Language and Nationalism in the Southern Baltic Region

Activity: Talk or presentation typesInvited talk

Description

In the wake of the end of the Cold war and the breakup of the Soviet Union, a few nation-states were re-founded or established along the southern Baltic littoral. All of them follow the rekindled logic of ethnolinguistic nationalism, which equates speech communities with nations. This kind of nationalism has decisively shaped the region’s politics and societies since the end of World War I, with the partial exception of the Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation. However, in 2014, following its annexation of Crimea, Russia adopted ethnolinguistic nationalism, too, while populists and pro-authoritarian forces in the southern Baltic the region employ this ideology as the core of their preferred anti-EU (anti-European) rhetoric. The staggering volume of research on ethnolinguistic nationalism in central and eastern Europe produced during the last four decades seems to be of no use in mitigating this divisive trend of a high self-harming potential.
Period13 May 2019
Held atUniversity of Greifswald, Germany
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • language politics
  • nationalism
  • ethnolinguistic nationalism
  • geopolitics
  • hybrid warfare
  • European Union
  • Russia
  • Eurasian Union
  • Germany
  • Poland
  • Finland
  • Estonia
  • Latvia
  • Lithuania
  • Baltic Sea region
  • Scandinavia