The formation of the nationalization policy in interwar and current Estonia: A comparative perspective

Abstract

This article takes the viewpoint of historical comparison to offer a reassessment of Estonia’s nationalization. Estonia has experienced several regime changes in its history and has faced the challenges of nation-building with every alternation. The independence of 1918 and the re-independence of 1991 are especially explored in this article with regard to nationalization, which includes the institutionalization of national cultural autonomy and citizenship policy.

In general, national cultural autonomy is considered the means of guaranteeing its minorities the right to self-rule with respect to cultural affairs. Estonia’s independence manifest of February 1918 promised this right to the country’s minorities who included Germans, Russians, Swedes, and Jews. The enactment of the law on cultural autonomy in 1925 accorded Germans and Jews the right of self-rule with respect to cultural affairs in the interwar period. The right of cultural autonomy was also on the agenda during the period of perestroika and the related law was adopted in 1993.

According to Brubaker’s definition, Estonia is a coercive nationalizer as well as an active pluralist, pursuing the nationalization as its primal goal along with the official recognition of national minorities. Extant literature explores this intricate situation using discussions on triadic or quadratic nexus, but the question why Estonians took the pluralist approach into consideration when it was still not clear whether their state would be established must be addressed. In this sense, the author of this article would argue that it is worth paying more attention to the continuity maintained with regard to the previous regime.

While interwar Estonia’s cultural autonomy functioned rather successfully as a system, the current law is regarded to be completely symbolic. The emblematic nature of the current law emanates primarily from two causes. First, the number of Russians holding Estonian citizenship was quite limited immediately after Estonia’s re-independence. Therefore, most Russians were not entitled to use the associated right. Second, the Estonia’s school system uses the Russian language as its medium of education, which harked to the Soviet period. Hence, Russians as minority did not need to demand the right of education in their mother tongue; at least until the school reforms were instituted. Thus, cultural autonomy was not the priority for Russians.

Almost 30 years after the re-independence, Russian politicians who are quite active in the field of Estonian politics compete to postulate discrete forms of nationalization in Estonia and propose varied means of social integration. As more Russians obtain Estonian citizenship, culturally and politically plural approaches to nationalization become increasingly necessary.