Skip to main content
Brave New Estonia
By Abdul Turay
Published Postimees 21 February 2010

When my editor called me to write a piece about Estonian Independence day my first thought was: “why me?”

I am aware there are a lot of people interested in reading what I have to say about this, that and the other, but surely a big patriotic event like Independence Day is best covered by native writers?

But then I realised, everything that can be written about Estonian Independence Day and the new national awakening Estonia currently is going through has already been exhaustively covered.

I can imagine the words.

“Estonians fought to preserve the nation’s freedom, Estonians must still fight to preserve the nation’s freedom.”

What else is there left to say?

Well actually looking at it from as an outsider there is quite a lot to say. I can say this with authority. Patriots from other countries envy Estonia. This is an exciting time to be alive and be Estonian.

To us outsiders what is going on in Estonia is an heroic human endeavour, it’s nation building, it’s “a brave new world” in the sense Shakespeare originally meant it.

Let's see how they do things in other countries. I'll use my country, because I know it.

Britain doesn't have a national day. We have the Queen’s birthday but nobody knows when it is, and nobody cares.

Wear a British flag in London and you are liable to get beaten up. Yes really ...I knew of a French guy who went down to the Notting Hill Carnival in a Union Flag T-shirt. He got the crap beaten out of him.

I have an army friend who has been in two wars. I have never seen him in uniform, soldiers are not allowed to walk around with their uniforms on, for fear of being attacked by pacifists. Pacifists can be a pretty violent bunch in England.

In British towns you rarely see the Union flag. If you do, it’s usually some hotel or public building; somewhere it has to be displayed. In Scotland you never see it.

Sport divides the nation, the Scots cheer when England loses. There used to be so-called Home Nations football games between England, Scotland Wales, Northern Ireland. They had to stop it because at every match fans would riot.

Estonia has soldiers confidently and proudly walking down the street fully kitted out. A flag in every home, a long list of patriotic songs which are sung with gusty at patriotic song festivals.

Not everybody is going to be celebrating Independence Day though.

A friend said to me that he found the nationalistic sentiments of many of his countrymen ugly and distasteful.

He described an incident one night, about the time of the troubles in Georgia, when he came across couple of girls merrily drunk on Freedom Square and shouting at the moon in English: “We’re Estonians and we hate Russians.”

“They can’t have been older than 17 or 18; it always amazes me that it is very young people, too young to even remember the Soviet times can be so angry, and so full of hate,” he said.

A student I teach, an exceptional bright young man, described the feeling of togetherness as so superficial as to be almost bizarre. He said suddenly people are holding hands and singing with the same neighbour that they quarrelled with two days ago.
“Eestlane olen ja Eestlaseks jään.”
He said you can be sure that in a few days they will be quarrelling again.

Some people are more prosaic in the objection.

“Estonia may be free, but I’m not free because I am poor,” a female friend told me.

“What good is national freedom. I can’t eat it, I can’t use it to pay my rent,” she said.

Besides is Estonia really free? If the banks are owned by Sweden and most industry including this paper are owned by other Scandinavian interests, who really controls the country?

Is it even possible for any country to be truly sovereign in a globalised world?

Anybody reading about the history of nationalism is bound to be cynical. Nationalism evolved out of war and intolerance and has been responsible for genocides as we have seen in Rwanda, Serbia and other places.

But nations are just another way of organising people into groups. People have always lived in groups. Nationalism is neither good or bad it just is.

When my father stepped off the boat six decades ago he came to a Britain as poor and as hopeless as Estonia was in the early 90s.

As the saying goes, he learned three things. “The streets weren’t paved with gold, the streets weren’t paved at all, and he was expected to pave them.”

Despite being a scholarly man, my father and mother ended up doing factory work. In the process they rebuilt the country. It was only later in life that my father started to do an academic job and started to make a lot of money. Millions of ordinary people did the same. It’s the ordinary tale of an ordinary man.

When I think of my father, I think of a friend, an electrician, a true blue-collar Estonian. He just lost his job. He didn't complain, he just put a note off his car the next day “willing to clear icicles” taking advantage of the wintry conditions. It's people like him who make the county great.

In countries like Germany, France, Britain and Holland the process of rebuilding took as least until the early 70's , longer if you count the time it has taken to catch up with the United States.

It’s been 19 years since independence, so Estonia is at the point that Britain was in the 1960s. Britain was a dreary place then. But at hat time America started to take Western Europeans seriously again. It was just before the British Invasion.

It's about time we in Western Europe started to start New Europe seriously.

Of course there are problems. You have politicians wrong-footing people. Instead of talking about building a fairer society they were setting impossible goals about making the country rich. Do you remember when Estonia was supposed to be in the top five richest countries in Europe? Ironically this idea sounded kind of Soviet. Like one of Stalin's five year plans. Merciful the recession killed off that nonsense.

Also how to deal with the country's Russian-speaking minorities.
You don’t need me to tell you that there is no quick fix to this problem.

And there is the falling population. Immigration can not solve this problem and the Government campaign's for people to “get busy” as we say in English, has been only partially successful.

But at least you have a project. Estonia is like a man that is building a grand house. He may face setbacks from time to time but ultimately he will finish the task.

As anyone who has built a house will tell you, it is a tremendously satisfying process.

You see people going about their daily lives they are are just trying to make ends, to take care of their family and provide for their children, they don’t think that they are part of any heroic human endeavour. They don't think of themselves as heroes, but they are, they really are.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Just wondering, who is your boss? I don't live in Estonia and don't know what paper you work for.
Abdul turay said…
read the header, postimees

Popular posts from this blog

Tallinn's unlikely twin By Abdul Turay First published November 2008 The idea behind twinning is that two vaguely similar cities exchange cultural links for their mutual benefit. Warsaw is twinned with Coventry – both cities were flattened by the Luftwaffe, after all. Tartu, the famous Estonian university town, is twined with Uppsala which is the home to the oldest university in Scandinavia. And Tallinn… Tallinn is twinned with Dartford. Come again, Dartford! For those of you who don’t know Britain well, Dartford is a dull dormitory suburb on the back end of London. Dartford is in the county of Kent, the so-called “garden of England”. Technically it is both a town and a borough , but it is not a city since it doesn’t have a Royal charter to call itself that. Say the word “Dartford” to most Britons, and they will answer back “tunnel”. The Dartford crossing is both a tunnel and a bridge. It links up Kent with London both above and below the river Thames. When City Paper called up the
Black men, Estonian women: the truth By Abdul Turay Published Postimees 11 November 2009 Well that got your attention; the headline I mean. Any story on this subject, the technical term is miscegenation, is bound to get punters. The yellow media, women's magazines and reality TV shows are obsessed with the subject. Not a month goes by without some publication writing about it. Anne and Style, for example, recently ran a long feature about mixed couples. Most of these stories are muddle-headed and wrong. There's paranoia in this country that there is an army of dark-skinned men form Turkey, the tropics, some place south, who are going to make off with the nation's women. It's never going to happen. I'll explain why in a minute. Seriously, I think there are more important things to think about and worry about. I worry about feeding my family. I worry about other people being able to feed their families, so I write about politics and economics. But the p
A note for New Tallinners Russian Translation below.  Dear New Tallinners Whether you are here for work or study; welcome to Tallinn, I hope that you have a successful, productive and fun time in our beautiful city. Tallinn has come a long way in the last 20 years. It is hard to believe this city was once grey and Soviet. It can be bewildering at times being in a new city in a new country, when all the information you need is in another language. Did you know that you can help to make it better? Did you know you have access to legal services? What do you know about the sports, leisure and cultural activities going on in Tallinn? The local elections for the City council take place this October 15. Did you know that you can vote?   Everybody registered to live in Tallinn can vote? Voting will give you say in how the city is run? It gives you power? I hope to serve you as your local candidate. How someone like me ended up in Estonian politics, is too long a story to g