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. 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, while nearly 7 per cent of the 1.36 million permanent residents are stateless; equally many have opted for Russian citizenship. At the same time, the integration strategy declares Estonia a home for over 100 ethnic nationalities and the state is committed to the preservation and development of minority cultures.
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. This dissertation argues that the policy areas of citizenship and multiculturalism 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. 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. 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.” State measures to develop and preserve non-Estonian ethnic cultures co-opt minority actors by inducing them to define themselves through cultural heritage 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 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. 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.