Latvia has increasingly made claims on the intellectual and cultural heritage of Sir Isaiah Berlin, Mark Rothko, and Sergei Eisenstein. All three were born into Jewish families on what is now Latvian territory in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, but left Latvian territory while still children. None of the three ever consciously identified themselves with the post-1918 Latvian state. The paper begins with a theoretical discussion of the role and place given to cultural intellectuals in framing national identity (see e.g. Hobsbawn 1983) – providing ‘the cultural meat for the nationalist meal’ (Spencer and Wollman 2006) – and connects these ideas to contemporary social constructivist approaches. The second empirical part begins with a discussion of the ‘Latvian’ backgrounds of Berlin, Rothko and Eisenstein, and then moves on to consider the the who, how and why in the process of "claiming" the three as Latvian. The paper concludes with a discussion of the internal and external identity-framing purpose that this process serves, arguing that it is driven by (i) a desire to partially bridge the intellectual-cultural division between east and west, which has seen eastern nationalism as characterized as having an underlying feeling of ‘inferiority or inadequacy’ (Plamenatz 1976. See also Kohn 1945) that the enlargement of the European Union has exacerbated rather than eradicated and (ii) to resultingly frame Latvia as a culturally mainstream European state.
