Watching the Other Across the Border: Representations of Russia and Estonia on Finnish National Television

Abstract

This paper draws on contemporary debates in cultural and border studies, where borders and national identities, as well as their cultural representations are understood as constructed, dynamic and diverse. A sample of films shown on Finnish television about Finland's two neighboring countries, Estonia and Russia, is analyzed in terms of their represented images of the “other” and contrasted with perceptions of Finns triggered by real-life cultural encounters such as experiences through mobilities. The study underlines that interactions between the different sources of perception, as well as between media representation and perception, are far from being straightforward. On the one hand, the media is a reflection of people's or a nation's relation to the “other;” on the other hand, media representations are themselves influential in bringing neighbors closer, or conversely, may reinforce existing boundaries or even create new mental borders. Therefore, it is important to integrate these intricate relationships into our thinking about “soft” bordering processes.

Acknowledgments

The paper is part of the EuroCORECODE Collaborative Research Project “Unfamiliarity as signs of European times: scrutinizing historical representations of otherness and contemporary daily practices in border regions”.⁵

Funding

Research was funded by the Academy of Finland (AKA [grant decision number 137403]) and the European Science Foundation (ESF [grant number 09-EuroCORECODE-FP-009].

ORCID

Ágnes Németh http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0919-8677

Notes

1 EXLINEA 2003-2005 “Lines of Exclusion as Arenas of Co-operation: Reconfiguring the External Boundaries of Europe – Policies, Practices, perceptions”. The survey did not study the opinions of the public at large, focusing only on CBC experts, but can still give a good picture on the general idea of Finns on Russians.

2 One indirect way to reveal the ways how Finnish tourists perceive these two countries (previous to and through their travels) is by asking travel agencies about their offers and experiences with customers. For the purpose of this research, responses of 13 Finnish travel agencies are used to briefly explain the most popular Russian and Estonian tourist destinations of Finns, and the main motivation for the visits.

3 Viewers do not expect documentaries to be true in an absolute sense; however, they expect things to be presented in a form as they are in reality. For example, people's opinions are to be presented as viewpoints instead of facts; or re-enactments do not intend to look like archival footages; and dates and other figures need to be accurate.

4 Search words used were “Venäjä”, “Neuvostoliitto”, “Viro” and “Eesti” (“Russia”, “Soviet Union” and “Estonia” respectively). As the Elonet database is not complete, the collection of movies and documentaries has been complemented with films found in Yle's own archives, the Topic Archive (Yle Juttuarkisto) and The Living Archive (Yle Elävä Arkisto).

5 UNFAMILIARITY Project: Unfamiliarity as signs of European times: Scrutinising historical representations of otherness and contemporary daily practices in border regions. Funded by: European Science Foundation, Academy of Finland, The Danish Council for Independent Research, Research Foundation Flanders, Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.