Abstract
This article explores the Estonian ‘integration’ project, which was launched in the early 1990s to bridge the differences between ethnic Estonians and ethnic Russians by assimilating the latter with the former. Since the project will soon turn thirty, it is timely to ask whether it has been a success. This article employs Grigorii Golosov’s index of political party nationalization to understand whether the ‘integration’ project has helped to narrow the ideological divide between ethnic Estonians and ethnic Russians. In other words, the study asks whether ethnic Estonians and ethnic Russians vote for the same political parties in comparable proportions or there are ‘Estonian’ and ‘Russian’ parties in the country. The analysis of the outcomes of four local and four parliamentary elections that took place in Estonia in 2005—2019 shows that by the mid-2000s Estonia achieved a considerable level of political party system nationalization at both national and local levels. At the national level, political party system nationalization remained high in 2007—2019 despite significant changes in the country’s political party system. At the local level, however, political party system nationalization has been diminishing since 2013, leading one to conclude that the Estonian ‘integration’ project has failed to close the ideological divide between ethnic Estonians and ethnic Russians.
Highlights
A quarter of Estonia’s population are ethnic Russians, which allows conclud ing that Estonia is a plural society, i. e. a society with deep religious, linguis tic, cultural, ethnic and ideological cleavages [18]
Many chose the path of integration, and it took more than a decade for many of the latter to realize the threat of falling into a mimicry trap described by Bhabha [3]: the deeply they “integrated”, the more often ethnic Estonians thought that they only “mimicked” integration in order to avoid segregation or for other purposes, in cluding serving the interests of Russia aimed at undermining Estonian statehood
There is no debate in the Estonian society on alternatives to the socalled integration model of interethnic coexistence in the country, there are no policies aimed at facilitating active interethnic dialogue between ethnic Estonian majority and predominantly ethnic Russian minority [36]
Summary
Saint Petersburg State University 7—9 Universitetskaya emb., Saint Petersburg, Russia, 199034. This article employs Grigorii Golosov’s index of political party nationalization to understand whether the ‘integration’ project has helped to narrow the ideological divide between ethnic Estonians and ethnic Russians. Political party system nationalization has been diminishing since 2013, leading one to conclude that the Estonian ‘integration’ project has failed to close the ideological divide between ethnic Estonians and ethnic Russians. This article employs Golosov’s index of party nationalization in order to understand, whether people in different parts of Estonia, those inhibited predominantly by ethnic Estonians, like the Pärnu county, those inhibited predominantly by ethnic Russians, like the town of Narva, and those inhibited almost by representatives of the two segments of the Estonian society, like the capital city of Tallinn, tend to vote for the same or for different political parties. One should note the differences between voting in urban and rural areas of Estonia that exist ed in those times: for example, the Social Democratic Party collected more votes than the People’s Union (previously known as the Agrarian Union) in the four biggest towns in 2005, the People’s Union came fourth according to the number of votes countrywide, thanks to its popularity in rural areas
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