Reactive Re-Bordering,Geopolitics and Biopolitics: Estonia at Europe’s Eastern Flank

Introduction

This contribution to the Forum intends to shed light on the most recent changes in Estonia’s policies towards Russia, Belarus and Ukraine after February 24, 2022. I intend to show how the Russian–Ukrainian war transformed Estonia’s relations with its eastern neighbors. I start the analysis with a general account of spatiality and bordering in Estonia’s foreign policy thinking, with the ensuing distinction between its geopolitical and biopolitical aspects particularly boosted by Russia’s military interference in Ukraine. I discuss both the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic discourses on re-bordering with Russia and de-bordering with Ukraine, and finalize the essay with research-based conclusions largely pertaining to the deconstruction of Eastern Europe in Estonian regionalist imagery.

Spaces and Borders in Estonian Foreign Policy

I understand bordering, re-bordering and de-bordering as socially and discursively constructed phenomena that boil down to different forms of association and alienation, inclusion and exclusion, securitization and de-securitization. This approach interprets borders through the prism of relations of proximity/closeness and distancing that are never fixed and always in flux, being dependent on a constellation of multiple spatial and territorial factors.

The strongly emphasized Western identity of Estonia and its belonging to the Euro-Atlantic security community resonates with Huntington’s civilizational bordering that was quite popular in Estonia starting from the regaining the independence (Ruutsoo, 1995). Estonia was one of a few countries in Europe that has consistently treated Russia as a potential security perpetrator and encroacher (Park, 1995). The strong notes of securitization in the Estonian mainstream discourse prevented the country from transitioning away from ‘existential’ (securitized) to ‘normal’ (de-securitized) politics (Mälksoo, 2006); rather this discourse for three decades was vacillating between these two geopolitical models. February 24, 2022 was an event that made the ‘existential’ re-bordering of the whole spectrum of relations with Russia clearer and thicker.

The reverse side of the Huntingtonian vision of Estonia’s geospatial positioning in Europe is a strongly pronounced avoidance of Orientalization. As Maria Mälksoo (2006) assumed years ago, the historical experience of occupation explains Estonia’s sensitivity to policies of major European states aimed to prioritize relations with Moscow, and reluctance to accept its ‘East European’ – and therefore inferior and secondary in importance – status in the eyes of older and larger EU and NATO members. In particular, the much publicized concept of digital state was largely motivated by the desire to get rid of the legacy of occupation and open Estonia to the neoliberal global world (Kersti Kaljulaid, 2018).

The political positionality ‘on the right side of history’ was a key shaper of Estonia’s diplomatic activities during this country’s non-permanent membership in the UN Security Council in 2020–2021. On the one hand, when it came to issues pertaining to Belarus and Ukraine, Estonia was aware that it is ‘the Council’s sole Eastern European member’ (Gowan, 2022), which explained its high activity in condemning and isolating the Lukashenka regime and supporting President Zelensky. On the other hand, in the UN Security Council Estonia was interested in developing partnership with such countries as Norway (Haugevik et al., 2021) as a testimony to the Baltic–Nordic diplomatic synergies. In engaging with such global issues as energy production, Estonia always has in mind, apart from environmental and financial aspects, the prospects of teaming up with its major Western allies, first of all the United States (Jermalavičius et al., 2022).

The decisively pro-Western perspective of Estonia’s foreign policy is corroborated by its engaged contribution to specific policy projects aimed at spatial reconfiguration of Europe’s eastern flank. From a geopolitical perspective, this applies to Estonia’s participation in the 3 + 1 formula (three Baltic states and Poland), as well as in the ‘Bucharest 9’ platform bringing together all EU and NATO member states bordering on Russia, from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Of major geoeconomic importance is the US-supported Three Seas Initiative which, as seen from an American viewpoint, ‘would represent a concrete and much needed strategic American economic footprint in the region, complementary to the security-military dimension of the U.S. presence. It would be a concrete counterweight to investments in critical infrastructure by actors who do not share our democratic values and interests, hindering their political and economic influence’ (Aurescu & Rau, 2021). In Ian Brzezinski’s (2021) words, 3SI is an alternative to both Chinese Belt and Road and Russian imperial ambitions, including the Eurasian project. As a practical gesture of support for 3SI, ‘Estonia has put forward 20 million euros to the Three Seas Investment Fund, following State Secretary Mike Pompeo’s announcement of a US contribution with the size of one billion dollars’ (Kuusik, 2020).

The Geo- and Biopolitics of Security

In 2014, Estonia has unambiguously qualified the annexation of Crimea as an act of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and firmly located itself as an active participant of the coalition of democracies bent on defending the right of countries to freely choose the alliances they wish to partake and meant to delegitimize Russia’s plans for spheres of influence (Studemeyer, 2019, 796). In 2022, when Russia restarted the invasion, this geopolitical stance was supplemented by measures of biopolitical distancing from Russia. The interconnections of geopolitical (as related to spaces and territories) and biopolitical (as related to populations and people’s lives and bodies) agendas in securitized environments have been already discussed in academia (Dillion & Lobo-Guerrero, 2008), and the case of Estonia seems to be a good extension of this debate.

Geopolitical dimensions certainly prevailed in Estonia’s detachment from the increasingly belligerent ‘Russian world’. For years, Estonia painstakingly was trying to find a balance between a sober attitude to Russia as a neoimperial power with geopolitical ambitions towards its neighbors and attempts to mitigate the ensuing conflictuality by diplomatic means. On February 9, 2022, only a few weeks before the invasion, the head of the Estonian parliamentary commission on foreign affairs Marko Mihkelson was meeting in Moscow with his counterpart from the Federation Council and assumed that these bilateral talks might eventually ‘melt the ice’ in the Estonian–Russian relations (ERR, 2022). The two parliaments even envisaged a joint session in the foreseeable future. However, the military attack on Ukraine put an end to these rosy expectations. Two mutually complementary policy tracks became dominant – further de-bordering of relations with Ukraine, and stronger re-bordering measures towards Russia and Belarus.

When it comes to the first track, Estonia’s policies are in harmony with the strategy of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry to reposition Ukraine as a Central European country (Dmytro Kuleba 2021) and associate it with the members of the Visegrad Group through both bilateral relations and the EU’s and NATO’s institutional frameworks. This Ukrainian quest for recognition resembles Estonia’s earlier demand for acknowledgment of its full-fledged European identity and civilizational belonging to the Euro-Atlantic international society and seems to be in line with a consensus within the EU on opening the membership perspectives for Ukraine (as well as for Moldova) who ought to be politically decoupled from Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan within the EaP (Gogolashvili, 2022). In other words, Estonia supports the clearly expressed desire of Ukraine to become Europe (Aslund, 2023) without adjectives.

This policy implies even greater reliance on normative and institutional coherence and solidarity within the Euro-Atlantic West on helping Ukraine to withstand Russian invasion and later on integrating Ukraine into the EU and eventually NATO (Volodymyr Zelensky i Kaja Kallas spylkuyutsa zi studentami Zhitomyrskoi Polytekhniki, 2023). In Estonian view, Ukraine needs to be accepted not as just a victimized country but as a full-fledged European nation that suffered a lot but still has a very strong resource potential. In this regard, Estonia clearly identifies itself with a group of Baltic and Central European countries that are taking the lead role in effectively responding to the Russian aggression financially, politically and militarily. Within the normative European space Estonia sees itself ‘a success story emblematic of everything Ukrainians now aspire to achieve’ (Weiss, 2022). Tallinn regards the NATO membership for Finland and Sweden as a further much desired consolidation of trans-Atlantic forces in the Baltic Sea Region which, in the words of the former Estonian Foreign Minister, is transforming into NATO’s ‘internal lake’ (Why has Estonia Criticised China’s Peace Plan for Ukraine? 2023).

The second policy track consists of unprecedented measures of re-bordering undertaken towards Russia and Belarus. These moves can be qualified as ‘reactive exceptionalism’ and are tantamount to acknowledging the decomposition of Eastern Europe as a space of a common EU–Russia neighborhood, and the simultaneous isolation of Russia and its satellite from European political, institutional, normative and cultural spaces. Economic dimensions of re-bordering matter a lot as well: the Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas has publicly called local companies to avoid the temptation of lucrative trade with Russia circumventing Western sanctions (Cook, 2023).

From the Estonian perspective, the meaning of its eastern border has changed – nowadays it delineates the European community of nation states, where economic interdependency goes hand in hand with globalization, from Russia’s domain of imperial transgressions (Watch, 2023). It is the constitutive value of this border for Estonian international identity that explains the lucidly articulated resolve to defend it by all possible means. Estonian security experts make clear that ‘if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine, the attack against the Baltic States will follow in upcoming years. Accordingly, Estonia is preparing for a possible full scale conventional conflict with Russia’ (Veebel & Ploom, 2023, 151). These gloomy predictions are justified by such gestures from the Russian side as, for example, targeting Estonia as part of missile simulation in June 2022 (Tammik, 2022), or cyber-attacking Estonia as a retaliation for its pro-Ukraine policies (ERR, 2023e).

Against this backdrop, Estonian experts deem that ‘in the foreseeable future, Russia is likely to remain a major threat to European security for two main reasons: it will not give up its imperial ambitions to (re-) establish a sphere of influence, using force if necessary, and it will not become a stable democracy… It is high time Europe abandoned the slogan proclaiming that “there can be no military solution.” The war in Ukraine provides painful evidence that this statement does not hold’ (Raik & Hurt, 2022). The policy of reactive re-bordering and expelling Russia from the European security space was confirmed by a report of Estonian Defense Ministry of January 2023 that rebuffed any possibilities for an eventual comeback to the pre-war arrangements with the Kremlin and re-emphasized the critical importance of militarily deterring Russia (Russia’s War in Ukraine: Myths and Lessons, 2022). In the words of Jonathan Vseviov (2023, 7), the Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia, ‘the grey zone between Russia and the democratic West destabilizes the region and breeds conflicts’.

Such attitudes reveal a yawning gap between the concerns of Russia’s immediate neighbors and those of countries farther west. “The Baltic states and Poland do not fear any real or imagined escalation as much as a Russian victory. They have therefore provided Kyiv with as much military aid as they can, outpacing many other countries when measured relative to the size of their economies. And they have made their frustration with Western handwringing clear. From the viewpoint of these countries, the West’s inconsistent and constantly shifting limits on the kinds of weapons it will deliver unnecessarily prolong the war” (Raik, 2022).

Within the logic of re-bordering, all connections in one way or another related to Russia are discursively marked as toxic for Estonian security. In January 2023, the Estonian government demanded to decrease the number of diplomats in the Russian embassy in Tallinn to match the quantity of Estonian diplomats stationed in Moscow. Even though the Estonian Foreign Ministry referred to the established principle of parity in diplomatic practice, the Russian side interpreted the Estonian demand as an unfriendly gesture, which has ultimately led to the mutual recalls of the two ambassadors and the ensuing lowering to the minimum of bilateral relations. Referring to the earlier closure of Russian consulates in Narva and Tartu, the Russian side complained that its smaller personnel in Estonia won’t be able to properly and timely provide consular services to Russian citizens. Indicatively, the Estonian Foreign Minister was trying to dissuade the mayor of Narva from assisting with a working space to a company commissioned by the Russian embassy for delivering and processing documents (ERR, 2023a).

Re-bordering affected the sphere of symbolic politics too. In Summer 2022 the Estonian government, despite protests by the local Russophones and an indecisive position of the municipal authorities, has removed the Soviet-era monument of T-34 tank from Narva’s suburbs. In parallel to that, the Estonian government restarted a long-standing process of persuading the local authorities to rename some streets in Narva that still commemorate historical figures associated with the Soviet rule. The symbolic dimension of re-bordering was strengthened by the visual exchange of messages from both sides of the Narova River on the ninth of May 2023: in Ivangorod, a huge video screen was installed to play war-time patriotic songs hearable on the Estonian shore, while on the Narva side a large poster portraying Putin as a war criminal appeared.

Now let me turn to biopolitical dimensions of Estonia’s strategy. The biopolitical de-bordering of Ukraine included as its main components state-sponsored assistance to Ukrainian war refugees and coordination of practical measures in this domain with Finland. These policies were in a sharp contrast with the biopolitical alienation from Russia: starting from the end of February 2022 Estonia introduced multiple bans, including the de facto closure of the border with Russia even for Russian holders of Schengen visas, cancellation of cultural events with participation of Russian artists, refusal to matriculate Russian students in Estonian universities and heavy restrictions in issuing work permits for Russian citizens. Due to the war, many routine biopolitical practices have been reconsidered or cancelled. This relates, for example, to severe bans on transporting goods from Russia by individual border crossers. According to new rules, Russian citizens who prefer to receive part of their pension from Russia through a Russian bank might not be eligible for Estonian medical insurance (ERR, 2023b). One more sphere affected by re-bordering is property located in Estonia and owned by Russian citizens who can neither get a physical access to it nor pay utility bills: in February 2023, an Estonian county court legalized the practice of alienation of property from Russian debtors, thus setting a precedent for possible other cases of the same sort (ERR, 2023c).

Withdrawing voting rights from Russian citizens at municipal elections was acutely debated in Estonian political circles. The main proponent of this idea is the Isamaa (‘Fatherland’) party whose leader explained insistence on their proposal as follows: Russophone residents ‘vote for their representatives who bear a certain mindset and convey a certain signal… that they don’t need to know our Constitution and Estonian language, because they are poorly integrated in Estonian society. They have other interests which don’t serve the purpose of unity, integrity and security of the Estonian state’ (ERR, 2023f).

The Estonian government made clear that the precondition for the functioning of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in Estonia is its clear and public distancing from the warmongering position taken by the Moscow patriarch Kirill. Upon demand by Estonian Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Justice, the head of the Estonian Orthodox Church metropolitan Evgeniy has publicly repudiated pro-war sentiments expressed by the head of the ROC (Otvet mitropolita Tallinskogo i vseya Estonii Yevgeniya na pis’mo iz Ministerstva Vnutrennikh Del, 2022). Later Evgeniy – again upon demand by the Estonian authorities – renounced the involvement of Estonian Orthodox community into a ‘pray for peace in Ukraine’ organized in Tallinn by a pro-Russian group ‘Koos/Vmeste’ (Zayavlenie Estonskoi Pravoslavnoi Tserkvi Moskovskogo Patriarkhata, 2023).

Biopolitical re-bordering also affected Russian citizens trying to escape conscription and find a safer place abroad. The dominant attitudes were well exposed by Estonian MP Mikhail Lotman: ‘Estonia is not a kind of place where Russians might simply hide for a while. Our country is open to Ukrainian war refugees whose percentage in Estonia is the highest in Europe. Should we host a significant number of Russian escapees, there might be conflicts between them and Ukrainians, which we don’t need. Estonia is not neutral in this conflict’ (Lotman, 2023).

The controversies related to biopolitical re-bordering might be approached within the framework of the concept of ‘regimes of belonging’ (Leone, 2012), which seems to be a more nuanced concept than identity (Pfaff-Czarnecka, 2011). The Estonian government has toughened the rules of belonging to Estonian national community and minimized possibilities for new immigrants from Russia to join this community. Within this ‘regime of belonging’ new migrants from Russia are outright rejected, as they are judged not on the basis of their actual political positions, skills and loyalty but their citizenship, which they cannot easily change (Polynin, 2023). In the meantime, Estonia opened its ‘regime of belonging’ to Ukrainian war refugees who are expected to undertake efforts for eventual integration in Estonian society, both culturally and linguistically.

Domestic Counter-narratives

There are several factors that dislocate the Estonian discourses of securitized re-bordering. The most important one is the resistance by a significant part of Estonian Russophone population to cutting off contacts with Russia and turning to Ukraine as a major reference point of Estonian foreign policy.

There is a vast academic and policy-relevant literature discussing different aspects of social, cultural and linguistic integration of Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia as ‘domestic others’ whose agency is deployed in various security-related contexts. Particularly important in this respect is the predominantly Russian-speaking county of Ida-Virumaa which, apart from its Russian cultural and linguistic background, shares border with Russia. The war in Ukraine reinforced the extant mechanisms of alienation between the Estonian majority and a significant part of the Russophone minority, and solidified the existing gaps within society.

The policy of the Estonian state was aimed at rejecting Russia’s European credentials and in the meantime to symbolically Europeanizing Estonian Russophones in their locational cradle, the city of Narva. It is illustrative that the municipal council of Narva came up with the idea of a new urban motto which reads ‘Europe starts here’. The semiotics of re-bordering looks quite lucid in this slogan which was heavily criticized by local Russophones exactly because it was seen as – and most likely meant to – symbolically depriving Russia of its European status (Smirnov, 2022). This criticism exposed Narva as remained significantly embedded in post-Soviet and largely Russia-inspired mentality, which was widely covered by many international observers (Zakharevich, 2022).

The discourses that implicitly or explicitly question the idea of re-bordering are meant to undermine the rigidity of the wholesale isolation of Russia. Some of the media narratives claimed that inflation, largely provoked by sanctions against Russia and the ensuing disruption of trade relations, primarily hits Russophone consumers (ERR, 2023d). Estonian Russophone media is replete with criticism of Estonian authorities for the decision to ban some of Russian TV channels, since it might play into the hands of the Kremlin propaganda. The anti-rebordering attitudes are strong in the public pronouncements of Yana Toom, an Estonian member of the European Parliament (Zhelezniy zanaves s Rossiei ne pomozhet – deputat Evroparlamenta ot Estonii, 2022) whose condemnation of the military intervention in Ukraine did not translate into a support for discontinuing routine trans-border communication with Russia.

When it comes to de-bordering, the level of public support for Ukraine is not a constant and may be fluctuating depending on many parameters. An important intervening factor was the public resonance of a legal investigation against Estonian non-governmental organization ‘Slava Ukraini’ that was accused of financial irregularities in dealing with Ukrainian partners. In March 2023, the story has surfaced in the media and damaged the unconditional public support for fundraising for Ukraine (Postimees, 2023).

Discussion

Since the restoration of independence, Estonian foreign policy discourse was dominated by practical geopolitics and focused on pragmatics assessment of Estonia’s ability to protect itself from Russia as the only existential threat to the country (International Security and Estonia, 2023). ‘For the Estonian elite, survival is a keyword, and it is related to the US as the only realistic ally to counter Russia’s attack’ (Veebel & Ploom, 2022, 94). Such a frame explains the geopolitical vision of such projects as Nord Stream that was predominant in Estonian foreign policy discourse (Security in the Baltic Sea Region with Estonia’s Prime Minister, 2022).

However, after the restart of Russia’s war against Ukraine in 2022 geopolitical appraisals were complemented by the growing salience of biopolitical practices, including issues of citizenship, visa policies and trans-border mobility. The biopolitical estrangement has even stronger impact on the state of Estonia’s relations with Russia, since their long-term effects stretch far beyond the political elites and extend to the entire society. Their common denominators were what might be dubbed regimes of belonging and, concomitantly, differential treatment of different categories of population.

The logics of geopolitics and biopolitics differ from each other: ‘Whereas geopolitical rationalities and technologies are characterized by a distributional logic in which security threats are understood as emanating from “sovereign territorial political subjects and their competing hegemonies,” biopolitical rationalities understood ‘in terms of the biological structures and functions of species existence together with the relations that obtain between species life and all of its contingent local and global correlations’ (Larrinaga & Doucet, 2010, 15–16). More specifically, biopolitical and geopolitical logics produced different forms of securitization. From a geopolitical perspective, securitization implies protection of national territory and borders against Russia through military alliances and partnerships, particularly with the US and the UK. In biopolitics, securitization operates through attributing characteristics of threats to certain categories of population and developing particular policies towards them aimed at neutralizing potentials risks, dangers and perils for the entire collective body. Securitization of Syrian and Russian refugees and de-securitization of Ukrainian displaced persons is an eloquent example of the biopolitical security in practice.

The two logics have different dynamics as seen from a decolonial perspective. In geopolitical sphere, the legacy of the Soviet colonialism was overcome by Estonia’s membership in the EU and NATO, the two major pillars of Euro-Atlantic security order. In this respect, one may say that Estonia’s reaction to Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine was a decisive move towards the completion of the decades-long de-colonial agenda formulated in the early 1990s (Initiative Center for the Decolonization of Estonia, 1995). Yet in the biopolitical sphere this legacy – exemplified by a sizeable part of the population nostalgic of the Soviet Union and sympathetic to Russia – remains a strong factor shaping Estonian domestic politics. In this sense, the ‘post-colonial syndrome’ (Mälksoo, 2006, 282) is still there. In the context of the war, in Ukraine post-colonialism with its emphasis on cultural hybridities and dependencies on the former imperial center becomes even less relevant for the Estonian national majority and the ruling political elite, as opposed to the inherently dissident Russophone community much more sympathetic with the post-colonial ideas of liminality and in-betweenness.

Conclusions

Two important conclusions stem from this analysis. First, the current war and reactions to it made the buffer zone between Russia and the Euro-Atlantic international society a highly contested and problematic concept. In this sense, the whole idea of Eastern Europe is qualitatively transforming. Ukraine and Moldova, on the way to Europeanization and acceptance of European norms and standards, associate themselves with the space of Central Europe rather than with Europe’s eastern margins given their inherent negative connotations.

Second, after the restart of the war in February 2022, the previous geopolitical bordering vis-à-vis Russia was supplemented with constructing biopolitical borders and bans. Of course, this is not a linear process, since Estonia hosts many Russians who escaped their country after the restart of the war and are keen to integrate into Estonian society. Many of these ‘new Russians’ sincerely believe in a more democratic future of the post-Putin Russia, but these expectations are not shared by the Estonian government that sees the strengthening of NATO’s military presence in the Baltic Sea Region, rather than positive changes in Russia, as the guarantee of national security. This strategy implies a high level of self-identification with Ukraine that, as seen from Tallinn, is on the same track to the Euro-Atlantic security community as was Estonia itself three decades ago.