Making Identity Count: Estonia 2020

Abstract

The year 2020 in Estonian politics and society, like elsewhere around the world, was dominated by the COVID crisis, which, especially during the spring and autumn of the year, set the tone for much of public debate. The domestic political situation was fraught with diverse issues as the governmental coalition was struggling with public/elite opposition to the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE), a populist party that was included in the governing coalition following the 2019 elections. Concurrently, Estonia achieved a foreign policy milestone, serving a term as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. In the context of the COVID crisis, Estonia’s economy did see a 2.5% downturn (Bank of Estonia 2025), but, overall, the government handled the crisis well as the following years demonstrated Estonia’s swift recovery from the effects of the pandemic. The current report examines the construction of Estonian national identity in 2020. Drawing from a dataset of 2294 coded references to aspects of what constitutes being Estonian from political speeches, newspapers, letters to editors, films, novels, and history textbooks, the analysis reveals a public sphere characterized by distinct patterns of discourse distribution: elite sources monopolize discussions of politics, international relations, and formal national identity construction with predominantly positive valences while mass sources set the tone for this discourse around social structure, gender roles, and everyday life experiences with more critical and ambivalent emotional tones. The context of the pandemic provides a unique lens for examining how crisis conditions define discursive divisions, with elite sources framing government responses positively while mass discourse, conversely, expresses more scepticism and criticism. The analysis identifies five major thematic clusters – Politics/Economy, Social Structure, Estonianness, Historical Others, and Significant Others. The categories Education and Estonian language emerge as rare points of convergence between elite and mass discourse.