Abstract
This essay focuses on the ways in which the EU’s preliminary steps towards integration and eastward expansion in the early 1990s are represented in Tõnu Õnnepalu’s Piiririik (Border State, 1993), published in the year of the Maastricht Treaty. Taking the EU as the self-declared heir of the European Enlightenment project of democracy, liberty, equality and progress, the essay looks at what Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer have termed the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’: specifically, the way that the project of emancipation became coupled to the destructive potentials of reason and imperial domination. The essay contends that Border State focuses on these latter aspects of the dialectic and offers an original and highly critical vision of the failures of post-Maastricht Europe.
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Notes
- 1.
As Maire Jaanus writes, ‘Piir means border, boundary, frontier, threshold, limit, end, terminus, line, borderline. Riik is a state, body politic, nation, country, community, kingdom, domain, realm, empire, government. Thus, Piiririik could be translated in so many ways (as Boundary Nation, Border State, Limit Realm, etc)’ (Jaanus, ‘Estonia’s Time and Monumental Time’, in Violeta Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), p. 227).
- 2.
Õnnepalu, Border State, trans. by Madli Puhvel (1993; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 33. Hereafter, citations are marked by page numbers inserted in the main body of the text.
- 3.
Viljar Veebel and Ramon Loik, ‘Estonia’, in Donnacha Ó Beacháin, Vera Sheridan and Sabina Stan, eds, Life in Post-Communist Eastern Europe after EU Membership: Happy Ever After? (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 176.
- 4.
In his fascinating novel The Czar’s Madman (1978), Jaan Kross, arguably the most well-known Estonian writer internationally, uses the Russian Czar and the novel’s hero Timotheus von Bock, a Baltic German nobleman, to symbolise the opposition between tyranny and Enlightenment (see Maire Jaanus, ‘Estonia and Pain: Jaan Kross’s The Czar’s Madman’, in Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism, pp. 309–29).
- 5.
See Delanty, Inventing Europe, pp. 65–74.
- 6.
Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 21–2.
- 7.
Kohn, ‘Colonialism’, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/colonialism (accessed 29 July 2015). Kohn also emphasises that some major Enlightenment thinkers (Kant, Smith, Diderot) criticised colonialism and the arguments that supported it.
- 8.
Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, p. 17.
- 9.
Õnnepalu, Border State, pp. 4, 5. The ‘stillborn’ history includes Estonia’s brief period of inter-war independence that ended with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the USSR’s annexation of the Baltic countries in the 1940s. The colonisation of Estonia started as early as the thirteenth century with the invading German knights and continued with Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Russia fighting over the territory thereafter.
- 10.
Quoted in Daniel Brewer, The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 1.
- 11.
See Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (1955; London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 211–44.
- 12.
Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34 (2008), p. 340.
- 13.
Quoted in Iain Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 60.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 60 (italics in the original).
- 15.
Ibid., p. 45.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 76.
- 17.
Quoted in ibid., p. 78.
- 18.
Quoted in Rolf Liiv, ‘Kümme aastat hiljem: kas “piiririigis” on miskit uut’, Sirp, 6 June 2003, http://www.sirp.ee/archive/2003/06.06.03/Kirjand/kirjand1-1.html (accessed 17 June 2015 and translated by Liina-Ly Roos).
- 19.
Laanes, Lepitamatud dialoogid: subjekt ja mälu nõukogudejärgses eesti romaanis (Tartu: Tartu ülikooli kirjastus, 2009), p. 174 (translated by Liina-Ly Roos). Õnnepalu himself has commented on the novel’s perceived allegory of power relations between western and eastern Europe: ‘With this book I have indeed noticed that people are kind of choosing a side in it and that the side depends often on where they themselves are from, East or West. Sometimes the compulsion to choose sides causes an inner conflict for them. And usually it remains unspoken, but it comes out in emotional reactions’ (quoted in Kaur Kender, ‘Kuulates “Piiririiki”’, Postimees Kultuur, 22 May 2003, http://kultuur.postimees.ee/2022705/kuulates-piiririiki (accessed 16 June 2015 and translated by Liina-Ly Roos)).
- 20.
Romanowicz, Passage through the Red Sea, trans. by Virgilia Peterson (1960; New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p. 22.
- 21.
Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. by Michael Henry Heim (1984; New York: Harper Colophon, 1985), p. 102. The Franz of Border State echoes this sentiment when claiming, admiringly, that Estonia is ‘a country where history was being made on a daily basis’ (Õnnepalu, Border State, p. 75).
- 22.
Nataša Kovačević, ‘Storming the EU Fortress: Communities of Disagreement in Dubravka Ugrešić’, Cultural Critique, Vol. 83 (2013), p. 65.
- 23.
Ibid., pp. 70, 74.
- 24.
Maire Jaanus employs Kristeva’s distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘monumental’ time: see Jaanus, ‘Estonia’s Time’, pp. 213–19.
- 25.
Õnnepalu, Border State, pp. 11, 12. Regarding the Estonian culture of appreciating nature, and the relation between this culture and the national issue, see Robert W. Smurr, Perceptions of Nature, Expressions of Nation: An Environmental History of Estonia (2009).
- 26.
Jaanus, ‘Estonia’s Time’, pp. 221–2.
- 27.
In a survey of 2014, only 45 per cent of the pooled Estonians had a ‘very positive image’ of the EU (European Commission, ‘Standard Eurobarometer82, Autumn 2014, Public Opinion in the European Union, First Results’, European Commission, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/eb/eb82/eb82_first_en.pdf (accessed 18 May 2015)).
- 28.
Õnnepalu, Border State, p. 61.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 61. My work on this essay has been greatly aided by Liina-Ly Roos, a doctoral student in the Scandinavian Department of the University of Washington, who assisted my research and translated pertinent work from the Estonian. Professor Guntis Šmidchens of the University of Washington has been very generous with his help with research on Estonia and the EU, and Professor Sabrina Ramet of Norway’s NTNU has also assisted with valuable research materials.
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Crnković, G.P. (2016). A Betrayal of Enlightenment: EU Expansion and Tõnu Õnnepalu’s Border State . In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Novel and Europe. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_10
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