Post-Cold War Identity Politics

Northern and Baltic Experiences

Marko Lehti, David J Smith, Marko Lehti, David J Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135760496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

During the past decade northern Europe has started to assume an identity of its own. Categories of East and West have become blurred, challenging as well the idea of what it means to be Nordic. Post-Cold War Identity Politics maps this process in Scandinavia. Looking at projects designed to help regional development in the Nordic countires, it assesses whether a new way of defining 'Northern-ness' is emerging. The book highlights the existence of co-existing and - to some extent - competing region-building projects in northern Europe. It demonstrates how they are all efforts by existing nations to redefine their role in Europe at a time of change, and points to how they might develop in the future.

1
Possessing a Baltic Europe: Retold National Narratives in the European North

MARKO LEHTI

INVENTING A BALTIC WORLD

In the early 1990s two historians, David Kirby and Matti Klinge, separately introduced a new term, the Baltic World, to define a novel scene of history.¹ In their use of the term Baltic, reference was made not only to the three Baltic states but to the whole Baltic Sea Area (BSA), including also Scandinavia and Finland as well as parts of Poland, Germany and Russia. In their use of the word world, the Baltic Sea Area was described as a whole setting, if not a uniform area, for human activity that had existed at least in the past. The model for this new term was taken from the idea of a Mediterranean world introduced by Fernand Braudel in the 1940s. The question arises as to why an idea of this kind was borrowed and adapted to the European North in the 1990s. No scientific activity can be isolated from the trends of its own time and this statement holds good in the case of historiography, too. Seemingly, in the early 1990s there emerged a strong need to imagine new kinds of spatial images to rise above the old East-West division. Thus, the invention of the Baltic World was not only an issue of historiography but also part of a much wider process of reacting to the drastic changes that followed the disappearance of the Soviet zone and thereby the disappearance of the old East.

Larry Wolff has shown in his stimulating book Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment that the invention of a new spatial image is not a sudden process and that signs of a change can be found in several fields—travel accounts, novels, scientific books and cartography. Wolff writes about a great turn that took place 200 years ago. Then, it was a question of replacing the old North-South division by a new East-West division at the moment when Europe’s political, economic and intellectual activity was shifting away from the shores of the Mediterranean to the shores of the Atlantic. A new space between Europe and the Orient was discovered and named. But it was preceded by a blurring of the old images of the North and the Orient. Russia spread out towards the Black Sea and began to be comprehended not only as a northern country but also as a realm to be constituted on a north-south axis, from St Petersburg to the sea of Azov or to the Crimea in the south. Thus, it constituted not only a northern realm but also an eastern one. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire, the Orient, withdrew from the Hungarian lands and a new space between Europe and the Orient emerged.² The resulting confusion in the midst of change had then to be sorted out in several texts from novels to scientific studies. A new space was possessed and finally named Eastern Europe.

For Wolff, it is not a question of an invention of Eastern Europe or any other image as such, but of efforts to map or possess a changing politico-cultural order and of defining one’s own central position in it. But possessing a new situation requires the naming of a new space. Without a name, nothing can exist in the social world. With a name, we are also giving co-ordinates in space and time. Naming thus means the invention of new narratives, to be told about something which has not existed before. Yet every narrative has to be based on something that has existed before, thereby using the past and emphasizing continuity are crucial elements in new spatial narratives, too. Naming a space means defining its nature, its boundaries, but also its past and future.

I would argue that the situation after the end of the Cold War is highly reminiscent of events over 200 years ago. The East is no longer the same East that it used to be. On the other hand, denying the East would mean denying the West, too, and hence while the old East has lost its meaning there is still an East! It exists in the form of a ‘silk curtain’. The East exists also in the ‘return-to- Europe’ rhetoric of the politicians of the former Eastern Europe, because this is also a narrative based on the backwardness of the East and on how it will follow the West. Consequently, there is a kind of Europe in-between comprehending itself as a transit region escaping from easternness to westernness. On the other hand, during the past decade, practices have emerged connected with the EU and NATO enlargements, the latest of which is the extension of Schengen border regulations to concern applicant countries. This depicts a new East including Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. In the current Europe, old self-evident features have disappeared but instead of one there are several narratives available for outlining a new order. Sheer amazement has been characteristic of the European attitude towards the disappearance of the Iron Curtain, the transformation of the old Eastern Europe and the emergence of the new Russia. Old myths have been mixed with new visions as a new Europe is envisioned. And there is no single way of comprehending this European change, but several. A Baltic Europe is certainly a contribution to the depiction of a new Europe existing at least partly beyond the old East-West division.

The idea of change and of a search for the new order have been characteristic of the decade following the end of the Cold War. That decade can be comprehended as a formative moment. According to Erik Ringmar, a formative moment can be characterized as ‘a time when the very definition of the meaningful is up for grabs; when old metaphors are replaced by new ones; when new stories are told about these metaphors, new identities established and new social practices initiated’. Old stories are contested and new ones are invented to replace them. It is also a period when some try to hang on to the old beliefs, while others bravely look forward to the building of the new order, as James Der Derrian recounts in his analysis of the nature of the ruptures in history. Formative moments also underline the role of individuals as creators of something new, because there exists in a community a great desire for new narratives, to bring order into the midst of change. ‘For this reason formative moments often come to appear as times of unprecedented poetic freedom: people suddenly believe they can fashion themselves according to their own fancy and become whatever they want to be,’ as Ringmar writes.³ It is easy to recognize that the region-building approaches for the BSA belong to this category.

Not only has the division of Europe changed over the last decade, sovereignty has also been redefined. During the past few decades, a novel geo-rhetoric has been spread all around Europe. In this rhetoric, sovereign entities exist parallel with non-sovereign and national units coexist with non-national. The straitjacket of state boundaries has been broken up by trans-boundary and cross-boundary cooperation but, in particular, a new kind of spatial imagination has gained a place in geopolitical thinking. Regionalism is a fact in the new Europe because the current discourse on Europe recognizes varying images of regions: micro-regions within states, such as Catalonia, Scotland or Bavaria; interstate regions, made up of the states such as the EU or the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS); trans-regions that cross state borders and consist of state and non-state actors as several Euro-regions; and also quasi-continental regions, such as Europe itself.⁴ This new regionalism has blurred the limits of state sovereignty and has led many to argue about ‘the end of sovereignty’ or, if not quite so dramatically, at least about the need for a drastic redefinition of sovereignty.⁵

The Baltic World is an excellent example of this change, because it does not only contribute to one of the regional models, but to all of them at the same time. The BSA is based on trans-regional co-operation between different kinds of networks formed by non-state actors, but it can be comprehended also as an interstate region existing in official state co-operation, that is, in the form of the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS). The conceiving of the Baltic World has also had a strong influence on the image of a particular quasi-continental region, Europe, because it has reorganized and surpassed the fundamental East-West division of Europe. The rise of micro-regions such as Schleswig-Holstein has again been an essential element in the invention of the BSA and, on the other hand, these micro-regions have used the BSA for strengthening their position. Nonetheless, I am not arguing that the state or a nation is disappearing. New spatial images seemingly have their origin in the national discourses, but because of the challenge of a new regionalism, the old nations and nation-states have been forced to reidentify themselves in a new Europe.

In this chapter I am arguing that the regionalization of Europe has been in the first place a discursive process; it is a process of naming. In the European North during the last decade and a half several new regional narratives have been recounted, yet most of them have been centred, in one way or another, around the Baltic Sea. An alternative rhetoric has arisen, founded on concepts of northernness or of a New Northern Europe,⁶ of an Amber Gateway or of a Yule-land! These new images have not been invented by accident. They are attempts to reorganize a disintegrating world. In the discourse on the Baltic World it is not only a question of simply reorganizing ‘the near abroad’, but also of systematizing the idea of the whole of Europe. Views on Europe and its divisions have been blurring ever since the end of the Cold War and thus many new Europes have been imagined. In this chapter I am endeavouring to capture this great change in spatial and temporal narratives, which has made possible the envisioning of a new order beyond the old East-West division. This is not to argue that the East-West division has totally vanished, but that it has lost its monopoly and exclusiveness.

I am especially interested in the narratives on Europe invented near the former East-West dividing line. Eastern Europe, as stated by Wolff, was and is a western invention, but, of course, people in the East have also had visions of their own about Europe. Thus, the disappearance of the East-West division has most probably been comprehended differently on the shores of the Atlantic and in the European North. The imagining of a Baltic Europe has not, however, been a simple and one-sided process but includes several, even contrary dimensions. I have tried to capture this variety by separately analysing the different aspects of the new Baltic rhetoric and seeing the new discourse not as a constant structure but as a continuing process or, I would say, as a continuing debate over Europe and one’s own identity within Europe.

INVENTING SIMILARITIES BEYOND THE EAST-WEST DIVISION

Up until the end of the 1980s the Soviet Union and the whole Soviet bloc were seen in the West, including the Nordic countries, as one uniform grey zone extending from the shores of the Baltic Sea all the way to Vladivostok. The East-West dividing line of the Cold War era was a truly exclusive one. Thus, the other side represented an ‘otherness’ with which there was no possibility of sharing common features. During the last few years of the 1980s political changes in East Central Europe and the perestroika in the Soviet Union started to upset the uniformity of the East. In the Baltic World, the most drastic event was the (re-) emergence of the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—as independent political and national units. The Popular Fronts of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania succeeded, after 1988, in bringing these nations on to the political stage and transformed these former passive subordinates into active actors.⁷ In the West these states have belonged to the realm of the lost and forgotten past, but from the late 1980s onwards they have been there to stay in the present, too. These three small nations in this manner broke up the uniformity of the Soviet Union and introduced to the western public the varying faces of the East. The blurring of the uniformity of the old East required a repossessing of what the East truly means and includes. The position of the newborn Baltic states was in the first place the target of this re-evaluation, although later in the 1990s the main issue shifted more to the essence of what Russia is.

A Baltic Finnic Space

The discussion in Finland at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, when the former Baltic states began to re-emerge, serves as a good example of the contrasting reactions the amazement of the change in the East brought forth. In these years, this problem constituted, in Finland, a part of the tentative efforts made to capture and to cope with a change that began to affect Europe as whole. There arose positive expectations, but many comprehended the changes as new fears.

As to the specifics of what was happening in the eastern Baltic, it should be noted that even if Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are geographically close neighbours of Finland, the existence of these countries was almost completely forgotten by the Finnish public during the Cold War years. After the annexation of the three Baltic states by the Soviet Union in 1940 and the experiences of the Winter War and the Continuation War, the Finns tried to protect their position in the West by forgetting altogether their location as a fourth Baltic stat...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• THE BALTIC SEA AREA
• CONTRIBUTORS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION: OTHER EUROPES
• 1. POSSESSING A BALTIC EUROPE: RETOLD NATIONAL NARRATIVES IN THE EUROPEAN NORTH
• 2. NORDIC NEAR ABROAD OR NEW NORTHERN EUROPE? PERSPECTIVES ON POST-COLD WAR REGIONAL CO-OPERATION IN THE BALTIC SEA AREA
• 3. PAST POLITICS IN NORTH-EASTERN EUROPE: THE ROLE OF HISTORY IN POST-COLD WAR IDENTITY POLITICS
• 4. FROM MODERN TO POST-MODERN REGION-BUILDING: EMANCIPATING THE FINNISH NATION FROM THE STATE
• 5. THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN THE NORDIC AND THE NORTHERN: TORN APART BUT MEETING AGAIN?
• 6. LOOKING FOR NEIGHBOURS: ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF LATVIAN RHETORIC ON NORDIC ‘CLOSENESS’
• 7. REGIONAL SECURITY: ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL?
• 8. ESTONIA AND EUROPE: A COMMON IDENTITY OR AN IDENTITY CRISIS?
• 9. PARADISE REGAINED: THE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF EUROPE IN THE LITHUANIAN DEBATE
• 10. THE BALTIC STATES IN RUSSIAN FOREIGN POLICY DISCOURSE: CAN RUSSIA BECOME A BALTIC COUNTRY?
• 11. POST-SOVIET GEO-POLITICS IN THE NORTH OF EUROPE
• 12. CLASH OF THE BOUNDARIES? THE EUROPEAN UNION AND RUSSIA IN THE NORTHERN DIMENSION
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY