A B S T R A C T
In this article, I examine how a territorial
imaginary conflating culture, territory, nation,
and security allows ‘‘elites of statecraft’’ in Europe
to frame citizenship and integration policy as
(inter)national security matters. Focusing on
post-Soviet Estonia, I argue that this imaginary
legitimized the denial of citizenship to Soviet-era
Russian speakers and enabled the government’s
integration policy objective of creating the
‘‘Estonian cultural domain.’’ Drawing on historical,
archival, and ethnographic research, I demonstrate
how the invocation of national security justified
these events and how the territorial imaginary
structured the making of integration policy from
the 1991 reestablishment of independence to
E.U. accession in 2004. [state, elites, policy,
nation, security]
I
n this article, I examine how E.U. accession normalizes the nation
around the issues of citizenship and integration policy. Focusing on
citizenship and ethnic-integration policy in post-Soviet Estonia, my
central empirical concerns are (1) how the decision to deny citizenship
to 500,000 Soviet-era Russian speakers was constructed as a
security measure when Estonia regained independence in 1991; and (2)
why the western diplomatic community endorsed this decision and the
Estonian government’s 2000 ethnic integration policy aiming to create the
‘‘Estonian cultural domain’’ (Estonian Government 2000:sect. 3.4).1
Addressing these issues requires an investigation not only of Estonia’s
particular history but also of how an international group of ‘‘elites of
statecraft’’ interpret and debate that history in light of their spatially
conceived task of securing the European interstate system. I approach
these questions by examining the discursive field in which these elites
reproduce the Estonian nation-state by constructing Soviet-era Russian
speakers as a particular problem requiring a particular policy solution.
This discursive field consists of a territorial imaginary in which a secure
European political order is composed of horizontally arranged, interlocking,
and culturally homogenous states. This imaginary reproduces an
isomorphic relationship between people, culture, territory, and state,
and it renders minorities and noncitizens as potential threats by virtue of
their putative cultural difference. I, thus, argue that Estonia’s main ethnicintegration
policy, ‘‘State Programme: Integration in Estonian Society
2000–2007’’ (hereafter, the ‘‘State Programme’’), which aims to have
Soviet-era Russian speakers secure the Estonian nation by participating
in its reproduction, should not be seen as a case of reactionary ‘‘East
European’’ nationalism. Rather, it is a logical expression of European assumptions
about nation, state, and security that are reinforced through
the process of E.U. accession.2
My argument traces the historical trajectory from the denial of citizenship
to Soviet-era Russian speakers in 1991 to the completion of the
State Programme in preparation for E.U. accession in 2004. It proceeds in
GREGORY FELDMAN
University of British Columbia
Culture, state, and security in Europe:
The case of citizenship and integration policy in Estonia
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 676–694, ISSN 0094-0496, electronic
ISSN 1548-1425. A 2005 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through
the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, www.ucpress.edu/journals/
rights.htm.
six steps. It first explains that the study of policy involves
not so much decoding the secret agendas of policy elites as
showing how these elites construct and legitimize policy
within hegemonic discourses of culture, power, and place
(Gupta and Ferguson 1997a). The first section also defines
the term elites of statecraft in relation to Estonia’s State
Programme, and explains why ‘‘polymorphous engagement’’
(Gusterson 1997) is a useful research strategy for
understanding how those elites brought that policy to
fruition. To situate the State Programme in a European
context, the article next describes the territorial imaginary
and explains its role in generating family resemblances
among European states’ minority policies.
The remaining four sections focus on the Estonian
case by showing how elites of statecraft produced, defined,
managed, and marginalized 500,000 stateless Soviet-era
Russian speakers. The first of these sections explains how
the pre-Soviet Estonian republic’s status as an illegally
annexed state rendered citizenship policy in post-Soviet
Estonia both sensible and necessary in light of the territorial
imaginary. To show how the Estonian government
could clarify ambiguous legal terminology pertaining to
national minorities, it next explains why the Organization
for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) failed to
pressure the government to treat noncitizen Russian
speakers and Russian speakers with citizenship as legally
the same. The article then focuses on how the territorial
imaginary enabled Nordic and Estonian officials to dominate
the process of developing integration policy. The
last section analyses particular events in which elites of
statecraft discuss integration. It shows how the territorial
imaginary structured these events so as to preclude minority
leaders from mobilizing western diplomats and
OSCE officials to pressure Estonian officials to liberalize
integration policy.
Although it takes Estonia as its case study, this article
is not about Estonia per se. Instead, it is about how the
territorial imaginary—a European spatial-cum-cultural
discourse of international security—informs the ways in
which elites of statecraft problematize particular cases of
minority–state relations in Europe. The territorial imaginary
is not a model for the specific Estonian case but,
rather, a broader discursive field that makes particular
models in Europe imaginable (e.g., the Estonian, the Swiss,
the British, or the Bosnian model). The Europeanness of
Estonia’s ethnic-integration policy is demonstrated through
its conformity to European law, conventions, and agreements
as well as Nordic diplomats’ foreign-policy agenda.
These were not tailor-made for Estonia but, rather, for all
of Europe (east and west) by European diplomats, civil
servants, lawyers, state officials, parliamentarians, and so
on. Thus, the point of focusing on Estonia is not to detail
the idiosyncrasies of its case and then decide whether
it deviates from a European norm. Rather, the point is to
show how such idiosyncrasies are possible in the context
of European international relations. Only brief comparisons
are made to show how the territorial imaginary
contains differences among European cases of minority–
state relations. As Caroline Humphrey argues regarding
postsocialist societies, ‘‘It’s not much good describing
two different situations and then totting up, ‘There is X
here, but not there; there’s Y here, but not there’ and so on’’
(2002:13). She suggests that ‘‘one needs a relevant field
for comparison’’ (Humphrey 2002:13), which can inform
the analysis of any particular situation. For present purposes,
that field is the territorial imaginary.
Two strands of anthropological research have inspired
this article. The first reflects a growing sense that
the nation-state is finding new ways to assert itself (cf.
Aretxaga 2003; Cheah 1998:33; Ong 1999; Wilson and
Donnan 1998), rather than retreating from globalization
(cf. Appadurai 1996). In particular, Jutta Weldes et al.
correctly note that matters of security can easily ‘‘entrench
the state rather than ‘deterritorialize’ it or disarticulate
it from the imagined community of the nation’’ (1999:8).
Several anthropologists are now looking more closely at
the intersection of security, nation, and state to understand
how violence is produced (Denich 1994; Feldman
1991; Gusterson 1996; Hinton 2002a, 2002b; Malkki 1995;
Nagengast 1994; Sluka 2000). The present article contributes
to this literature by asking how Estonia’s ‘‘return to
Europe’’ renders citizenship and culture as matters of
(inter)national security.
The second strand is anthropology’s challenge to the
postsocialist transition metaphor. Particularly in the early
and mid-1990s, research on east European politics was
defined by what Rogers Brubaker (1998:298) calls the
‘‘Manichean view’’ of nationalism in which ‘‘Western’’
nationalism (civic, liberal, modern, and good) is diametrically
opposed to ‘‘Eastern’’ nationalism (ethnic, traditional,
premodern, and bad). Anthropologists have since
denaturalized the transition metaphor by illustrating how
particular responses to changes in postsocialist Europe
exemplify pragmatic reasoning in complex circumstances,
rather than mere ‘‘backwardness’’ (Berdahl et al. 2000;
Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Gal and Kligman 2000; Verdery
1997; Wedel 2001). From here, anthropologists can move
a step further by demonstrating how taken-for-granted
nationalist discourse in western Europe is implicated in
eastern European efforts to protect the nation. Robert
Hayden makes this point forcefully when arguing that
the wars in former Yugoslavia were channeled through
the political structures of modern constitutions adopted
from western Europe. Far from resulting from ancient
ethnic hatreds, these wars were the ‘‘logical outcome of
a conceptual structure that is both central European
in origin and central to European political and social
thought’’ (Hayden 2000:8).3
I likewise argue that, although
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
677
in nonviolent circumstances, Estonian officials’ effort
to establish Estonian linguistic and cultural hegemony
throughout the state’s territorial space is not reducible
to reactionary ‘‘East European’’ nationalism. Instead, it
reflects conventional moves enabled by pan-European
discourses of state, security, nation, and culture in which
‘‘civic’’ and ‘‘ethnic’’ are only rhetorical variations on the
theme of national boundaries.
Policy, elites, and ethnography
I focus on policy making because policy constitutes a
pivotal site in the regulation of mass society. It is a crucial
target of anthropological inquiry, as it expresses in condensed
terms the hegemonic forms of social order and
reiterates their legitimizing narratives. It frames how individuals
may legally and legitimately conduct themselves in
public space, thereby rendering it of high anthropological
importance. As Cris Shore and Susan Wright point out,
‘‘People are classified, shaped and ordered according to
policies. . . . The study of policy, therefore, leads straight
into issues at the heart of anthropology: norms and institutions;
ideology and consciousness; knowledge and
power; rhetoric and discourse; meaning and interpretation;
the global and the local’’ (1997:4). Political anthropology
has much to contribute to the question of how power
relations are reproduced through public policy by asking
what makes certain policies imaginable in the first place.
Rather than limit the study of policy to its effects or
(in)efficiencies, researchers must destabilize policy itself
by situating it within its enabling discourses. The point is
not to deny agency to the subjects of policy but to invert the
usual approach to the study of power. Although examining
how ‘‘local’’ people internalize, resist, or appropriate hegemonic
discourse is a necessary task, asking how strategically
positioned policy elites manipulate international
power flows through policy making that limit local survival
strategies is equally important (Greenhalgh 2003:197).
Studying the production of policy involves ‘‘studying
up’’ (Nader 1972), but policy making itself is not simply
an activity that furthers elites’ particular interests.4
To
assume so narrowly characterizes power as something
emanating from the will of particular people. The operative
question is not what hidden intents, agendas, and
state secrets elites might be sharing in their policy meetings.
As Philip Abrams notes, secrets are not to blame for
the difficulty of studying the state, as they turn out to be
either trivial or theoretically predictable ‘‘when the gaff is
blown’’ (1988:62). Furthermore, the question is not how
elites are constrained by pressures from below but, rather,
how elites interpret what they see below as a particular
policy problem. The key question is what broader discursive
parameters bear on elites’ policy decisions, publicly
legitimize the actions they authorize, and produce any
given policy effect. The contours of that discursive field
need illumination. As Michel Foucault argues, ‘‘Let us not,
therefore, ask why certain people want to dominate, what
they seek, what is their overall strategy. Let us ask, instead,
how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at
the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes
which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our
behaviors etc.’’ (1980:97).
Like many policy processes, the relevant data addressing
the question of how post-Soviet Estonia’s citizenship
and integration policy became logically possible
are dispersed throughout space and time. Such processes
do not lend themselves to traditional thick description
(Geertz 1973), which assumes an anchoring in a particular
place. The anthropological study of policy can, thus, benefit
from what Hugh Gusterson has called ‘‘polymorphous
engagement’’ (1997:116), that is, interacting with informants
in a number of sites and using an eclectic mix
of research techniques (see also Donnan and McFarlane
1997:262; Gupta and Ferguson 1997b:37–38; Nader 1972:
307; Shore 2000:7). For my purposes, polymorphous engagement
conducted from 1999 to 2001 involved participantobservation
in Tallinn (Estonia’s capital) among elites of
statecraft in their policy meetings, in conferences on multiculturalism,
in diplomatic receptions, and at the offices of
numerous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) contracted
to work on integration. Immersion in these venues
prepared me to critically interpret other kinds of data related
to the same policy process, such as Estonian–Soviet history,
diplomatic correspondence, European legal agreements, and
policy documents.
The wide range of state and nonstate actors involved
in public policy reflects the current neoliberal trend of
delegating state tasks to the nonprofit sector. This trend
offers new and varied ethnographic opportunities to study
state processes (Verdery 1996:209). Statecraft is no longer
a task restricted to diplomats and officials. Instead, it
includes a wide range of individuals that are, at least rhetorically,
involved in preparing society for a putatively
better future (Shore and Wright 1997). Regarding Estonia’s
integration policy, elites of statecraft work to provide
better life opportunities for minorities and noncitizens by
equipping them with linguistic and cultural skills necessary
to succeed in a western-oriented Estonian society.5
They specifically include NGO leaders, officials from international
organizations, state officials, civil servants,
western diplomats, and minority leaders.
My fieldwork from 1999 to 2001 was based at the NonEstonians
Integration Foundation, an NGO authorized to
manage ethnic integration for the Estonian government
and to specifically oversee the implementation of the
State Programme. The State Programme aims to improve
Russian speakers’ Estonian language skills to increase
these individuals’ value on the job market, expedite their
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
678
naturalization rates, and expose them to Estonian culture
and society, from which they were ostensibly shielded
during the Soviet era. This is to be achieved through a
breadth of activities including language-training programs,
teacher-training activities, and language camps for Russianspeaking
children. It also involves a media campaign
designed to promote the virtues of ethnic integration to
Estonians and Russian speakers alike. In short, the State
Programme seeks to transform ‘‘non-Estonians’’ into citizens
who can ‘‘competently’’ function in Estonian society:
Integration is expressed in the gradual disappearance
of those barriers which today prevent many nonEstonians
from being competitive in the labour market,
taking part in the educational opportunities
available here and participating in local cultural and
political life. These barriers are above all connected
with the shortcomings in the knowledge of the
Estonian language and local culture, with uncertain
legal status and also with fears and prejudices resulting
from rapid social changes. [Estonian Government
2000:sect. 3.2]
This objective, however, was premised on a specific security
concern, namely, that ‘‘the formation of a ‘two societies
in one country’ model . . . may become dangerous both
socially and from the point of view of security policy’’
(Estonian Government 2000:sect. 3.1). The alleviation of
this threat, again, is to occur through the establishment of
the ‘‘Estonian cultural domain’’ (Estonian Government
2000:sect. 3.4).
The Integration Foundation is the central node for
these elites who discuss, debate, design, implement, and
manage the numerous activities developed under the rubric
of the State Programme. European Commission (E.C.) officials
and Nordic diplomats were among the many western
officials who routinely circulated through the Integration
Foundation, as the E.U. PHARE Programme and the governments
of Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark financially
and politically support the State Programme. During
the period of my fieldwork there, regular appearances
were made by OSCE officials who monitored the integration
process, by the UN Development Programme (UNDP)
staff who provided administrative support, and by various
Estonian- and Russian-speaking NGO leaders contracted to
run particular projects.
These elites of statecraft were a cosmopolitan group,
although they approached integration from different
power positions. Most had master’s degrees, and more
than a few held law degrees or doctorates. Rarely did any
of them speak fewer than three languages fluently. Western
diplomats in Estonia had varied international experience.
Junior diplomats were often on their first overseas
posting in Estonia, a point that some Estonian officials
took as an insult. ‘‘They send them here to cut their teeth,’’
remarked one. Senior diplomats and ambassadors often
had prior experience in eastern Europe during the Cold
War. The Finnish charge´ d’affaires even had Tallinn under
his diplomatic jurisdiction during a posting to Leningrad
in the 1980s. OSCE staff in Estonia largely hailed from
northern Europe, especially, Germany, Sweden, and Finland,
as OSCE headquarters thought that regional familiarity
best prepared its officials for the particularities of
the Estonian situation. On average, younger than the staff
at western embassies, OSCE officials also seemed more
idealistic than the diplomats representing nation-states.
Although they were diligent in monitoring Estonian policy
and legislation for discriminatory potential, they were
equally frustrated by the principle of state sovereignty’s
limiting effect on their efforts. In contrast, western diplomats
rarely seemed so bothered. If plainly asked what they
thought about the status of Russian speakers in Estonia,
their answer was equally bland and consistent with their
policy agenda. One diplomat explained, ‘‘You have to
remember that Estonia has only been independent for
less than ten years. They [the government] have a tough
job. The State Programme is a very good step in the
right direction.’’
Estonian officials, like their Russian-speaking counterparts,
had either traveled, studied, or participated in
conferences in western Europe and North America during
the 1990s. Western governments and the European Union
funded many such opportunities so that east Europeans
could be introduced to ‘‘civil society’’ and learn how to carry
out a smooth ‘‘transition to western democracy.’’ Both
Estonian- and Russian-speaking leaders shared skepticism
toward these opportunities, even if they enjoyed the trips.
This was particularly the case if they were already young
adults when the Soviet Union collapsed. Both saw the
European Union not as a western saving grace, but as
another megabureaucracy that they would have to manipulate
to their own advantage, much in the same way they
had done with Soviet bureaucracy. For example, an official
working at Estonia’s Citizenship and Migration Board took a
pragmatic approach to E.U. and OSCE presence in Estonia:
‘‘I think OSCE is good for Estonia because they say, ‘Well,
Estonia is no Kosovo [sic]. It’s pretty peaceful, and so they
give their approval to the European Union, which Estonia
wants to join. The E.U. is just another empire. We are going
from one empire to another.’’
Estonian officials working on ethnic integration were
not ardent nationalists. They commanded the theoretical
complexities of multiculturalism and were skilled in public
administration. They were committed to improving the
life opportunities of Russian speakers so long as this
occurred within the context of strengthening the link
between the nation-state and the Estonian language and
culture. They saw integration as a moral, reasonable, and
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
679
pragmatic choice for Russian speakers if they wanted to
show respect for and to advance in Estonian society. In
effect, they espoused a moderate nationalism that could
include the Other as long as the Other voluntarily reproduced
the nation in whose name the state exists. In the
long run, therefore, Russian speakers were not marginalized
by state officials’ clever manipulations, although this
behavior was certainly not beyond various radical nationalists.
Rather, marginalization occurs by virtue of the
normal principle of state sovereignty underpinning the
European interstate system and by the hegemonic understanding
that a particular national culture is morally entitled
to a privileged relationship with the territorial state.
The territorial imaginary of interstate security
If state sovereignty and the right of the national majority
to a privileged relationship with the state are normal
European practices, then showing how these practices
are logically possible and how they unfold in different
cases is worthwhile. The aim here is to set up a field in
which to compare different cases of minority–state relations
and to show the ‘‘Europeanness’’ of Estonian citizenship
and integration policy. Minority–state relations
are conceptualized through a territorial imaginary of European
security that conflates people, culture, territory,
and the state. This imaginary—akin to what Liisa Malkki
has called ‘‘the national order of things’’ (1992:37, 1995:
5)—informs European practices in the regulation of asylum
seekers, immigrants, and national minorities, and it
contains the range of models that European states use to
deal with Others on their territory. To be sure, the ‘‘problem’’
is not the presence of Others in the territorial state
per se but, rather, the putative need to regulate contact
between those Others and the national majority. The
state’s role (through which it legitimizes itself as protector
of the nation) is to mediate that contact through law and
public policy.
The concept of ‘‘state sovereignty’’—and the affiliated
concepts of ‘‘national security’’ and ‘‘minority rights’’—
genealogically derives from European practices of international
relations, which are based on spatial-horizontal
assumptions (cf. Der Derian 1987; Walker 1993). Tracing
back to early modern Europe, these assumptions include
an allegiance to the sovereign over God, a monolithic conception
of citizenship, and the erasure of diverse and
alternative identities within the flat, enclosed, Euclidean
space of state territory (Walker 2000:24–25). These assumptions
produce a territorial imaginary that is a horizontal
grid of culturally particular units in which a state
is authorized to protect the identity of the titular nation.
As such, the interstate system has the effect of asserting
boundaries along national lines between ‘‘us’’ and
‘‘them’’—with varying degrees of success—rendering
nations outside the state as potential threats (Walker
1993). In this situation, the nation-state, lacking an ontological
foundation, must inscribe its identity through the
act of identifying nonnationals within its territorial space
as threats by virtue of alleged cultural difference (Feldman
2005a). Through the prism of the territorial imaginary, this
automatically renders minority rights, citizenship, and
immigration as (inter)national issues, which can potentially
destabilize state borders and the broader interstate
system (Feldman 2005b). Picking up on just that implication,
one Estonian official succinctly noted, ‘‘Sweden is, of
course, interested in the State Programme because they
don’t want our Russians showing up on their shores.’’
This territorial imaginary is often most noticeable in
moments of crisis, as suggested by Malkki’s (1992:32–33)
observation that refugees are depicted as ‘‘uprooted’’ from
their homelands, external to the ‘‘family of nations,’’ and
‘‘problems’’ to be solved. The identification of refugees
as problems presupposes the coherence of interlocking
nation-states with culturally homogenous peoples rooted
in each of them.6
The Council of Europe subtly reproduces
the notion of rootedness when writing that ‘‘it was agreed
that the national minorities which the upheavals of history
have established in Europe had to be protected and
respected as a contribution to peace and stability’’ (1995a:
para. 5, emphasis added). The construction of security
threats arising from individuals uprooted from elsewhere
and now an alien presence in a putatively homogenous
state both enables and contains the range of policy options
available to deal with such threats: normalization through
naturalization, containment through limited autonomy,
detainment in refugee centers, return to the ‘‘homeland,’’
and, in the worst case, extermination. Despite their wide
moral variability, these options all reproduce, and are produced
by, the territorial imaginary by rendering (inter)
national security a matter of privileging a particular national
culture on a particular territorialized state.
Whereas models of minority–state relations vary among
states, they, nonetheless, bear family resemblances, as their
particular historical circumstances are filtered through the
territorial imaginary in the act of policy making. In eastern
Europe, for example, David Campbell (1999) demonstrates
how the territorial imaginary, or ‘‘apartheid cartography,’’ in
his parlance, led the international diplomatic community
to rebuild Bosnia as a composite of ethnic-based territorial
units. Ironically, this community institutionalized the same
categories that predicated Bosnia’s collapse. It reproduced
the territorial imaginary below the state level by, first,
dividing the Republic of Bosnia-Herzogovina into two entities,
namely, the Federation of Bosnia-Herzogovina and
the Republika Srpska, on the basis of ethnic boundaries
and, second, by subdividing the former into ten cantons
with either Croat or Muslim majorities.7
Showing apartheid
cartography’s broader influence, Campbell (1999:404) notes
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
680
that Belgium and Switzerland served as models for the
Afrikaaner Freedom Front seeking a white homeland in
postapartheid South Africa and for Serb and Croat nationalists
negotiating peace in Lisbon in 1992. The former
Soviet Union was also firmly organized in line with the territorial
imaginary. Although antinationalist, it was highly
committed to nationhood (Brubaker 1998:284) by aligning
each of its 15 union republics, 20 autonomous republics,
8 oblasts, and 10 okrugs with a national group (Tishkov
2002).8
Similar to the peace brokers for Bosnia-Herzogovina,
the Soviet Union institutionalized the divisions along which
it collapsed.
In western Europe, Gerd Baumann (1996:24) describes
how the spectrum of political views on immigration
and multiculturalism in London are contained by the
assumption of ontological territorialized cultures. Conservatives
contend that immigrants are culturally ill suited
to succeed in England and only generate social problems,
whereas liberals argue that, with assistance, immigrants
can overcome their own traditional customs and adapt to
a pregiven English culture. The Danish government implemented
an integration act in 1999 that aimed to convert
immigrants into productive and equal citizens by providing
them with courses on the Danish language and society
as well as on job-market skills. Its passage was a victory
for supporters of immigrants, who had been trying to
thwart the rise of the anti-immigrant neo-Right (Hervik
in press). As in the United Kingdom, however, Denmark’s
political debate pivoted on the question of whether foreigners
could adopt the culture of the host nation, with
neither side questioning the right to cultural hegemony
for the national majority. In this vein, Verena Stolcke
(1995:5) compellingly shows how cultural fundamentalists
in western Europe make use of the territorial imaginary to
push for stricter immigration control by claiming that
humans are naturally ethnocentric, that different cultures
are inherently incommensurable, and that national groups
should be spatially segregated lest they lapse into hostility
(see also Holmes 2000:7). The territorial imaginary does
not compel states to pursue exclusionary policies. It only
reiterates basic assumptions about minority–state relations,
from a diplomatic perspective, that limit the range
of ‘‘reasonable’’ integration models.9
Marilyn Strathern,
commenting on Stolcke’s discussion, indicates the territorial
imaginary’s role in producing nationalist policies of
any degree of intensity:
One would not want to be carried (reassured?) by the
idea that cultural fundamentalism is a right-wing plot.
It may be very useful for right-wing political language,
but such politics also draw on usages more generally
current. . . . While immigration policies may offer
particular evidence of right-wing political thinking,
they hold water precisely because of their saliency. . . .
Different political regimes speak in its common
language. [1995:16]
Thus, to assume that the territorial imaginary is a model for
minority–state relations specific to the Estonian or even east
European cases is misleading. This move reproduces tropes
of east Europe as west Europe’s Other. Instead, historically
particular cases of minority–state relations are channeled
through a broader discursive field that reifies assumptions
about culture, state, territory, and security.
Producing the stateless: The restoration of the
Estonian nation-state
Strathern’s observation that cultural fundamentalism
draws on ‘‘generally current’’ political discourse is apparent
when one examines the mainstream diplomatic logic
through which the pre-Soviet Estonian republic was restored
and Soviet-era Russian speakers were denied citizenship
in 1991. Estonian leaders declared independence
in 1918, and the country joined the League of Nations in
1922. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed
the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which would have direct
implications for post-Soviet Estonia’s 1991 citizenship
policy. This agreement contained a secret protocol permitting
Nazi Germany to acquire western Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Austria, and Hungary without Soviet interference,
and the Soviet Union to acquire eastern Poland, Lithuania,
Latvia, Estonia, and Finland without German interference.
With German complicity assured (for the moment), the
Soviet Union coerced the Estonian government into signing
a so-called mutual assistance pact one month later,
which justified the entry of the Soviet army into Estonia as
a security measure. Estonia was formally annexed by
the Soviet Union in 1940. The governments of Great Britain
and the United States immediately decried annexation as
an illegal violation of state sovereignty and the mutual
assistance pact as an agreement signed under duress.
Nonetheless, the Allies’ common cause with Stalin against
Hitler rendered the matter of secondary importance (Vizulis
1985:59–66).10
Reaffirming moral support for Estonia
in 1983, U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz wrote to
Enrst Jaakson, Estonia’s exile consul general, that ‘‘Soviet
aggression stamped out Estonia’s independence when
Soviet armies invaded Estonia in 1940. We have never
recognized the forcible incorporation of Estonia into the
Soviet Union, and we will not compromise this principle’’
(Vizulis 1985:188).
Kind words notwithstanding, between 1939 and 1945,
Estonia lost roughly 250,000 out of 1.1 million people
(Raun 1991:181), largely through emigration, deportation,
and execution and other war-related deaths. Deportations
continued until the early 1950s, with as many as 83,000
more Estonians sent to the interior of Soviet Russia. The
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
681
eastward movement of exiled Estonians to Siberia was answered
with the westward settlement of Russians speakers
in Estonia for the next several decades.11
This in-migration
significantly changed Estonia’s demography from 88 percent
ethnic Estonian (of 1.1 million people) in 1934 to
65 percent (of 1.5 million people) just before reindependence
in 1991 (Raun 1991:247; Statistical Office of Estonia
2001). The Soviet regime did not require Russian speakers
to learn Estonian, so Russian—the ‘‘language of brotherhood’’—became
the lingua franca in communication between
Estonians and Russian speakers, as Russian was
extensively taught in Estonian-medium schools. This situation,
along with Russification policies, in general, was a key
factor in producing what Estonian scholars have called an
‘‘existential angst’’ about the loss of the Estonian language
and culture (Endre and Laar 1997; Ruutsoo 1995; Trass
2000:177; Vihalemm and Lauristin 1997:280). In response,
40 Estonian writers sent an open letter to Pravda in 1980
(which it did not publish) asserting a list of complaints,
many of which pertained to the survival of the Estonian
language: restrictions on the use of Estonian in business and
science, the growing scarcity of Estonian-language journals
and books, continuing propaganda pushing the teaching of
Russian, appointment of bureaucrats lacking Estonian language
capability, and the unilateral demand on Estonians,
but not Russians, to become bilingual (Misiunas and Taagepera
1993:269).
By the late 1980s, when the independence movement
had gathered momentum, the Molotov–Ribbentrop
Pact’s secret protocol became the key legal factor that
underpinned the successful reestablishment of Estonian,
Latvian, and Lithuanian independence.12
Mikhail Gorbachev’s
policy of glasnost (openness) not only exposed the
protocol but also made it a political issue. On August 23,
1989, the 50th anniversary of the pact, nearly two million
Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians joined hands to form
the ‘‘Baltic Chain’’ stretching from Tallinn to Riga to
Vilnius in protest of the illegal Soviet annexation. It was
one of the largest and most internationally witnessed
expressions of nationalist populism on the road to independence.
It directly called the validity of the secret protocol,
and thus the Soviet annexation, into question. Sensing
decreasing legitimacy inside and outside the Soviet Union,
the Supreme Soviet in Moscow acknowledged the existence
of the pact’s secret protocol, and Alexander Yakovlev,
an adviser to Gorbachev, ‘‘unequivocally’’ condemned it for
its role in preparing Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania (Beschloss and Talbott 1993:101).
Estonian leaders finally declared independence on
August 20, 1991, shortly after a failed coup led by conservatives
in the Soviet army. The Dutch government,
speaking on behalf of the European Community, announced
on August 27 that ‘‘the Community and its
member States warmly welcome the restoration of the
sovereignty and independence of the Baltic States, which
they lost in 1940’’ (Rich 1993:38, emphasis added). President
George H. W. Bush announced on September 2 the
establishment of diplomatic relations with Estonia, Latvia,
and Lithuania, noting that this marked ‘‘the culmination
of the United States’ 52 year refusal to accept the forcible
incorporation of the independent Baltic States by the
USSR’’ (Rich 1993:38).13
Crucially, western governments
were not simply recognizing the independence of Estonia
as if it were seceding from the Soviet Union but, rather,
the restoration of the Estonian republic’s sovereign independence.
Their agreement about the illegality of the
Soviet annexation allowed Estonian nationalist leaders
to frame their drive for independence not as a vulgar
nationalist attempt at domination but, rather, as an internationally
justifiable effort to restore the sovereignty of
the pre-Soviet nation-state. Therefore, despite the heightened
drama of the (re)independence movement, its success
hinged on the technical argument for resolving the
Soviet Union’s 1940 violation of international law (Pettai
and Hallik 2002:510).
The legal restoration of the pre-Soviet Estonian nation-state
would have negative consequences for Sovietera
Russian speakers, as it directly implicated post-Soviet
Estonia’s citizenship policy. Because the international
community restored a state whose sovereignty was illegally
held in abeyance, then, it followed that the Estonian
Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR) never legally existed. Because
the ESSR never legally existed, it also followed that
Russian speakers who had arrived during the Soviet era
had not been legally admitted into Estonia. They were,
thus, denied citizenship in reindependent Estonia, classified
as aliens, and required to apply for residency permits
to legalize their status. Despite having been born or lived
most of their lives in Estonia, they could only obtain citizenship
through naturalization, and, in accordance with
European norms, they were denied minority rights because
these are only available to citizens.14
Only those
who were citizens of the pre-Soviet republic, or descendents
of citizens, were entitled to automatic citizenship in
post-Soviet Estonia, as the logic of state restoration carried
with it the restoration of citizenship.15
Some 75,000 Russian
speakers received citizenship on this basis.
Although successful as a technical–legal argument,
the denial of citizenship was understood as a necessary
move to preserve the Estonian language and culture. At a
western-funded 1999 conference boldly entitled ‘‘Integration,
Education and Language: On the Brink of the New
Millennium in Multicultural Estonia,’’ the Estonian scholar
Priit Ja¨rve (1999:4) explained the prevailing logic behind
citizenship policy: Naturalization is necessary to help
Russian speakers develop ties to sovereign Estonia, to learn
the sole official language of Estonian, and to become
acquainted with Estonian culture, all of which would
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
682
prepare them to assume the rights and responsibilities of
citizenship. In contrast, automatic citizenship would allow
Russian speakers to elect enough members of parliament
to pass a constitutional amendment declaring Russian a
second official language. This would, presumably, lead to
Russian becoming the de facto sole official language because
far more Estonians spoke Russian than Russian
speakers who spoke Estonian.16
If this situation were to
occur, then it would moot the Estonian nation-state, as the
ostensible purpose of a state is to protect the nation
(linguistically and culturally defined) in whose name it
exists. The argument registered with western officials. A
Swedish diplomat sentimentally recalled what a senior
Estonian official had once told him: ‘‘You must understand
that the language is the only thing we have. People come
from all over the world back to Estonia, but with different
experiences. Language is what keeps us together.’’
The technical–legal logic underpinning the restoration
of Estonian sovereignty and the denial of citizenship
contained within it the basic assumption that international
security is a matter of aligning national cultures with
territorial states. In effect, the object of state security was
not cast as protecting the life and limb of individual
Estonians but, rather, the putative cultural and linguistic
milieu in which Estonians become self-actualized. In this
context, the state could argue that Soviet-era Russian
speakers were a threat not for any deed that they had
done but, rather, who they were in cultural terms. Diplomacy’s
cultural fundamentalist premise enabled this
argument as it frames minorities and immigrants as a
destabilizing presence in a putatively homogeneous state
by virtue of carrying an alien national culture. By the end
of the 1990s, therefore, security debates in Estonia were
no longer cast in military terms but, rather, in terms of
minority demographics and the divergent cultures of
Estonians and Russians (Kuus 2002:299). In 2001, the
Estonian Foreign Ministry’s National Security Concept
explicitly stated that Estonia perceived no threat from
another state (Kuus 2002:303) while, simultaneously, the
Ethnic Affairs Ministry justified the State Programme on
the claim that unintegrated Russian speakers were social
and security threats (Estonian Government 2000:sect 3.1).
In sum, the territorial imaginary reframes (inter)national
security from a narrow question of military aggression to
a vague question of one’s cultural disposition. Diplomacy
assumes a national security risk when the sovereign state
does not regulate alien individuals through immigration
and naturalization procedures.
Defining the stateless: It depends what the
meaning of the word minority is
By the early 1990s, OSCE missions had opened up in
virtually every country of the former East bloc with the
task of identifying and resolving nationalist conflicts before
they led to interstate violence. Max van der Stoel,
OSCE’s former high commissioner on national minorities
([HCNM] 1992–2001), argued in 1993 that if the Estonian
government tried to assert the ‘‘privileged position’’ of the
Estonian population, then it would generate ‘‘considerable
risk’’ of increased tension with the non-Estonian population
as well as negatively affect relations between Estonia
and the Russian Federation (OSCE 2004). Through ‘‘silent
diplomacy’’, OSCE pressured the Estonian government
to legally treat its large noncitizen population as citizens
(and therefore ‘‘minorities’’) lest the predicted gloomier
scenario materialize.
The crux of this matter unfolded according to state
sovereignty in diplomatic correspondence between the
HCNM and former acting Estonian Foreign Minister Riivo
Sinija¨rv in October and November 1996.17
The HCNM
wrote that the Estonian prime minister had informed
him that, on signing the Council of Europe’s Framework
Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, the
government would make a reservation stating that the
document would only apply to nonethnic Estonians who
were Estonian citizens. The HCNM put forth the following
argument in disapproval of the government’s decision:
The Framework Convention was drafted with the aim
to transform to the greatest possible extent the political
commitments adopted by the CSCE (now OSCE)
into legal obligations, (pursuant to Appendix II of the
Vienna Declaration of 9 October 1993). It is also
relevant to recall that Estonia, on acceding to the CSCE
in September 1991, has not made any reservations
regarding the political commitments relating to national
minorities in the various CSCE documents . . .
I am making these remarks in order to make clear that
many articles of the Framework Convention have a
close resemblance to CSCE Commitments (especially
the 1990 CSCE Copenhagen Document on the Human
Dimension) while several resemble articles in the UN
Declaration of 1985. Against this background there is
in my view a risk that making the intended reservation
to the Framework Convention without some clarifying
remarks might lead to fears and concerns about an
intended change of Estonia’s policies regarding noncitizens
living in Estonia, which, I would hope and
expect, are in reality unfounded. I would therefore
recommend that your Government would make it clear
that the intended reservation will not in any way
change Estonia’s international commitments and obligations,
and that the reservation does not signify that
the Government intends to restrict the existing rights
of non-citizens living on its territory. [Minelres 1996a]
Significantly, the HCNM was not appealing to Estonia’s explicit
legal obligations but, rather, mustering an argument
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
683
on the basis of what he saw as a resemblance to a different
international agreement. The Estonian foreign minister
would not miss this point.
Sinija¨rv’s reply to the HCNM included an addendum
commenting on Estonia’s legal commitments under the
Framework Convention. The first item in the addendum
explained the difference between a ‘‘reservation’’ and a
‘‘declaration,’’ according to international law. The HCNM
incorrectly thought that the Estonian government was
adding the former, rather than the latter. A reservation,
the addendum explained, refers to portions of the legal
text that will be excluded or modified during implementation,
whereas a declaration specifies how certain
terms will be understood during implementation (Minelres
1996b:sect. 1). The significance of highlighting the HCNM’s
error was much deeper than merely clarifying terminology.
Sinija¨rv’s point acted as a reminder to the HCNM that
sovereign states have the right to interpret certain passages
in legal texts as they see fit. In this case, the Framework
Convention cedes the authority to define ‘‘national minority’’
to the sovereign state and only requires that citizens of
the state receive minority-rights protection.18
The foreign minister’s addendum, then, pointed out
that there is no universally accepted definition of the term
national minority in international law. Instead, the international
custom is to follow Francesco Capotorti’s definition,
written in his review of Article 27 of the 1966 UN
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:
a group numerically inferior to the rest of the population
of a State, in a non-dominant position, whose
members—being nationals of the State—possess
ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics differing
from those of the rest of the population and show, if
only implicitly, as sense of solidarity, directed towards
preserving their culture, tradition, religion or language.
[Thornberry 1991:6, emphasis added]19
The addendum further notes that the Framework Convention
refrains from defining national minority, which
means ‘‘the Contracting Parties [may] define the exact
scope of its application’’ (Minelres 1996b:sect. 3). It then
explains that the 1990 Copenhagen Document did not
solve this definitional problem either, which means that
OSCE commitments are ‘‘of a strictly political nature’’
(Minelres 1996b:sect. 4). The addendum also cast a different
light on the HCNM’s claim that the Framework
Convention was drafted to transform OSCE political commitments
into legal obligations. It argues that ‘‘para 27 of
the Explanatory Report [of the Framework Convention]
merely states that the [Copenhagen] Document has provided
‘guidance’ for the drafting of the Framework Convention’’
(Minelres 1996b:sect. 4). The foreign minister,
thus, argued that the Framework Convention does not
singularly derive from the Copenhagen Document, a point
that further undermined the HCNM’s attempts to force
the Estonian government to give up its declaration. To
be sure, the Estonian foreign minister and the HCNM
both interpreted paragraph 27 reasonably, but the terms
political and guidance are vague enough to have allowed
the Estonian foreign minister to repel the HCNM’s recommendations
through his invocation of state sovereignty.
Because of international law and diplomatic custom, the
Estonian government never heeded the demand that its
stateless population be treated as citizens of the republic.
Managing the stateless: Developing an ethnic
integration policy
Even though noncitizen Russian speakers could not be
officially classified as minorities (and, therefore, were not
treated as citizens), by the late 1990s western officials
pushed the Estonian government to develop a plan to
integrate Russian speakers into Estonian society. This
became a stated condition of E.U. accession (E.C. 1999).
In effect, the E.C. urged that the Estonian government
solve the ‘‘problem’’ that international recognition of
Estonia’s restored status had legitimized. Again, the territorial
imaginary functioned as the prism through which
this ‘‘challenge’’ was conceived and as the template by
which Nordic and Estonian officials could dominate the
integration process over the interests of Russian speakers.
The Nordic embassies in Estonia had pursued dozens
of small-scale integration projects but found that running
them overstretched their time and resources. One diplomat
admitted, ‘‘I would never be able to know the individual
organizations [that submit applications]. I run
other programs in Estonia from the embassy, and it is
difficult to know the local situation. Evaluating project
applications is difficult.’’ Simultaneously, the UNDP’s
deputy chief of mission in Estonia found that the government
lacked the capacity to manage the funds offered by
western donors:
The Estonian government did not, until 1997, see a
need for an integration policy. ‘‘Integration’’ was not
used. People talked about adult language learning,
human rights, and discrimination. When I was at the
Ministry of Education as an UN volunteer, we were
subject to a barrage of projects with foreign aid
funding and no Estonian organizations to implement
them. What made the work difficult is that the
Ministry did not give us guidelines. They thought the
issue was only a fire that needed to be put out. We
tried to use the resources the best we could. No one
wanted to deal with adult language learning. . . .
Donors were looking for a national partner to deal
with. There was no one contact organization. It fell
between the gaps.
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
684
Therefore, UNDP joined forces with the Nordic embassies
in 1998 to create and fund a major integration project,
based on the smaller existing projects, which they tellingly
entitled ‘‘The Nordic/UNDP Project: Support to the State
Integration Programme’’ (NUP). Among other initiatives,
NUP funded a series of activities aimed at the ‘‘capacitybuilding
of the Non-Estonians Integration Foundation’’ so
that the Estonian government could absorb western funds
and oversee the management of the integration on its
own. It also identified the integration policy problem in
the form of the ‘‘many non-Estonians still [living] in socalled
micro-societies, the existence of which contributes
to an undesirable model of ‘two societies in one state’ ’’
(UNDP 1998:7). NUP’s long-term goal testifies more clearly
to the role of the territorial imaginary in conceptualizing
policy solutions pertaining to minority–state relations:
‘‘preserving both stability and a commitment to the protection
and continued development of Estonian culture’’
(UNDP 1998:13). In effect, the desirable model, like those
in Denmark and the United Kingdom, is one in which
minorities and noncitizens adopt the language and culture
of the national majority rather than one that cedes cultural
space to national minorities.
NUP’s administration also said much about how the
territorial imaginary, particularly its emphasis on state
sovereignty, informed the daily practices of these elites
of statecraft. Despite being funded by western sources,
the Estonian minister of ethnic affairs chaired its steering
committee. Other committee members included the director
of the Integration Foundation and two prominent
Estonian sociologists. UNDP’s resident representative
(akin to an ambassador) and program manager for ethnic
integration were regular attendees. The ambassadors of
Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Sweden were also on
the committee. That their first secretaries—usually the
highest-ranked officials in small embassies behind the
ambassadors—attended on their behalf, however, suggests
the low priority that these ambassadors gave to integration.
Two Russian speakers were also on the committee,
although they rarely attended meetings. One was a member
of parliament (MP). Because his presence was regularly
required in Tallinn’s Old Town, he found it difficult to
attend meetings at the Integration Foundation, located in
the suburbs. The other was a journalist who grew dismayed
with the committee for not accepting his ideas for integration
projects. He explained that ‘‘I’m very passive. Why to
do decorative roles. My proposals and opinions don’t have
any role. In the beginning, I was very active. . . . Really, this
Integration Foundation, where there are no Russians [working],
wants to control the integration process. Estonians
make proposals and Russians must accept it.’’
The weak presence of Russian speakers on the steering
committee rarely came up during committee meetings.
Only the technical, administrative questions were discussed:
Are enough funds remaining to run a given
language-training program for the fiscal year? Are plans
coming along to hold the next conference on multiculturalism?
Are the newspapers reporting on our integration
activities? Tensions between western officials and
their Estonian counterparts pivoted on finance and administration,
particularly, on when the Estonian government
would take over full responsibility for the integration
process. The point was illustrated at one meeting when
a diplomat asked, ‘‘What will be the role of the donors
[Nordic embassies] after 2001?’’ The minister replied that
‘‘the integration budget for 2000 is 58 million Estonian
Kroons. More than half is paid for by the donors. It is not
possible that the state will finance the full 60 million after
2000. We still need donors.’’ The reply came with a smile
conveying polite assertion, not embarrassment.
To be sure, the continuation of western funds for
integration was never in serious doubt. In venues outside
of steering-committee meetings, both Estonian and
western officials were more candid about the availability
of western funds. The same diplomat who asked about
the donors’ role explained that ‘‘Norway’s money will
continue for some time.’’ Indeed, integration fit into the
Norwegian Foreign Ministry’s development objectives,
which the diplomat listed in priority as northwest Russia,
the Baltic states, and Poland. Integration in Estonia, he
explained, fulfilled two ministry objectives, as it would
reorient Russians in Estonia away from Moscow and
toward Tallinn and western Europe, in general. Other
officials were even more explicit about the link between
integration and security, as shown by the reaction of a
Finnish diplomat on the steering committee to a blunt
comment from a vitriolic Estonian nationalist MP. The
MP once remarked that the Nordic governments are not
interested in integration for humanitarian reasons but,
rather, for ‘‘their own security. They wish to have stability
in northern Europe so they take interest in keeping ethnic
relations regulated. Neither are there business interests
because Estonia is too small; and nor labor, the country is,
again, too small.’’ When I presented the Finnish diplomat
with this viewpoint, he smiled curtly and said, ‘‘It’s pretty
well put. Stability is a major part of our policy. And
integration is essential in that context.’’ Recognizing the
importance of that context, a leading Estonian sociologist
on minority issues summarized it concisely when asked
why western funding for integration was so easily attained:
‘‘[Relative] to other issues, it’s comparatively easy. They’ve
been watching Yugoslavia. They are ready to pay because
they are afraid.’’ A tacit understanding existed among
Estonian officials and Nordic diplomats that western
funding would continue largely because integration was a
‘‘problem’’ understood in terms of (inter)national security.
Ultimately, this culture-cum-security thesis premised
the State Programme, which the government approved in
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
685
March 2000.20
It also received considerable political and
financial backing from the Nordic countries through NUP
as well as the European Union through a separate largescale
Estonian language training program.21
On the one
hand, the document framed the Estonian language as
Russian speakers’ ‘‘outlet to the rest of society’’ and their
key to social mobility (Estonian Government 2000:sect
3.1). On the other hand, resembling the concern of cultural
fundamentalists, it assumed that continued use of the
Russian language would lead (stressed again) to ‘‘the formation
of a ‘two societies in one country’ model in
Estonia, which may become dangerous both socially and
from the point of view of security policy’’ (Estonian Government
2000:sect 3.1).
This security premise, which had underpinned integration
debates and policies in Estonia throughout the
1990s (Feldman 2005a), set up the State Programme’s
expected outcome: the creation of ‘‘the Estonian model of
a multicultural society, which is characterized by the principles
of cultural pluralism, a strong common core, and the
preservation and development of the Estonian cultural
domain’’ (Estonian Government 2000:sect. 3.4). ‘‘Cultural
pluralism’’ is to occur under the conditions of the Framework
Convention, which, ironically, states that ‘‘without
prejudice to measures taken in pursuance of their general
integration policy, the Parties shall refrain from policies or
practices aimed at assimilation’’ (Council of Europe
1995b:sect. II, art. 5, para. 1 and 2). In other words, the
Framework Convention itself is subordinate to the state’s
integration policy. ‘‘A strong common core’’ is to be based
on the use of the Estonian language in the public sphere
(Estonian Government 2000:sect. 3.4). The Estonian language
is the tool by which society is to be united, lest
distinct linguistic groups lapse into conflict. Public life is to
be ordered through the use of the Estonian language.22
Hence, 81 percent of the 2000 budget for the State
Programme was committed to teaching the Estonian language
to Russian speakers. The phrase ‘‘Estonian cultural
domain’’ signals the top priority given to the preservation
and development of the Estonian culture (Estonian Government
2000:sect. 3.4), a constitutional objective of the
Estonian state.23
The government committee that wrote the
State Programme circulated a draft to leaders of nationalminority
associations for their comments but only after its
basic goals and premises were established. As a leader of a
non-Slavic minority association joked, ‘‘It was funny to get
acquainted with a document that was already resolved.’’
Elites of statecraft in Estonia did not envision that the
State Programme’s goal of an ‘‘Estonian cultural domain’’
would segregate Russian speakers from Estonians. Similar
to liberals in the United Kingdom, their strategy was to
increase Russian speakers’ opportunities to learn the Estonian
language and about the Estonian culture, thereby
hastening their integration into Estonian society. Working
through the territorial imaginary, however, the State Programme’s
effect is still to make a single language and
culture isomorphic with the state by co-opting minorities
and noncitizens into reproducing them for the nationstate
(Feldman 2005c). It is worth noting that minority
leaders also viewed the security of the Estonian state in
culturally fundamentalist terms, showing how disagreement
is contained within a common discursive field. One
prominent Russian journalist explained that
it’s easier to assimilate a minority of 10 percent, but
30 percent is dangerous for the nation. This might
cost both groups their identity. Estonians are afraid of
the appearance of minorities but Russians here are not
identifying with Russians in Russia. If Russians here
do not have the chance to form a subnation . . . they
might form criminal subactivity, and a shady economy.
What the journalist cited as a condition of intrastate security,
however—the creation of a Russian subnation—the
Estonian government cited as a security threat.
The Nordic diplomats’ support for the Estonian government’s
State Programme (and, hence, its construction
of a security threat) shows how their agenda differed from
that of OSCE. The diplomats aimed to institutionalize
ethnic integration, whereas OSCE officials focused more
on how integration actually affects Russian speakers. In a
group interview, the diplomats explained that they pursued
a two-track strategy in Estonia: On one track, they
supported the Estonian government’s efforts to expedite
the integration process, and, on the other track, they
supported OSCE’s efforts to ensure that the Estonian
government meets international standards on minority
and human rights. In practice, they left the latter track
entirely to OSCE. One of them later explained, ‘‘We have to
understand that [OSCE has] a mission to know the nittygritty,
but for us and the other embassies we need to
decide which places need institutional support. Really
what is important is that there is a bag of money [for the
State Programme].’’ When asked why establishing an ‘‘Estonian
cultural domain’’ was an uncontroversial (and
ironic) goal for a minority integration program, the UNDP
deputy chief of mission succinctly explained that ‘‘most
people have accepted the linguistic premise of integration.
Every country draws the line somewhere. [Pressuring
Estonia further] would violate sovereignty.’’
Marginalizing the stateless: Minority leaders
among the elites of statecraft
In addition to policy meetings, elites of statecraft met in
several different venues to either formally or informally
discuss matters of ethnic integration. These events followed
a routine format, demonstrating how the territorial
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
686
imaginary allows officials representing nation-states to
assume a disproportionate amount of control over integration
policy in comparison with noncitizens and minority
leaders. Usually held in some landmark Estonian
building, these events featured the regular circle of representatives
from the Estonian government, western diplomatic
community, and national-minority associations.
Western diplomats would maintain a cool distance from
minority leaders, whereas minority leaders would corner
OSCE officials to press their case to liberalize the government’s
integration policy.
For example, the OSCE mission held a reception in
March 2000 in Tallinn’s Old Town Hall to introduce their
new ambassador.24
As the Estonian government had just
approved the State Programme a few days earlier, much
chatter among the guests was about the document. In the
receiving line, I stood behind a western ambassador I had
met at an earlier function. I asked him what he thought of
the State Programme. His expression suggested that integration
is not a high priority, and he responded, ‘‘The point
is to put our full support behind it.’’ (His first secretary later
asserted that, because of the State Programme, ‘‘Estonia as
a concept works. There aren’t major ethnic problems.’’) I
inched my way forward until I was greeted by the OSCE
mission’s first secretary from Finland, who specialized in
education and integration in Estonia. She proposed that we
meet to discuss integration, as it was an interest we
shared. The new ambassador, whose hand I shook next,
seconded the offer. After confirming the interview, I
approached the buffet line and encountered a Nordic
diplomat. I decided to see how he would respond to feedback
I had received on the NUP media campaign to promote
the benefits of integration in Estonia. ‘‘Oh, please
tell,’’ he said, feigning excitement but certainly interested. I
told him that many Russians and Estonians that I had
talked to saw the policy as ‘‘an E.U. version of Soviet propaganda.’’
I added that ‘‘people joke that in the Soviet Union
all languages and cultures were equal, but that Russian
was more equal than others. Now they say that about Estonian.’’
This feedback suggested to me that neither Estonians
nor Russian speakers saw a basic difference between how
the European Union and the Soviet Union managed language
and cultural policy. I then reported that ‘‘someone
else compared the media campaign to advertisements
selling Palmolive soap.’’ ‘‘Yeah, but soap sells,’’ he replied,
sniffing confirmation that his government’s foreign policy
in Estonia was working despite public skepticism.
Apart from polite introductions and pleasant small
talk, little engaged discussion occurred between western
diplomats and minority leaders. The latter, instead, seized
the opportunity to launch their grievances to OSCE
officials. Away from the buzz of the buffet table and the
wet bar, two prominent minority leaders looked exasperated
as they stressed a list of important points to a mission
member, a German lawyer who was fluent in Russian.
His body language and facial expression revealed that
he understood their position but could do nothing about
it. Later, speaking with his Finnish counterpart, this
official lambasted the Estonian government for not taking
language training and economic development seriously
enough. In reaction to his outbreak, uncharacteristic for
an OSCE official, his Finnish colleague nodded her head in
agreement, but, again testifying to the importance of state
sovereignty, she stressed, ‘‘They are doing all that they have
to, which is more than many E.U. countries . . . look
at France!’’
The format was the same at events in different venues,
as explicitly demonstrated at a 1999 Nordic-funded conference
on multiculturalism entitled ‘‘Cultural Plurality
in Estonia: Policies and Solutions.’’ A British, a Canadian,
and an Estonian scholar each gave keynote lectures. Only
three Russian speakers and no noncitizens were included
among the other 25 speakers. Very few were even invited to
attend. The remaining speakers and attendees were Estonian
scholars and officials as well as scholars and officials
from the Nordic countries, United Kingdom, Holland, and
Canada. One of the western keynote speakers, who regularly
lectured on multiculturalism in eastern Europe
throughout the 1990s, cynically remarked, ‘‘These conferences
are 90 percent formality but 10 percent of the
people are probably interested in hearing different ideas.
At least, it’s good for networking and trading business cards
and meeting people. It’s foreign funding so they have to
bring in foreign experts. Most of the audience wouldn’t
mind if I wasn’t here.’’ A Russian-speaking human-rights
advocate who attended the conference expressed similar
skepticism about these types of events:
These conferences have the same format: Estonians
present opening speeches and ceremonies, Estonians
make their remarks and contributions, then they
leave and don’t wait for discussion. The Danes once
tried to organize a dialogue between Russian and
Estonian journalists with the same result. It reflects
the real separation between the two communities.
Nonetheless, Russian-speaking leaders also organized
events to which they invited western officials, but even
in these venues they had limited ability to prompt these
officials to seriously challenge the Estonian government’s
integration policy. For example, minority leaders convened
a meeting of the President’s Roundtable on Ethnic
Affairs to openly discuss a draft of the State Programme
in November 1999.25
The advisor for ethnic integration to
the minister for ethnic affairs was invited to present the
draft to the roundtable. Western officials in attendance
included an OSCE official as well as diplomats from the
Danish, Norwegian, and U.S. embassies. Steering the
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
687
meeting toward administrative issues, the advisor started
his presentation by saying that ‘‘we have to talk not so
much about ‘what to do’ but ‘how to do it.’ ’’ After hearing
his lengthy presentation, Estonian- and Russian-speaking
members doubted that the state’s financial, administrative,
and educational systems were capable of teaching
the Estonian language on such a large scale. An MP from
the nationalist Pro Patria Union asked how the State
Programme would be funded, given the cutbacks in the
state budget as a part of Estonia’s market reforms necessary
for E.U. accession. The advisor assured him (if he was
really concerned) that foreign aid was available.
A leader of a local ethnic Russian cultural society
complained about the State Programme’s decentralized
approach to integration, as its responsibilities are dispersed
among four ministries over which the minister for ethnic
affairs has no authority: ‘‘There is a Russian saying that
‘seven caretakers don’t take care of the child.’ There is not
one organization in charge of integration overall.’’ She then
added that ‘‘there is a pathological attitude about learning
the language.’’ A prominent member then shifted the
discussion from the administration to the politics of integration:
‘‘What is really behind integration for certain
political forces? We have known ‘what’ and ‘how’ but not
‘what for.’ This document is to protect the Estonian language.
They would like to create an assimilated not an
integrated society. We must find from where these desires
come. This is a seven-year version of a five-year plan.’’ In
contrast to the advisor’s managerial approach, this member
was not asking ‘‘how to do it’’ but, rather, what the
government’s policy was for. His equation of the document
with a Soviet five-year plan was a clever tactic that compared
the government to the former occupying power in
an attempt to delegitimize its authority. The fit between
the State Programme and western diplomats’ vision of international
security, however, undermines the charge that
the policy is a legacy of Soviet public administration.
Ultimately, the protests from roundtable members
had no impact, as the draft of the State Programme
discussed in the presence of these diplomats differed very
little from the final draft that the government approved.
Western diplomats did not question the premises of the
State Programme either in this meeting or in later meetings
at the Integration Foundation. The only western
official to comment at the roundtable meeting was a
Swedish first secretary from the OSCE mission, who said
that he looked ‘‘forward to seeing the budget. Values are
expressed in terms of money.’’ (That the E.U. PHARE
Programme and the Nordic countries pay for over half of
its cost testifies to the value that western diplomats place
on the State Programme.) The OSCE official also added
that Russians in Estonia should be called ‘‘Russian Estonians,’’
rather than ‘‘non-Estonians,’’ just as members of
the Swedish minority in Finland are called ‘‘Swedish
Finns,’’ rather than ‘‘non-Finns.’’ As evidence of the label’s
positive effects on integration in Finland, he noted that
Swedish Finns cheer for Finland, rather than Sweden,
when the two countries’ hockey teams face off in the ice
rink. Blank Estonian and Russian faces stared back at him,
puzzling over the naive example he introduced. Minority
leaders are less concerned with ‘‘hyphenated’’ nationalities
than they are with influencing the objectives of the
government’s State Programme.
The stereotyped pattern of these events reflects the
structural marginalization of minority leaders in diplomatic
affairs. Ethnic integration is just such an affair, given
its implications for secure interstate borders in the diplomatic
imagination. Minority leaders only have limited
success in mobilizing OSCE’s support because OSCE is an
intergovernmental organization that must honor state sovereignty.
This fact frustrates mission members as well as
minority leaders, insofar as they work hard to ensure life
chances for minorities and noncitizens. They find themselves
not simply running up against obstinate officials
representing a nation-state, however, but against the obstinate
principle of state sovereignty, which inherently privileges
the lives of some national groups over others.
By 2000, the E.C. (2000:18) declared that Estonia had
fulfilled OSCE recommendations on naturalization and
citizenship. The following year’s E.U. accession progress
report similarly noted that Estonia’s Citizenship Law
‘‘is generally in line with international standards’’ (E.C.
2001:21) and that the rights of Russian speakers ‘‘continue
to be largely observed and safeguarded’’ (E.C. 2001:22). The
report’s main concern was that the Estonian government
continues ‘‘to devote adequate resources and give
proper attention to all elements of the integration program’’
(E.C. 2001:23). Former Danish Prime Minister Poul
Nyrup Rasmussen even upheld the State Programme as a
model for all of Europe (de Souza 2001). In 2003, Guenter
Verheugen, E.U. commissioner in charge of enlargement,
asserted during a speech at the Diplomatic Academy of
Moscow that ‘‘it is internationally accepted that certain
constitutional rights are reserved for those who are citizens
of the country. . . . Stateless people in Latvia and
Estonia will enjoy the rights of permanent residents in
the EU, but they won’t have the rights determined by
citizenship and cannot automatically claim the rights
given to EU citizens under EU law’’ (Radio Free Europe/
Radio Liberty 2003). Estonia completed accession negotiations
in 2003 and joined the European Union in May
2004, at which point 160,000 Russian speakers were still
stateless (Estonian Foreign Ministry 2004).26
Conclusion: Images of Europe
This article has asked how it is possible to deny 500,000
Soviet-era Russian speakers citizenship in post-Soviet
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
688
Estonia and to subsequently develop an integration policy
that seeks to establish the ‘‘Estonian cultural domain.’’ The
answer requires situating Estonia’s particular citizenship
and integration policy in a broader European discourse
of state, culture, security, and territory to explain why the
European Union and western governments so readily
supported it. The relative ease with which policy makers
implemented these decisions was enabled by the assumption
that the unregulated presence of the Other in a state’s
territory constitutes a(n) (inter)national security risk. State
sovereignty plays a pivotal role in structuring interaction
among elites of statecraft, as the territorial imaginary is
built on the notion that states represent putatively homogenous
national cultures. For western officials, it normalized
the Estonian decision to deny citizenship to Soviet-era
Russian speakers. It also allowed the Estonian foreign
minister to repel OSCE pressure to include noncitizen
Russian speakers under the same rubric as ‘‘national
minorities.’’ Furthermore, it brought Nordic and Estonian
officials together for the common purpose of establishing
the Estonian cultural domain with the only
point of contention between them being the speed with
which the Estonian government would take full control
of the process. The efforts of minority leaders and OSCE
officials to liberalize Estonia’s integration policy were
largely dashed, given the privileged position of the language
and culture of the national majority in the diplomatic
imagination.
The Estonian case is not remarkable for its own historical
idiosyncrasies but, rather, for what it reveals about
the European logic of international relations and minority–
state relations. Estonia’s ‘‘return to Europe’’ consolidated
the nation-state around citizenship and minority issues.
The culturally exclusionist premise of the State Programme
results from Estonia’s status as a basic European nationstate,
rather than a particular, post-Soviet ‘‘East European’’
nation-state. To be sure, the State Programme aims to
expand the life chances of Russian speakers. Yet this goal
is based on the assumption that an (inter)national security
risk is at hand if the ‘‘alien’’ population—even if it is from
the country in which it lives—does not reproduce the
language and culture of the national majority. This assumption
warranted the denial of citizenship to Soviet-era
Russian speakers not because of what they had done
but, rather, because of the way they were classified in
diplomatic practice. The question of how this situation
was logically possible is of high anthropological importance,
as it drives at issues of power, social regulation, and
the use of ‘‘culture’’ as a securitized object in mass society.
An examination of this issue, however, requires inverting
anthropology’s preferred approach to the study of power.
It asks not how individuals respond to their marginal
position but, rather, how policy elites can legitimately place
particular individuals in disadvantaged positions. The
territorial imaginary does not determine this outcome.
Instead, it functions as a template of spatial order in
diplomatic practice that contains the range of acceptable
ways to interpret national history and classify an otherwise
undifferentiated population.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This article would not have been possible
without the assistance of the many people working on integration
in Estonia who offered their time and insights. To them, I extend
my deepest gratitude. Although they are too many to name here,
they include the staff of the Integration Foundation, the UNDP
Mission to Estonia, Nordic and British diplomats in Estonia,
officials from the OSCE Mission to Estonia, officials from the
E.C. delegation to Estonia, and the numerous people working in
national-minority associations. I would like to thank John Borneman,
Christian Joppke, Cris Shore, and Levent Soysal for their
insightful comments as well as John Burdick and Hugh Gusterson
for their encouragement along the way. A particular debt of
gratitude goes to Virginia Dominguez and Merje Kuus for their
strategic input. This article has also benefited from presentations
at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University;
the Culture in Global Affairs Program at the George
Washington University; and the Departments of Geography and
Anthropology/Sociology at the University of British Columbia.
The usual disclaimers apply. Research was supported by a Fulbright
Fellowship to Estonia (1999–2000) and a David L. Boren
Fellowship (2000–01).
1. ‘‘Ethnic integration’’ refers to the Estonian government’s selfdescribed
efforts to bring Russian speakers into the mainstream
of Estonian society by increasing their command of the Estonian
language and knowledge of Estonian culture. I use the term ethnic
not with the aim of reproducing the civic–ethnic dichotomy but to
distinguish between the national groups living in Estonia: Estonians
and the various groups of Russian speakers, mainly Russians,
Byelorussians, and Ukrainians. Using the term Estonians without
such a modification could suggest either ethnic Estonians or
citizens of Estonia, who include many ethnic Russians and others.
Furthermore, ‘‘minority’’ integration is not an accurate phrase, as a
member of a minority is legally understood to be a citizen of his or
her country of residence, regardless of national background. Integration
in Estonia is not particular to citizens but, rather, to all
nonethnic Estonians. Nationality is also ambiguous because this
can refer to either citizenship or ‘‘ethnicity.’’
2. I avoid capitalizing the terms eastern and western to avoid
essentialist connotations. The terms appear in lower case to
indicate nation-states or people representing nation-states on
either side of the old Iron Curtain. This is not a statement about
their essential qualities but, rather, a shorthand way of speaking
about people from particular parts of Europe. When referring to
an essentialist definition, as used either in scholarly writing or by
the elites of statecraft themselves, I place the capitalized term
in quotes to maintain analytical distance.
3. John Borneman makes a similar point when analyzing Yugoslavia’s
violent breakup by suggesting that ‘‘Eastern Europe is
engaged in a catching up process to the West, creating relatively
homogenous nation-states as a precondition for entrance into the
EU’’ (1998:281).
4. Studying up is still a fairly uncommon anthropological
project. Exceptions include Abe´le`s 1993; Abe´le`s et al. 1993; Gupta
1995; Gusterson 1996, 1997; Herzfeld 1992; Kertzer and Arel
2002:6; Marcus 1983; Shore 2000; Wedel 2001; and Zabusky 1995.
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
689
5. I have modified the term intellectuals of statecraft put forth
by Gearo´id O´ Tuathail and John Agnew (1992:193). This term
refers to the range of actors in academia, think tanks, and
defense institutions that specialize in matters of security and
state and from whom government officials draw their intellectual
capital.
6. Similarly, throughout the post–Cold War era, minorities
across Europe have been routinely framed as ‘‘problems’’ and
‘‘challenges’’ to the viability of the interstate system (cf. Ekeus
2003:1), much as they were after World War I (Arendt 1958:270;
Azca´rate 1945:3; Macartney 1934:179).
7. If a single Bosnian culture of multiculturalism, as it were,
emerged across the territory of the entire republic, then an isomorphism
between state and culture would still take hold at a
higher level of order. ‘‘Bosnians’’ would become synonymous with
the state’s territory, thus, transcending particular national identities
(much as E.C. officials hope that a European identity transcends
national identities across E.U. territorial space). Hayden’s
(2000:111–122) detailed analysis of the constitution of the Federation
of Bosnia-Herzegovina suggests such transcendence
would be difficult because of the federation’s administrative
structure, which is compartmentalized along nationalist lines.
For present purposes, however, the point is not to predict whether
nationalist identities remain or a collective identity that contains
national differences prevails. Rather, it is to recognize how
the territorial imaginary enables these two options (over others),
both of which assume that stability is a function of privileging
one cultural identity within a territorialized state or otherwise
bounded political unit.
8. The Bolshevik internationalist movement featured two postulates
about the existence of ethnic groups: (1) that an ethnic
group has a set of inalienable characteristics, including its own
territory, common language, and a distinct sociopsychological
mentality; and (2) that the existence and development of an
indigenous nation depends on its own statehood (Tishkov
2002:29). This conceptualization is closely related to that of the
Council of Europe’s 1995 Framework Convention for the Protection
of National Minorities, which seeks to create room for
national minorities in a political territory to which they are
presumably foreign. The Framework Convention’s understanding
of this task is premised on a construction of minorities that is
highly similar to the Bolshevik idea of ethnic groups: ‘‘The Parties
undertake to promote the conditions necessary for persons
belonging to national minorities to maintain and develop
their culture, and to preserve the essential elements of the identity,
namely their religion, language, traditions and cultural heritage’’
(Council of Europe 1995b:sect. II, art. 1, para. 1).
9. I do not argue here that members of different ethnic groups
would not come into conflict if elites of statecraft did not assume
that they would. Rather, that which is acted on as a national
security issue depends on its definition as such (cf. Campbell
1998:9–13; Weldes et al. 1999:9–13).
10. In violation of the pact, Nazi Germany occupied the country
for three years beginning in 1941 until the resumption of Soviet
rule in 1944. President Franklin Roosevelt still objected strongly to
the annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, but, sealing these
countries’ fate, he confided to Stalin that he would not go to war
with the Soviet Union over the issue (Vizulis 1985:72).
11. Most nonethnic Estonians (and their descendents) who
arrived in Estonia during the Soviet-era speak Russian as a first
language, regardless of their ethnicity.
12. For a detailed history of the restoration of Estonian independence
and the formation of Estonia’s citizenship laws, see
Lauristin and Vihalemm 1997 and Pettai and Hallik 2002.
13. The U.S. government officially recognized Estonian independence
on September 4, 1991.
14. The guidelines for citizenship and minority rights are mostly
found in a series of treaties and conventions produced by the
Council of Europe, which is composed of 45 member states and
is distinct from the European Union. OSCE is responsible for
observing how well an E.U. applicant state adheres to these
treaties and conventions, one of the most important being the
Framework Convention. The E.C. makes its judgment about
an applicant state’s preparedness for E.U. membership largely
on the basis of OSCE reports.
Estonia’s Citizenship Law stipulates the requirements for
naturalization: a five-year period of permanent residence in
post-Soviet Estonia, plus one year of residence after application;
successful completion of an Estonian language exam; successful
completion of a civics exam; a legal income sufficient to cover
subsistence for the applicant and his or her dependents; loyalty
to the Estonian state; and an oath of loyalty to the Estonian constitutional
order.
15. Stateless individuals in Estonia who are legal residents are
guaranteed social benefits and the right to vote in local elections,
but they lack the right to vote in national elections, to hold certain
public-sector jobs, and to belong to a political party. Naturalization
rates have slowed considerably since 1997 because those who
learned Estonian during the Soviet era have already acquired
citizenship. The remainder must learn the official language from
scratch. Although many former military personnel and their
families returned to Russia through repatriation programs sponsored
by the U.S., Dutch, and Swedish governments, the majority
of Russian speakers opted to stay in Estonia, as they had built
careers, raised families, and, in most cases, been born there. The
Estonian government ruled out territorial autonomy for the
Russian-speaking enclave in Ida-Virumaa (a county in northeastern
Estonia adjacent to Russia), as it would violate Estonia’s
territorial integrity.
16. Ja¨rve (1999:4) also points out that this argument remained
intact despite the virtual impossibility that enough Russian
speakers would ever be elected to parliament to carry out the
process of establishing Russian as a second official language. To
do so would require a two-thirds majority vote in parliament to
put the matter to a referendum. Given that Russian speakers only
form about one-third of the population and only 15 percent of
the citizenry, that enough parliamentarians would even agree to
the put the matter to the voting public is highly unlikely. Equally
unlikely, even if it were put to a referendum, is that it would
receive the requisite 50 percent of votes. Not enough Russian
speakers have citizenship (i.e., are eligible to vote in a referendum)
to pass the referendum.
17. Because OSCE relies on silent diplomacy to deal with
politically sensitive matters, its major opinions on how well a
government is meeting its international obligations are communicated
through diplomatic correspondence to avoid direct
confrontation. Silent diplomacy also allows OSCE to avoid embarrassing
the host nation-state and tempting the media to
sensationalize sensitive issues. Diplomatic letters offer rich
ethnographic material, as they are the medium through which
the E.U. accession criteria regarding minority rights are negotiated.
The production of an OSCE opinion follows a circuitous
path. The local mission first writes a report on the basis of its
own fact-finding investigations. The mission has access to a wide
range of people and information, including government data,
government officials, local officials, school administrators, and minority
leaders. This report is next sent to OSCE headquarters in
Vienna for further legal assessment and then to the HCNM’s office
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
690
in The Hague. The HCNM will then author a letter to the foreign
minister of the host country.
18. The Framework Convention’s explanatory report points out
that the authors of this text avoided trying to define national
minority. Instead, they ‘‘decided to adopt a pragmatic approach,
based on the recognition at this stage, it is impossible to arrive at
a definition capable of mustering general support of all Council of
Europe member States’’ (Council of Europe 1995a:para. 12).
19. The Estonian government’s declaration, deposited on
January 6, 1997, is as follows:
The Republic of Estonia understands the term ‘‘national
minorities’’, which is not defined in the Framework
Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, as
follows: are considered as [sic] ‘‘national minority’’
those citizens of Estonia who
-reside on the territory of Estonia;
-maintain longstanding, firm and lasting ties with
Estonia;
-are distinct from Estonians on the basis of their ethnic,
cultural, religious or linguistic characteristics;
-are motivated by a concern to preserve together their
cultural traditions, their religion or their language,
which constitute the basis of their common identity.
[Council of Europe 2003]
20. The Framework Convention for the Protection of National
Minorities backstops the State Programme’s security concern.
The former’s Explanatory Report makes clear that its call to
protect minority ‘‘ ‘traditions’ is not an endorsement or acceptance
of practices which are contrary to national law or international
standards. Traditional practices remain subject to
limitation arising from the requirements of public order’’ (Council
of Europe 1995a:para. 44). The concern with ‘‘public order’’
testifies to the conceptual link between state security and a clear
power differential between the majority and minority national
groups. In effect, the Framework Convention secures the national
majority as much as it protects national minorities, which traps
the multicultural politics of inclusion within the framework of
the nation-state’s exclusivist agenda.
21. The ease with which the State Programme passed western
standards and bypassed the concerns of Russian speakers
indicates the pivotal position of the sovereign nation-state in
minority–state relations in Europe. The precedent in European
law and custom backstops the State Programme’s strong emphasis
on the Estonian language and culture. The Framework Convention’s
deference to state sovereignty begins in the preamble,
which asserts the primacy of ‘‘the rule of law, respecting the
territorial integrity and national sovereignty of states’’ (Council of
Europe 1995b). The Framework Convention gives states ‘‘a measure
of discretion’’ in implementing its objectives on the grounds
that each state knows best how to manage minorities within its
own particular circumstances (Council of Europe 1995a:para 11).
Furthermore, it does not commit the signatory state to any financial
obligation toward establishing minority educational and
training institutions (Council of Europe 1995b:sect. II, art. 13, para.
1–2). Estonia had signed the Council of Europe’s Framework
Convention in 1995 and entered it into force in 1998. Meeting
the conditions of this international agreement is among the most
important steps in gaining E.C. approval on minority rights.
22. In March 2002, the parliament passed the Basic School
and Gymnasium Act, which requires Russian-medium secondary
schools to conduct 60 percent of their curriculum in the Estonian
language.
23. The preamble to the Estonian Constitution guarantees
‘‘the preservation and development of the Estonian nation and
culture throughout the ages’’ (Estonian State 1992). The official
Estonian version uses the term rahvas, which in English means
‘‘nation’’ in the civic sense, rather than rahvus, which connotes
the ethnic meaning of nation. Estonian administrators and officials,
however, operate almost entirely on the basis of the Estonian
rahvus when designing ethnic integration programs. This testifies
to Hayden’s (2000:15) point that nation-states may welcome
minorities as citizens although never fully accept them into
mainstream society. For a detailed analysis of the Estonian Constitution
as it pertains to citizenship, law, and ethnic relations,
see Ruutsoo 1998.
24. At an OSCE reception held the previous year in Estonia’s
national art gallery, I asked one mission member why the group
did not hold the reception in the lounge of Tallinn’s splendid
Russian Drama Theatre. Smilingly, he answered, ‘‘That wouldn’t
be tolerated.’’
25. President Lennart Meri created the President’s Roundtable
on Ethnic Affairs in 1993 as a way to promote interethnic
dialogue at a moment when ethnic tensions were high and the Red
Army was still present on Estonian soil. It is composed of leaders
of national cultural societies as well as Estonian and Russianspeaking
politicians and academics. The roundtable, which has
the power to submit legislation to parliament, is the most visible
and vocal forum for minority leaders in Estonia to express their
views regarding integration. The roundtable acts as the unofficial
representative of minorities to western embassies and the E.C.
Noncitizens may not join the roundtable because it is funded
through the office of the president.
26. By 2002, out of over 550,000 Russian speakers, 75,000 had
Estonian citizenship restored to them, 95,000 opted for Russian
or Ukrainian citizenship, about 120,000 had become naturalized
Estonian citizens, and approximately 9,000 were not registered
with the state at all (Estonian Foreign Ministry 2002). Roughly
110,000 emigrated from Estonia back to Russia or Ukraine during
the 1990s (Hallik 2002:69). The remaining 170,000 (as of 2002) are
stateless and living in Estonia on the basis of temporary or
permanent residency permits.
References cited
Abe´le`s, Marc
1993 Political Anthropology of a Transnational Institutional: The
European Parliament. French Political Science 11(1):1–19.
Abe´le`s, Marc, Ire`ne Bellier, and Marion McDonald
1993 Approche anthropologique de la Commission Europe´enne.
Brussels: European Commission.
Abrams, Philip
1988 Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State. Journal of
Historical Sociology 1(1):58–89.
Appadurai, Arjun
1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Arendt, Hannah
1958 The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: World.
Aretxaga, Begon˜a
2003 Maddening States. Annual Review of Anthropology
32:393–410.
Azca´rate, Pablo de
1945 League of Nations and National Minorities: An Experiment.
Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace.
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
691
Baumann, Gerd
1996 Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic
London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berdahl, Daphne, Matti Bunzl, and Martha Lampland, eds.
2000 Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern
Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
Beschloss, Michael, and Strobe Talbott
1993 At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the
Cold War. Boston: Little, Brown.
Borneman, John
1998 Subversion of International Order: Studies in the Political
Anthropology of Culture. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Brubaker, Rogers
1998 Myths and Misconceptions in the Study of Nationalism.
In The State of the State: Ernest Gellner and the Theory of
Nationalism. John A. Hall, ed. Pp. 272–306. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Burawoy, Michael, and Katherine Verdery, eds.
1999 Uncertain Transitions: Ethnographies of Change in the
Post-Socialist World. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Campbell, David
1998 Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the
Politics of Identity. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
1999 Apartheid Cartography: The Political Anthropology and
Spatial Effects of International Diplomacy in Bosnia. Political
Geography 18:395–435.
Cheah, Pheng
1998 Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical—Today. In Cosmopolitics.
Bruce Robbin and Pheng Cheah, eds. Pp. 20–41.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Council of Europe
1995a Explanatory Report: Framework Convention for the
Protection of National Minorities. Electronic document,
http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/Reports/Html/157.htm,
accessed August 15, 2002.
1995b Framework Convention for the Protection of National
Minorities. Electronic document, http://conventions.coe.int/
treaty/en/Treaties/Html/157.htm, accessed December 9,
2003.
2003 List of Declarations Made with Respect to Treaty No.
157: Framework Convention for the Protection of National
Minorities. Electronic document, http://conventions.coe.int/
Treaty/EN/CadreListeTraites.htm, accessed December 12.
Denich, Bette
1994 Dismembering Yugoslavia: Nationalist Ideologies and
the Symbolic Revival of Genocide. American Ethnologist
21(2):367–390.
Der Derian, James
1987 On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
de Souza, Nick
2001 Heads above the Rest. Worldlink, November–December.
Electronic document, http://www.worldlink.co.uk/stories/
storyReader$913, accessed January 9, 2003.
Donnan, Hastings, and Graham McFarlane
1997 Anthropology and Policy Research: The View from
Northern Ireland. In Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives
on Governance and Power. Cris Shore and Susan Wright,
eds. Pp. 261–281. London: Routledge.
Ekeus, Rolf
2003 ‘‘Toward a Europe for All’’ Address of Mr. Rolf Ekeus,
OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities to the
Programme Roundtable Conference Organized by the Netherlands
Helsinki Committee on ‘‘New Minorities’’: Inclusion
and Equality. Electronic document, http://www.osce.org/
documents/hcnm/2003/10/901_en.pdf, accessed, December 2.
Endre, Sirje, and Mart Laar
1997 Valitsus ko˜igutab rahvusriigi alustalasid (The government
is shaking the pillars of the nation-state). Eesti Pa¨evaleht,
December 12. Electronic document, http://www.zzz.ee/
epl-search/getart.py?id=43265&words=po˜lis, accessed
December 5, 1999.
Estonian Foreign Ministry
2002 Citizenship and Nationality. Electronic document, http://
www.vm.ee/estonia/kat_399/pea_172/2868.html, accessed
December 12, 2003.
2004 Citizenship and Integration. Electronic document, http://
www.vm.ee/estonia/kat_399/4518.html, accessed October 20.
Estonian Government
2000 State Programme: ‘‘Integration in Estonian Society 2000–
2007.’’ Tallinn: Estonian Government.
Estonian State
1992 Preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of Estonia.
Electronic document, http://www.president.ee/eng/
ametitegevus, accessed August 19, 2004.
European Commission (E.C.)
1999 Estonia: Accession Partnership 1999. Electronic document,
http://www.vm.ee/eng/euro/kat_316/2800.html, accessed
June 21, 2004.
2000 Estonia 2000: Regular Report from the Commission on
Estonia’s Progress Toward Accession. Tallinn: Delegation of
the European Commission to Estonia.
2001 Estonia 2001: Regular Report from the Commission on
Estonia’s Progress Toward Accession. Tallinn: Delegation of
the European Commission to Estonia.
Feldman, Allen
1991 Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and
Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Feldman, Gregory
2005a Essential Crises: A Performative Approach to the Migrants,
Minorities, and the European Nation-State. Anthropological
Quarterly 78(1):213–246.
2005b Estranged States: Diplomacy and the Containment of
National Minorities in Europe. Anthropological Theory 5(3):
219–245.
2005c Neoliberal Nationalism: European Union Accession,
Ethnic Integration Policy, and the Estonian Nation-State. In
Crossing European Boundaries: Beyond Conventional Geographical
Categories. Jaro Stacul, Christina Moutsou, and
Helen Kopnina, eds. Pp. 41–63. London: Berghahn.
Foucault, Michel
1980 Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings
1972–1977. Colin Gordon, ed. New York: Pantheon
Books.
Gal, Susan, and Gail Kligman
2000 The Politics of Gender after Socialism. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Greenhalgh, Susan
2003 Planned Births, Unplanned Persons: ‘‘Population’’ in the
Making of Chinese Modernity. American Ethnologist 30(2):
196–215.
Gupta, Akhil
1995 Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the
Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State. American
Ethnologist 22(2):375–402.
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
692
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson
1997a Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
1997b Discipline and Practice: ‘‘The Field’’ as Site, Method, and
Location in Anthropology. In Anthropological Locations:
Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Akhil Gupta
and James Ferguson, eds. Pp. 1–46. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Gusterson, Hugh
1996 Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the
Cold War. Berkeley: University of California Press.
1997 Studying Up Revisited. Political and Legal Anthropology
Review 20(1):114–119.
Hallik, Klara
2002 Nationalising Policies and Integration Challenges. In The
Challenge of the Russian Minority: Emerging Multicultural
Democracy in Estonia. Marju Lauristin and Mati Heidmets,
eds. Pp. 65–88. Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Hayden, Robert
2000 Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic
of the Yugoslav Conflicts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Hervik, Peter
In press The Emergence of Neo-Nationalism in Denmark,
1992–2001. In Neo-Nationalism Inside the EU: Anthropological
Perspectives. Marcus Banks and Andre Gingrich, eds.
Oxford: Berghahn.
Herzfeld, Michael
1992 The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the
Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Hinton, Alexander, ed.
2002a Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
2002b Genocide: An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Holmes, Douglas
2000 Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, and
Neofascism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Humphrey, Caroline
2002 Does the Category ‘‘Postsocialist’’ Still Make Sense. In
Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia.
C. M. Hann, ed. Pp. 12–15. London: Routledge.
Ja¨rve, Priit
1999 Integration and Language. Outline of the paper presented
at the International Conference ‘‘Integration, Education,
and Language: On the Brink of the New Millennium in a
Multicultural Estonia.’’ Electronic document, http://www.
jti.ee/et/hr/integratsioon/int_and_lang.html, accessed May
12, 2005.
Kertzer, David, and Dominique Arel
2002 Censuses, Identity Formation, and the Struggle for
Political Power. In Census and Identity: The Politics of Race,
Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses. David Kertzer
and Dominique Arel, eds. Pp. 1–42. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kuus, Merje
2002 Toward Cooperative Security? International Integration
and the Construction of Security in Estonia. Millennium:
Journal of International Studies 30(2):297–317.
Lauristin, Marju, and Peeter Vihalemm
1997 Recent Historical Developments in Estonia: Three
Stages of Transition (1987–1997). In Return to the Western
World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the Estonian
Post-Communist Transition. Marju Lauristin and Peeter
Vihalemm, with Karl-Erik Rosenberg and Lennart Weibull,
eds. Pp. 173–126. Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Macartney, C. A.
1934 National States and National Minorities. London: Humphrey
Milford–Oxford University Press.
Malkki, Liisa
1992 National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the
Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and
Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7(1):24–44.
1995 Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology
among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Marcus, George, ed.
1983 Elites, Ethnographic Issues. Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press.
Minelres
1996a Letter to Minister for Foreign Affairs, October 28, 1996.
Electronic document, http://www.riga.lv/minelres/count/
Estonia/961028r.htm, accessed September 4, 2002.
1996b Minister of Foreign Affairs’ Answer, November 27, 1996.
Electronic document, http://www.riga.lv/minelres/count/
estonia/961127a.htm, accessed September 4, 2002.
Misiunas, Romauld, and Rein Taagepera
1993 The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940–1990.
London: Hurst.
Nader, Laura
1972 Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying
Up. In Reinventing Anthropology. Dell Hymes, ed. Pp.
285–311. New York: Pantheon Press.
Nagengast, Carole
1994 Violence, Terror, and the Crisis of the State. Annual
Review of Anthropology 23:109–136.
Ong, Aihwa
1999 Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE)
2004 Letter from Max van der Stoel, High Commissioner
on National Minorities to Trivimi Velliste, Minister of Foreign
Affairs of the Republic of Estonia. Reference: No. 206/93/
L/Rev. Electronic document, http://www.osce.org/hcnm.
documents/recommendations/lithuania/1993/02c1243.html,
accessed February 16.
O´ Tuathail, Gearo´id, and John Agnew
1992 Geopolitics and Discourse: Practical Geopolitical Reasoning
in American Foreign Policy. Political Geography 11(2):
190–204.
Pettai, Vello, and Klara Hallik
2002 Understanding Processes of Ethnic Control: Segmentation,
Dependency and Co-Optation in Post-Communist
Estonia. Nations and Nationalism 8(4):505–529.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
2003 Baltic States Report: A Survey of Developments in
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. 4(35). Electronic document,
http://www.rferl.org/balticreport/2003/11/35–261103.html,
accessed November 26.
Raun, Toivo
1991 Estonia and the Estonians. Palo Alto, CA: Hoover
Institution Press.
Rich, Roland
1993 Recognition of States: The Collapse of Yugoslavia and the
Soviet Union. Special issue, ‘‘Symposium: Recent Developments
in the Practice of State Recognition,’’ European Journal
of International Law 4(1):36–65.
Ruutsoo, Rein
1995 Introduction: Estonia on the Border of Two Civilizations.
Culture, state, and security in Europe n American Ethnologist
693
Theme issue, ‘‘Visions and Policies: Estonia’s Path to Independence
and Beyond 1987–1993,’’ Nationalities Papers 23
(1):13–16.
1998 Eesti kodakondsuspoliitika ja rahvusriigi kujunemise
piirjooned (Estonian citizenship policy in the context of the
emerging nation-state). In Vene ku¨simus ja eesti valikud (The
Russian question and challenges for Estonia). Mati Heidmets,
ed. Tallinn: Tallinna Pedagoogikau¨likool Kirjastus.
Shore, Cris
2000 Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European
Integration. London: Routledge.
Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright
1997 Policy: A New Field of Anthropology. In Anthropology of
Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. Cris
Shore and Susan Wright, eds. Pp. 3–39. London: Routledge.
Sluka, Jeffrey
2000 Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Statistical Office of Estonia
2001 Ethnic Composition of the Population of Estonia. Electronic
document, http://www.stat.ee/index.aw/section=597,
accessed December 16, 2003.
Stolcke, Verena
1995 Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of
Exclusion in Europe. Current Anthropology 36(1):1–24.
Strathern, Marilyn
1995 Comments: Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics
of Exclusion in Europe. Current Anthropology 36(1):1–24.
Thornberry, Patrick
1991 International Law and the Rights of National Minorities.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tishkov, Valery
2002 History and Legacies of the USSR: The Demise of a
Multiethnic Experiment. In Searching for Peace in Europe
and Eurasia: An Overview of Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding
Activities. Paul van Tongeren, Hans van de Veen, and
Juliette Verhoeven, eds. Pp. 27–38. Boulder, CO: Lynne
Rienner.
Trass, Hans
2000 Europa Liit: U¨ hineda vo˜i mitte? (European Union: To join
or not?). In Eest 21: Sajandil: Arengustrateegiad, visioonid,
valikus (Estonia in the 21st century: Development strategies,
visions, options). Ahto Oja, ed. Pp. 176–177. Tallinn: Estonian
Academy of Sciences Press.
UN Development Programme (UNDP)
1998 Project of the Government of Estonia: Support to the State
Programme for Integration of non-Estonians into Estonian
Society. Tallinn: UN Development Programme.
Verdery, Katherine
1996 What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
1997 The ‘‘New’’ Eastern Europe in an Anthropology of Europe.
‘‘Provocations in European Anthropology,’’ with Talal Asad,
James Fernandez, Michael Herzfeld, Andrew Lass, Susan
Carol Rogers, Jane Schneider, and Katherine Verdery. American
Anthropologist 99(4):713–730.
Vihalemm, Triin, and Marju Lauristin
1997 Cultural Adjustment to the Changing Societal Environment:
The Case of Russians in Estonia. In Return to the
Western World: Cultural and Political Perspectives on the
Estonian Post-Communist Transition. Marju Lauristin and
Peeter Vihalemm, with Karl-Erik Rosenberg and Lennart
Weibull, eds. Pp. 279–297. Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Vizulis, I. Joseph
1985 Nations under Duress: The Baltic States. New York:
National University Publications.
Walker, R. B. J.
1993 Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political
Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2000 Europe Is Not Where It Is Supposed to Be. In International
Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration:
Power, Security and Community. Morten Kelstrup and
Michael C. Williams, eds. Pp. 14–32. London: Routledge.
Wedel, Janine
2001 Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid
to Eastern Europe 1989–1998. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Weldes, Jutta, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond
Duvall, eds.
1999 Introduction: Constructing Insecurity. In Cultures of
Insecurity: States, Communities and the Production of
Danger. Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and
Raymond Duvall, eds. Pp. 1–33. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Wilson, Thomas, and Hastings Donnan
1998 Border Identities: Nation and State at International
Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Zabusky,
Stacia
1995 Launching Europe: An Ethnography of European Cooperation
in Space Science. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
accepted January 2, 2005
final version submitted March 1, 2005
Gregory Feldman
Department of Geography
University of British Columbia
1984 West Mall
Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2 Canada
gfel@interchange.ubc.ca
American Ethnologist n Volume 32 Number 4 November 2005
694