How citizenship matters: narratives of stateless and citizenship choice in Estonia

Abstract

The phenomenon of statelessness is most often studied as an issue of international and human-rights law. In contrast, this paper examines narratives of citizenship choice among initially stateless Russian-speaking residents of Estonia in order to explore the practical meanings of (non)citizenship in a context where the available options include both national citizenship and statelessness. While legal aspects of citizenship do explain many of the perceived benefits and disadvantages of various citizenship options, we find that deliberations about citizenship choice also reflect extra-legal normative and affective dimensions of civic belonging. The resulting multidimensional model of citizenship helps account for courses of action that would appear anomalous if citizenship choice were merely an instrumental matter of weighing the costs and benefits of different options. It also points to a growing disjuncture among citizenship as a source of legal rights and obligations, as a normative framework, and as a site of attachment and identification.

Keywords::

• Baltics
• citizenship
• citizenship choice
• Estonia
• European Union
• national minorities
• Russian-speaking
• statelessness

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Institute of International Education Fulbright Program, the University of Michigan's International Institute, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and the Institute of International and Social Studies (IISS) in Tallinn. We are grateful to Raivo Vetik, Rein Vöörmann, and Jelena Helemäe for their assistance during data collection in Estonia. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the expertise, encouragement, and unfailing support Michael D. Kennedy and Barbara A. Anderson.

Notes

^1. The expression ‘ethnic Estonians’ denotes Estonian citizens who identify with Estonian culture, speak Estonian as their primary language of communication, and have Estonian ancestry. ‘Estonian Russians’ are ethnic Russians, living in Estonia; ‘Russian-speaking Estonian Jews’ are culturally and linguistically similar to Russians, but have Jewish ancestry. (This population can be distinguished from the small contingent of Jews living in Estonia who are culturally Estonian and, in contrast to their Russian-speaking counterparts, are generally accepted as ethnically Estonian.) When speaking of Estonian Russians and Russian-speaking Estonian Jews collectively, we use the term ‘Russian-speakers.’

^2. Estonia's citizenship policy was thus a formally jus soli (residence-based) citizenship attribution that did not explicitly consider ethnic background. It differs in this way from jus sanguinis inheritance of citizenship mediated by official classifications of ethnicity. On the distinction between jus sanguinis and jus soli (residence- or nativity-based) citizenship, see Brubaker (1992) and Joppke (2007).

^3. ‘Undetermined citizenship’ is the official Estonian term for what we refer to as statelessness – a lack of de jure citizenship in any sovereign state.

^4. A noteworthy exception is Sawyer and Blitz's (2011a) comparative study of contemporary statelessness in four EU member states (France, the UK, Slovenia, and Estonia) using an Arendtian framework. In addition to examining the normative, legal, theoretical, and empirical dimensions of both de jure and de facto statelessness in the EU, a further strength of the volume is its empirical focus on the micro-level perspectives of individuals who experience statelessness either in fact or in effect. The goals of the present contribution are more modest, but in important ways also complementary. Whereas Sawyer and Blitz's study emphasizes the impact of statelessness on access to rights, subjective well-being, and life chances in different European contexts, this paper uses deliberations about citizenship choice among (initially) stateless persons in a single country in order to explore the extra-legal meanings of citizenship as a category of practice. Vetik's (2011) chapter on Estonia is especially helpful for our purposes, taking up one aspect of citizenship choice that is of interest to us as well – the decision to remain stateless. Moreover, his findings offer a useful basis on which to validate our inductive typology of motivational framings, as noted further below. Finally, our inclusion of Jewish Russian-speakers enables us to explore whether ethno-religious ties to a third country and access to its citizenship might affect the dynamics of citizenship choice.

^5. Analogous processes of disaggregation were also identified by Arendt ([1951] 1985) in the case of expatriated minorities during World War II.

^6. These expressions are inspired by, but not reliant on, the work of Kenneth Burke and Pierre Bourdieu, respectively.

^7. The original sampled also included 11 ethnic Estonians (1 of them Jewish).

^8. All interviews with Estonian Russians and Russian-speaking Estonian Jews were conducted in Russian by the first author. (The second author does not speak Russian.) They were transcribed in Russian by an Estonian Russian transcriptionist and translated into English by bilingual university students. The first author checked both the transcriptions and the translations for accuracy. Coding and interpretation of the quotations discussed below were reviewed by the first author for fidelity to the original Russian.

^9. In 1989, activists favoring Estonian independence established Citizens' Committees. The Committees sought to register those who would be Estonian citizens based on Estonia's citizenship policies of the 1940s (i.e., those who were citizens of Estonia during its first period of independence and their descendants). They also allowed individuals who did not qualify under these conditions to register for citizenship. Those who registered were granted automatic Estonian citizenship when the Citizenship Law was passed in 1992.

^10. A strikingly similar array of motives emerges in Vetik's (2011) qualitative analysis of reasons for remaining stateless. Like many of our respondents, participants in Vetik's interviews and focus groups cite ‘mostly pragmatic’ (Vetik 2011, 250) considerations. Some of Vetik's examples, however, are suggestive of affective/symbolic framings, as when a ‘connection with Russia’ offers a possible ‘reason for not seeking Estonian citizenship’ (Vetik 2011, 249). Finally, a further reason for remaining stateless recalls our normative/territorial dimension of citizenship, namely ‘an emotional aversion to applying for [Estonian] citizenship’ founded on the belief that they ‘should have automatically been granted citizenship after independence was restored in Estonia’ (Vetik 2011, 247). These close parallels seem to corroborate the validity of our typology as applicable, at least in the Estonian case, to independent samples drawn at different time points using somewhat different selection criteria and methods of data collection.

^11. We use the term ‘ethnic’ in reference to transnational communities based on beliefs about common ancestry and heritage and ‘cultural’ in reference to commonalities of language, religion, and custom, while reserving ‘national’ for things pertaining to nation-states or the populations they claim to represent. In English, ‘nationality’ is often synonymous with ‘citizenship.’ In the present context, however, ‘nationality’ (natsionalnost) has a more technical meaning, referring to Soviet-era classifications of officially recognized ethnic groups. Until that time, non-Jewish Estonian Russians would have been formally designated as ‘Russians’ and Jewish Russian-speakers as ‘Jews.’ These categories remained relevant after independence insofar as Estonian ‘nationality’ usually translated into Estonian citizenship. In our data, however, it does not appear that Soviet Era classifications entered into deliberations about citizenship choice independently of informal (e.g., ethnic or religious) identifications.

^12. The referendum that Lyudmila refers to is likely a 1992 referendum to approve a new Constitution. She could vote based on her registration with the Citizens Committees.

^13. The absence of individuals for whom a strong attachment to Russia led to Russian citizenship is not surprising in itself, as such persons may have been more likely to emigrate before our period of study. However, it may also reflect the perception of many Russian-speakers in Estonia that they have become culturally more similar to Estonians than to Russians in Russia (Fein 2005).

^14. This question was motivated in part by an interest in whether Russian-speakers born in the Soviet Union had considered that country to be their ‘homeland’ or whether the designation was reserved for the constituent republic in which they were born or resided (cf. Laitin 1998).

^15. On the rights of ‘aliens’ in Estonia, see Lottmann (2008), Southwick and Lynch (2009), and Vetik (2011).

^16. A similar divergence can be found in the former East Germany, whose inhabitants often report feeling like ‘second-class’ citizens of the Federal Republic due to derogatory stereotyping and structural inequalities (Straughn 2007).