Abstract
National Identity and Conflict in Estonia and Moldova. A Theoretical and Empirical Re-Cognition of National Identity and Conflict in Post-Soviet Nation-States.
This thesis addresses the problem of how the mediation and reinterpretation of national identity in fields of the post-Soviet area has generated violent conflict within the successor states of the Soviet republics. I focus on conflict processes in Estonia and Moldova from 1987 to 1993, and ask why the one did not escalate into massive, physical violence but generated and remained in a mode of large-scale structural violence, and why the other escalated into spiralling direct violence and war.
A comparative logic of inquiry informs the choice of the Estonian and Moldovan cases. Both areas were included in the USSR in 1940 and after World War II. As Soviet Socialist Republics they were inhabited by relatively equal proportions of Soviet Russian-speaking citizens and vernacular-speaking citizens belonging to the so-called titular nationality. Demographic patterns of settlement and living, and politico-economic patterns of organization were strikingly similar in the two republics. Hence, from 1987 to 1993 meny sociopolitical processes worked in similar fashion in these two countries on the western rim of the former Soviet system. But there were also significant differences. Questions of how relationships were generated between national movements, who came to state power in both cases, and Russian-speaking inhabitants who were increasingly excluded from powerful representation as nationalists laid down new langs, are particularly relevant for the comparative question about conflict dynamics. These relationships were conceptualized in tenns of national security in both countries.
The task of analysing what happened in the Estonian and Moldovan cases involves a lot more than forrnulating an empirical research strategy. After decades of Cold War, new tools are needed in the theoretical tool-boxes of political scientists and peace workers akke. Rogers Brubaker (1996: 20) argues that to make sense of the Soviet collapse and its after-play in the nationalizing successor states it is most urgent to work out better theoretical approaches to the relational settinga wherein national identity fluctuates in events of nationness. This thesis undertakes the theoretical task of finding concepts to analyse how groups contextualized by conflict are in fact imagining the communities that Benedict Anderson (1991) describes. The empirical analysis then asks how the effective politics of imagining national identity played into conflict dynamics within the field of the nation-space: How did national identity and conflict inter-play in Estonia and Moldova from 1987 to 1993?
Chapter 2 clarifies ontological, epistemological and methodological questions concerning my views and assumptions about politics and the scientific study of politics. Chapter 3 presente the most important thoretical concepts that I use in analysing the conflict processes in Estonia and Moldova. Chapter 4 analyses the historicity of national identity formations in Estonia and Moldova before the 1987-93 period began, and presents some of the narrative themes which were central in the politics of national identity in Estonia and Moldova in that period. Chapter 5 analyses how violence and conflict were generated in the 1987-93 period as Estonian and Moldovan nationalists answered "what is the nation?" by presenting Self-identity as an inherently limited and sovereign community in relation to the Russian-speaking inhabitants. Chapter 6 draws the lines of argument from each separate chapter together in comparative reflection over why the conflict in Estonia did not escalate into massive, physical violence but generated and remained in a mode of large-scale structural violence, and why the conflict in Moldova escalated into spiralling direct violence and war.