A Home for 121 Nationalities Or Less
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A Home for 121 Nationalities or Less: Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Integration in Post-Soviet Estonia DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Elo-Hanna Seljamaa Graduate Program in Comparative Studies The Ohio State University 2012 Dissertation Committee: Dorothy P. Noyes, Advisor Nicholas Breyfogle Ray Cashman Richard Herrmann Margaret Mills Copyright by Elo-Hanna Seljamaa 2012 Abstract When Estonia declared itself independent from the USSR in August 1991, it did so as the legal successor of the Republic of Estonia established in 1918, claiming to be returning to the Western world after a nearly five-decade rupture caused by illegal Soviet rule. Together with international recognition, this principle of legal continuity provided the new-old state with a starting point for vigorous, interlocking citizenship and property reforms that excluded Soviet-era settlers from the emerging body of citizens and naturalized Estonia’s dramatic transition to capitalism. As a precondition for membership in the European Union and NATO, Estonia launched in the late 1990s a national integration policy aimed at teaching mostly Russian-speaking Soviet-era settlers the Estonian language and reducing the number of people with undetermined citizenship. Twenty years into independence, Estonia is integrated into international organizations and takes pride in strong fiscal discipline, while income gaps continue to grow and nearly 7 per cent of the 1.36 million permanent residents are stateless; equally many have opted for Russian citizenship. Blending nationalist arguments with neoliberal ones, coalition parties are adamant about retaining the restorationist citizenship policy. At the same time, the integration strategy declares Estonia a home for over 100 ethnic nationalities and the ii state is committed to the preservation and development of minority cultures, sponsoring associations established for this purpose. Grounded in 18 months of ethnographic research in Tallinn as well as readings of popular culture, legal texts, and policy documents, this dissertation takes an innovative approach to nationalism, integration and ethnic interactions in post-Soviet Estonia. I look at how actors on all sides draw simultaneously on pre-Soviet, Soviet, and liberal frameworks to consolidate their own positions within a complex democratic situation inflected by European institutions, global capitalist flows, and the neighboring Russian Federation. Whereas previous studies of integration in contemporary Estonia have tended to focus on the issue of citizenship and bypass claims to multiculturalism, this dissertation argues that the two policy areas are intertwined, both informed by the idea of ethnicity as a category of descent that is synonymous with nationality and complete with a national language, culture, character and ethnic homeland. One of the cornerstones of Soviet nationality policy, this concept of ethnicity/nationality continues to hold sway in post-Soviet Estonia, constituting a shared ground between majority and minority actors from which to conceptualize difference and define the conditions or limits of belonging. The dissertation explores how the Estonian integration model combines this notion of ethnicity/nationality with liberal theories of multiculturalism in order to argue for the incommensurability of cultures and reinforce the Estonian-centered nation-state, while resisting pressures from without to Europeanize or de-territorialize national citizenship and integration policies. Though the integration policy envisions a public sphere common to all permanent iii residents, the territorialized definition of ethnicity/nationality gives Estonians privileged access to this space, while reducing minority actors to guests who lack the authority to participate in the shaping of the Estonian society as minorities. The state attempts to reestablish and naturalize continuity between pre- and post-Soviet statehood through the creation of national holidays and other objectifications of the “Estonian cultural space.” At the same time, state measures to develop and preserve non-Estonian ethnic cultures co-opt minority actors by inducing them to define themselves through cultural heritage, narrowly defined, rather than their current political, social or economic interests. Recent controversies over war memorials and the ongoing debate on the future of Russian- medium education in Estonia demonstrate how majority elites delegitimate minority critics by attributing their actions to the Russian Federation's attempts to weaken Estonian sovereignty. The authorities’ habitual securitization of domestic issues reinforces the distinction between the state-bearing majority and culture-bearing minorities, indicating powerholders’ propensity to break free from normal political procedures and suppress the democratic discussion of alternatives. The argument about the incommensurability of cultures does not hold up in everyday life, where the Soviet, Estonian, and Russian overlap and merge. Both explicit controversies and more intimate responses point to the insufficiency of the official legal-restorationist narrative to accommodate individuals’ complex experiences of the war, the Soviet era and the post-Soviet transition to capitalism. At the same time, however, Tallinn’s iv inhabitants hold on to the separateness of Estonian- and Russian-language life worlds and reproduce it continuously through quotidian choices and implicit mutual recognition. The dissertation introduces the term “commonality” to describe the coexistence of individuals who conceive of themselves in terms of differences rather than similarities and do not constitute a social network but are nevertheless interdependent by virtue of inhabiting the same social and institutional environment. Tacit recognition of the other’s otherness and the other’s space serves under these conditions as a means of downplaying the very same differences and preventing them from becoming the prevailing interpretative framework or a source of quotidian social conflict. In addition to yielding new insights into the workings of nationalism and integration in post-Soviet Estonia, this study seeks to enhance the broader understanding of ethnicity and nationalism in post-Soviet and post-socialist states and regions. The unexpectedly comfortable fit between Soviet legacies, liberal multiculturalism and exclusionary culturalist arguments implies that ethnic nationalism takes different forms in different contexts rather than being confined to the “uncivilized” East. Moreover, the study shows that citizenship and integration policies can be interpreted and implemented in ways that consolidate rather than weaken both the power of the nation-state and the marginalization of minorities. Finally, the study is in conversation with scholarship on collective memory, demonstrating how various actors use this concept strategically and how they negotiate overlaps between putatively separate memory communities. v Dedication In memory of my paternal grandparents, whom I continue to miss, And to my maternal grandmother For her support, courage, wit, and love. vi Acknowledgments Every dissertation is a team effort and this might be particularly – or differently true – of ethnographic projects. I have been fortunate to have supporters, friends and institutions, in multiple countries on two continents and I wish I could somehow bring them all together, but the following words will have to suffice for the time being. I would first of all like to express my deepest gratitude to all individuals, organizations, and groups of other kind, who kindly gave me time and attention and opened their homes, even if it meant enduring my first poor and later mediocre Russian. I learnt tremendously from these exchanges and hope to have been able to put some of it into this work. Special thanks are due to the youth organization I worked with for several months in 2011 and continued to socialize with once the job was done. The following far too many pages are shaped by our time together in a manner that is rather invisible but all the more powerful. I would have never made it to Tallinn as a fieldworker had it not been for the Fulbright program and the U.S. Embassy in Estonia as well as individuals who encouraged and supported me during the application process, making sure I ended up in a university that was just right for me. Dr. Gordon P. K. Chu Memorial Scholarship was of great help during preliminary research in summer 2009 and my extended stay in Tallinn would not vii have been possible without the generous support from the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, which has also been an invaluable learning environment during the past several years. Archimedes Foundation/the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research funded two years of my studies and research and I am very grateful for that. Drawing on different disciplines, this dissertation captures a minuscule of what the Comparative Studies department is about and I would like to thank both the faculty and fellow graduate students for their support and insightful comments on different occasions. Special thanks go to Marge Lynd, the Academic Program Coordinator of the department, as well as to Andrew Culp, Allison Fish, Kate Dean-Haidet, Ilana Maymind and Wamaee Muriuki, who read earlier versions of some of the chapters and gave useful feedback in our writing group while allowing