Ilmārs Šlāpins in conversation with Krišjānis Kariņš, chairman of the Saeima faction of the New Era party, in 2004

Arturs Krišjānis Kariņš, born in 1964 into a family of Latvian refugees in the USA, took a bachelor's degree in the humanities at the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 and a doctorate in philosophy specialising in linguistics in 1996; his dissertation was on the stress system of the Latvian language. In Latvia he founded a company that produces Lāči ice cream. When Einars Repše's party New Era was founded, he became involved in politics.

Rīgas Laiks: Like a good many other television viewers, I suspect, I noticed you because of that expression on your face which seems to say: "But I know that in the end everything will be all right!" Do you actually possess such knowledge, or does it merely look that way?

Krišjānis Kariņš: No, I have no such knowledge that everything will sort itself out. But, if I may speak of myself in this way, I am a genuinely optimistic person. I have noticed one thing — what goes on in politics, and especially here in the Saeima building: emotions sometimes rise in a very large wave, and people generally put things more sharply and more absolutely than they really think. So my approach is this — I believe that things settle into their places. You have to let them do it, and in fact it doesn't happen by itself. You have to work at it. And there's no need to get quite so worked up.

RL: Has the time spent in the Saeima, and in politics generally, brought about any change in your outlook on the world and in your optimism?

Kariņš: At least I can't see any. You'd have to ask people who have known me longer.

RL: When you came into politics, did you imagine the work as it turned out to be, or differently?

Kariņš: I hadn't imagined that so much energy would have to be devoted to things that seem so trifling. If you work in an academic environment or in business, personal relationships matter in the working atmosphere, but, well, the work somehow has to get done. Here, in politics, personal relationships turn out to be the main and decisive thing. Nobody is taken on here, nobody is dismissed here. Here we are all elected for four years and, at least in the previous coalition, I often talked to people not only to make an argument but chiefly just to hold things together. That turned out to be a far bigger job than I had imagined.

RL: How does the kind of argument you have to use in politics differ from the kind used in academia?

Kariņš: In fact it's extraordinarily similar. The subject is different, of course, but I don't see the argumentation differing. From business I have experience of selling, and that helps in politics too, but the methods of setting up and proving an argument are just the same as in the academic world. With one difference — in academia a scholar works up a piece of research and then defends it at some conference, without worrying particularly about what the person sitting next to them thinks of it. In politics we have not only a law to argue for, but we also have to think about how to present it, knowing how others — say, my interlocutor — will take it. Academics generally only argue; salespeople generally only sell. A politician has to argue and sell at the same time. I put these two sets of experience together.

RL: The subject you chose for your doctoral dissertation — was it an individual one, or is it something many linguists work on?

Kariņš: Nobody takes up a subject somebody else is already working on. I wrote about the intonation structure of syllables in Latvian and, as with all dissertations, the topic is fairly narrow. The most interesting part was how research into syllable intonation structure fits into a broader theory of the interaction of sound, word and sentence within the abstract structure of language. So I was working on the interaction of tone and stress in words and sentences, studying Latvian specifically as an example that shows one regularity to be at work rather than another. One more example within that broader discussion in which everyone takes part, and into which I took my narrow patch and added it.

RL: What exactly makes the example of Latvian interesting for linguistics?

Kariņš: We have retained tonal distinctions in words from Indo-European. In Riga this is much less pronounced than outside Riga, but we have the level, the falling and the broken intonation. We have not only word stress, which is significant, but tone as well. Usually one or the other is decisive in a language. In Japanese, for instance, saying the single syllable "ma" in five different tones yields five independent meanings — "mother-in-law", "knot", "butter" and whatever else, I don't remember. In Latvian this interaction differs from other languages, because both systems have survived intact. The tonal system is very limited, to be sure, but it exists.

RL: Can it be proved scientifically that both these systems were in fact retained rather than borrowed?

Kariņš: Yes, that's a direct conclusion. Any linguist working in historical linguistics can prove it to you. It's elementary.

RL: To what extent was your choice of subject guided by patriotic feeling? Or were you making use of your familiarity with Latvian?

Kariņš: Of course, any scholar wants to make use of their particular knowledge to further their scholarly work. That's how it is in every field. I know Latvian, so I have an opportunity that is harder for other scholars to come by. I can read the work of Latvian scholars, I can rely on a great many Latvian philologists.

RL: Russian scholars have taken an interest in Latvian too.

Kariņš: Yes, and Australians, and Americans, and Germans. The circle of people who have taken an interest in Latvian isn't all that small. Linguistics isn't a broad field, there are thousands of people working in it, though not hundreds of thousands, but Latvian and Lithuanian are interesting because a great deal has survived in them from the ancient Indo-European language that has been lost elsewhere.

RL: What do you say to people who ask what the point of your research is, where it can be applied?

Kariņš: Where can the knowledge acquired in the course of the research be applied, or where can the result be applied? Those are two different things. The result can be taken further by those scholars who are developing our understanding of language. In linguistics the aim is to understand how the language capacity works in the human brain. Every human being has an innate ability to acquire language. By the age of five, children everywhere in the world acquire their native language perfectly. What is it in us that allows us to acquire a language? How do children learn grammar when they don't yet have any grasp of how to tie their shoes? The way children learn grammar can be seen from the mistakes they let slip. They generalise grammatical rules where the rules have exceptions, forming plurals on the general pattern rather than on the pattern of the exception.

RL: They take on the rule first and only then the exceptions?

Kariņš: Yes, and how does that happen? It's one of the wonders. My children attach the past-tense form in "-īju" or "-ēju" to words that have a different past-tense ending. I'm hugely delighted by it. I see it happening in my own children too, and it's marvellous to watch. Another field where this science gets applied further is artificial intelligence — engineers are teaching this box here (points at a computer), for instance, to recognise language. To recognise spoken text and convert it so that it can be printed out and we can understand what is being said. The step from one to the other involves the work of a great many scholars, and one of those sciences is linguistics. Another question is what you gain from studying such a semi-esoteric subject. The same as from studying anything else — you learn to think systematically, you learn to follow a line of reasoning and to argue. You might equally ask why learn mathematics at school if you're going to be a writer later in life. Mathematics trains the brain very well, trains you to reason logically about what comes first and what comes afterwards... It's exactly the same in linguistics; most of the text of my dissertation is a kind of algebra of language, very dry and full of diagrams. It isn't interesting, but look — our conversation is now being recorded by this nice little device here, and behind this device lies a great deal of work, including some very abstract research that has given an insight to somebody working practically. A broader perception of the world is what any immersion in any subject gives you. So to any young person who has the ability and can find some funding, I'd recommend studying almost anything. We never know what life will bring next. All we have is what we accumulate. As the child of refugees I've inherited the understanding that absolutely everything can be taken from you, but what you have put into yourself can never be taken away. Of the Latvians of my generation who grew up in America, ninety-five per cent have been through university. And they aren't only from academic families; farmers' children studied too. I've seen it in my immediate family — my grandparents, who left Latvia in 1944, lost absolutely everything they had, but they didn't lose their knowledge.

RL: Is there a difference between the thinking of a refugee and the thinking of an immigrant? Not all immigrants are refugees.

Kariņš: The difference is that in immigrant families of my generation you can expect no more than passive comprehension of the language. Only isolated words survive — ciao, bon giorno — and the names of dishes. An immigrant of my generation might still know what a pīrāgs is, and līgo, līgo, but no more than that. The Latvian refugee community was a political emigration, they were fleeing Soviet power; several hundred thousand people fled from Kurzeme. As a community they always held that they would return to live in Latvia. That's the difference. As for drive, you can observe that in American universities, especially among those who go on from a bachelor's to a master's and a doctorate, most are either the children of immigrants, like me, or foreigners studying in America. If you're an immigrant you start from zero and you need to find something to hold on to. Those whose parents already have at least a house to inherit have less drive. America has always been driven forward by immigrants. They are the ones who build up all of its science. That drive is visible in Latvia too, because the political order has changed; economically speaking, everyone here is an immigrant, everyone is starting from zero.

RL: If you hadn't returned to Latvia, would you have continued an academic career?

Kariņš: The work was no longer purely academic by then; I was working in a laboratory that dealt with the computerisation of language. And besides, I had decided to return. I simply wanted to live here.

RL: But why didn't you carry on your scholarly work here?

Kariņš: When I moved to Latvia I wanted to work at the University. But at the University I met with… as they say, the doors were simply closed. I had to choose whether to stay here and find something else to do, or not to stay here. I decided that I wanted to live here more than I necessarily wanted to go on working on the scholarly plane.

RL: But you carried out your research on stress in Latvia?

Kariņš: Yes, I received a grant from the American government for a year's work. In the course of that year I read an enormous amount at the Academy of Sciences. And, like you, I took a tape recorder and went out into the countryside to people who had lived their whole lives in one place and whose parents had lived in that same place. What happened was that Latvia's academics wanted to offer me what they call informants — go and see Jānis Kalniņš, who lives over towards Sigulda, and so on. But I didn't want to go to people who were already used to scholars. They had already formed a certain notion of how one ought to speak. I travelled around and went to the local councils, asking after people who had lived in one place for a long time. I got a glimpse of a part of Latvia I wouldn't otherwise have seen.

RL: I've come to feel that Latvians are excessively watchful about their language; they tend to correct other people's mistakes in speech.

Kariņš: If somebody says four words in English to an American, however broken and incorrect, the typical American will say — oh, how beautifully you speak! If in Latvia a person speaks with an accent, as I do for instance, there's no getting by without comments. In any case, Latvians are very conscious of their language. They feel it and savour it in a way that I don't know happens anywhere else. I don't know whether it's unique, but it certainly isn't so where I grew up. I know that in England people's pronunciation is held hostage to prejudice. I know Latvians who grew up outside London and then re-trained their pronunciation to sound like Londoners, because otherwise they sound like country folk! In Latvia (and this is easy to see when you come in from outside) there are prejudices against the Latgalian and eastern Latvian dialects and intonations. It goes so far that people actively lose these intonations. Once, when I was collecting material, I was in Alūksne at a school leavers' ceremony. And there were speeches by pupils, starting with the twelfth form, then the eleventh, the tenth and so on. And it was interesting — it began with the headmaster, who spoke in the purest Riga Latvian, then there was a girl from the senior form who spoke the same way, but with each form further down the dialect was increasingly present. And then out came a boy from the fifth form, in a white shirt and a woven belt, who performed in the most beautiful Alūksne dialect with Malēnian intonations. And the whole crowd stirred and whispered. I talked to them afterwards and you could feel that those who had decided to leave for Riga after finishing school were themselves rooting the dialect out of their speech. And it's such a shame — the diversity of a language is the most beautiful thing a language can have.

RL: So how does it actually stand — is the Latgalian dialect a separate language or merely a dialect?

Kariņš: The difference is purely political. From a linguist's point of view, Latgalian is the purest Latvian. All the rest of Latvian is under strong Livonian influence. Because nobody slaughtered the Livonians; they assimilated. My father's family are assimilated Vidzeme Livonians who were still speaking Livonian five generations ago. A German is said to have studied the farmsteads of Svētciemmuiža at one time and found ten families still speaking Livonian, one of them from the Karri farmstead. So I have nothing whatever to do with war. My grandfather still wrote his surname with two "r"s.

RL: Does it mean anything in Livonian?

Kariņš: I've tried to establish that. There are several possibilities — one is unploughed field or rise in the ground, another had something to do with a lion, and the third I don't remember. It isn't as if it's a word meaning, say, a granary. It's a root that can mean a great many things, depending on the ending.

RL: Have you traced your genealogy?

Kariņš: I know it back to about 1790, but that too came about quite by chance — through an acquaintance of mine who is a well-known Latvian demographer. He happens to be researching the Vidzeme Livonians now, and he rings me up to ask whether I'm connected with such-and-such a Kariņš. Yes, that's my grandfather! And then he helped me piece the family tree together five or six generations back. They all lived in the same spot — by the river Salaca.

RL: The Kariņš easiest to find on the internet is Uldis Kariņš.

Kariņš: That's my father. All the Kariņš family (and now that I'm in politics a great many have written to me) are from Salacgrīva. From that same Karri farmstead. But the kinship is fairly distant, since I'm already the third generation in which the family has only one son.

RL: There is a great deal of research into the effect of the use of stress on the intelligibility of speech.

Kariņš: Melody, rhythm — they matter, but they aren't the main thing. Try uttering a sentence without using the right words, using only the right stress; I doubt anyone would understand. For example, I say — eeaee eaee (makes so-called inarticulate sounds), meaning "Let's go and eat!" On the other hand, when computers were first taught artificial speech, it was flat and hard to understand, because human intonation was missing. But you could understand it. Just as one can understand a written word if we lay a sheet of paper over it and cover the line halfway. We recognise the word even though we see only half of each letter. There is a great deal of unnecessary noise in language. A signal has, say, four components; if two of them disappear, the rest is still enough. An ordinary telephone, for instance, takes up to 3000 hertz and cuts off the rest, and the sounds that differ in the high frequencies — "s", "f", "š" — cannot be told apart over the phone. If we start spelling things out, it will be impossible to distinguish "s" from "f", yet on hearing the word "Kārlis" you won't be in any doubt about which it was — "kārlis or kārlif?" In the same way, taking away rhythm or tone means losing part of the signal.

RL: Has the idea of creating an ideal language been abandoned?

Kariņš: A utopia. No, it hasn't been abandoned. From a scientific point of view no language is ideal; it's just that in some the emphasis falls chiefly on one thing, in others on another. In Latvian, morphology, the endings of words, matter a great deal. They change the meaning of a word and the understanding of a sentence. We say: "Jānis saw Juris." We might just as well say: "Juris was seen by Jānis." We usually use one or two orderings, but we can play with word order, and poets are especially fond of doing so. In English, order is the main thing — first comes the one who saw and only then the one who was seen. English grammar is very thin. It is rich in vocabulary, but not in grammar. Where in Latvian we derive one word from another, in English each meaning has its own word expressing precisely that thing. But you can learn English grammar in an afternoon. In Latvian, with a vocabulary of five hundred or a thousand words you can understand a great deal, but the catch is in the morphology and the grammar.

RL: As a linguist, haven't you happened to notice peculiarities in the language of Latvian politicians?

Kariņš: I have to say that I haven't had the chance or the time to talk about such things for a long while. My daily life is such that I analyse how anyone says anything very little indeed. Something strikes me now and again, that's true, something interesting still catches my attention from time to time, but I don't know whether more so than for anyone else. But I have no time to think about the signal rather than the content.

RL: Which mechanism is dominant in Latvian politics — the rational one, where you know what needs to be done and then consider how best to achieve it, or the ethical one, where there's a notion of how things would be better and an attempt is made to work out what exactly ought to be done?

Kariņš: One would like to think that you first know what is to be achieved and then think about how. But that isn't always how it works out. On a great many questions the people who have been elected approach things far too emotionally.

RL: Is that heartfelt, or are they play-acting after all?

Kariņš: I think there's some element of play-acting in everyone, but we all do approach things emotionally.

RL: How can one look emotionally at, say, the law on the circulation of alcohol, unless one is an alcoholic?

Kariņš: Easily. The main task facing any government is to hold the budget deficit at a certain level, to maintain fiscal discipline. Our country has far more needs than means. Money is needed everywhere. There is a lot of money in the budget, but with a limit. The difficulty is working out what should be a priority and what is forced to wait. Many people, when they come up against this, become extraordinarily emotional. In this coalition I was the one who tried to be rational. We have ten lats, so we can spend ten lats. We have to buy bread and milk, however much we might like expensive cheeses and good wines. Some people really will act so as to buy the wine, but in this case, as a country, we usually have to see to the milk. In countries where democracy has been around longer, one or two parties with more conservative views generally emerge, and one or two with more left-wing views. One side pulls one way, the other pulls another. And in effect the ship goes straight ahead. In Latvia we have yet to develop either a clear conservative bloc or a clear socialist bloc. Our parties are still split along the national question. I hadn't intended to go into politics at all; for me it was a project to help build a conservative political party. I had meant to work precisely on the rational brainwork that would go on behind the scenes. But somehow one thing led to another, and I didn't resist at all and decided that it would be interesting. I moved into the active part of it. We have tried to define what a conservative politics would be, but we came to the conclusion that we ourselves are still... I think that in Latvia there are as yet no political parties in the sense understood in a stable democracy. As organisations we are still too inconsistent.

RL: Do you think new parties will form?

Kariņš: No, I don't think new ones will form, but these will transform themselves or merge. From our point of view, thirteen years is a good part of a lifetime. But from the point of view of a country's political culture it is a moment. I grew up in America, which counts as a very young country. The old European countries reproach America for having no culture at all. And the Americans themselves think so too — if someone comes over from Europe who speaks with a noticeable accent, in the eyes of a typical American he will be very cultured and knowledgeable. Americans think an accent is a beautiful thing. I remember my mother once phoning me at the halls of residence; the telephone was out in the corridor, and a student comes running up to me and asks: "Who's that beautiful girl ringing you?" I was in a hurry, but it turned out — my mum! And solely because of the accent. It's taken very positively there. So, America is a young country, but its political system has been essentially unchanged since 1776, only gradually tinkered with and improved. In that year Latvian peasants were still serfs. That's how it was! So, taking all the minuses into account, we have come astonishingly far in thirteen years. Our system is in fact very stable and civilised. Our difficulty is that the political parties still squabble over trifles and governments change and everyone frets about who will sit in which chair, and we never get to the real work. Everything goes on, deputies attend committees, but nobody has their attention on the real game. And the real game is the country's prosperity. Imagine the situation in a communal flat! If, on going home, your main battle is over who hasn't cleaned up the kitchen, then you have neither the mental nor the physical strength to occupy yourself with anything else, anything of the spirit; you have to fight. In politics we are in a sort of communal flat, where we are forced to fuss far too much over things that every one of the hundred deputies would openly say are not what we ought to be doing. Everyone says we shouldn't be bothering with such things, but everyone, myself included, bothers with such things. That is the quiet tragedy.

RL: How has it come about that parties have begun so openly to acknowledge the party's own survival as one of their chief motives? For Fatherland and Freedom talk about it quite directly. New Era too, in my view, largely develops its policy on the basis of how the party will be seen at the next elections.

Kariņš: I think it's like that everywhere. It just shows itself in different ways. If you think about it — a party has a goal, but the way to achieve it is through the organisation. Nobody wants to run that organisation down, because that would reduce the chance of your goal being achieved. All politicians, willing or not, are forced to think about how the organisation will survive.

RL: It works out as a paradox. Suppose there's an organisation whose main goal is the complete prohibition of alcohol, but in order to exist they constantly have to make concessions and reckon with the fact that voters want to buy alcohol. And there is a permanent contradiction between what the party wants to achieve and how it wants to look in the eyes of the voters.

Kariņš: But that's exactly as it should be. We are only the voters' representatives. I'm not elected from some particular region or village. I'm elected from Vidzeme. Tell me, whom do I represent? The Limbaži end of it? Cēsis? Imagine I have set my heart on something that ordinary voters are against. It would be right that I shouldn't be able to bring it about, precisely because of the resistance from others. And that next time they'd throw me, the fool, off the list. There has to be that kind of check. Nor is it the case that we politicians are blank sheets, that we go around asking what you want. We do explain how we will work, and if you think along the same lines, then vote for us! That's exactly why we try to work according to a programme. But there are also things that weren't foreseen, and then whether our support grows or shrinks will depend on our choices. That's everyday life. That's why all politicians keep one eye on what their supporters think and the other on what they themselves feel is most right. That's as it should be. If we didn't look at what our voters think, that would be dangerous. Then we could do whatever we liked. Looked at this way, Latvia's First Party may be changing direction at the moment, because by all the polls they have already lost their supporters. And they have to look for new ones. When that connection is lost, anything is possible. It's just like at an individual level — from people who have severed ties with their families you can expect anything at all. That, after all, is the great function of the family and of society — not only to give a person spiritual satisfaction but also to set certain frameworks for what behaviour is acceptable and what is not.

RL: But where individuals are concerned, one of the elements that makes up a politician's charisma is the ability to sacrifice oneself. Including by standing down from office if there's some problem or scandal. Western politicians often make use of that, and people respect it.

Kariņš: If our aim is to get there, then there are several roads by which to do it. You can go right and you can go left. If the straight road is blocked, you have to start thinking. You can keep battering away, but that may have bad consequences; the other option is a temporary retreat, which doesn't mean you have lost. That's how it is in politics, that's how it is in life, and it's certainly how it is in military affairs.

RL: Does that mean Repše will go one way and the party another?

Kariņš: No, I don't see Repše and the party going two different ways. But there is always the question of how an organisation will move forward in order to get further. There are always various possibilities there. For instance, I don't see that Šķēle and the People's Party have gone different ways.

RL: Yet the actions of an individual and the actions of a party are perceived differently from the point of view of public image.

Kariņš: Quite right. And if an organisation has various means at its disposal, then using them skilfully is the highest art of flying. In any undertaking it's good to have more than one means available.

RL: Do you experience New Era as a kind of fighter aircraft that can be flown successfully?

Kariņš: I have never compared our organisation to military hardware. Comparisons with animals always come to my mind. Let's say there's an animal that is larger and slower, and one that is nimbler. One has great bulk and a small head, the other has the more developed mind.

RL: And what sort is New Era, then?

Kariņš: We are a growing organisation. We are in the making. In the present situation too. Perhaps we will be the sort that learns to handle all of its possibilities. There is one thing I have always liked about our organisation — an enormous human resource.

RL: In terms of numbers?

Kariņš: Let's say in the quality of the people. We have people who have each already achieved something in their own field and who have now come together to work on a common project. If you were dropped into a forest and had to find the right point somewhere within a 25-kilometre radius, some little house, you would surely be glad if there were various kinds of people there, if they weren't all of one character and with one body of knowledge. Because as you go forward you can never know what situation will arise. It's the same for us in New Era. We don't try to play games we aren't any good at. We have said how we want to work in government; if that isn't wanted at the moment, then so be it. The process is under way. Unfortunately it's under way, you might say from the point of view of the state, but on the other hand — better that it should be under way than not.

RL: There were statistics for Italy, I think — on average one government a year. And nothing happened, the country lives on.

Kariņš: I would very much not want us to become the Italy of Northern Europe. I don't know how good or bad it has been for Italy itself, but of the European countries Italy isn't known as the best-ordered one. Well, to put it mildly. We ought to aim higher, and I think it is realistically possible for us to arrive at a much more stable arrangement. If we look at our neighbours in Scandinavia, they are much more stable and even politically boring. If you put that together with our character, I think that's the thing...

RL: Then it'll be dull enough to kill — the flies will die of boredom.

Kariņš: You shouldn't think that way. You should never confuse outward calm with inner dullness. Inner dullness isn't characteristic of Latvians at all. This is my national prejudice, but Latvians as a whole are one of the most talented groups of people I have come across. I really am convinced of it. If you give Latvians the opportunity, they can do the very devil of a lot. There just has to be the opportunity.

The article was first published in the April 2004 issue of the magazine "Rīgas Laiks"