Are Minorities in Europe 'Othered' in the Space between Policy and Academic Research? - A Case Study on Russians in Latvia and Estonia

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Are Minorities in Europe ‘Othered’ in the Space between

Policy and Academic Research? –

A Case Study on Russians in Latvia and Estonia

Master’s Thesis

Adam Brookes Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Max Bader

M.A. Russian and Eurasian Studies Faculty of Humanities

Submission Date: June 29th, 2020

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Abstract

The political history and lived experience of Russians in the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia plausibly constitutes an historic example of civic Othering. The hybrid, multi-layered identities and subjective perceptions of nationality amongst these communities have been covered by academic research. At the same time, Latvia and Estonia have engaged in the political dialogue of ‘Europeanization’ as Member States of the European Union, as part of a top-down process to understand and, at times, promote a common ‘European identity’, which has also been frequent analyzed and discussed in academic literature. While both these aspects of research have been extensive, there has been less contemporary investigation at their crossroads: European identity amongst Russians in Estonia and Latvia. This paper performs a ‘research synthesis’ type of meta-analysis on academic and policy papers to shed light on this potential gap between academic literature and policy research. Its conclusions have implications for researchers and practitioners of both kinds, as well as grounds to consider the gap as a form of ‘methodological Othering’ itself.

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“The peoples of Europe have no idea how dear they are to us! I believe we, future Russians … will comprehend that to become a genuine Russian means to seek finally to reconcile all European controversies, to show the solution of European anguish in our all-humanitarian and all-unifying Russian soul, and to embrace in it with brotherly love all our brethren…”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1880)

“Both by spirit and by historical and cultural traditions, Russia is a natural member of the European family.”

Vladimir Putin (November 23, 2006)

“A great many people really care very little for their own compatriots, but they hate anything foreign.”

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1919)

“There is no future for the people of Europe other than in union.”

Jean Monnet (1957)

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Introduction

Russia and her people(s) have a long history and association with the lands east of the Baltic Sea – what to them is known as Прибалтика (Pribáltika) – and today consists of the Russian Federation’s exclave of Kaliningrad, and the sovereign states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In particular, the Russian minorities of Latvia and Estonia have played an important role in the post-Soviet histories of those two countries, constituting roughly a quarter of the population of each country, and engaging in an occasionally tense political dialogue with the ethnic Latvian and Estonian majorities, relating to civic and language rights. This dialectic of minority representation as a settled diaspora has invoked academic intrigue into issues of identity and loyalty at the local and national level. At the same time, Latvia and Estonia, as part of the European Union since 2004, have been engaged in a supra-national discussion of developing a common ‘European’ identity, which has implications for political rhetoric at the national level. Both within Russia and outside its borders, there has been an historic – and at times – fiercely contested debate over how ‘European’ Russia is as a civilization; by logical extension, this calls into question how ‘European’ Russian people are as an ethnic group. Proponents of the idea that Russia is not truly ‘European’ are engaging in a process of Othering – this is true both in cases of outsiders casting Russia as Other to Europe, and of Russians casting Europe as an external Other. While substantial enquiry has been conducted into attachment to Europe and the EU in Latvia and Estonia across the whole population(s), and into identity amongst local ethnic Russian communities in these two countries, regarding national civic identity, and diaspora ethnic identity as Russians, much less enquiry has been conducted specifically into perceptions of ‘European’ identity and attachment to the European Union amongst these Russian minority communities in Latvia and Estonia. This paper proposes that this is a significant research gap, and that the consequence of such is an impaired ability on the part of policymakers to properly engage with the citizenry they represent. Thus, this paper shall first conduct a review of historic and present literature written on Othering, on identity in Europe and the European Union, and on identity amongst Russians resident in Estonia and Latvia, before performing a meta-analysis of papers to establish the true extent/existence of this proposed gap in research literature. This meta-analysis presents itself as an article of new research, which seeks to establish a foundation of further new research into this intersection of Russian and European studies.

As a broad community within a larger diaspora, the Russians of the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have garnered a fair amount of outside intrigue and scholarly attention

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since those countries gained their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Much research has been carried out into the identities forged amongst Russian communities in the post-independence Baltic states, where many initially felt that they were systematically discriminated against within a new country that some were not fully happy being a part of, under a system which the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights has branded (Latvia’s case specifically) as “deeply problematic in terms of real or perceived equality and social cohesion” (Council of Europe 2007, 8 / §29). Moreover, the ascension of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to NATO and the European Union in 2004 indicates a certain political identity and security vector pursued by the successive governments of these three states, which again may not necessarily align with the desires of their ethnic Russian minorities. Of these three Latvia and Estonia have presented as more notable case studies, with Lithuania less so. This is due to simple demographics: ethnic Russians constitute a far more sizable proportion of the population of Latvia and Estonia than they do in Lithuania; perhaps as a result of this greater minority proportion, Latvia and Estonia have historically enacted (from the 1990s until recently) controversial ‘non-citizenship’ programs for their Russian inhabitants who either could not or would not become citizens after the collapse of the Soviet Union (De Pommereau 2018; Krohn 2014). ‘Russian’ politics has played a sizable part in wider political discourse in Latvia and Estonia, both in the sense of their relationship with neighboring Russia (Lithuania does not have a direct border with Russia – another reason for lesser attention in this regard) and on an internal civic dialogue between ethnic Russians and their national ethnic-majority counterparts, Latvians and Estonians, respectively.

As stated, there is already an array of existing academic literature on investigations into linguistic and political identities and views amongst ethnic Russians in these two countries. Much has been written on new ‘hybrid’ identities, whether concerning linguistic innovations and code-switching (Zabrodskaja 2009) or spatial hybridity cutting across the Russian/Latvian and Russian/Estonian borders, especially in the ‘dual metropole’ of Narva/Ivangorod, on the Estonia/Russia border (Koval 2019). The Russian communities in the Baltic have also been considered part of a wider regional securitization issue (Jæger 2000; Buzan and Waever 2003; Fernandes and Correia 2018), as, in the sceptic’s view, they are plausible soft power targets for Russian state propaganda to turn into a viable ‘fifth column’ (Clemens Jr. 1998, 710). Up until now, the focus of extant literature has been on the setting of these communities within the framework of a national ‘space’ – what are Russian identities and politics within Latvia and Estonia? Less concern has so far been drawn towards Russian identities and politics within the

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European Union. The EU has been a key overarching feature of the identities and politics of Latvia and Estonia themselves for over two decades now; the same could be said of NATO, by way of security issues. Why should this be the case? It is the view of this paper that at a time of such challenge for the ongoing ‘project’ of the European Union, against the backdrop of an increasingly loud discourse of ‘Europeanization’, that understanding the extent of ‘European feeling’ across the 27 Member States is not just important amongst the ethnic-majorities of (what are predominantly nation-) states, but of minority groups within them also.

This thesis proposes that the Russian communities of Latvia and Estonia have enjoyed – though the word is not used in the ‘positive’ sense here – a unique civic experience in the past 30 years. While there may be parallels to be drawn post-hoc with other Othered minority communities in Europe and across the world, this experience warrants further investigation in its own right, both for academic purposes, and for the sake of bettering the application of civic policy at both national and supra-national levels, for the betterment of the lived experience of these minority communities and their fellow citizens. While professional social survey frameworks do successfully encapsulate a broadly accurate depiction of their researched countries’ demographics through random-probability sampling (when not using more targeted sampling), and minority communities’ views are therefore included in their data findings, the specificities of these voices and lived experiences are often lost behind the wall of wider data in these large survey reports. The theoretical framework of this paper analyses other authors’ presentations of qualitative data regarding resident Russians’ self-reported perceptions of multi-local ‘belonging’ within Latvia and Estonia. Therefore, it is pertinent to first conduct a review of contemporary academic literature on the three core metrics of common identity and outsider-hood that interest this meta-study: Othering, its history and conceptual application; European identity, its history and present development; Russia’s European Otherness and ‘fifth-column’ narratives, with the wider implications for potential regional securitization. This academic literature review is conducted with the specific interests of this paper in mind – thus, while seeking to be comprehensive, it maintains a relevant focus. Before reviewing the literature, for orientation, this paper first presents a brief summary of the themes to be subsequently discussed.

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Thematic Overview

This chapter introduces the reader to the factual elements of the themes to be discussed in this paper, and whose literature is to be reviewed in Chapter 2.

1.1 Borders and Others

What is a border? Upon its definition, how and where should it be drawn, and for what/whose purpose? The dividing line – real or imagined – between You and I, between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is a fundamental concern of philosophy and politics. The demarcation of borders between individuals and nations have profound consequences for all of us in our day-to-day lived experiences and the diplomatic and military machinations of the states that we live under. The perceived difference between Self and Other constitutes the basis of the formation of personal identity; the publicly accepted line on a map between countries constitutes the basis of nation- and statecraft. These two layers of bordering also have a complex interdependent relationship: since the development of the idea of the nation-state, polities in Europe in particular have drawn their geographic boundaries around the physical contiguous dispersal of their dominant ethnic groups, which in turn has created national identities whereby inhabitants of one country can easily discern the inhabitants of another as somewhat Other. This has been no less true of the European collective mind gazing out past the outer borders of ‘Europe’ – a fluid and elusive concept throughout history – and labelling as Other those living beyond.

The clearest example of spatial Othering to be investigated between Russians living in the Baltic states and Russians living in Russia is the geographical demarcation running between the Russian-majority city of Narva in Estonia, and the Russian-majority city of Ivangorod in Russia: this dividing line is the international border that runs through the Narva river, flowing out to see from the Lake Peipus which saw Alexander Nevsky’s victory on the ice, centuries before (see below). According to Estonian political scientist Eiki Berg (2000, 78) “the Estonian‐ Russian borderland is a relatively fragile, fairly contested and highly politicised arena”.

1.2 Old Border, Old Othering?

There is a long history of Othering in the context of the Russian state in its various inceptions and the states that have existed in the Baltic region. In the European Mediaeval Period, or Middle Ages, the land that is now Latvia and Estonia came under the dominion of the Teutonic crusaders, who sought – and were eventually successful in – the Christianization of the then-pagan Lithuanians, Latvians, Latgalians, Livs, and Estonians (Raun 2002). The land was

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granted to the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, or Livonian Order, an offshoot of the main Teutonic Order, and became referred to officially as Terra Mariana, in honor of the Biblical Mary. This theocratic confederated state then came into conflict with the Russian princedoms, culminating in defeat on frozen Lake Peipus, pitted against Alexander Nevsky at the famous Battle of the Ice (Ледовое побоище in Russian) in 1242 (Nicolle 1996). This Othering was twice demarcated along religious lines: the pagan Baltic tribes were Othered by Catholic Europe until they were ‘civilized’ by the Livonian Crusade, and the Orthodox Russians were then Othered by the crusaders and Christianized Balts and Ests; of course, the same could be said of the reverse in both cases. This tradition of using one’s religion as the benchmark for ‘civilization’ to cast heathens as Other is ancient and widespread (Staszak 2008, 3).

After the disastrous Livonian War (1559-1583), waged in part against the Tsardom of Ivan IV ‘The Terrible’, these territories became annexed, carved up and segmented between Denmark, Sweden, and Poland-Lithuania, before the Russian Empire conquered them all over the course of the eighteenth century, whereby they did not claim their independence as Estonia and Latvia (and Lithuania) until 1918. After a brief period of independence, these three nascent states of the Baltic were annexed again by the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, then the Soviet Union again during the Second World War. Henceforth, the Baltic states were occupied by the Soviet Union until they restored their independence in 1991, after a campaign of civil resistance, starting in 1989, known colloquially as the ‘Singing Revolution’. During the period of occupation, the Soviet regime forcibly altered the demographics of the Baltic states, initially for strategic economic purposes – such as in Narva (Kattago 2008) – and later as an attempt to stymie nationalist sentiment and prevent the states’ declarations of independence (Clemens Jr. 1998, 715). These waves of dictated migration were the root cause of some civic tension in Latvia and Estonia in the immediate aftermath of independence (Mikeladze 2009, 467; Clemens Jr. 1998, 710). This bilateral relationship between the Latvian, Estonian, and Russian populations (not to mention other minority Baltic groups such as the Latgalians) could feasibly be propounded as an historic example of political Othering.

As potential Other to both the ‘native’ Latvian and Estonian populations, who historically have considered themselves as fully ‘European’ (Kuldkepp 2013; Ilves 1999; Madiot 2005), and to the Russian population of the ‘Motherland’ they left behind, who have a less consistently avowed relationship with being exclusively ‘European’ over ‘Eurasian’ (Morozova 2009, 667), it is both academically intriguing and politically expedient to understand the precise nature of

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perceived Othering amongst the ethnic Russian populations of the former Terra Mariana, and their understanding of, and potential attachment to, the notion of a ‘European’ identity as modernly understood within the European Union, relative to the populations of their current homeland, and the homeland whence their forebears came.

1.3 The EU and European Identity

Numerous scholars have over the years researched possible correlations between personal perceptions of local, regional and national pride(s) and identity with a coterminous pride and identity associated with an idea of ‘Europe’, understood as the European Union. In the wake of the major 2004 expansion of the European Union, when Estonia and Latvia joined as Member States alongside eight other countries, research into ‘European identity’, its meaning and significance, was still unclear. In the words of Bruter (2005, xii): “we do not really know what people mean when they say they fell European … we do not really know why some people say they fell European rather than other” and that there are “contradictory theories” as to whether or not a “mass European identity” had even been formed by that point in time, let alone whether or not it could grow, evolve, and/or be molded by deliberate policy.

One of the key missions of the European Union presently (and historically) is to create and foster a pan-Union sense of ‘European’ identity amongst the citizens of its Member States, and it is undergoing extensive measures to do so. The strength and legitimacy of this identity policy can be measured by its penetration across Member States, both socially and spatially. This is no easy task, given the huge diversity between and within them; minority groups within each country are especially liable/vulnerable to being excluded from the discourse of this common identity. This paper’s research hopes to provide extrapolated relevance for understanding European identity amongst ethnic minorities across the EU, which would be beneficial for understanding and improving EU cultural policy. An example of a community that resides on the ‘periphery’ of the Union in both these senses is that of the Russian-majority Estonian border town of Narva. This paper seeks to theoretically examine the sense of unity and community that the European Commission hopes to achieve, and then practically explore the extent to which this can be measured as successful or unsuccessful in this particular locale. The implications for the findings of this study could potentially be profound: though Narva’s geo-strategic position is arguably unique within the EU and NATO (and this paper’s sociological findings have strategic implications also), the fact that it is a minority-majority community means that the results of this paper can be extrapolated for the application of policy across Member States

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with similar such communities. Besides, direct comparisons, this study aims to be illuminative by providing new on-the-ground data to an already strong academic field.

As an historical community – or, rather, a grouping of historical communities – whose history is not that deep, with the majority of members and their forebears arriving in the Baltic after 1945, with an extra particular expansion in the 1980s, the Russians of Latvia and Estonia have presented an interesting case to researchers in the field of multifaceted identity. Research in the 1990s (see Kirch, Kirch, and Tuisk 1993) explored Baltic Russians, their identities and sense of allegiances to Russia and/or the new/reborn states they now found themselves in. Research in the early 2000s built upon earlier literature on European identity at the cusp of the 5th

expansion of the European Union, of which Latvia and Estonia were a part. However, comparatively less academic attention has performed a cross-analysis of these two particular fields of investigation. Mainstream attention has tended to focus on comparisons of national identity with the supranational identity that ‘Europa’ offers and brings. Though case studies have provided multi-layered analyses at the local and regional, besides national, levels, these are as part of a much larger, broader dataset covering multiple communities across multiple countries. This paper’s research proposes something new.

1.4 Latvia, Estonia, and Narva today

Latvia has historically held a relatively more prominent role in the general consciousness of the wider European populace thanks to the economic prowess of Riga. As a major port since the era of the Hanseatic League, the capital city has drawn Baltic Sea trade through Latvia for centuries, enriching the country’s rulers; this is why it was a key concession in any lost imperial war. As a city of the Russian Empire, Riga added to its status as a trade entrepot by becoming a major industrial center, and this newfound wealth and importance brought with it the Art Nouveau architecture for which the city is celebrated today.

Besides Riga, Daugavpils, Latvia’s second-largest city, has a minority-majority demography, with half the population being Russian (Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs 2017). Today, it is a Russian political and cultural stronghold: Daugavpils and its environs were the main bastion of support for Russian being upgraded to official language status in a 2012 referendum (Central Election Commission 2012). Ultimately, the referendum was rejected nationwide, and Russian remains unofficial, and legally considered ‘foreign’ to Latvia.

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Despite the initial challenges and setbacks brought about by the transition to democracy and barriers to citizenship for many, Russian Latvians have since made progress in establishing political representation, led by the nationally popular pro-Russian minority party Harmony (Latvian: “Saskaņa”; Russian: «Согласие»). One notable recent example has been Nils Ušakovs, the former mayor of Riga, whose tenure and dismissal were not without controversy (Gershkovich 2019).

Estonia is, geographically and economically, on the periphery of ‘Europe’, as understood by the metonym of the European Union. In turn, Narva is, geographically and socially, on the periphery of Estonia, as understood in terms of the nation-state. The inquest of this paper is to establish the extent of penetration of ‘European’ identity to this ‘periphery’ region. If “Europe is an idea”, how is this idea received in a place where a significant proportion of its inhabitants may feel ostracized by wider society and the state, and may not even be citizens of it? Is possession of citizenship a useful indicator of one’s personal sense of European-ness, or is residency more important in subjective perception and ‘European’ self-actualization? Narva presents an intriguing case study in core-periphery modelling at both the level of the nation-state (Estonia) and supranational association (European Union). Estonia’s membership(s) of NATO and the OECD potentially provide(s) additional strata of conceivably ‘Western’ identity; the former is especially relevant in the case of Narva, owing to the city’s oft-discussed militarily strategic position. In Western Europe, ‘Western’ and ‘European’ identity can often casually be referred to as practically synonymous. In Narva, amongst the ethnic Russian population – with or without Estonian citizenship – this paper’s research could plausibly find that these two identities are not considered so synonymous. The most visceral example of civil unrest and inter-ethnic tension in Estonia in the post-Soviet era came in April 2007, during the so-called ‘Bronze Night’ (Estonian: Pronksiöö), when ethnic Russians protested the relocation of a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn (Ehala 2009; Melchior and Visser 2011; Melchior 2010). In the time leading up to Estonia’s EU accession, both its geography and politics were considered a site of contestation (Berg 2003, 101). More recent literature would seem to suggest that these are still sites of contestation today.

Narva is a border town in the far north-eastern corner of Estonia, in Ida-Viru County, lying directly on the Estonia-Russia border, facing Russia across the Narva river. The city has approximately 55,000 inhabitants, and this number is decreasing year-on-year. This is a reflection of many post-Soviet non-capital cities, as death rates exceed birth rates and the

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provinces experience a youth brain drain to either the national capitals or abroad. The population of Narva is approximately 80% ethnically Russian. According to estimates from the city’s Population Registration Office (Estonian: Narva Linnavalitsuse Elanikkonna Registreerimise Büroo), approximately 46.67% of the population in Narva were in that year registered as Estonian citizens, 36.34% were Russian citizens, while 15.26% were of undefined citizenship (Narva Department for Development and Economy 2013, 9). This demographic profile means that some Narva residents are legally able to cross the river without a visa requirement, while others are able to travel the Schengen area visa-free. Considering this particular demographic profile, and with Estonia being a member of NATO since 2004, Narva has been considered by some as a potential site of strategic tension and conflict between Russia and the bloc. As such, the city has in recent years (post-2014) garnered attention from journalists, seeking eye-catching headlines akin to ‘The Next Crimea?’ (Berman 2014; Trimbach and O’Lear 2015; Grigas 2014). Narva has been selected specifically as the thematic subject of this paper’s literature review as it – along with Ivangorod just across the river – is the settlement in the Baltic region that is most emblematic of the divide between Russia and ‘the West’, between the Russian state and a non-Russian state, between Europe in the EU, and Europe outside of it – it is the site most symbolic of This Side and That Side, Us and Them, Self and Other.

“Estonia is your home because you were born here. But Russia is your fatherland.”

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Literature Review

Where, and what, is Europe? It is a question that has been pondered by thinkers of various academic persuasions for millennia, with a tradition going back to the philosophers of Ancient Greece. It is a question pertinent to geography, anthropology, and political identity. The delineation of the borders of Europe is important in both its physical (political) and mental (culturally perceived) manifestations. The definition of where Europe ends and Asia begins has been culturally and strategically important in the history of the Russian state in its various guises over centuries – as Tsardom, Empire, Republic of the Soviet Union, and Federation. Debate over whether the Russian civilization is European, Asian, or Eurasian in nature has being fiercely contested both within Russia and without, by ethnic Russians and non-Russians alike. There has emerged another, more recent debate around the nature of Europe and European-ness in the wake of the gradual formation and expansion of the European Union. Since its incarnation as the modern Federation, Russia has been excluded from the membership of the European Union and has often positioned itself as being in antagonistic opposition to the political project. Clearly, then, the Russian state is not participatory to this understanding of European-hood. However, there are many ethnic Russians who call member states of the European Union their home. In the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia in particular, ethnic Russians constitute sizable minorities (25% and 24%, respectively) and contribute significantly to public discourse around identity and civic participation in those countries. Much scholarly and media attention has been given to the legal manner in which the governments of Latvia and Estonia have dealt with this ethnic Russia minority, whose history in the Baltic is often seen by ethnic Latvians and Estonians as a form of colonization in the twilight years of Soviet imperialistic occupation. The (dis-)enfranchisement of Russians in Latvia and Estonia within civil society is complicated by their two-tier systems of citizenship and undefined citizenship, that have defined so much of the public discourse around this community since its inception. The institutions of non-citizens / undefined citizenship (nepilsoņi in Latvia, kodakondsuseta isik in Estonia; негражданство in Russian) have made up a unique civic innovation in the post-Soviet space, that have not been totally free from controversy, having faced accusations of deliberate state-imposed social exclusion against ethnic Russians (who constitute the vast majority of non-/undefined citizens). The city of Narva is known outside Estonia primarily for the speculative reports made by strategy analysts and curious journalists that this would be the target for ‘Russia’s next annexation’ – à la Crimea – owing to the ethnic majority there. Perched on the very edge of the European Union, in physical sight of the country their ancestors hail from, and spoken of by

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outsiders as a potential fifth column demographic, do the Russians of Narva feel that they are truly ‘European’, and valued members of the Union?

This is an important question for European policymakers. As there are increasingly loud and frequent calls for an acceleration of EU unification, there is an increasing need for policymakers in Brussels to ensure that all communities in member states feel sufficiently ‘European’ not to risk undermining that union. The ethnic Russian population of Narva provides a clear case study, both geographic and demographic, of a community potentially at the edge of ‘European-ness’. An investigation into their perception of inclusivity and participation in Estonian and wider European society would be illuminating and likely applicable to other similar communities in the EU.

This literature review shall examine the history and current trend in academic writing of the phenomenon known as Othering, so as can be applied in an analysis of identity amongst this community of ethnic Russians in the Baltic. This paper specifically aims to lay the groundwork for an understanding of the self-perceived identity of ethnic Russians in Narva and lived experience (if existent or acknowledged) of Othering in their day-to-day lives on the border of Russia and the European Union. The wider intention of this literature review is to appreciate whether understandings of European identity amongst Russians in this corner of Estonia are reciprocated amongst other perceived marginalized communities in Europe, or if it is rooted in their Russian-ness, their non-Estonian-ness, ‘Eurasian’ identity, or a combination of any of the above factors. As such, this review shall not only be analyzing the content of extant literature around this subject, but also attempt to gauge the current prevailing trend in thought about this particular ethnic Russian community, and its significance in wider European public discourse. The structure of this paper shall be dual. Firstly, it shall briefly outline an understanding of historic and current though on the nature of what it is to be ‘European’ in terms of identity, juxtaposed by what it might mean to be ‘Russian’ for the relevant inhabitants of Narva and the wider Baltic; secondly, but primarily, it shall provide a review of academic literature on Othering, in multiple dimensions. Finally, this literature review shall provide its own analysis of the cited literature, regarding themes, trends, approaches, inconsistencies, and predict trends in future literature and manifest application of ideas into policy.

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2.1 A History of Russians in the Baltic

The history of Russians in Latvia and Estonia stretches back many generations; the first Russian settlers came as Old Believers, fleeing religious strife at the time of the Great Schism of the Russian Orthodox Church in the 17th Century. A few decades later, Russia conquered the land

held by Sweden in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) and Russians came to permanently settle the newly-conquered land and form a Governate (Губерния) of the Empire. However, in the politicized context of Russians in Estonia today, many refer to the more recent arrivals, who came to Estonia and Latvia in the 1980s, as the Moscow government of the Soviet Union attempted to quell ethno-nationalist sentiment in the Republics by forcibly altering demographics. As the Soviet period from 1940-1991 is considered an illegal occupation in Estonia, these Russians are considered cynical colonizers by some nationalist Estonians, and the sentiment that they ought to ‘go back to where they came from’ is not uncommon. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian diaspora experienced a sense of legal, cultural, political and psychological loss or demotion, as they went from being the dominant nationality within their ‘own’ country, to being an ethnic minority (albeit a substantial one in some areas) now in ‘someone else’s land; this loss of cultural-political capital has been painful for the Russian diaspora, especially those who cannot understand their new national language, which constituted the majority of Russians in 1992 (Brubaker 1992, 272-273).

In his seminal, yet controversial and oft-criticized essay ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (1993) – later developed into a bestselling book, Samuel Huntington famously delineated the post-Cold War world into different civilizational districts and claimed that the future of human history would be molded by their inevitable rivalry and conflict. Though Huntington’s ideas have proven widely controversial and disputed in the academic community, they do give rise to an interesting question in the context of this review: what would this theory imply for people whose ‘civilizational’ cultural identity and ‘civilizational’ home differ?

This question brings us to the issue of identity and Othering in two dimensions: social-cultural; and spatial. According to Cheskin (2012), in the context of Russians in Latvia: “public projections of Russian-speaking identity are both a counter- reaction to, and a synthesis with, constructed 'Latvian', 'Russian' and 'European' identities and discourses”. That is to say, in the social-cultural dimension, Russian identity in Latvia is reactive and oppositional in nature: the Othered Other their surroundings as a coping mechanism to environmental discourse. Regarding the spatial dimension of Russian identity in the Baltic, Andrey Makarychev (2005,

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481) considers the Russia-Estonia and Russia-Latvia borders to be “still in their infancy”. He also speaks of the ‘construction of Europe’ in the context of these borders, and advances that “conceptually, peripheries are presented as underdeveloped, inconveniently positioned and exposed to external dangers, and they are comprehended as subordinated territories” in line with the core-periphery conceptual model of Europe already discussed. As such, by association the inhabitants of these periphery areas are considered by inhabitants of the core to be subordinate to their own desires and interests.

2.2 A History of the Other

The Self and the Other have Hegelian roots. That is to say, the phenomena are formed in the mind from a mental dialectic of the subject perceiving not only itself as Self, but also objects understood to be in some way an extension of that Self, whether because of shared characteristics or an emotional bond, and thereby casting as Other that which it infers negatively as an object not belonging to the set of categories understood as the phenomenal realm of Self. In infancy, this is how we learn of the world beyond our own bodies; in societies, this phenomenal-psychological process is the cradle of the formation of power structures.

The phenomenon of the Other and Othering has a long and complex history and is found explored in depth in the academic fields of philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and critical theory. Rooted at first in the Hegelian dialectic, modern philosophy became concerned with the Other in the 20th Century through its introduction in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 (Brons 2015, 69). In the field of phenomenology, a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being, of lived experience and consciousness, the foundations for the modern understanding of the Other were laid in the work of Edmund Husserl, and advanced upon directly or indirectly through the writings of Buber, Sartre Foucault, Freud, Lacan, and others. The principle of casting a perceived human object as Other has had application in the subjugation and oppression of minority and Othered groups in the form of imperialism, colonialism, racialism and racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of prejudice and imbalanced power structures. As such, it has formed the basis of much of the research of postcolonial, feminist and queer critical theory, and academics exploring the history and manifestation of power, especially when rooted in culture.

On an individual level, viewing someone else as Other is not merely a cognitive recognition of the object as not-Self. Othering is the additional ‘recognition’ of the Other as inherently odd,

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alien, even inferior to oneself. In everyday parlance, it is “phenomena of stereotyping and racialization” (Thomas-Olalde and Velho 2011, 27). Lila Abu-Lughod (1991, 87), cited by Dervin (2012) describes Othering as a phenomenon that “allows individuals to construct sameness and difference and to affirm their own identity. Thus, Othering is not just about the other but also about the self”. Schwalbe (2000, 777) defines Othering as “the defining into existence of a group of people who are identifiable, from the standpoint of a group with the capacity to dominate, as inferior”. Vinkenburg (2014, 382) cites Jensen’s (2011, 65) observation that iterative Othering is a series of “discursive processes by which powerful groups, who may or may not make up a numerical majority, define subordinate groups into existence in a reductionist way which ascribes problematic and/or inferior characteristics to these subordinate groups. Such discursive processes affirm the legitimacy and superiority of the powerful and condition identity formation among the subordinate”. To Other is to take a position of inherent opposition, of value-judgment, and of implicit recognition – warranted or otherwise – of a desired power dynamic and hierarchy between the Self as subject and the Other as object. Iterated on a societal level, this perception of outsiders and outsider groups as Other constitutes a tribal narrative and casts the Other into a position of weakness, relative to the subject group. Examples of this include pseudo-scientific racial theory, with ‘Whiteness’ being considered both the epitome of humankind and its norm; the same can be said of gender/sex relations, with ‘man’ historically and in some circles to this day being considered both ‘better’ and the assumed ‘neutral’ term over ‘Woman’. This violent iteration has had tragic consequences throughout history, especially regarding identity in Europe. There has been a prevailing thought in academic writing and enacted public policy for decades that the cultural trauma Europe inflicted upon itself through Othering – most viscerally in the form of the Holocaust – is resolvable only through the creation of a post-national Europe, that a “solution to national history is the European future” (Boyer 2005, 523). In fact, Boyer cites Matti Bunzl’s article in the same journal that “the Holocaust stands at the core of the new Europe”.

What is the direction of travel for Othering within Europe? While clearly social inequalities are slowly being combated and smoothed out across the continent, with women and minority groups holding more personal freedom and economic access than in centuries past, the form of Othering is transmuting to other identities, within a polity (the EU) especially that nominally seeks to gain unifying strength through their diversities. The reality is not so rose-tinted: “while European [national] borders are becoming invisible for some, they are all too hard and visible for others” (M’charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014, 473). This same paper explores the

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conceptualization of the Other as a phenotypic issue in border management relations: while racism is slowly abating, and is not as visceral or prominent in the public space as before, it is still prevalent in the private sphere and affects inter-community relations at national and local levels.

As well as presenting a phenotypic-racial approach to discussing Othering, there are of course other academic approaches besides that have a direct relevance to this paper’s subjects. One can consider Othering as “a key process in the justification of social arrangements” amongst communities (Staerklé 2013, 50); this in turn leads to writing such as Shoshana (2016), examining the role of class as a cultural-sociological dimension of othering. Bowman (2003) asserts that the discourse of inter-community relations is “one of acknowledging, accommodating, and rendering difference familiar”. Dervin (2012, 181-194) examines Othering through the sociological and anthropological constructs of cultural identity and its representation.

Alternatively, one can explore Othering as a dimension of space in social relations, in particular through the use of maps, which hold political power in their own right. In discussing the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, MacLeod (2017, 158-159) elaborates that a country does not define the borders of the map, but rather the border defines the country itself. According to Johnson and Coleman (2012): “Societies have historically sought to spatialize difference – to other – even within the boundaries of supposedly unified polities … Certain regions become repositories for undesirable national traits as part of a dialectical process of nation and region building. The processes of othering are rarely as linear and tidy as proposed in some current formulations of the theory; rather, othering involves a host of concomitant processes that work together to produce economically and culturally differentiated regions. The processes by which particular places or regions become “othered” are not only interesting in the abstract but also carry with them enduring material consequences”. In terms of human geography, van Houtum and van Naerssen (2002) present ‘bordering’ as the spatial interpretation and application of Othering. The practice of geographic delineations therefore inherently Others those on the opposite side of the border from the perspective of the subject.

Finally, a common paradigm of the Other is the use of language, and its inherent alien nature to those who do not speak it (Vinkenburg 2014). This can be seen manifest in the instances where some languages’ denomination for a particular out-group (for example, ‘Germans /

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Немцы’ in the Russian language) are a determination that those people do not speak correctly, and therefore, not at all.

The modern construction of a ‘European’ identity could be considered an example of institutionalized Temporal Othering, which can be defined as “a possibility for a political community to constitute its identity without any spatial delimitation by means of casting as Other its own past, whose repetition in the future it seeks to avoid” (Prozorov 2011, 1273). Prozorov notes that this “image” of such behavior by the EU is commonly spread, but up for debate, and contests the notion himself. However, the case is there for it to be made, that ‘Europe’ as modernly understood, is an idea of peace and institutional harmony, and the exemplary past of violence, disharmony and fracture in European history is cast as Other to the modern European Union project.

2.3 Europe – Where and What is it?

This paper is concerned with Europe as both concept and space. Understandings of both natures – in lay and academic thinking – have evolved over time, according to local and regional political realities. In “Europe: How Far?”, W. H. Parker (1960) explores in detail how the perceived outer bounds of Europe have been altered on the map for centuries, in accordance not with better understandings of geography, but with shifts in political reality and the locus of power. Power, of course, is central to the practice of Othering, which has thus been central to the changing borders of ‘Europe’. One recurrent feature of the history of Europe’s borders from the 16th-Century onwards is the inclusion or exclusion of Russia (dually as a civilization and as

a state) within them. Regarded as decidedly not-Europe by the peoples to the West, Russia was finally and conclusively conceded to be both European as a both a cultural entity and a geographic one, when the border between Europe and Asia was declared by Swedish cartographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg to be the Ural mountains and river in 1730 (Parker 1960, 285). This new boundary became the accepted convention in Russia and the rest of Europe. But the practice of Othering Russians as ‘Europeanly’ inferior would prove to continue. While purporting to be a fortifying project, universally beneficial to all its participants achieving ‘unity through diversity’, the process of European integration has long faced criticism from multiple angles for its perceived core-periphery (West European-Other) dialectic Weltanschauung, regarded as at first a means to maintain some semblance of control over decolonizing Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, dominance of a capitalist class over the working

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class, and latterly as a means to assert Western European notions of ‘Europe’ over its Eastern part, through expansion (dis-)guised as welcoming inclusivity (Jonsson 2017). This paper’s premise aligns with that of the work Europe faces Europe, which contributor and editor Johan Fornäs (2017, 3) claims will provide insight into “what Europe may become tomorrow”. As he alludes, much of the public discourse on Europe’s ‘direction’ and ‘vector’ has emanated from its political-cultural center, in its Western part, around the ‘core’ of the Inner Six (France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries). Less attention has historically been devoted to the considerations of the vision of Europe’s future from its ‘periphery’, understood usually not as Iberia, Greece and Scandinavia, but the former Warsaw Pact countries, some of which border the Inner Six (Czechia, Poland, Slovenia) in Central Europe but are nonetheless not considered ‘central’ to European discourse. Further removed again, owing to geography and their small populations, are the Baltic states.

Green (2013, 346) cites Abélès’s (2000) argument that “the EU's vision of Europe is that Europe is a constantly evolving, never completed, project involving continual compromise that leaves the meaning or value of Europe, as an idea, permanently indistinct”. In fact: ‘Europe is a state of mind’ was the assertion of José Manuel Barroso’s administration during his tenure as President of the European Commission (2004-2014). Carl Cederberg (2017) examined this statement in his 2017 article ‘Europe as Identity and Ideal: Reading Barroso’s ‘New Narrative’ Heretically alongside Hegel, Husserl and Patočka’ and concludes that Barroso’s vision of Europe is nothing new, and belongs entirely to the historic “grand narrative of Europe”, as previously espoused by the aforementioned philosophers. By implication, if the European Commission’s understanding of Europe is – consciously or unconsciously – rooted in centuries-old ideas, it begs the question: how versatile and adaptable is their policy towards improving situations of Othering, and countering the core-periphery model?

The phenomenon of Europeans Othering those in a different geographic segment of the (sub)continent is clearly not a new one. In antiquity, when Mediterranean cultures were the core locus of power, the European ‘divide’ between ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’ followed a North/South dichotomy. The politicians and philosophers of Greece and Rome saw the tribes living north of the Alps and Carpathians as barbarians, vastly inferior in comparison with their own cultures. The Great Schism of the Christian Church into Catholic and Orthodox, which began in 1066 and developed insipidly over time, promoted further a new form of Othering in Europe along a dichotomy of faith: the violent summit of this Othering materialized in the Sack of

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Constantinople in 1204, when Catholics butchered the Greek Orthodox inhabitants of the city and grievously strained ecumenical relations for centuries thereon. However, this spiritual divide would not evolve into a political divide across Europe for another few centuries to come. Larry Wolff (1994) presents the case that the division of Europe into ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’, with the value-judgement connotations of ‘inferior’ and ‘superior’ is a modern construct, harking back to its ideological foundations in 18th-century Enlightenment thinking, and

entrenched over time until solidified in the ‘Iron Curtain’ of the Cold War era; such thinking has persevered after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Warsaw Pact regimes thereafter. One legacy of this Othering process is the push in some of these countries to ‘lose’ the label ‘Eastern European’, which is deemed inferior to ‘Central European’ (cf. Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia) or ‘Northern European’ (cf. Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; many people the latter even strive for the country to be considered ‘Nordic’ over ‘Baltic’, for the same reason that the geographic term conveys greater prestige internationally, by association with the political and economic success of Scandinavia). Each of these nations’ attempts to alter geographic and cultural delineations on the map and in the minds of citizens and foreigners alike is an attempt to overcome spatial Othering and transcend their imposed position of ‘periphery’ to advance towards the European ‘core’. Pedersen (2008) also emphasizes the observed contemporary cultural schism running across Europe, between West and East, ‘Old’ and ‘New’. He argues that this is more prevalent to present discourse than political dimensions. Data suggests that, at the time of the 2004 expansion, the populations of the ‘New Europe’ member states felt more attached to ‘Europe’ as an idea than did the populations of the established ‘Old Europe’ member states at the time; in juxtaposition, “nationalist attachment” was more prevalent in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe (Schilde 2014, 651). It would appear that the public zeitgeist around joining the European Union amongst citizens of these Central and Eastern European countries was more open to supra-national associations and shared identity across national borders than citizens of the countries that were already part of the supra-national union. This is perhaps not surprising. After all, these ‘new’ countries were joining the EU at a time when it was already established as an identifiable bloc, with unifying treaties and declared values. On the other hand, ‘Old Europe’ countries, such as France, or Italy, had become part of the European Union when it was not the European Union as such, but the European Coal and Steel Community; the Union, with its identity, symbols, hymn and modern structure, evolved around these countries’ memberships of it, and thus their citizens were never at any point presented with the case that they were ‘joining’ a coherent, identifiable bloc.

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Thomas Risse (2005, 291) cites Haas’ (1958) early research into multi-layered identities and civic loyalties in Europe and affirms that “transferring loyalty to Europe and the EU is possible without giving up one's national (or regional or local or gender) identities”. However, Risse’s findings suggest that, contrary to what one might first assume, public ‘loyalty’ to European Union institutions does not follow directly from perceived material benefit from “material benefits” such as infrastructural funding or the right to freedom of movement, or even “exposure to European institutions” at all, but rather through a repeated, iterated process in which “Europeanness of ‘becoming European’ is gradually being embedded in understandings of national identities”. Likewise, Fligstein, Polyakova and Sandholtz (2012) assert that, contrary to early theorization that a European identity was mutually exclusive with national identity, “European identity has not displaced national identities in the EU, but, for a significant share of EU citizens, a European identity exists alongside a national identity”. Moreover, they concur with Risse’s analysis that Europeanization is an iterative process of participation, which is tied to the breadth and scope of an individual’s “economic and social horizons” – those whose lives “are essentially local are more likely to assert nationalist identities”.

2.4 Russia as the European Other

The history of Russia and its interactions as a state – in various incarnations – with the rest of Europe has been a historical dialectic of whether or not Russia is Other to Europe, and vice versa. Russian and non-Russian alike, there has been fierce debate as to the ‘European-ness’ of the Russian people and culture, with consensus often found along the lines of political comfort at the time. Even the supposedly immutable borders of where ‘Europe’ ends, and ‘Asia’ begins have varied according to political acceptance of how ‘European’ Russia is. Neumann (1998) and Bruter (2005, 82) discuss the history of Russia and her people as Other to Europe. This naturally begs the question: does the ‘European’ status of Russia and Russians within Russia have an impact of the ‘European’ status of the Russian diaspora within Europe, especially a ‘Europe’ so politically conceived as the European Union? Can one be de-Othered? If so, is this process of de-Othering consistent across an ethnic group, a community, or is it perniciously selective according to the will and whim of the subject observer, as is often the case with Othering to begin with?

Existential anguish over the authenticity of Russia’s European credentials was a driving factor behind Peter the Great’s vision of St Petersburg, built as Russia’s “Window on the West”, and utilizing the Germanic “-burg” root over the Slavic “-grad” to denote the city’s – and by

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extension, Russia’s – emancipation from non-European ‘backwardness’. The debates between the Slavophiles and Westernizers of the 19th Century in Russia encapsulate this civilizational

angst as to its place, its destiny. Likewise, non-Russian outsiders have historically debated Russia’s eligibility to sit among the pantheon of European nations. Even if considered authentically ‘European’, Russia has still historically been cast as Other in as far as it is cast as the Great Threat to Europe, a dangerous and terrifying state ‘on the edge’, which cannot be seen to act rationally or fairly – “Russia–EU relations have often been presented in terms of a normative gap, with the EU appearing as a normative and Russia as a non-normative actor… [this] normative agenda in Eastern Europe serves instrumental purposes. Selective norm promotion has the potential to change the hierarchy of identities among post-Soviet states” (Casier 2013, 1377). This argumentation that Russia is inherently dangerous has historically and presently led to a securitization of Central and Eastern Europe, with the security of the Baltic region in particular being “constituted by discourses of danger revolving around Russian Otherness and European Sameness” (Jæger 2000, 18). The territory of the Baltic states delineates the fusion/fissure line of the so-called Western and Eastern agendas of security perception, as well as the ‘old’ and ‘new’ schools of security thought (Jæger 2000, 20). Therefore: applying the lens of the Copenhagen School, the Baltic states – and Narva / Ivangorod in particular, perhaps – constitute a Regional Security Complex vis-à-vis international relations with Russia. Exogenous discourse around the Baltic Russians, and Narva(ns) most notably, arguably also constitutes securitization. According to Balzacq (2005, 179): “Securitization is a rule-governed practice, the success of which does not necessarily depend on the existence of a real threat, but on the discursive ability to effectively endow a development with such a specific complexion.” Buzan and Wæver (2003, 415) note that Russia and the three Baltic states “form a ‘regional security complex’, i.e. a geographically coherent set of two or more states whose security perceptions are closely interlinked”, and that – whether they like it or not – securitization issues have formed an integral role in the post-Soviet political histories of these states. These same authors discuss elsewhere the potential to purport that – in the aftermath of Crimea’s annexation in 2014 – there has been a “(re)securitisation” of political discourse regarding Russia and the Baltic states (Fernandes and Correia 2018).

According to Berg and Ehin (2016, 10; cit. Miniotaite 2003, 210): “accession conditionality [to the European Union] has encouraged the constitution of a liberal post-modern state identity in the Baltic states”, the same of which cannot be said for the post-Soviet Russian Federation. However, this casting of Russia as Other to Europe has also at times been politically expedient

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for Russian leadership, as has been proven the case in contemporary political discourse, when rhetorical analysis performed on public speeches delivered by Russian officials proves that “an overwhelmingly positive image of Russia with a rather negative image of the EU for almost the entirety of this period [2004-2014]” (Schiffers 2015, 1), which implicitly casts Russia to its own people as natural, righteous and ontologically ‘the Self’, and the EU and its constituent member states as politically unnatural, culturally immoral, and ontologically ‘the Other’. Concerns over Russia’s ‘place’ in ‘Europe’ bleed into the lexicology of describing Russians who leave Russia’s borders. In fact, the terminology used to describe these communities in the Russian ‘Near Abroad’ has been contentious. This paper’s use of the word ‘diaspora’ to describe Russians in the Baltic states, though approved of and used by Shlapentokh, may be yet deemed inaccurate by other scholars, such as Laitin and Melvin, who prefer the term “Russian settler community”, or simply “Russian-speaking population”, respectively (Poppe and Hagendoorn 2001, 57). In fact, per John Armstrong’s oft-cited definition (1976, 393) of a diaspora as “any ethnic collectivity which lacks a territorial base within a given polity”, this may well be true. After all, a place such as Narva in Estonia could be argued as constituting a ‘territorial base’ for a significant portion of Estonia’s ethnic Russian community. In Latvia, Daugavpils and pockets of Riga could be argued as performing the same function. In commentary on these communities, commentators – both journalistic and academic alike – can often be found as pointing out their novelty, as if the nature of their immigration (being predominantly in the 20th century) negates a sense of laying down roots, being attached to the

land, being “sons of the soil” who are “entitled to more rights than are newcomers” (Acharya, Laitin and Zhang 2018; Kolstø 1999, 607). However, while possibly providing a broad corollary indicator for integration and ‘settling-down’, the passing of time is not a guaranteed proxy for the depth of the establishment of a ‘base’, ‘territorial’ of otherwise. The experience(s) and contribution to political discourse of the Russians in Latvia and Estonia has to a significant extent molded the post-Soviet experience of these states, and is to some extent coterminous with that history.

2.5 Analysis of Themes, Approaches, Ideas in the Literature; and its Implications

The above has provided the reader with an overview of some of the academic literature relating to Othering, and has embedded such in a specific context: namely, the experience of Russians in the Baltic; the historic and ongoing development of ‘Europe’ and its relevance to the debate around Othering.

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In the chapter cited above, Carl Cederberg (2017, 35) paraphrases Paul Valéry to claim that: “the particularity of Europe … is its claim to universality”. This pithy aphorism evokes much of the sentiment in the other cited literature on ‘Europe’ and its essence. However, this “particularity of Europe”, with enough accompanying justification, could be attributed to other regions, cultures, identities. Europe – and the people who live within it – has certainly followed a particular trajectory in history; that cannot be denied. But ‘European’ discourse should not fall into the trap of exceptionalism through a discourse of tolerance, lest it inherently Other alternative voices within Europe in the process.

As regards the expanse of multi-paradigm discourse and literature on Othering itself, be it social, cultural, spatial, or linguistic: this paper predicts that the future likely holds scope for analysis in digital Othering, in terms of internet access and negotiating ‘space’ in the new currency of online data. This predicted future trend in the worldwide manifestation of Othering will likely be pan-cultural, but with local idiosyncrasies based on national (and supra-national in the case of the EU) political systems. Russia’s attempt to form its own RuNet, independent of the World Wide Web, is an example of this. Digital Othering amongst communities would be particularly pertinent in a country such as Estonia, which prides itself on being a small Silicon Valley on the Baltic Sea. The country has led tech innovation in Europe, trailblazing the new interface of online civic participation with its e-elections, and more recently Estonian e-residency. Citizens’ interaction with their governments – in Estonia and elsewhere – are moving increasingly to the cyber realm. The Other of the future is likely to be the person who has poor access to the internet, or a lack of sophistication in using it. In a similar vein, big data farming of consumers by tech companies (and in some cases, governments) will give rise to potential scenarios of social engineering through the manipulation of online algorithms, that push information-entertainment content to users according to their previous preferences in the most benign case, and according to the preferences of those who pay the algorithm-maker, in the most malign. We may be looking ahead at a world where the constitutive Other is formed by design. This may be a gap in the present literature on Othering that is waiting to be filled: while the manipulation of Othering has been an historic tool for demagogues and dictators, to pit ‘the masses’ either against one another or ‘The Enemy’ in order to maintain power, modern technology creates new possibilities for this practice that may be realized in the coming years; the implication for information warfare potential is clear.

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Understanding citizens’ perceived experience of Othering is an important aspect of building public policy. Though the phenomenon is global and pan-cultural, in the context of ethnic Russians in Narva (and even the wider Baltic and EU), it ought to be of interest to any policymaker concerned with improving the health of civil society in Estonia. It should also be considered a potential security issue. Lying directly on the border with Russia, Narva is often mooted as a potential hostile annexation target through ground invasion by casual punditry. While this may not be really plausible (Estonia’s membership of NATO in all likelihood protects it for now), the Russian communities of the Baltic states are certainly targeted by Kremlin propaganda as part of wider information warfare ‘active measures’.

This literature review has explored the history and current trend of thought in academic research concerning Othering, and how it relates to the specific context of ethnic Russians in Narva. This phenomenon has implications for contemporary discourse on the political nature of the European Union’s understanding of what ‘Europe’ is, and raises questions of policy direction for both the Estonian authorities regarding this community, and policymakers in other EU states regarding communities considered on the ‘edge’ of their own societies.

It is therefore possible to conclude that Baltic Russians, especially in the Estonian border town of Narva – where there is a linguistic and cultural border with the rest of the country and a political border with Russia – conceivably experience Othering. In the context of this paper, this conclusion would suggest that if detailed and specific research were undertaken on Narvan Russians’ (or other Estonian Russians’ or Latvian Russians’) political and social relations with ‘Europe’ in the context of a discourse of Othering, it could be highly fruitful and illuminating.

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Theoretical Framework

This chapter outlines the methodology behind the theoretical framework behind this paper’s research question.

3.1 Meta-Analytic ‘Research Synthesis’ Approach

The theoretical framework of this paper is the application of a meta-analysis of qualitative data. This is sometimes referred to in academic literature as a meta-synthesis (Levitt 2018). Meta-analyses are more commonly performed upon quantitative data-sets, using raw numerical data for review in the fields of natural sciences. Thus, meta-syntheses of qualitative data-sets are comparatively rarer. However, it is by no means unheard of. It has been used as a template for research in the field of clinical psychotherapy (Levitt 2018; Timulak 2009) and the psychological implications of subjective identity, though applied to a sociological and political context, render this an acceptable methodology to employ for the purposes of this paper. This academic approach has a widespread application, which is growing increasingly popular in scientific and non-scientific academic fields alike (Timulak 2014, 481) and its nomenclature has come under the guises of: “qualitative analysis, qualitative synthesis, meta-ethnography, grounded formal theory, meta-study or meta-summary (cf. Onwuegbuzie, and Frels 2016, 27).” Though dealing with qualitative data on an ‘ethnic group’ (here: Russians in Latvia and Estonia), the term ‘meta-ethnography’ – a meta-analysis of ethnographies – might not be suitable, as an ethnography typically engages in the direct observation of lived experiences of people, rather than reports on their subjective views.

Specifically, the ‘branch’ this paper’s meta-analytic framework is better described as a “research synthesis” approach, as it is engaging with exclusively qualitative content. Research synthesis is “the integration of existing knowledge and research findings pertinent to an issue. The aim of synthesis is to increase the generality and applicability of those findings and to develop new knowledge through the process of integration. Synthesis is promoted as an approach that deals with the challenge of ‘information overload’, delivering products that further our understanding of problems and distil relevant evidence for decision-making” (Wyborn et al. 2018, 72). Therefore, this paper shall take three major data-sets from three major reports conducted for both academic and public policy purposes, and cross-examine their findings to develop a sharper understanding of the more specific interest of ‘European’ identity amongst Russians in Estonia and Latvia. This synthesis of research seeks to precisely cut through the wall of data in these large sets, and distil the information incised for greater clarity.

Are Minorities in Europe 'Othered' in the Space between Policy and Academic Research? - A Case Study on Russians in Latvia and Estonia