Emerging ethnic democracy in Estonia and Latvia

Emerging ethnic democracy in Estonia and Latvia

Published in: Magda Opalski, ed., Managing Diversity in Plural Societies: Minorities, Migration and Nation-Building in Post-Communist Europe, Ottawa: Forum Eastern Europe, 1998


EMERGING ETHNIC DEMOCRACY IN ESTONIA AND LATVIA*

Vello Pettai, Columbia University
Academic Center for Baltic & Russian Studies

Estonia /ɛsˈtoʊniə/ (·) (Estonian: Eesti), officially the Republic of Estonia (Estonian: Eesti Vabariik), is a country in Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia (343 km), and to the east by the Russian Federation (338.6 km). The territory of Estonia covers 45,227 km2 (17,462 sq mi) and is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate.

In the six years since independence was restored in the Baltic states, identifiable patterns of political development have begun to emerge. The adoption of new constitutions, the holding of repeated parliamentary elections, and the formation of stable political organizations are progressively institutionalizing modes of political interaction in the three states. With a significant period of time now passed since the restoration of independent statehood, it is the task of social and political scientists to begin to investigate these patterns both in their origins and details, as well as from a comparative perspective to illuminate their significance.

The choice here of ethnic democracy as a characterization of the Estonian and Latvian political systems is a provocative one. There are many, for example, who would challenge the use of "ethnic" as a modifier. They would say that there is only parliamentary democracy in both countries. There are others, meanwhile, who would question the term "democracy". Their argument is that the disenfranchisement of over a million mostly Russian-speaking residents in both countries smacks more of exclusionary ethnocracy than real democracy. The mystery of post-independence politics in Estonia and Latvia is that both sides are right.

The concept of ethnic democracy is not new. Its geneology goes back as far as Juan Linz’s classic typology of regimes. Since then it has been applied to numerous other cases, most notably Israel and Malaysia. Finally, it has also already been discussed in the context of Estonia and Latvia with some limited results. This chapter will therefore seek to pull together these divergent strands, while analyzing more in depth the implications and dynamics of such a regime. The main thesis will be that while ethnic democracy seems highly anomalous, precarious, and controversial as a political regime, its prospects for survival in these two countries have stabilized appreciably since the regimes’ most tense period of institutionalization in the early 1990s. The ethnopolitical structure of these two countries was dramatically altered by the adoption of restrictive citizenship laws and the severe skewing of political participation toward the Estonian and Latvian communities. This policy was intended, moreover, to re-establish a core degree of Estonian and Latvian nation-statehood in these republics despite the large mostly-Russian minority communities which had developed during the Soviet era. However, as I will seek to show in this chapter, the structures of ethnic democracy in these societies themselves have so far proven sufficiently effective in molding current and future ethnopolitical trends that little change or instability may in fact be anticipated.

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