Discourse of Extinction of the Nation in Parliamentary Debates in Latvia

Description

Latvia is a small country with negative demographical balance. There were several times in the recent history of independent Latvia where the discourse of extinction of the nation entered public and political debate following new discoveries of the researchers of demographics, but also due to traumatic experience of social, economic or financial crisis. Cases of discussions, acting politicians and arguments used when speaking about death of nation and extinction of nation in Latvian parliament Saeima is in centre of this paper. Its aim is to find out how discourse of extinction of the nation was formed in Saeima's debating process, what concepts of death are behind this discourse and how it is related to understanding urgent problems in Latvian society and politics.. The method used for analysis of parliamentary debates corpus of Latvian Saeima is discourse analysis. To select speeches of politicians in the particular context NoSketch tool for corpus analysis was used. . The results show that discourse of extinction of the nation was initiated several times during the period after re-gaining independence. First, in the 1990ies the discourse was both drawing on difficult situation of particular social groups and demographical data that called for urgent policies. After the year 2000 and following financial and economic crises of 2008/2009 the discourse of extinction remains in discussions connected to high rate of emigration of Latvians. Discourse of extinction not only is part of the call for action. The extinction argument is often used by particular political agents to rise their symbolic capital.. The discourse of extinction of nation in Saeima's  discourse is place for political rhetoric and competition, but also formation of concept of death.The research for this paper was funded by FLPP project Memento Mori: End of Life, Death and Imagined Afterlife in the Contemporary Latvian Lifeworld- lzp-2019/1-0223.

Period	29 Mar 2023
Event title	RSU Research week 2023: PLACES
Event type	Conference
Conference number	3
Organiser	Rīga Stradiņš University
Location	Rīga, LatviaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International