‘Welcome to the virtual state’: Estonian e-residency and the digitalised state as a commodity

Introduction

The ways in which national images and representations of national space are constitutive of the nation and the state have been crucial issues in social sciences since the classic works of nationalism. The emergence of nation branding as a particular kind of communication strategy and meaning management employed by governments in order to create favourable national images and to manage the country’s national reputation provides a novel perspective for approaching this topic. With the aim of advancing global competitiveness of a nation, nation branding is seen as reconstituting national spaces as commodities judged by their economic value rather than by cultural distinctiveness or political status.

In this article, we examine the reconstruction and commodification of the national space through digital technologies by using the case of Estonian e-residency as an empirical example. E-residency or ‘virtual residency’ is a project initiated by the Estonian government to provide entrepreneurs and residents of other countries with global access to Estonian e-services via state-issued digital identity in the form of electronic smart cards (eID). Although the implementation of the project has mainly focused on business-related targets, the ways in which the ideas of the ‘virtual state’ and ‘virtual residency’ have been conceptualised in national policy documents and communicated to different audiences flirt with and rhetorically challenge the concepts of nationhood, citizenship and territorial statehood. Aimed at attracting 10 million e-residents or ‘e-Estonians’ who would ‘digitally enlarge’ the country, which presently has a population of 1.3 million, the concept involves potential tensions between the commercial logic of nation branding, and the political and cultural rationale of the nation-state.

Critical approaches to nation branding have convincingly shown how the rationality of nation branding differs from that of nation building with respect to the representations of national space that are constructed either for purposes of nation branding or nation building (see e.g. Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Kania-Lundholm, 2014; Ståhlberg and Bolin, 2016). Though recognising that the two phenomena, nation building and nation branding, exist simultaneously, few studies have actually analysed the ways in which these different rationalities coexist or intertwine empirically (see e.g. Bengtsson, 2012; Jordan, 2014). In this study, we aim to address this issue by empirically studying how virtualisation of space and place through digital technologies may shape representations of national space.

Our study concentrates on the following research questions: What kinds of national images and representations of national space are constructed around the ideas of the ‘virtual state’ and ‘virtual residency’? In which ways do these images and representations indicate commodification of the national space? How are the commercial goals of nation branding assigned to e-residency and the political and cultural rationale of the nation-state challenged by the concept negotiated in the national context? The study draws on a qualitative textual analysis of the official website of e-residency directed at foreign audiences and the national media coverage of the project addressing domestic publics. The analysis focuses on representational practices employed by the government and other actors involved in the project in presenting e-residency to foreign and domestic audiences, and on the journalistic coverage of the project in the national media during its initial phase of implementation in 2014–2015.

Reconstructing national community and national space as a commodity

Nation branding generally refers to targeted communications initiated by national governments in order to create favourable national images and to manage their reputations abroad. ¹ Usually the aim is to attract different kinds of capitals, such as investments, entrepreneurs, tourists or talents, or to achieve particular recognition or acknowledgement abroad. Therefore, being driven primarily by commercial logic, nation branding is argued to selectively deploy only those national features and qualities that enhance a nation’s ‘marketability’ (Jansen, 2008: 122). According to the definition suggested by Kaneva (2011), for example, nation branding can be understood as ‘a compendium of discourses and practices aimed at reconstituting nationhood through marketing and branding paradigms’ (p. 118). Since nation branding exploits nationalist rhetoric and symbols mainly for commercial purposes, it has also been conceptualised as an example of ‘commercial nationalism’ (Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011), the practice of ‘commercialising the national’ (Kania-Lundholm, 2014). In this respect, nation branding is argued to represent a new framework in which ‘the national’ is both reinvented and legitimised (Götz, 2016).

Accordingly, critical research views nation branding not only as a marketing practice but also as an ideological tool that alters the ways and the contexts in which national identity and nationhood have traditionally been articulated and communicated (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Kania-Lundholm, 2014; Robins and Morley, 1995; Roosvall and Salovaara-Moring, 2010). Various studies have sought to explain the differences between initiatives of nation branding and processes of nation building by contrasting a strategy of designing a commodity with that of creating a community. As Bolin and Ståhlberg have phrased it, unlike processes of nation building directed by cultural and political logic, the aim of nation branding is not to produce nations as ‘communities’ but rather as ‘commodities’ (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010), and to build the ‘face’ rather than the ‘soul’ of the nation (Ståhlberg and Bolin, 2016).

Besides altering the understanding and meaning of nationhood, nation branding also indicates a changing role and ethos of the state. By transferring the market logic into political and cultural realm of the state, nation branding is argued to enforce the culture of the ‘enterprise-state’ (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Graan, 2013; Valaskivi, 2016; Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011) and ‘an ethos within which states are no longer competing over territory and power but over investment and market share’ (Browning, 2015: 200). This view also relates to the concept of the ‘competitive state’ (Cerny, 2010), which characterises the changing rationality of the state under conditions of global capitalism and neoliberal governance. Under these circumstances, the traditional goals of domestic social solidarity, patriotism and national welfare common to the ‘protective state’ are displaced, or at least intertwined, with concerns of maintaining and promoting the state’s competitiveness in global arenas (Cerny, 2010; cf. Angell and Mordhorst, 2015).

Nation branding is thus seen both as a response to and an outcome of cultural and economic globalisation, which is argued to have quite opposite impacts on nation-states and national identities. Traditionally, the nation has offered both a sense of territorial stability and security, and a sense of familiarity and order in the global landscape (Roosvall and Salovaara-Moring, 2010). However, re-designing nations for global consumption or attraction implies reconstructing national spaces as globally open, multicultural or transnational sites, which are comprehensible without ‘cultural translation’ (Bengtsson, 2012; Ståhlberg and Bolin, 2016). In other words, nation branding is expected to re-establish national spaces as commodities judged by their economic value rather than by cultural distinctiveness or political status. Such a denationalising rationale contrasts with the conventional understanding of the national space embodied in the idea of the nation-state.

Yet, as some authors claim, nation branding may also function as a re-nationalising mechanism. For instance, by raising national self-esteem and appealing to national pride, states may enhance rather than threaten the sense of ontological security among their citizens through nation-branding efforts (Browning, 2015; Valaskivi, 2016). Likewise, by apparently strengthening national identification among citizens, nation branding is claimed to ‘(re)legitimise the nation-state as an anchoring point for identity in a globalised world’ (Varga, 2013: 826; cf. Aronczyk, 2008: 43). These arguments stress the re-nationalising rather than de-nationalising effects of nation branding, which contribute to stronger national identities and solidarities.

Altogether, these different viewpoints refer to the ambiguity in the relationship between branding and building a nation. Therefore, as Bolin and Ståhlberg (2010) suggest, since the two logics of nationalism and nation branding exist simultaneously, the question is to what extent these two logics compete with or reinforce each other (p. 97), as well as how the different kinds of ethos characterising the actions of the ‘competitive state’ and the ‘protective state’ are revealed in and around branding efforts.

The role of ICTs in reconstructing national and virtual spaces

Besides the implications of what nation branding is and does, critical research has also looked into the means of how nation branding is accomplished. Critical studies have been particularly engaged with the role and implications of media and communication technologies (Bengtsson, 2012; Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015). The role of ICTs, or media technologies more specifically, has so far been discussed mainly in studies analysing nation branding in or through virtual online media spaces, that is on the Internet and other web-based media environments (Bengtsson, 2011; 2012; Christensen, 2013; Miazhevich, 2012; Purcell and Kodras, 2001; Volcic, 2008). These studies have usually approached media and communication technologies as platforms and environments which create and shape particular types of communicative and representational practices within nation branding efforts. Purcell and Kodras (2001), for example, have analysed the attempts by the Slovenian state to create a new national image via emergent information technologies. As they argue, the new communication technologies such as the Internet enable a state to challenge and reinvent the hegemonic images crafted by traditional ‘gated media’ (Purcell and Kodras, 2001: 364). Bengtsson (2011; 2012) has examined nation branding in virtual environments through 3D media technologies that expand the former modes of representing the nation through traditional mass media and make it possible to construct a national space in the media rather than representing it through the media. However, the significance of such nation-branding projects in virtual environments is largely achieved through the attention of the traditional mass media (Bengtsson, 2011). Christensen’s (2013) study of the Swedish nation-branding initiative @Sweden on Twitter, on the other hand, provides a rather different perspective by focusing on the socially constitutive and politically legitimising role of technology as a discourse (Fisher, 2010). According to Christensen (2013), it was the view of Twitter as a ‘symbol of global, borderless, communicative freedom’ rather than the particular communication format of the platform, which supported the idea of a ‘democratic’ and ‘transparent’ nation branding attributed to the @Sweden campaign.

Thus, while previous studies in nation-branding research have mainly approached the role of media and communication technologies as means of representations that enable and shape particular representational practices, only a few studies have considered media and communication technologies themselves as a set of representations. However, as demonstrated by Christensen’s (2013) study, such representations, carrying various, ideologically biased assumptions about the qualities and effects of particular technology, may come to shape the practice and discourse of nation branding as well. In this study, we take the latter approach to critically examine the ways in which digital technologies are used to reconstruct national space, based on the case of Estonian e-residency.

As existing studies prove, ICTs do not create virtual places or spaces in the abstract. Instead, ICTs are used to institute particular types of virtual places or virtual spaces in specific localities, under particular cultural and political circumstances, and for particular purposes (Morley, 2013: 62; cf. Adams and Ghose, 2003). Concrete examples of ‘cyberspaces’ may thus help to clarify how a particular culture is spatialised through technology, as well as how spatialised technology is infused with different meanings and cultural values (Skop and Adams, 2009: 131). We assume that the ways in which digital technologies which support the creation of a global digitalised state envisioned through e-residency relate to the symbolic meanings and values that these technologies are associated with. The government-issued digital identity, which gives access to public (as well as private) e-services and enables communication with the state at a distance, can be approached here as a medium that defines and delimits nationals of the Estonian state through such digitally mediated communication. The significance attributed to the process in which the digital identity is extended to non-nationals of the country and to the related reconstruction of the national space, is presumably influenced by representations of particular technologies involved in that kind of digital extension.

The context of the Estonian e-residency programme

While most nation-branding studies qualify as ‘campaign analysis’ (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2015), Estonian e-residency as a policy instrument represents a rather different case in which nation branding and national reputation management have been closely integrated into the agenda and implementation of the national ICT policy. The Estonian government has made continuous efforts over the course of the last two decades to build the reputation of Estonia as an advanced digital society and a leading e-government in the world. Accordingly, ‘e-Estonia’ has also been a central theme in previous nation-branding campaigns of the country (Bengtsson, 2012; Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Jansen, 2008), and forms a core message in the recently launched and updated brand concept. ²

There are several ICT initiatives in Estonia which constitute the ‘e-Estonia’ narrative, and create an advantageous environment for implementing the e-residency project. One of the first initiatives in building the Estonian information society at the beginning of the 1990s was the state-funded programme ‘Tiger Leap’, which aimed to provide Estonian schools with up-to-date computers and Internet connection. Although focused on schools, the project came to signify the ‘lnternetisation’ of the society as a whole (Runnel et al., 2009). Since 2000, the emphasis has shifted to e-government and e-services (Kalvet, 2007). In 2001, the Estonian government launched a technological platform called ‘X-Road’ to interconnect state information systems. X-Road formed the spine of the national digital infrastructure and became the basis for the further development of public and private e-services in the different areas of society. Shortly thereafter, in 2002, the national ID card system was introduced. Online voting via digital authentication – first in 2005 in municipal elections and subsequently in 2007 in parliamentary elections – became an indication of e-democracy in the country (Kalvet, 2007; Vassil, 2015). In 2014, the Estonian government initiated the project Virtual Data Embassies with the aim of securing the functioning of governmental services from a public state cloud and remote servers in case of cyber attacks or other emergencies. The government plan, part of the vision of building the ‘virtual state’, should secure the digital continuity of the state regardless of the territorial integrity of the country. ³ (Transforming digital continuity, 2016).

Estonian digital policy and rapid technological advancement have been influenced, among other factors, by the technology-friendly culture of the Estonian society, including a general awareness of technology and a readiness to use it (Kalvet, 2007; Runnel et al., 2009). Such a technology-friendly culture and extensive digitalisation of the society have become a branding mechanism for the Estonian state, which not only has created the external image and reputation of the country as a digital forerunner but has also shaped local identity narratives (Madisson, 2016), as well as enforcing a sense of ‘e-patriotism’, a combination of technological optimism and national pride (Velmet, 2015). Consequently, these aspects have also shaped the particular context in which the e-residency project was introduced and launched.

An initial vision of e-residency was proposed in 2013 by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications in the ‘Digital Agenda 2020 for Estonia’, the national ICT strategy, followed by a more elaborate implementation plan in 2014 drafted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior. ⁴ E-residency was mainly envisioned here as a solution to attract foreign entrepreneurs and investors by giving them access to the electronic environment and services of the country, including the possibility of registering their businesses in Estonia and administrating them online at a distance. In addition, policy documents also emphasised the opportunity to involve foreign specialists and professionals in the development of the Estonian society without expecting them to settle in Estonia. Altogether, the project was expected to increase the attractiveness of Estonia both as ‘a business environment’ and ‘a friendly environment for living or for temporary stay’, and to strengthen ‘the image of Estonia as an e-state’ and ‘a society open to the world’. ⁵ The policy conceptualisation of the idea thus entailed different government agendas concerning digitalisation, economic growth and competitiveness, national reputation management and branding, as well as migration and labour mobility.

The idea attracted public attention in Estonian society in spring 2014 when Taavi Kotka, the Deputy Secretary General of ICT at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications and a former well-known IT entrepreneur, presented the vision of ‘10 million e-Estonians by 2025’ in the competition of Best Development Idea organised by the Estonian Development Fund. ⁶ The primary goal of the idea was ‘to make Estonia bigger’, so that ‘at least 10 million people all over the world would choose like to relate themselves to Estonia via e-identity’. Notably, in the Estonian language, the term ‘e-Estonian’ refers to a ‘virtual’ member of the Estonian nation rather than to an Estonian resident. ⁷ In this way, the initial meaning of the concept based on an analogy with (physical) residence became rhetorically related to the discourse of nationhood.

The implementation of the e-residency project has been coordinated by Enterprise Estonia, the government agency whose strategic mission is to increase the economic competitiveness of the country through promoting business and regional policy in Estonia. Enterprise Estonia has also been the major organisation responsible for the development of Brand Estonia. The Estonian Police and Border Guard Board started issuing e-resident identity cards in December 2014, after the parliament had approved the legislative framework with a unanimous vote in October 2014. By January 2017, 15,000 e-residents had already received their eID cards and approximately the same number were in the application process. ⁸ In addition to the so ‘common procedure of application’, the Estonian government has also ‘gifted’ e-residency to a number of prominent figures (including Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, for example) in order to promote the e-residency platform and to spread the idea of e-Estonia.

However, the idea of attracting a large number of foreigners as ‘virtual residents’ or ‘e-Estonians’, who would ‘digitally enlarge’ the Estonian state and the nation, has been introduced in a context that has historically been characterised by an ethno-cultural understanding of nationhood, which defines national community mainly in cultural and linguistic terms (Brubaker, 1992). Estonia has also been seen as an example of a nationalising state that conceives itself as the state of and for the core nation, understood in ethno-cultural terms and distinguished from the citizenry or permanent resident population of the state as a whole. Here the state is mainly conceived as strengthening the core nation, and promoting its language and culture, demographic vigour, economic welfare and political hegemony (Brubaker, 2011: 1786; cf. Jordan, 2014). Such a nationalising discourse and policies have been largely explained by the former Soviet occupation, which considerably changed the national structure of Estonia’s 1.3 million-population (Brubaker, 2011). However, the sense of ‘cultural vulnerability’ has been recently re-evoked in the context of the global refugee crisis, where the Estonian public has been one of the most cautious about possible immigration compared to other countries in Europe (Schlüter, Masso and Davidov, in press). We thus assume that the issue of cultural vulnerability may turn out to also be critical in the context of the e-residency project, in which the commercial logic of nation branding challenges the cultural logic of constructing the nation.

Method and data

To analyse the representational practices employed by the government and other actors involved in the project in presenting e-residency to foreign and domestic audiences, and the journalistic coverage of the project, we use qualitative textual analysis of two kinds of media texts, the official website of e-residency and national media, which are directed at different target audiences and characterised by different discursive genres.

The official website of e-residency, which also includes the online application platform, represents primarily the ‘authorised’, institutional discourse designed to particularly focus outwards on foreign audiences. The website is managed by Enterprise Estonia, the government-funded agency mainly in charge of the implementation of the e-residency programme. The website is also integrated into the larger governmental web portal e-Estonia.com, which provides a comprehensive overview of the digital society in Estonia ⁹ (both exclusively available in English). In addition to the text presented on the website, we also analysed additional promotion materials on e-residency uploaded there. For example, a synopsis entitled ‘Speaking points on the e-residency programme’ includes a list of ‘key-messages’, which are explicit instructions on how to ‘read’ as well as how to ‘talk’ about the project. The website and the materials analysed here were accessed during the period from August 2015 to December 2016. ¹⁰ While the main text remained unchanged, some sections (e.g. a special section entitled ‘Press Kit’, to meant for foreign press) were added to the website during that period. Since the government funded communication activities for promoting e-residency are only to begin after the pilot phase of the project, ¹¹ the website of e-residency can be considered a major source of information targeted to the foreign audience, including potential e-residents.

The second data source used in the analysis is the national media. They form a channel through which the government and other actors involved in the nation-branding initiatives can explain their efforts to the domestic publics and encourage positive perceptions of their actions. Through mainstream media attention, the branding is argued to serve a ‘recursive function’ – convincing domestic elites, stakeholders and publics that their government is acting in their best interests (Aronczyk, 2008: 44). On the other hand, the national media can also appear as sites of contestation, where government ideas and visions are critically reviewed either by journalists or other groups who can express their opinions there. The national media can also be seen as forming an arena in which new national narratives inspired by particular nation-branding discourses are constructed and popularised among domestic audiences. We analysed the media coverage of e-residency in the national print and online media over the two-year period of 2014–2015, which covers the initial introduction of the idea in the Estonian society, as well as the early implementation phase of the project. We conducted a systematic search of articles and news items, including all major newspapers with national coverage (the dailies Postimees and Eesti Päevaleht, the business daily Äripäev, the weekly Eesti Ekspress, and the cultural weekly Sirp), as well as private (Delfi) and public broadcasting (ETV ERR) online news portals by using a list of relevant keywords and the electronic search engines and archives of the respective news outlets. The total sample of media texts from the two-year period was comprised of 107 news items and articles dealing with e-residency either as the main topic or one of the main topics covered in the texts.

Qualitative textual analysis techniques were used for thematic analysis of the collected data. The analysis mainly followed the inductive approach. We started with a close reading of texts, paying particular attention to the national images and representations constructed around e-residency and the idea of the ‘virtual state’ in the texts (e.g. claims made on behalf of or about ‘us’, as well as ascriptions of particular qualities or features to Estonia or Estonians in the context of e-residency). We also focused on the linguistic means and rhetorical devices used to construct these representations (e.g. strategies of framing and contextualisation, means of rhetoric, metaphoric talk, etc.). To analyse the ways in which the different logics of nation branding and nation building are negotiated in the national context, the opinions expressed about the expected impacts and implications that e-residency would have for the Estonian state and the nation were systematically coded and scrutinised. To interpret the findings, we considered the situational and institutional factors surrounding the concrete instances of texts, as well as considering the broader socio-cultural and political context in which e-residency is introduced and implemented.

With respect to both kinds of sources, the conclusive analysis and the generalisations of the researchers are illustrated using textual extracts from the material.

The national space and the ‘virtual state’ presented outwards

The official website of e-residency directed at foreign audiences places the initiative in the context and narrative of e-Estonia, in which the concept is presented as one of the constitutive components of the Estonian digital society. The online presentation of the e-residency programme offers an image of Estonia that is largely based on the elements included in the broader narrative of e-Estonia, such as the well-established digital infrastructure of the country, outstanding e-government and widespread use of digital services among Estonians. The section of the website targeted to the foreign press lists a selection of ‘facts’ about Estonia to demonstrate the digital progressiveness of the country and especially outlines Estonia’s ‘digital firsts’ (e.g. Estonia as the first country that allowed online voting in general elections) to create an impression of the country as a digital pioneer.

However, besides highlighting digital advances that have taken place within Estonia, e-residency is presented as a means that proves the exportability of Estonia’s digital solutions and the extendibility of ‘e-Estonia’ beyond the national borders of the country. The metaphoric image of a ‘country without borders’, suggested on the website of the programme, can be seen as a particular expression of this ambition:

All of these … efficient and easy-to-use [digital] services have been available to Estonians for over a decade. By offering e-Residents the same services, Estonia is proudly pioneering the idea of a country without borders.

The idea of vanishing borders is similarly expressed by an Estonian e-resident from India, quoted on the website of e-residency, who argues:

In a couple of years, if more countries adopt this methodology, we will have a group of entrepreneurs and businessmen, who will not be limited by the boundaries of countries, because technology is shifting more and more to the cloud and e-business platforms. Physical boundaries start losing their relevance.

In this respect, the promotion of e-residency relies on, and also reproduces, the popular, yet highly contestable ‘end-of-geography’ narrative related to ICTs (particularly the Internet) and digitalisation (see e.g. Morley, 2013).

Another aspect that supports the image of a ‘borderless country’ is the inclusiveness of the concept with respect to potential e-residents and their origins, which is highlighted in the very first paragraph of the online introduction of the e-residency programme:

e-Residency offers every world citizen a government-issued digital identity and the opportunity to run a trusted company online, unleashing the world’s entrepreneurial potential.

The Republic of Estonia is the first country to offer e-Residency – a transnational digital identity available to anyone in the world interested in administering a location-independent business online.

The openness of the country, particularly in digital terms, is further emphasised in the section of the website describing the application process of e-residency, which underlines the ease with which it is possible ‘to join the Estonian digital society’:

You can join the Estonia digital society and become an e-resident in four simple steps.

Such an explicitly asserted digital inclusiveness and openness of the country, however, stand in contrast to the national policies and public attitudes concerning ‘physical residence’ in the country, characterised by general cautiousness towards immigration (Schlüter et al., in press). What makes it possible to affirm the country’s ‘openness’ in the given context and to adhere to the overall logic of the nation-branding discourse is the constructed imagined separation of ‘the virtual’ and ‘the physical’ social realms.

Instead of addressing nationals or citizens of particular countries, the text on the website speaks to ‘world citizens’, as revealed in the previous extracts. The deliberate use of such a term deploys cosmopolitan imagination (Ståhlberg and Bolin, 2016) and suggests a cosmopolitan identity, described by Calhoun (2003) as a ‘special sort of belonging’, ‘a view from nowhere or everywhere rather than from particular social spaces’ (p. 532). The suggested ‘availability to anyone in the world’, included in the previous extract, also indicates the contested view of the Internet as ‘omnipresent’ and ‘placeless’ (Morley, 2013).

Among the benefits of Estonian e-residency, the website repeatedly refers to the advantages that an Estonian e-resident would have due to Estonia’s membership in the European Union (EU) and with respect to the emergent Digital Single Market (DSM) in Europe. ¹² Thus, the benefits of e-residency are represented not only in relation to particular digital services offered within a single country but also in a broader regional context. Accordingly, this regional dimension is illustrated in the next text on the website of e-residency:

within the next few years Estonian e-residents will be able to easily identify themselves, access online services, and conduct business across Europe.

However, both Estonia and the EU are depicted here mainly as digitally accessible ‘virtual spaces’ or ‘online territories’, considering the fact that e-residency offers neither legal status nor rights for physical border-crossing. The suggested ‘irrelevance of borders’ is thus limited to the virtual realm constructed through the concept of e-residency.

The outward-directed presentation of e-residency on the official website of the programme thus follows the general logic of the nation-branding discourse, which aims to reconstruct national spaces as de-nationalised, globally open and cosmopolitan spaces. The spatial metaphors that are employed here contribute to the construction of the global and cosmopolitan image of the country. Consequently, e-Estonia, previously a symbol of a digitally advanced national society, is turned into an image of a de-territorialised transnational society. Moreover, the branding discourse and the repeatedly accentuated aspect that ‘belonging’ to such transnational society or the ‘virtual state’ is equally available to anyone suggests an image of the digitalised state as a globally marketable commodity rather than an exclusive national sphere.

Re-inventing ‘the national’ and legitimising the ‘virtual state’ domestically

The e-residency programme has created an opportunity to also retell the ‘e-Estonia’-narrative domestically as a part of the national discourse. Public statements made about e-residency by members of the government and the parliament, as well as commentaries by various experts and professionals published in the national media, typically include claims about the reputation of Estonia as a digitally advanced society and an innovative state. For example, such labels as ‘the most developed information society in the world’ stresses the digital advantages of Estonia compared to other countries. The discourse in which Estonia is presented as a digital pioneer known for its ‘digital firsts’, which is also communicated on the official website of e-residency, is likewise echoed in these statements. The ‘fact’ that Estonia is the first country that offers such a solution, frequently emphasised in the news and commentaries on e-residency, makes it possible to attribute a new image to the country as well – ‘a digital pathfinder’ – which is mainly, although not exclusively, used by members of the government when emphasising the significance of e-residency:

Today, when presenting in Slush, the largest event of start-ups and technology in the region, the Prime Minister Taavi Rõivas said that e-residency makes it possible to start a business in Europe from all over the world, and Estonia is to become a pathfinder in this field (news article, Postimees, 18 November 2014).

In the words of Hanno Pevkur, the Minister of the Interior, today is an important day, when Estonia as one of the most developed information societies in the world has a chance to be a pathfinder in the field of e-services. ‘E-Residency now gives the whole world the opportunity to experience the open and efficient e-services previously familiar only to Estonians’, Pevkur added (news article, Delfi, 1 December 2014).

Other motifs that are regularly used to characterise the national image and reputation in the context of e-residency are related to the overall competitiveness of the country, the agility of the state (i.e. the capacity of the government to act and to respond to policy challenges fast), and the advantages for entrepreneurship in the country. However, such disadvantageous features as the smallness of and geopolitical marginality of the country are highlighted, often in order to create a contrast with and to further emphasise the positive aspects previously mentioned.

These motifs also occur in combination in a new trope suggested in the context of e-residency. According to this trope, e-residency is presented in texts as a technologically novel and innovative concept that may potentially transform Estonia’s economic position and create a globally outstanding reputation for the small country. Such metaphors as a ‘new Switzerland’ or a ‘digital Luxembourg’ are used in media texts to communicate this target. This sort of rhetoric is not only used by government representatives but also by journalists and other professionals commenting on the project in the national media:

Estonia would become the Luxembourg of the 21st century, a small country that many would prefer to do business with because it is convenient or economical (commentary by Henrik Roonemaa, a journalist, Postimees, 2 May 2014).

If we are careful and devoted, then in 10 years we shall become the new Switzerland. While they in their mountains between three large states once managed to build a unique way of keeping the money of the mighty [people] of the world, we now have the key to keeping and managing something even more valuable – the real identity of the most success-minded people of the world (commentary by Joel Volkov, Head of the Advertising Agency ‘Der Tank’, Postimees, 11 December 2014).

The aspect of national reputation management tied to the project (e.g. promises to make Estonia a ‘new Switzerland’ and a ‘digital Luxembourg’) thus also functions as a legitimising mechanism in the domestic context, justifying not only the project but also appealing to national pride and national self-esteem.

The logic of transforming the country into a ‘service’ or a ‘commodity’ that is globally ‘traded’ through e-residency, which is essential to the government vision of the concept, has also been acknowledged or approved rather than contested or rejected in the journalistic coverage of the project. The following quotes from journalists commenting on e-residency illustrate this:

With the idea of e-residency, we take our e-state to the free market and the market, as we know, determines everything (commentary by Henrik Roonemaa, a journalist, Postimees, 2 May 2014).

Ten million Estonian e-residents, or the pursuit of them, makes the issue of e-identity a mass commodity. This is not necessarily wrong. Perhaps it will become the [Estonian] Nokia once demanded by our president Meri [Lennart Meri, the Estonian President in 1992–2001], and not of the current days but of the glory days (commentary by Argo Ideon, a journalist, Postimees, 4 July 2014).

The branding logic assigned to e-residency is likewise accepted with respect to the national culture. An opinion piece by an Estonian film director, which is one of the few articles in the national media that addresses cultural aspects in relation to e-residency, also approaches the topic from a market and branding perspective. What is raised here as an issue is not the ways in which e-residents as ‘e-Estonians’ would relate to the Estonian culture but rather the image of the Estonian culture that they would have through the virtual environment that they are given access to. In accordance with the overall branding logic, e-residency is viewed here as a chance to export Estonian culture to the world:

Perhaps it is utopian but the huge interest in Estonian e-residency gives us a unique opportunity to introduce Estonian culture to the world The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications has initiated the programme. ‘10 million e-Estonians’, with the goal of 10 million e-Estonians or e-residents in the world by 2025. Just within the next three years, it is expected to bring at least 17,000 e-residents and 5000 enterprises to Estonia. But what kind of image will these future e-residents have of the culture of their e-homeland? /…/ Regarding the huge popularity of e-residency, we have a unique opportunity to export Estonian culture, which we definitely should not fail to take advantage of (commentary by Ülo Pikkov, Estonian film director and theoretician, Sirp, 16 January 2015).

This brings us to a crucial aspect of the public legitimisation of the e-residency project and of the government’s effort ‘to make Estonia global’. Suggested as an alternative to physical immigration, it is also communicated as an instrument to ensure cultural sustainability and national integrity, in addition to the economic benefits ascribed to the project. As the following statements presented on behalf of the government argue, the concept would enlarge the economic space of the country without exploiting the physical resources of the state and ‘diluting’ the national culture:

Such a new success story [e-residency] would bring global recognition to Estonia and increase soft security. The state treasury would receive more money thanks to millions of paying clients who, at the same time, would not use the physical infrastructure or natural resources of our state. /…/ as a result of common efforts we could enlarge our economic space enormously without diluting our culture and also protect our language (commentary by Taavi Kotka, Deputy Secretary General of ICT at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, Äripäev, 13 October 2014).

It is our chance to increase the number of those contributing to our economy /…/ without them moving to Estonia physically. The richer the state, the more [there would be] means to contribute to the protection of our culture and language (interview with Taavi Kotka, Deputy Secretary General of ICT at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, Eesti Päevaleht, 14 October 2014).

The attempts to present e-residency to domestic publics thus seek to reconcile the commercial goals of e-residency as a branding instrument with the nationalist agenda of the government, and to combine the rhetoric of the ‘competitive state’ with that of the ‘protective state’ (Cerny, 2010; cf. Angell and Mordhorst, 2015). What makes it possible to negotiate and reconcile the commercial logic of nation branding, and the political and the cultural rationale of the nation-state in the domestic sphere is the conceived separation of the virtual and the physical social realms, which is constructed in the texts. It is the ‘virtual state’ rather than the territorial nation-state which is primarily marketed through e-residency and welcomes ‘residents’ from all over the world, as presented in the national media. In this respect, the idea of ‘making Estonia bigger’ in digital terms and the vision of a deterritorialised digitalised state are in fact defended through the idea of an intact territorial nation-state.

Conclusions

In this article, we examined the reconstruction and commodification of the national space through information and communication technologies (ICTs) by using the case of the Estonian e-residency project. The empirical study relied on a qualitative textual analysis of the official website of e-residency and related online sources that present the project to foreign audiences, and of the national media covering the project domestically.

The results of the analysis showed how the e-residency project reinforces, re-contextualises and also alters the existing narrative of Estonia as ‘e-Estonia’, a digitally advanced society, which has been consistently communicated through previous nation-branding campaigns of the country (see e.g. Bengtsson, 2012; Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Jansen, 2008). However, unlike the nation-branding campaigns launched at the beginning of the 2000s, which focused on branding the country primarily in the European context and supporting Estonia’s ‘return to Europe’ (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Jordan, 2014), the branding of the country through e-residency appeals to the global competitiveness of the country. Through e-residency, ‘e-Estonia’, previously a symbol of a digitally advanced national society, is being transformed into the image of a globally open transnational society. The imagery constructed around the notions of the ‘virtual state’ and ‘virtual residency’ presents a commodified version of the national space described by global reach and accessibility, transnational character and technological attractiveness. The idea of the ‘virtual state’ and the metaphoric image of a ‘borderless country’ suggested in connection with e-residency make it possible to surpass the perceived constraints related to the small size and geopolitical location of the country. Consequently, the imagery of the ‘virtual state’ underlying the concept of e-residency is also integrated into the new brand concept of the country launched at the beginning of 2017. ¹³

What supports the efforts of ‘making Estonia global’ and the reconstruction of national space as a globally tradeable commodity are the discourse and popular representations of ICTs, which suggest an image of the virtual space as omnipresent and universal, independent of location and territorial constraints (see e.g. Morley, 2013). The spatial representations evoked by ICTs and digitalisation make it possible to ‘destroy the distance’ between the local and the global (Giddens, 1991). However, the case of e-residency shows that besides creating global access to the electronic environment of the state at a distance, the technology also makes it possible to maintain an imagined socio-cultural distance between the ‘virtual residents’ and the national community of the country. Therefore, the vision of ‘virtual residency’ as a particular alternative to immigration makes it possible to appeal to ‘intact national space’ and to legitimise the concept as a ‘socio-culturally safe’, digitally mediated internationalisation of Estonian society in the domestic context. In other words, the transnational virtual space constructed through e-residency for purposes of nation branding is legitimised through the integrity of the territorially delimited national space. Thus, besides the de-nationalised images and representations of the national space, which are mainly constructed outwards, the presentation of e-residency to domestic publics also includes representations defining national space in terms of national culture and language, physical infrastructure and natural resources, among other things. In this respect, the logics of nation branding and nationalism coexist and reinforce rather than displace or compete with each other (see e.g. Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2010; Jordan, 2014).

As our study demonstrates, ICTs go beyond expanding the techniques of nation branding in terms of communication infrastructures and platforms that lead to new types of communicative practices and provide novel technological means for representing the nation and the national space (see e.g. Bengtsson, 2011; 2012; Purcell and Kodras, 2001). Digital technologies also suggest new ways to conceive the national space which relate to popular, though contested assumptions about the spatial effects of the particular technology (e.g. the idea of ‘vanishing borders’). Altogether, the representations of the national space that are being constructed in relation to e-residency are largely based on a conceived duality of ‘the virtual’ and ‘the physical’ social realms. The digitalised state constructed as a commodity is presented as technologically linked, yet conceived as separate from the territorially established nation-state. The digitalised state indicates a new constructed space of transnational identity and meaning, which, however, is viewed separately from the territorially defined space of national identity characterised by cultural exclusivity. E-residency provides progressive and positive meanings as an alternative to the past-oriented connotations related to the post-Soviet transformation of the country. But it also contributes to the reproduction of the exclusionary understanding of the nation, which creates tensions in the processes of the internationalisation of the society, considering the relatively negative attitudes towards immigrants in the European context (Schlüter et al., in press), as well as drawing clear linguistic-cultural borders between national groups in Estonia since the Soviet time as indicated in previous studies (Soll et al., 2015).

An aspect not addressed in the current study concerns the role of e-residents in the future branding of the country. Being inscribed in the narrative of e-Estonia, the ways in which e-residents themselves envision and construct their relationship to the Estonian state, and contribute to its image and reputation, remain an intriguing question to be addressed in further research.