Unbearable “eastern European mentality:” the affective contradiction in the national belonging of Estonians with a migratory experience

ABSTRACT

This article asks what it means to be of Estonian origin with/in a migratory experience, following an online survey of people aged 20–35 and in-depth interviews with over 50 Estonians living abroad. We deploy the concept of affective contradiction – that is, the simultaneous presence of divergent affective affinities – in describing how Estonian young adults abroad articulate and negotiate their sense of national belonging. We demonstrate how ‘eastern Europe’ has come to refer to a certain kind of unfavorable mentality for these migrant Estonians, and one which also influences their desire to return.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• affect
• Estonia
• Eastern Europe
• national belonging

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our research participants for their time and dedication, the special section editors and anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on the earlier draft of the article, and Postimees Foundation for supporting this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All names of the interviewees are pseudonyms.

2. A study of young migrants from the Baltic states in London (King et al. 2018) also notes that their research participants described their migration as an ‘adventure.’

3. According to Jouhki and Pennanen (2016, 6), the West is not an inherent entity but a label given to different geopolitical and cultural phenomena in different situations. In this article, we refer to the category of ‘West’ – and in a similar fashion ‘East’ – as formations of symbolic geography generated in the specific context of post-socialist Estonia. In Estonia, the ‘West’ generally includes rich, industrialized countries in Europe and north America, plus Australia and Japan. The inferiority of eastern European origin is, however, still most clearly expressed, as well as experienced, in the advanced countries in Europe.

4. Of course, this choice is not equally available to all, given the financial cost and competitiveness for scholarships in tertiary education.

5. Estonia’s aspiration to associate itself with the northern region, however, can be traced back to the late nineteenth century nationalist movement (Piirimäe 2011).

6. Although rare among our research participants, taking pride in eastern European identity can partly be explained by the influence of discourses in the art world where ‘eastern Europeanness’ has been promoted as a location of fresh views and decolonization.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Postimees Foundation under research grant ‘Young Estonians in the global circulation of knowledge: Choices for the place of residence within the emerging diaspora’ [POST 23].

Notes on contributors

Terje Toomistu

Terje Toomistu is an anthropologist and a research fellow at the University of Tartu’s Department of Ethnology, whose prime areas of focus are gender, mobility, and affect. She received her PhD degree in Ethnology as well as her MA degrees (cum laude) in Ethnology and in Communication Studies from the University of Tartu. Toomistu’s major research projects cover Indonesian gender and sexuality and the late Soviet non-conformist youth. She has curated exhibitions in United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Sweden, and given lectures and seminars at universities internationally. Toomistu is also a documentary filmmaker. Her work has been featured widely in the international press, including The Guardian and The Economist.

Aet Annist

Aet Annist is a social anthropologist and a senior researcher at the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tartu, focusing on processes related to sociality in the context of changes. Her datasets are derived from diverse, often multi-sited fieldwork in Estonia and the United Kingdom, which has brought her analytical focus to developing the concept of dispossession in its different forms (social, symbolic, and ethnic dispossession as well as dispossession of the future). She has been involved in several projects studying youth, most recently, within PROMISE, a Horizon 2020 project led by the University of Manchester. Annist has contributed regularly to Estonian media, to applied research for Estonian ministries and parliament as a consultant, to art exhibitions as a writer, and as an activist, consultant, and facilitator to the activities of Estonian and British protest groups.

Rein Murakas

Rein Murakas works as a consultant researcher and an analyst for different Estonian and international research projects. His main research fields include youth problems, inequality, financial behavior, entrepreneurship, researcher mobility, health, methodology, and the use of social science data sources.