While there are a number of claimants to the mathematical centre of Europe,
re http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_midpoint_of_Europe
the logistical, that is, geopolitical centre of the Europe of tomorrow is
Riga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga .
There are any number of reasons why Brussels should not be the EU capital,
while there are many reasons why Riga should be.

While the originator of this thesis has advocated Riga as the capital of
the European Union for some time, politicians have ignored the question.
It makes sense to dismiss Riga as the capital of Europe for political reasons
that dominante among the political elites.

But is the same disinterest true for the general public? Surely not.
Indeed, there are many people of populist sympathies
who would welcome a serious discussion,
no less than they would welcome Riga as the capital city of Europe.

Failure on the march:

On February 2, Latvia’s Treasury sold 8 million lati ($15.8 million) in 10-year lats-denominated government bonds at an average yield of 6.72 percent as it returned to the market for the first time since it took a bailout loan in 2008.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-02/latvia-sells-8-million-lati-in-10-year-debt-average-yield-6-72-.html

The Latvian geographic position and its significance overblown according to Latvijas Investīciju un attīstības aģentūras (LIAA) direktor Andris Ozols.

http://www.delfi.lv/news/conference/interviews/delfi-intervija-ar-andri-ozolu-latvijas-geografiska-stavokla-nozime-ir-parspileta.d?id=36686175

At the same time
1. the misery quotient in Latvia is the highest ever (no I did not conduct a poll),
2. the population of the country and Riga is in a decline,
3. a president without a liver (bez aknām) according to a number of politologues, plans to be elected by a partidocratic Saeima a second time,
6. A coalition of political parties that call themselves “Vienotība” (unity) proving itself a failure in less than 100 days (yes, 100 days are over now)

What are the realistic chances of Riga becoming the capital city of Europe?

None.  Do you really need another windmill, jandz?

Today Riga has become a city that has become a “grausts”, a wreck.
Most of Latvia is a wreck thanks to the deeds of its government, the State.

To put the mask of Potemkin over Riga, several cultural she- and he-ass ministers have proposed spending enormous sums in building a grandiose library and now to spend 84 mil to reconstruct an old theatre so in 2014 Riga can have a new concert hall as it shows the rest of Europe what a “City of Culture” it is. The reader may want to remember the “most expensive bridge” over Daugava (one needs to look hard for an argument why it is there now and not when it “might” be needed in some distant future).

The nation is not the State. The nation is the people.

The politicians are celebrating with praises, to paraphrase them: “how patient and quiet (undemonstrative) the Latvian people are.” Well, what do you expect? When the people of Bauska demonstrated against the closing of their hospital, the demonstration lasted but a few hours, when the government sent the Alfa police group to disperse it. When people demonstrated, myself including, on January 13 a couple of years back, the governsment emphasized the hooligans it sent to discredit it. (Just what President Mubarak in Egypt has done.) And though the President promised to dismiss the Saeima, a reaquest of the peaceful demonstrators, he obviously was sending the people a spam message or got cold feet and did nothing. Moreover, he wants to continue to lead the “grausting” of Riga and Latvia by being elected by the same Saeima he did not dismiss.

Riga has enormous potential for any number of geographic reasons, not least because it IS Europe’s near centre. Of course, with capons running the State, the nation cannot expect but to be a worm. As for windmills,, at present Riga is not a windmill, but a rag upon a stick.

another view on why Germany and Japan were ,rebuilt’ - while the victims of the Soviet communists have been left out on the line -
Author: Juri Estam - Tallinn, Estonia

A negligible number of the Russians who live in the Baltic States are the descendants of Russians who made the area their home several centuries ago. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians have no bone to pick with them; they are our citizens and compatriots. The Baltic States have also turned their cheeks in regard to the hundreds of thousands of Russian colonists who were settled in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after the illegal incorporation of the Baltic States into the USSR after the Kremlin’s aggression against these previously independent states. The Baltic States were the only parts of Europe - three parliamentary democracies - that were simply handed over to Stalin in plain public view, with Western assent and acquiescence. Now that we have finally emerged from the rubble of the Soviet Empire, free once again, the European Union and the Western World don’t have the decency to give us an economic chance. Vanquished Germany (the country that brought calamity upon Europe and the world, in cahoots with Stalin the sociopath) was given the gift of the Marshall Plan after WW II by the West with no second thoughts. Where are Russian repatriation payments to Central and Eastern Europe, where is the Marshall Plan for Central and Eastern Europe that the West ought to activate? Not so much as compensation for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, not as blood money for the Yalta Betrayal, but simply as a prudent, wise and benevolent measure. A stable and well-to-do belt of Central and Eastern European countries would help to stabilize the periphery of Europe, guarding against the unwelcome ideologies and behaviors that are often bred during periods of economic downturn. A prosperous CEE would cement the democratic tradition. Besides - an Eastern Europe with buying power would be a prime market of substantial size for goods manufactured not only in Western Europe and Northern America, but for goods and services manufactured anywhere. The Balts have made their peace with Russian residents instead of demanding decolonization, which is technically the right of all previously occupied countries. It is only the died-in-the-wool Russian imperialists and disloyal residents that we have a hard time accommodating. America, for example, doesn’t suffer the presence of people who constitute a clear and present security risk in the homeland. The Baltic States should not be expected to coexist peacefully with belligerent Putinistas. To expect this is too much, it is an unreasonable and foolish expectation. The former colonists in the Baltic States have a personal choice to make. They can either get with the program and participate in the building up of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – their new homelands - or they can expect to be given the cold shoulder when they act seditiously. The Kremlin vocally contends that occupation was liberation. This is gibberish. Make-believe liberation is not liberation, it is simply delusional. This also smells of a drift towards future new aggression against the long-suffering Baltic States. Territories are essentially being contested again in Europe. We all know what happened the last time, when Hitler made the Sudeten Germans a bone of contention, and Chamberlain and his friends caved in. The handwriting is there on the wall again, after the Russian aggression in Georgia. The fact that the Berlin Wall was knocked down two decades ago was a great victory for the West and for the vanquished peoples of Eastern Europe. This victory needs to be kept safe, not nickel and dimed back into the hands of an ominous, essentially undemocratic and mean-spirited Kremlin. It is time for Central and Eastern Europe to be given a Marshall Plan. The boost that would come from this would also work to the benefit of the benefactors.

The Economist
Harmony in minor key
Jan 29th 2011, 22:23 by K.S. | LONDON

While Hungary’s government and its media law remains a stormy issue, Latvia’s media landscape is quite clouded enough even without government intervention. Worries about shrinking press freedom have intensified following a purge in the Russian-language station TV5. This follows its sale by News Corporation to Andrejs Ēķis, a leading figure in the tycoon-heavy “For a good Latvia” party.

This led to the sacking under murky circumstances of a popular anchorman and producer at TV5, Oļegs Ignatjevs. TV5 executives cited falling ratings (link in Latvian). Company documents suggested he was fired according to a “staff reduction” programme. But others blame Riga’s hyper-senstive mayor Nils Ušakovs, a chairman of the opposition Harmony Centre.

“My bosses asked me several times not to criticise Harmony Centre. It was very awkward,” says Mr Ignatjevs. He was not the first journalist to misbehave: in May 2010 news director Vladislavs Andrejevs left TV5 in a similar fashion. TV5 directors deny all allegations in both cases.

Ignatjev’s firing is the latest in a series of moves that have consolidated power over the media and forced independent journalists to find work elsewhere; in December Aleksandr Krasnitsky, the respected editor-in-chief of the daily Telegraf, was sacked after the paper published a story about a schoolboy threatened with expulsion for slandering Ušakovs. Mr Krasnitsky worries that accepting job offers from other publications could jinx them with the same fate as the now-neutered Telegraf.

The big question in all this is how Harmony Centre has become so influential. Despite being in opposition, its magnetic qualities over the media remind some people of the Kremlin’s “party of power”. Although it is not landing many punches on the governing coalition, it is clearly the most popular party in Latvia according to opinion polls.

Oppositionism at a time of economic austerity is always likely to play well. But the real reason for Harmony’s good rating may be its role as a receptacle for protest votes, chiefly from those who dislike Latvia’s mainstream “nationalist” parties, who have made for the most part little effort to win hearts and minds of the country’s ethnic Russians and Soviet-era migrants.

After independence was restored in the early 1990s, the only ideology left standing in Latvia was that of an ethnically-based nation-state. As both Western-type democracy and nationalism were already booked by Latvian parties, Harmony Centre (the name of the party was different then, but the same people still run it) had to offer its electorate a much milder stance towards Russia. Harmony Centre’s big task now is to build on that and gain votes from other quarters, portraying itself not as a Kremlin poodle but as a European-style centre-left party. Naughty journalists who interfere with that mission must expect speedy punishment.

Latvian nationalist parties campaigning for the country’s language may be playing into Harmony’s hands. In July 2010 the parliament approved broadcast media language restrictions, which required 65% of air time to be conducted in Latvian. That forced local Russian TV and radio to change its formats and made them less attractive to the ethnic audience. However the pro-Harmony First Baltic Channel, a branch of the Moscow-run First Channel, does not have to follow any rules. So ratings for the more independent Russophone media are falling, while First Baltic Channel entrenches its position. Does anyone remember the mistakes made by Czechoslovak ethno-enthusiasts in the 1930s?

OMG! Please say it ain’t so.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/01/luzhkov_and_latvia

Latvia is not in a helpless position. It’s location presents it with opportunities to offer something to all sides of the equasion, re the West and East. At the moment, however, the political forces at play, a sort of partidocratic continuum caught up in a waiting game for catastrophic collapse, keeps the nation paralized. We either get that collapse through the collapse of the euro, for example, or look for forces that may be able to force such a collapse in a controlled manner.

One such force is the presidential office of Latvia, which at the moment presents itself as a sur-geon (super-John) who is a purely passive force. There is little the public can do about this passivity except keep pointing at it with hopes it can be shamed and thus forced to become more active. In short, it is an office that must take risks, but has been playing it safe with unproductive results.

Riga at this time is not a wealth making engine for Latvia, and this is largely due to the paranoia that the political parties transmit to the public with regards to Russia. As the article in the Economist indicates (see link provided by Ambersun above), the other force (beside the President) that may promt a collapse of the partidocracies is Harmony centre with its ostensible links to dreaded Moscow and allegedly dictatorial Putin. Perhaps Harmoney Center sees Putin more as the necessary authoritarian force that can move Russia away, both, from submitting itself to the played out forces of neo-liberalism and managing to control the corruption that neo-capitalist anarchy brought to all post-Soviet states. Certainly many Latvians suspect themselves to be in sympathy with Harmony Centre at the same time as they fear associating themselves with it because of the paranoia encouraged by the partidocracies. In this sense, Latvia is running in circles to no good end.

Harmony Centre is a powerful influence especially in Riga, which is not at this time (as pointed out) a wealth making engine, but at best an urban entity with an uncertain future. It would therefore serve the interests of said party to consider the motion to move Riga toward a greater competitive stance vis a vis Brussels as Europe’s capital city. Hopefully this is not simply a symbolic move, though one should not ignore its potential. Europe is in the throes of great changes and more are coming in the future. One of the changes that would be disastrous for Europe is to ignore a greater collaborative link with Russia. In one way or another—and some of it with a great deal of bloodshed—such an accomodation has been working itself out since the early Middle Ages, on through the Romanov tsars, the Soviet Union, and now Russia struggling to get on its feet again.

The nearest opportunity for change in the Latvian political scene is the upcoming election for President, what with the political parties unable to move off the dead centre, they ran aground on in the last general elections again. And surely all opposition parties can and should force the Latvian Finance Minister from his party’s (Vienotība) wimpish tet a tete with Bruessels. Perhaps the Minister can reimagine his responsibilities in terms of a head of an institution that helps Latvia to accumulate capital not waste it.

There are of course a number of alternatives to Riga becoming the capital city of the European Union.

[color=red]The first alternative is to let the city decline further in infrastructure and population. On “100. Pants” tv program last evening, a mother stated that parents would continue to leave the city, because suburban municipalities offered better child care than Riga, where the waiting list for Kindergarten is up to 5000 thousand children strong.

Another alternative that one hears much these days is to offer long-term visas, even citizenship to moneyed foreigners (Tunisians, Egyptians, Russians) to fill the vacuum left by government policy of driving native Latvians out of the country to Ireland, England, Sweden, etc.

Yet another alternative is to offer Riga to the highest bidder and rent it out for the next one hundred years. China, Russia, Germany, Sweden, England may be interested in getting closer to the European centre than the Latvian government. The money received as down payment for Riga would cover Latvia’s debt to the ECB, IMF, and Swedish banks; the rent in subsequent years would be reinvested in Latvia proper.

Latvia, the country and its development as a whole, has been ignored by its government (and its myopic supporters) in favor of an emotional diversionary topic, i.e., the Latvian language and the alleged threats made against it by “foreign” influences and competition. By concentrating on the issue of the Latvian language, the Latvian government has been able to dismiss the development of Latvia as a secondary issue.

A candidate for the Presidency of Latvia, a former diplomat, has offered the opinion that Latvia needs not look for a “messiah” in its presidential leader. Nevertheless, everyone knows that the Presidential office is one of the few places wherefrom may come truly sovereign policy proposals, if for no other reason than the exposure of the President to high visibility. The current president has shunned such a “vision” in favor of “maturing in office”. He let pass an opportunity to dismiss the Saeima, which continues to “cure in office” as any sort of cheese will.

Interestingly, a new political party association (VL/LNNK) in the Saeima, presuming itself to be one that “gives all to Latvia”, has reconfirmed the diversionary tactics of its predecessors and is making the language issue take precedent over the issue of Latvia once more.

When will Latvia become issue #1 for all Latvians? [/color]

Reaching for the Half-Way point in SELLING Riga!

According to Dienas Bizness (4. feb., p.4.), five year residency permits in Latvia are soon to sell like hotcakes. While the beginnings have been slow [by Jan. 28, 2011, requests for five year residency permits have numbered 159, involved 361 persons, of which 259 persons received permits. Said persons have invested approximately 23 million lats in the Latvian economy with 56.4% going to real estate, 42.5% to banks].

According to Ģirts Rugainis (a partner in Prudentia investment bank), investments originating through residency permit sales could reach a billion lats over the next five years. While this is welcome news, it is premature to wax euphoric if only because the government of Latvia is not known to be either forward looking or capable of forward analysis.

Given the realities of life, one may expect that the five year residency permits will, over time, become permanent residency permits. The residents will have families, and the newborn and their parents are likely to become citizens. Thus, if I can trump Mr. Rugainis’ optimism, over the next twenty years the population of Riga will be one made up largely of immigrants from the near and far abroad.

Well and good, but if looking forward has any uses, why not also anticipate a different civilization, one in which local cultures are ever more receding into oblivion, and given the present passivity of the Latvian government, are making little or no contribution toward the evolution of the future.

It comes to mind that in order to protect the native population and extend its life time, the residency permits (and all the future consequences of it) be limited by juridical decree to Riga. In other words, build around Riga a wall beyond which the residency permit holders are not permitted to move without visas, while Latvians, providing the labor force of Riga, can enter Riga with no obstructions.

Other possibilities come to mind as well. One of them, while allowing the permit holders to live in Riga, would not allow newly created families of such to become citizens of Riga and/or Latvia (whatever a countrywide debate on this issue decides), but remain citizens of the country of their origin. Thus, welcome all, Russians, Germans, Swedes, Englishmen, Americans et al to Riga, however, be citizens with a foot for ever in two countries. Among other things, this ought to act as a guarantee that no future citizen of Riga be so poor as cannot purchase a ticket to the country of his-her parental origins.

This writer plans to contribute, from time to time other forward looking projections. Next time: Should Riga residency permit holders be permitted to procreate themselves as clones only?

New York Times perspective
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/greathomesanddestinations/18iht-reriga18.html
with no warning about consequences to Forward Looking. Perhaps a done deal then?

Belgium is fractured, but local governance works so well, Brussels is not needed. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/18/belgium-marks-250-days-no-government President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy in Riga. http://www.baltic-course.com/eng/analytics/?doc=37432 However, no one has guts in Riga to suggest that Rompuy just visited the future capital city of the European Union of the future. Why? Most likely because the government of Latvia is unselfconsciously ashamed of itself for lack of ideas with regards to Latvia’s future. So much for an exclusionary parliamentary democracy touting the horn of democracy.

In order to become the capital city of the EU, Riga needs to become a cosmopolitan city with all languages spoken freely, even if one two three languages predominate.

There was a news blurb recently (I believe in the Financial Times, but cannot find the link) that Brussels would soon give one time only exam to entry level bureaucrats to Brussels in English, because there are alarmingly few English speaking bureaucrats in Brussels. This is an opportunity for Riga to gets its act together and become more accessible to English speaking people and start moving the grail eastward. This should pay off handsomely in years to come. Latvians returning from England and Ireland could contribute handsomely to Riga, when shops there can start posting in their windows signs saying “English spoken here”.

Which raises a question: Are there any participants at LOL who speak Russian at home?

If turning Riga into the capital city of the European Union of tomorrow were to become the goal (however uncertain the outcome at this time) of the Latvian media (blogs including), it would give encouragement to untold thousands of Latvians currently working abroad with little hope of ever returning to Latvia. The last is due to the regressive policies of the government when it comes to economic development of Latvia with a vision.

The Latvian government has no policy at this time that would encourage a return of those of its citizens its policies forced to become economic refugees in the first place. With the passing of time, those policies have only deteriorated as is manifest by its surrender of the country’s economic development and independence to foreign banks. If the policies of the current government remain in force, the disastrous loss of population in Latvia will continue with its negative repercussions—either by a continued population outflow or an inflow of people fleeing distant centers of unrest. The following link http://latviaeconomy.blogspot.com/ about Latvia’s population decline is not new, but certainly worth reading in the face of the government’s do-nothing and hands-hang-down orientation.

Encouraging popular forces to think of Riga as a beacon to the future rather than a city in decline may serve to unite the so-called two societies dominant in Latvia and create a new and forward looking body of citizens, not to mention a country with a future. No doubt, Riga is not the only item on tomorrow’s agenda, what with the countryside being an even greater disaster zone, however, Riga as the capital city of tomorrow best advertises the very real movement of economic development towards realistic energy sources, which the West has nearly exhausted in its sphere of influence.

To speak of Riga as the future capital of Europe is a call to re-vision the future of Latvia. Let us not forget that there is no future where the inertia of the present state of mind is taking us.

The proposition that Latvians (and soon all Europeans) ought to look toward Riga as the capital city of the European Union tomorrow comes from an awakening to the fact that Riga has become not much of anything, but if anything, then an empty thing, a kind of vacuum that sucks things into itself without ever noticeably altering the shape of things within its self or things about it.

Riga’s vacuum has been created by political myopia, which has succeeded in convincing itself and the public that near sightedness stands for political giants thinking. Two examples from the cook book of the giants’ kitchen should suffice. The first recipe is for turning Riga into a port city, another Hamburg perhaps. The second turns ships into flying fish; that is, airplanes replace Amsterdam’s Shiphol airport with that of Riga Airport (RIX).

Because both cooking recipes involve much money and are time consuming to implement, it is likely that before the RIX is ever completed, the ground under it will become marshland due to geological forces coming into effect at the end of this century. As for Riga as a port city, at best it makes the coasts of the Gulf of Riga home to effluents no more attractive than the black smoke from the coal furnaces of steam locomotives.

No doubt, the advantages of transportation as means to stimulate the economy of Riga and Latvia are sufficient unto the day, but go no further than see Latvia as a periphery of the EU and Riga as its border town. As a result, Riga becomes a black hole, which—this still being an urban age with cities become ira beastly engines of wealth —makes a sucking sound heard throughout Latvia. In short, Riga cares not one whit about Latvia, whether the whit resides in the Latvian Saeima or Riga Dome.

The function of the Port of Riga at this time is to load Latvia’s forests aboard ships, which then carry them, say, to England, while a Brit tourist comes to Riga to piss on Latvia’s Freedom Monument. The Brit is soon let go. However, the trade off for Latvia is that the real pisser is the British government, which with its aggressive lumber buying policies prevents Latvians from developing their own wood processing workshops. This is not to say that the Latvians and other Balts do not appreciate the low level and low paying jobs at chicken packing factories about Norwich and elsewhere in Europe. The point is that England rather overdevelop than allow other parts of the world, in this instance Latvia, partake of development.

The hubris of Brussels and Western Europe continues to exploit a 16th-17th century meme implanted in its head at about that time. Napoleon, Hitler, Churchill, and De Gaul all are models of Western major generals. Stalin, made super-real by the ease with which he may be demonized by the hubris of the West, as if it wipes the sins of the others from the butcher’s board. NATO exploits the meme to this day. Indeed, so strong is the meme, that a leading political party in Latvia, currently the Union Party (Vienotība), is unselfconsciously playing the role of Liberty on the fields of the American and French revolutions. As the picture link shows, unfortunately for the West, a very different beast, one tied to dreams of inexhaustible oil resources and now a defunct ‘leisure society’, flies the skies.

Today one may avoid imagining Riga as geographic centre of Europe only if one listens to too much of Brussels and Moscow. Of course, there are Muscovites who believe that the geographical centre of Europe ought to be Moscow (if one makes Europe a land from England to Kamchatka), nevertheless, there is no escaping the fact that historically Europe does not reach beyond the Urals, because Rome did not get past the Romanovs. In other words, Moscow is a kind of Brussels of the East. If the strength of the argument for Brussels as the capital city of the EU depends on the support it gets from the NATO (USA & Europe military alliance), Moscow and Beijing have no less interest in keeping the balance of power on their side.

To put it as simply and plainly as possible, Riga is not only the centre of Europe geographically, but is its centre also geopolitically. Viewed from this perspective, the politicians of Latvia and Riga in Latvia sleep.

You mean to speak of Riga as the capital city of the European Union? Ha, ha, ha!

Businessman Jānis Ošlejs http://www.latvijaexpo2010.lv/en/janis-oslejs-latvijas-paviljons-spilgts-piedzivojums/ (John Oshley) has a most interesting essay on the subject of economy in the March issue of “Rīgas Laiks”. Though Oshley’s essay deals with economic laws in general, he begins his piece (my translation): “Everyone who walks these days the streets of the centre of Riga will have noticed the fast pace with which once proud buildings have become abandoned. Walking along the beautiful and not [very] long School Street (Skolas iela, about forty buildings) and looking at how many windows have curtains, one notices ten empty buildings. Every fourth building is empty.”

Such news strikes me particularly hard, because once upon a time one of these forty buildings (Nr. 10) belonged to my maternal grandfather, who bought it in the 1920s after he returned from a stint in Moscow as Latvia’s ambassador to then young Soviet Union.

Part of the memories of my grandparents’ apartment there is a picture of the famed French tapestries called “Apocalypse”. The picture was a small reproduction and hung on the wall near the door to my grandmother’s study. It showed an angels blowing a trumpet, while fire rained from the sky http://www.fotobank.ru/img/BR01-2719.jpg?size=l . There is a blood filled history behind the reason why my grandmother had picked this picture. But this is not why I mention it here. Interestingly, the tapestries were rescued from a potato field, where following the French Revolution they kept potatoes from freezing in the winter. Perhaps one may think of the streets of Riga as embedded with the tapestry of history, now soon ready to grow weeds.

School Street (Skolas iela) is indeed part of the centre or heart of Riga. Its western end opens on Esplanade and is a stone’s throw from the Russian Orthodox Cathedral. To think that I once argued strenuously against my relatives’ wish to sell the building, and that I gave in to their wishes most reluctantly. Ha, ha, ha!

If the “ha, ha, ha” is to prevail, then one may well support Moscow and its claim to be the geopolitical centre. Of course, it is true only if one makes Europe out to be a land from England to Kamchatka. In terms of history, Europe does not however reach beyond the Ural Mountains because Rome–Avignon did not get further than the Romanovs. Others believe that Brussels is a well chosen compromise capital city, seeing that the decision was made by the nations that created the old Holy Roman Empire in the West: Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Germany, and England. Note however, none the nations or their chief cities mentioned are anywhere near the European centre of tomorrow.

In other words, history defaults to Riga, whether Riga likes the honor or not. Jānis Ošlejs (John Oshley’s) observations support this writer’s claim that Riga is on its way to a physical state known as “grausts”, i.e., empty and abandoned buildings rising in number and falling into disuse and ruin http://www.delfi.lv/news/national/riga/graustu-skaits-riga-varetu-but-trisreiz-lielaks.d?id=37058121 .

In spite of that, [size=5]Riga is the perfect spot for a Post-World War I , II, & Cold War Europe’s geopolitical centre. [/size]

Brussels may remain as the headquarters of NATO http://eu-nato.gov.ge/uploads/nato_hq.jpg  for some time, at least until the various geopolitical forces of Europe (whether they be NATO or not NATO) realign and rearrange themselves in such a way that America no longer exercises veto power over the collective future of Europe. Certainly, Riga—its hour as a capital city of Europe then near upon it—ought to exercise a timely re-vision and restudy of itself and Europe. Else, like its second freedom in 1991, it will find itself not only once more unprepared, but turned into a potato and turnip field.

(To be cont.)

Theme: Riga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga as the capital city of the European Union of tomorrow. Yes, I have heard some rumours.

As argued in previous posts, Riga plays a geopolitical role in the future of the European Union. However, this role has been deliberately overlooked as if to give the impression that such an assertion has no validity.

One can find as many reasons for censuring Riga off the map as there have been pretenders to the role of emperors of Europe. As far as Riga is concerned, however, the first emperor of Europe was not a secular ruler, but the Pope, who came to Eastern Europe to impose a Western interpretation of history and religion that would help impose obedience to secular authority. While the emperors of today are corporate creatures, the creatures’ mace is NATO.

The Western notion of European and Western history was first worked out at the Cluny http://historymedren.about.com/od/cterms/g/cluny.htm monastery in France beginning of the 10th century.

This is not to say that the Benedictine monks who ran the monastery rewrote history, but they worked on behalf of the secular powers who established Cluny in order to create a standing committee that—given that the wanderings of the tribes had come up against the shores of the Atlantic ocean—would work for the ruling princes and establish methods that would enable same to have greater control over their estates. These estates were now facing a new geopolitical reality—the wanderers from the East had come up against the edge of land and the ocean, and they could either turn back or find means to cross the ocean.

The sailing ship, the boat, the barge, the raft always had a significant role to play in navigating the waters of Europe, but a thousand years ago, the ocean going ships had not been invented yet. While the ships were bound to come and turn the European secular princes into colonialists, the first reaction of the mass migration of Eastern tribes was to turn back East toward whence they came, their Motherland. To gain control over this Motherland (it had no precise borders and no one really knew where they had come from), the princes of the West had to control the free-wheeling and democratic people of the forests of the East. Gaining control meant not only taking physical control over the people’s land (largely by deforesting it), but by replacing the East’s wandering preachers—then known as Johns (Jeans, Huans, Ians, Ivan, Jahnis, Dion, Angus etc.)—with a new kind of preacher (domiciled) and a new message.

That the Cluniacs were successful in their mission is attested to by the New Testament, where John, one of many wandering aesthetes, is replaced by a John turned into Jesus. Jesus does not differ from John one whit, except that he had a storybook “resurrection”, after which he was sent to sit on his hands in heaven. Once the Inquisition had seared the ‘miracle’ into the minds of the common folk, the secular rulers could rule with no opposition from the common folk.

The princes of the West, after turning back East, conquered the princes of the East as far as the Ural Mountains. The latter were reached—most of us know—through the agency of the Romanov tsars, the first of whom was Peter I (the Great), who earned his druthers by learning shipbuilding from the Dutch. While it is emphasized that Peter I did what he did to make Russia strong and enable it to better imitate and oppose the aggressive West, it is conveniently forgotten that Peter I may also have been (wittingly or unwittingly) a tool who helped facilitate the advances of the West toward the East and conquer the Motherland.

Riga was among the Popes’ early conquests in the East, even though the Cluniacs had established centralized power in Poland considerably earlier, some say as early as the 9th century. When the Pope conquered Riga, Riga was not where it is now. Riga at that time was much further up the Daugava River, because the water level in those days was much higher than it is today and the Gulf of Riga penetrated the land much further to the south http://www.stockphotopro.com/photo-thumbs-2/stockphotopro_29685713XRM_no_title.jpg than it does today.

One of the first deeds of the Pope’s representative, Bishop Albert, was to destroy the old stronghold of the preachers of Johns at the forest fortress of Jersika (Jerusalem in proto-Latvian) and insist that a new Jerusalem, under the control of Jesus created by the Cluniac Pope, was to emerge from Riga, then a trader’s town downriver from Jersika.

PS There have been many guesses whence the name “Riga”. Here is one to add to the list: the word “gorod” in Nov-gorod means town (or stopping point, parking lot, etc.), thus, Novgorod = Newtown. Today the word “gorod” is still heard whenever we mention the word “garage”. If we reverse “gorod” and read it as “rodgo”, we come close (but for the pronunciation) to reading it as “riga”, thus, port, town, a place to park our boat after we have floated downriver Daugava from Novgorod. In short, the oppugnate of Novgorod was Riga and of Riga it was Novgorod.