Abstract
This article employs moral geographies in analysing the land restitution process and outcome. Moral geographies investigate how abstract values, deliberations and judgements are translated into everyday life and, consequently, to landscape. The dynamics of moral geographies are analysed by transdisciplinary research methods using mainly qualitative data, such as documents, media and literature, but also spatial and statistical data. Land restitution in Estonia had its start in 1991, instigated by the heat of national reawakening, aiming to reverse the past 50 years of Soviet ‘wrongdoings’. This task proved to be not so straightforward. The initial heydays got entangled not only in all subsequent matters of practicalities, but also with social and spatial justice. To date, land reform has been completed on 99% of Estonia’s territory. For over 30 years, the land restitution has been shaped by global changes as well as local particularities and, in the process, moral ideas have been transformed. Thus, though landscape reflects moral categories and ideology, these two are interdependent: landscape can, in turn, mould moral ideals in certain ways.
Highlights
With the widest imaginable brush, both bold and colourful, the Estonian national myth of origin would go something like this: ancestors settled in the territory just after the continental ice had retreated over 10,000 years ago, making Estonians one of the most sedentary peoples in Europe
The persistence of the word ‘land’ in naming the entire nation explains the importance of land in the Estonian national psyche
As Palang and Peil [77] point out, often the farms that started selling lands were the first ones bought for property a century ago, thereby encouraging a speculation about the centres of innovation being stable and supporting the idea of persistence of many features in the landscape, despite all political changes and struggles
Summary
With the widest imaginable brush, both bold and colourful, the Estonian national myth of origin would go something like this: ancestors settled in the territory just after the continental ice had retreated over 10,000 years ago, making Estonians one of the most sedentary peoples in Europe. This belief in ‘solitary nature’ is an interesting construction of both the past and the role of landscape and place-making in it Such ideologically loaded myths about land and secludedness were often behind the restitution processes in many post-socialist countries after the collapse of the Soviet system. In 1941, when Germany occupied Estonia, the Nazis returned the land, to be nationalised once again by the Soviets in 1944 [10,11] The former owners were allowed to continue using the nationalised land ‘forever’, but the pressure to join collective farms strengthened step by step after the war [10,12]. How the overall process progressed and became enmired in intricacies, is discussed later in this paper
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