Latvia: the nearly Banana Republic

  • 2009-01-14
  • By Karlis Streips
Wikipedia, that great paragon of 21st-century knowledge*, defines "banana republic" thus:  "A small country that is politically unstable, dependent on limited agriculture, and ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy, and corrupt clique."  We can remove agriculture from this description if we're thinking about Latvia.  It is an irony of history that just when the post-Soviet Latvian government was 's understandably, but in hindsight foolishly 's dismantling as opposed to reforming the system of collective farms, agriculture in much of the rest of the world was going throug...
 
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