Cultural Autonomy of National Minorities in Estonia: The Erosion of a Promise

Abstract

After a debate lasting several years, Estonia enacted a law of non-territorial cultural autonomy for national minorities in 1993, echoing experiences from the country’s previous period of independence. In international discussion, the law was initially cited as a promising way of dealing with minority issues in Central and Eastern Europe. With time, however, its applicability in contemporary Estonia has been questioned; in practice, the law has failed to be implemented. This paper inspects possible reasons for its disuse, and argues that the law could still play a role in Estonia’s minority policies, especially with regard to education. The paper is based on an analysis of legislation, parliamentary records and media.

Keywords:

• cultural autonomy
• Estonia
• Russian speakers
• non-territorial autonomy
• minority policies

Notes

^1. Also known as National Minorities’ Cultural Autonomy Act.

^2. It should be mentioned however, that the Estonians most likely to reach the topmost positions of the Communist Party hierarchy were the repatriated descendants of 19th-century settlers from Estonia to Russia proper. They could be expected to be more loyal to the regime, as they had no personal or family memories from the bourgeois independent republic. They were usually in practice more fluent in Russian than in Estonian.

^3. That is, the Estonian and Latvian Popular Fronts and the Lithuanian Sąjūdis movement.

^4. The Ingrian Finns are descendants of 17th-century settlers from Finland to the area, which later became the St. Petersburg region. After the border settlements with Russia in 1920 and later, and after the Second World War, many of the Ingrian Finns came to live in Estonia.

^5. What Smith, in fact, stresses (e.g., 2005) is that cultural autonomy can serve as a complement, not a substitute for territorially based approaches when it comes to large minority groups living compactly on a certain territory. Thus, he prefers territorial to non-territorial cultural autonomy, thereby not meaning that it would be better to have no cultural autonomy at all. The Ministry of Culture’s quotations and summary of Vetik’s statement do not reflect considerations of this kind.

^6. This may also lead to disputes between organizations over the use of resources. In 2013, the yearly financial support of 50,000 euro, which the Estonian Union of Ingrian Finns had previously received from the Ministry of Culture, was allocated instead to a new organization recently founded by the Union’s previous chairman (Must 2013).

^7. On 26–28 April 2007, street rioting and looting mainly by Russian-speaking youths in Tallinn was triggered by the government’s decision to remove a Soviet-time war monument from the city center. Some 1300 people were detained by the police during the two nights. The events have received considerable scholarly attention too, see, e.g., several articles in 2008’s last issue of the Journal of Baltic Studies (39, 4); Berg and Ehin 2009; Petersoo and Tamm 2008.