Overlapping Democracies, Europe's Democratic Deficit, and National Education Policy

Abstract

Eleven years after Estonia regained independence, its government sought admission to the European Union and NATO, which pressured the country to act on issues related to the Holocaust and in particular to adopt a Holocaust education day in schools. The policy, though adopted, was deeply unpopular within the country, leading to the dilemma of overlapping democracies, in which a European majority supported a measure that a national majority strongly opposed. School directors, navigating the policy environment between opposed groups—the international community and the ethnic Estonian majority—emerged as key actors in the policy process, displaying media savvy and publicly challenging (in the case of leaders of elite schools) or privately resisting the new policy. Their general conduct—openly deferential but minimally compliant or noncompliant with the policy—may reflect a deliberate reproduction of practices of resistance developed under Soviet hegemony. These practices of resistance were redirected toward ends that were consistent with democratic preferences of the national majority, on the one hand, but not with the international community, European majority, nor with the democratically elected government's policy.