The Latvian President, Ms Vaira Vike-Freiberga, talks to Derek Scally about her country's ambitions for the future and the part which Ireland could play in them.
Irish voters were urged yesterday to consider how rejecting the Nice Treaty would affect the futures of EU candidate countries.
President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia, who begins a two-day state visit to Ireland today, said the Irish people should remember that "Ireland has a voice in our future".
"We viewed the rejection of the Nice Treaty with alarm; after all it is our future at stake," she said in an interview with The Irish Times.
Ms Vike-Freiberga has been President of Latvia since 1999 after working for 30 years as a professor of psychology in Montreal. She said Latvia was "working furiously" towards EU membership and that the accession application had driven forward the country's modernisation process.
"It would be tremendously disappointing to see the process toward which we have been working for half a century coming to an end. The Iron Curtain lifted a decade ago, and we have a lot of ground to catch up," she said.
Latvia was invited to begin EU accession talks in December 2000 and despite its late start has overtaken Poland and other countries.
For Latvia, membership of the European Union would end a process that began with the Russian financial crisis of 1998. By redirecting its focus onto Europe, the country's economy recovered in record time and the EU has remained its most important export market. Ms Vike-Freiberga speaks of how "what started out as a crisis finally developed into an opportunity".
But the enthusiasm of Latvia's 2.8 million citizens for the European experiment has become volatile in recent months.
"Enthusiasm tends to rise and fall with the latest information," Ms Vike-Freiberga said.
Support for joining the EU dropped to just 36 per cent after recent uncertainty about agriculture subsidies.
Support has recovered since then, but with euro-scepticism hovering at around 40 per cent, the EU will loom large in October's general election.
"There is a growing anxiety towards the European Union; older people in particular are worried about change because we don't have a clear picture," she said. She hopes the Latvian journalists accompanying her on the state visit will send home a clearer picture of "what the EU means to Irish people".
Next month, Latvia hosts a conference for members of the so-called Vilnius group of aspirant NATO members, including Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
However, it is the three Baltic states, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania, who are most confident of joining the NATO alliance at the Prague summit in November.
For the Baltic states, which have spent all but 30 of the last 110 years ruled by others, the promise of independence has been the central attraction of joining NATO.
"We want to be integrated into NATO; it's a club we want to belong to, an alliance that guarantees safety for its members," said Ms Vike-Freiberga. "After our history of the last 50 years that sounds like a jolly good deal."
But Latvia's pursuit of NATO membership has brought it into conflict with Russia, its present neighbour and former occupier. President Vike-Freiberga hopes she has heard the last of Russian criticism of NATO's eastward expansion, a criticism that could be heard right up until the signing of last month's accord in Rome.
"Russia has had the good sense to see that every country has the right to make its own choices. As much as they dislike it, they can- not do anything about it," she said.
"Having come to an agreement with NATO it would be foolish of them to prevent agreement with the organisation at whose table they are now sitting."
Politics aside, President Vike-Freiberga says she is looking forward already to next year's Eurovision Song Contest in Riga, following Latvia's victory in the contest last month.
"We hope the contest will help people place Latvia and encourage them to look it up on the map," she said.
Unlike Ireland, she said, Latvia had no plans to win the contest three times in a row. But it's not just in Eurovision success that Latvia can identify with Ireland.
"Ireland is a shining example of what can be done in the European Union," said President Vike-Freiberga, but her praise is not without mild criticism.
"All the new candidate countries have invested too much in this process. We cannot just sit there and hold our breath."