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In this article, I analyse the ways in which coloniality as a racialized and racializing rationality of government and knowledge production shapes political and historical subjects in postsocialist Europe. I analyse Latvian attempts to establish historical presence in European modernity through appropriation of 17th-century colonial pursuits of the Duchy of Courland into Latvian national history, as well as interpretations of this historical appropriation by Western scholars and travellers. I argue that Latvian identification with Europe's colonial past not only renders visible the continued salience of coloniality in European politics but also illuminates the mechanisms through which Europe attempts to renew its moral superiority in the global arena by relegating colonialism to a past that Europe claims to have overcome and that Latvians are required to overcome to become fully European. I argue that in order to understand how coloniality continues to inform political life in contemporary Europe it is necessary to move beyond analysis of national histories and deploy a relational approach which traces how contemporary political subjects are constituted in racialized and racializing fields of power relations. It is also necessary to analyse postsocialist Eastern Europe not only in relation to the socialist past but also the global present.

In Latvian towns and villages, post‐Soviet capitalism has produced a palpable change that locals describe as “emptiness.” People point to empty houses and apartments, and they list friends and relatives who have left. They fear school closures and the cancellation of transportation routes. They imagine the future as an entirely different world, one in which they will play no part. As a social formation, emptiness consists of (1) an observable reality wherein places rapidly lose their constitutive elements (people, infrastructure, services, social networks, and the future); (2) a way of life that emerges in response to such changes, which seem irreversible; and (3) an emic interpretive framework for making sense of the new reality. Emptiness in Latvia is symptomatic of post–Cold War spatiotemporal arrangements of power wherein capital and the state increasingly abandon people and places. [emptiness, capitalism, the future, postsocialism, Latvia, eastern Europe]

Based on analysis of a bordering encounter that took place in the offices of the Latvian State Border Guard, I trace how bordering produces connections at the same time as it effects separations. Despite being separated by state‐based lines of power, participants of the bordering encounter – all former Soviet citizens – recognised each other as ‘normal people’ striving to obtain a ‘normal life’. This connection was enabled by historically formed understanding of shared conditions of life and critical awareness of global power hierarchies. The sociality formed during the bordering encounter invites a rethinking of how distribution of life is negotiated through bordering, and how politics is imagined in relation to borders.