Leaving the ‘Baltic’ States and ‘Welcome to Estonia’: Re-regionalising Estonian Identity1

Abstract

After a decade of transformation in Estonia, the formerly dominant topics on the political agenda—internal consolidation on ethnic grounds and external security—have given way to an emergency of less conflictual modes of identity policy. If recent analysis was focused almost entirely on ethnic tensions then this article argues that the way Estonian elites imagine Estonia's place on the map of the world can also be said to be influenced by the fact that the country will soon be part of an enlarged Europe. Thus, conflictual issues increasingly lose their importance. Historically, Estonians have been influenced by Germans, Swedes and Russians, and all these three ‘cultural spaces’ had their own impact on Estonian imagination. Is Estonia ‘simply’ Western or particularly Scandinavian? Does it belong to the ‘North’, the ‘East’ or the ‘West’? Is it ‘Baltic’, baltisch, pribaltiiskii or simply ‘Estonian’? An imagined Estonian Geschichtsraum must not necessarily be limited to the almost canonical ‘our space’ inhabited by ethnic Estonians. This view, which was extremely popular at the end of the 1980s, becomes, on integrating Europe, increasingly old-fashioned because of its isolationist tendencies. However, ‘our space’ remains the core of any attempt to re-regionalise Estonian identity in providing the historic motive of Estonians living there for at least 5000 years. Yet, the growing dissatisfaction with being ‘Baltic’ as a means of being a victim of history is one of the main arguments in trying to escape the ‘East’ and reach the ‘North’, and it is part of a marketing strategy to ‘sell’ the country as being successfully transformed.