Authors

Discussion

The study uses data from the project "National identity and Estonian-Russian relations: a longitudinal study of elite and mass discourses" (2021−2025), which is part of a global network (Vucetic, Hopf 2020) ‘Making Identity Count’ (MIC). The inductive and constructivist MIC method assembles a database of the most widely circulated and the most popular sources in six genres – high school history textbooks, novels, movies, political speeches, readers’ letters and opinion and editorials pieces in the most widely circulated national newspapers. The data of Estonia has been collected for six calendar years – 1990, 1995, 2000, 2010 and 2020.

The paper presents findings of the project from the perspective of the interplay of discourses of national identity (what it means “to be Estonian”) with the disursive representations of the internal Other at the levels of mass (on the basis of readers’ letters, movies and novels) and elite (political speeches, op-eds). The findings indicate toward longitudinal alterations in the pattern of salient identity categories, the interplay between the construction of Estonian national identity and identification with Europe, Estonian language, Estonian culture, liberal democracy, cosmopolitanism, constitutional patriotism, welfare state, nativism and populism. The paper presents examples of cases, where the elites have been influenced by the patterns of internal Othering among the mass common sense and vice versa, where culturally hegemonic perceptions have been affected by the mobilizing representation (Disch 2011) of the national elites (e.g. countering the ‘loss of national currency’ narrative at the adoption of the euro in January 2011).