1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
1.1 M INORITY IDENTITY WITHIN THE NATION STATE
The considerably large Russian population within Estonia finds itself in close proximity to a land that many would recognize as a mother-state. Though Russian-speakers within Estonia are not always ethnically Russian, nor may they have been born in Russia proper, their link to a country that speaks the second most popular language in Estonia, is right across the border, and once called Estonia part of its territory factors prominently into Estonian state considerations and policy. Understanding links to a nation or nationalism that exists beyond the confines of an actual border is necessary in this instance. Rogers Brubaker’s Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, looks at this very issue, pointing to the Soviet Union’s dissolution specifically as one of his argument’s key examples where a typical understanding of nationhood,
nationalism, and the national question is challenged.
Brubaker acknowledges that the formation of states around the “principle of
nationality” was a formative shift conducted by numerous states in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a purposeful secession from the multinational superpower that it had once been.7 Estonia is a fitting example of this development, as the independent post-Soviet state was and continues to be understood as distinctly Estonian, a point particularly
expressed through the official state language, though equal rights and protection are afforded to other ethnic minorities in Estonia’s constitution.8 Growing alongside these nations that are actively “nationalizing” are what Brubaker terms “external national
homelands,” nations whose nationalisms are assertive by nature, actively seeking to oppose or compete for claims over people.9 Typically, these homeland perspectives grow from defeat or dissolution, their sentiments a result of loss of status and space that hurts the nation’s power, influence, prestige, and economic and political impact. They assert themselves as this “external national homeland” when they begin to view residents of neighboring countries as their co-nationals and claim a responsibility for them, regardless of the borders that separate them.10 Russia’s approach towards Russian nationals abroad conforms remarkably well to Brubaker’s classification, as evidenced in the official Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation.11 Estonia, as an immediate neighbor and home to a significant Russian minority, fulfills the criteria to warrant Russia’s politically watchful eye.
Brubaker’s text posits that “nation” is something that is practiced rather than
territorially institutionalized.12 Nationness13 lies with the people, rather than the territory
7 Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3.
8 Constitution of the Republic of Estonia, chp. I, §6.
9 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, 5.
10 Ibid, 5.
11 Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, Section 3, 39 d) and e) http://www.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/0/76389FEC168189ED44257B2E0039B16D
Konstantin Kosachev, “Russia must defend interests of compatriots abroad,” Valdai, March 3, 2013, accessed October 20, 2013, http://valdaiclub.com/politics/56220.html.
12 Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, 21.
13 Brubaker uses the term “nationness” as an instigator for thinking about the word “nation” differently.
Essentially the two words are meant to be the same, but he employs “nationness” tostress the nation’s role
“as practical category, institutionalized form, and contingent event. ‘Nation’ is a category of practice, not (in the first instance) a category of analysis” (7). I use the term in the same way asBrubaker in this thesis,
though this is often confused. In fact, the Soviet Union’s republics and autonomous regions contributed to this confusion, classifying territories based on the ethnic descent of its inhabitants. However, in generating these categories of social identification, the Soviets simultaneously failed to create a link between that ethnic label and citizenship, as the USSR was a self-professed multi-national union.14 This link between territory and ethnic identity helped to pave the way for countries such as Estonia to break from the
conglomeration that was the Soviet Union into smaller, more ethnically homogenous states.
Yet, having used such methods to secure their independence, the element of an
ever-evolving nationness that Brubaker encourages is lost in today’s discussions of transnational relations. Rather, it appears that territorial and cultural boundaries must align, while
Brubaker challenges society to think of nationalism without nations, and of “national autonomy…not [as] the convergence of territorial administration and national culture, but their independence.”15
Brubaker correctly predicted that nationalizing states would continue to have tense relationships with new minority groups within their borders and the states beyond their borders that these groups acknowledged as external homelands. His predictions also ring true in the case of Estonia when he states that successor states will see newly defined Russian enclaves develop within their national borders, an almost compensational
occurrence considering the loss of territory with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. At the point of publication, Nationalism Reframed did not have the distance from the construction of new states that would have been necessary to predict how the former Soviet republics would deal with the portions of their citizenry that were becoming members of a new Russian minority, nor how that minority would react to its new status. Nevertheless,
Brubaker’s work in redefining and contextualizing nationalism and nationness with modern historical examples remains pertinent to this thesis. Not only have many of his predictions been particularly applicable to Estonia’s case, but also the questions that he poses and was
subscribing to his call to change the thinking surrounding the concept of nation from an established entity, “a real group,” through which we evaluate participants and events to that of a changing concept that they act on and through, inviting change.
14 Ibid, 23
15 Ibid, 40.
unable to answer at the time of his writing remain relevant to the concerns of this thesis.
His curiosity as to how minority Russians will identify themselves—as an entirely separate nationality or along lines of language and culture—and in what ways Russia itself will choose to effect or influence the extent of the minority’s resoluteness in setting themselves apart will be explored in this study.16