Cooperative Agendas and the Power of the Periphery: the US, Estonia, and NATO after the Ukraine Crisis

ABSTRACT

The geopolitical discourses of hegemonic actors dominate the inter-state system and are significant determinants of how international politics play out on the world stage. Particularly in terms of security discourses, peripheral nation-states are often considered to be pawns moved (or not) at the will of dominant nation-states across the grand chessboard of the world. This assumption, however, ignores the ability of peripheral and peripheralised nation-states to influence geopolitical agendas. Through a critical analysis of the US and Estonian discourses present during President Barack Obama’s 2014 visit to Tallinn, Estonia, immediately preceding the 2014 NATO Summit in Wales, this paper argues that historically peripheralised nation-states can leverage historical context, “good geopolitical citizenship,” changes to the international status quo, and security goals that are complementary to those of more powerful actors to influence geopolitical agendas and become important players in geopolitical strategy and action. Drawing on Ó Tuathail’s theory of geopolitics as a drama played out on the world stage and Gee’s “building tasks of language” framework for discourse analysis, this paper investigates how the complementary security discourses of President Obama and President Toomas Ilves of Estonia produced a kind of “cooperative” geopolitical agenda that advanced both US and Estonian goals for NATO’s 2014 Summit and NATO’s future plans for addressing Russian action in the post-Ukraine Crisis environment. Specifically, the analysis suggests that peripheralised countries, such as Estonia, can and do exercise agency in geopolitical processes even while dominant security discourses, such as those of the US and NATO, seek to manage them according to hegemonic priorities.

Acknowledgements

My sincerest thanks to Caroline Nagel, Kathrin Hörschelmann, Kimberley Peters, Pete Hopkins, Matt Benwell, Kimberley Patton, and Niklas Hultin for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful to the editors of Geopolitics and the anonymous reviewers for their hard work in improving this paper. Any remaining errors and omissions are my own.

Notes

1. Latvia, Lithuania and Poland also featured in NATO discourses in the months and years after the Ukraine Crisis, but in 2014 Estonia was “first among equals” in garnering the attention of the US (Hanna 2017).

2. Here, it is apropos to acknowledge that oftentimes the way in which we speak about geopolitical discourses accords an enormous amount of power to named states and organisations even though they are political institutions, not people. For instance, the “US” and “Estonia” are spoken of like the states themselves have geopolitical discourses, treating states as the primary referent in international politics and discursively obscuring the power structures at work. After all, it is not the state that has agency; it is the actors within states who claim to speak for the national community who have the agency.

3. What I term “common sense knowledge” is what Gee terms “signs and systems knowledge,” by which he means certain forms of knowledge that are favored, privileged or made to see more “real” than others—i.e. made to seem like common sense.

4. NB: Percent GDP figures vary based on annual price adjustments. NATO data reports Estonia’s GDP contribution at 1.9% in 2014, but at the time of President Obama’s speech in September it may have well have been 2% based on Estonia’s 2014 contribution and the GDP figure being reported at that time.