Baltic States’ EU membership: discursive search for (and failure to obtain) farewell from Russia

ABSTRACT

The article assesses the EU membership of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania with a special focus on their attempts, already as EU members to change their relations with Russia, which remains their ‘significant Other’. We employ the discourse-historical analysis and focus on the evolution of the Baltic strategic discourse towards three themes, particularly contested by Russia, including the domestic interethnic issues, politics of memory and the elements of the constitutional identities of three Baltic States. First, with references to the EU context, we introduce several landmark cases of the Baltic confrontation with Russia which occurred prior to 2014 (‘pre-Crimea’). Then we analyze the corpus of official documents from three Baltic states (2011 - December 2023), including their government programs, national security strategies, Constitutions and programs of their EU Council Presidencies (2013 Lithuania, 2015 Latvia and 2017 Estonia). Discourse analysis reveals how cautionary attitudes from the Baltic States are linked with their historical experiences of the Soviet occupation and with their prudent assessment of the EU as a security guarantee. We conclude that 20 years after the Baltic EU accession, their relations went through the full circle and since ‘post-Crimea’ downgraded from pragmatic partnership to animosity which makes Baltic-Russian reconciliation ontologically impossible.

KEYWORDS:

• Baltic States
• European Union
• Russia
• politics of memory
• interethnic issues
• constitutional identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pribaltika (literally: the region adjacent to the Baltic Sea) is a traditional Soviet term to jointly designate Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In the USSR, this notion applied to a geographical and economic region. Its current use in the official Russian discourse implicitly denies the independent statehood of the three Baltic States.

2. Despite their solidarity with Georgia, the Baltic States had to resign themselves to mainstream Western attitudes that in this case ‘found it was severely constrained in what it could practically do’ (Bowker 2011, 209) and merely returned to the business-as-usual approach towards Russia. Hence, this context deserves a separate analysis that extends beyond our text.

3. All three Baltic States conducted their most recent national population censuses in 2021. According to their results, the main ethnic groups of Estonia were Estonians (69.06%), Russians (23.67%) and Ukrainians (2.09%), while all other ethnicities each comprised less than one percent of the population. In Latvia, ethnic Latvians comprised 62.74%, followed by Russians (24,49%), Belarusians (3.10%), Ukrainians (2.23%), Poles (1.97%) and Lithuanians (1.14%). Lithuania’s ethnic composition was the following: Lithuanians (84.61%), Poles (6.53% percent), Russians (5.02%) and Belarusians (1.00%). Moreover, Lithuania was the only Baltic country that after the restoration of its independence chose zero option-granting citizenship. Estonia and Latvia used a more restrictive approach which resulted in the formation of the category of so-called ‘non-citizens’. This term applies to the Soviet-time migrants to Estonia and Latvia and their descendants, most of them are ethnic Russians. According to the databases provided by Statistics Estonia and Official Statistics Portal of Latvia as of 1 January 2022, there were 66,583 (or 5.00% of the country’s population) persons with unspecified citizenship in Estonia and 195,159 (9.56%) non-citizens in Latvia.