Week 30: On a Train Devouring the Land
Finding the most inconvenient way to move through the Baltics
The past few days I’ve been travelling through Estonia and Latvia.
A couple of years ago I had an idea to write about a new high speed rail line that is being built that will connect the three Baltic states to the European train network in Warsaw. The rail line is symbolic as much as it is practical and would make a good story and argument about the Baltic states’ desire to throw off their Soviet pasts and demonstrate their commitment to the European Union. As part of the article I thought it would be an interesting idea to do this route via current public transport arrangements – prioritising trains – to see how inconvenient it was.
Yet the time I had available included a weekend, and on weekends it is not just inconvenient, but impossible (without having to stay overnight in border towns). So I ended up getting buses between Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn. This remains the easiest way without flying (“easy” being a relative term here).
I didn’t end up writing about the high speed rail line, but given my fondness for public transport the idea, and the ideas, for the article never left me. So I decided to try again. Or partially at least. This time I flew into Tallinn, and on a weekday you can make it to Riga in a day by train, but doing so is a hilarious lesson in the lack of coordination between the Estonian and Latvian governments.
At 7:15am on Friday I caught a train leaving Tallinn to a town called Valga. Valga lies on the Estonian border with Latvia and is a twin town with Valka on the Latvian side. The train station lies within Valga, but it is also used by Valka. While both countries were occupied by the Soviet Union this wasn’t much of an issue as trains would run straight through between the two capitals. But since gaining their independence new national railway authorities were created and it seems they weren’t that keen on speaking with each other – this apparent lack of communication continued even as both countries ascended to the free movement Schengen Area in 2007.
The train from Tallinn arrived in Valga at around 10:45am, and then there is a wait. A certain wait is to be expected, half an hour or so would give the station time to coordinate between its Estonian and Latvian trains, and compensate for any delays that may occur. But this is not what happens. Instead it is four hours later that the train from Riga turns up at the end of its line and prepares to make the journey back to the Latvian capital. As a result of this wait, I was the only person dumb enough to make the journey to Riga in a single day. A German couple I spoke to were going to overnight in Valga and get the early morning train to Riga (there are two trains per day).
So I had some time to kill in Valga/Valka. Needing to stock up on snacks for the next leg I headed to the local supermarket, which also, for interest sake, happened to be close to the Latvian border. When I got there I found that not only was it close, but the carpark was effectively the border. Maybe to a cynic this could be symbolic of the European Dream of borderless commerce, but it seemed a bit disappointing to me. Coming from a country with no land borders I guess I expected something with a little more respect.
What was also intriguing was that the check-out machines in the supermarket had the language choices of Estonian, English and Russian. I found this odd given that the supermarket was literally less than a minute walk from the Latvian border, and that much of the town’s major infrastructure lay on the Estonian side – meaning that Latvians would need to come across to shop.
When searching around for ideas about a more substantive piece I wish to write about the new rail line I came across a journal article from a linguist who spent some time in the local Hesburger (a Finnish fast food chain) on the Estonian side of the border to listen to what language was used to order by Latvians coming into the restaurant. Most would order in Russian, even if they spoke it poorly. Amusingly the servers would be annoyed by this, but there was no Latvian/Estonian bilingualism, despite the intimate relationship between the two towns (to be fair to the Latvians, Estonian – like its Finnish sibling – is a non-Indo-European language and utterly bewildering).
What is also intriguing about this is that most young Estonians and Latvians speak excellent English, with it now being the foreign language of choice (although Russian previously wasn’t a choice). But the idea of Russian being the lingua franca remains embedded in the town psychology.
When I returned to the station with my snacks there was young woman in an Australian women’s football (soccer) jersey sitting in the station hall. Despite being a relatively small country of just 27 million people, Australians are everywhere. You can’t avoid us, no matter where you go. You can find yourself in a small town on the Estonian/Latvian border and there will be an Australian. It’s almost guaranteed. Or so I thought. Needing to go to the bathroom I asked if she would mind my bags and she turned out to be French. And French enough that her English wasn’t particularly good. And with my schoolboy French now barely able to do little more than basic pleasantries, I was unable to find out just why she was wearing an Australian football jersey.
A mystery maybe as intriguing as why Latvia and Estonia are unable to coordinate train schedules.
I found some time last week finalise an article for The Lowy Institute on some of the information I gathered on my recent trip to Taiwan. I’d actually been chipping away at this piece for a few weeks before I was able to pull it all together. A very long gestation period for just 850 words.
Visiting both the Ministry of Labour and the National Immigration Agencies gave me some good material to make an argument about Taiwan’s burgeoning multiculturalism. With its precariously low birth rates, Taiwan has turned to Southeast Asia to supplement its population – or more accurately supplement their labour force (there’s a distinction). People from Southeast Asia now make up close to 4 percent of the population.
This is leading to Taiwan to think about what it means to become more of a multicultural society. How does it create the social infrastructure that can not only accommodate new cultures, but incorporate them into a national narrative?
Of course, with Taiwan everything comes in contrast to China. In recent years the Chinese Communist Party has made ethnic nationalism a central – and aggressive – ideological pillar. Not only through its brutality and Sinicisation of Uyghurs and Tibetans, but through its belief that it has jurisdiction over all ethnic Chinese regardless of where they live and their citizenship, and its rhetorical claims that anyone who doesn’t fall in line with their commands is a “traitor to the Chinese people”.
A Taiwan that can embrace multiculturalism and allow it to flourish is a new card it has to play to not only in distinguishing itself from China, but as I argue in the article, it creates new sets of interests for Southeast Asian countries that can put diplomatic pressure on China not to invade Taiwan.
