscing about the New Year’s I spent in Harbin two years ago (o man, how time passes) and how awesome it is the way Russians do it.
Why yes, we are dancing around a Christmas tree.
And then this is where the internet took me last night: NYE → Russians → this NPR piece about Russian New Year celebrations that turned up on my Facebook news feed → the Russian-American food blogger (Yulinka Cooks!) who posted it → a series of food blogs inspired by Russian and post-Soviet cuisine (I wish I could name them all because many were quite good, but the clicking-on-things was too spontaneous), including → the Gastronomical Me → and finally Nami-Nami, “an Estonian food lover sharing a delicious life and blog with an equally food-obsessed husband K. and two gorgeous kid
Perhaps it was this gorgeous-looking Canada-inspired ice cream (pictured below the cut) served with cloudberries, which is something special to the Nordic/Baltic region (we had cloudberry ice cream while couchsurfing in Turku, Finland), but I got stuck on this blog, and then somehow on Estonia. And today at work, taking advantage of the holiday lull, I spent a few hours reading (the tangents keep going) about the country in post-war and post-Soviet times.
Maple syrup and marscapone ice cream with cloudberries
In post-Soviet times, Estonia is known for being pretty technologically-advanced. Skype is one of their shining stars, it turns out. So, using search terms like “innovation” and/or “knowledge economy” alongside “Estonia,” to keep my internet surfing work appropriate, I arrived at this Der Spiegel article, “Skype and Sensibility: Estonia Lives the European Dream,” from just a couple months ago. Being so close to the “Scandinavian socialist paradise,”† I didn’t think there would be so much emphasis on the state staying out of the way, and a quote like this from the Minister of the Economy kind of surprised me (not the bit about transparency though, duh):
“Comparisons are always difficult,” he says. “But when we had finally escaped from Soviet socialism, we were sick and tired of government centralism. We wanted precisely the opposite in all respects: We wanted a transparent state. A country that isn’t constantly intervening, nationalizing businesses, placing a bureaucracy above everything and imposing rules on people in every respect.”
Skype, Estonia's greatest export
Obviously the post-Soviet context puts the quote in a far different context, and it is fair that liberalism has been the mood worldwide for some time now (my home province, too, is Open for Business), but upon first reading, it struck me a little too close to contemporary American libertarianism (most noticeably in the Tea Party) and its hostility towards the institution of government. I still have questions about what form the welfare state takes in countries like Estonia, but no worries, I’m not accusing Estonia’s centre-right government of confused populism (I certainly don’t know enough about it).
Entirely separate reading and policy tangents and links, also today, led me to the blog of Alex Himelfarb and his thoughts on David Cameron’s Big Society (actually Phillip Blond‘s). Big Society sounded kind of cool to me when I first read about it, and although there are problems with it (which Himelfarb points out), so cool that I felt kind of guilty thinking it was cool because it came from a Tory (LoL). Certainly a big criticism would be that it’s just an out for the (awkward) Conservative government in the UK, an out from social spending, as per Tory ideology. Anyways, all that reading culminated in this concluding line.
…just as the state without a strong and independent civil society is an empty shell that serves the powerful, strong civil society without the state is a myth.
OMG, THAT’S TOTALLY HOW I FEEL!!! It helped me reconcile what I was reading about Estonia with what I feel about the relationships between the state and civil society‡ as well as the world at large (so much is happening this year, from the Arab Spring, to the #Occupy movement, and more recently the protests in Russia*), but it also articulated what I think is the (critical) importance of the state/government in the society operates. I wish I could say more as an independent thinker, and perhaps relate it to what I learned about social democracy this year, but I’m pretty spent with all this hyperlinking… I think it’s time to say good night (to 2011 as well, perhaps, providing that nothing too exciting happens in the next couple days – I hope things are shiny in 2012).
† Yes, I know it’s not really a socialist paradise, but some aspects of the Nordic model still stand in spite of New Public Management.
‡ I don’t have a visual for civil society, sorry. Skype is appropriate, in some ways, to represent the free market and liberal values, but I have no idea what might be a good picture of civil society.
* Actually, the reason I returned to the Estonia-reading at work today was because I had clicked on a news article about today’s protests, which had also led me to some interesting pieces on facism in contemporary Russia.
