From the birth of nations to the european union: Colonial and decolonial developments in the baltic region

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the trajectory of Baltic developments from the 1860s until the present with an emphasis on historical continuities over different periods of colonial rule. Latvian and Estonian national consciousness started to develop under both Baltic German and Russian rule. After two decades of independence, Soviet annexation in 1940 gradually imposed a centralized Soviet colonial regime. We see a paradoxical structure of repetition there, where decolonial movements of the Soviet era used strategies borrowed from nineteenth-century German romanticism and were domesticated into the Baltic cultural realm during the 1860s-1880s. Following the tradition of Baltic song festivals allows us to outline the seesaw structure of decolonial movements, where relative gains are partially lost in subsequent strengthenings of colonial rule.