This article examines how the Swedish-speaking island community of Ruhnu in the Gulf of Riga navigated the island's incorporation into the Estonian nation-state through a sustained strategy of petitioning. From 1919 to 1921, Ruhnu's inhabitants pursued parallel petitions submitted to Estonian authorities and to the King of Sweden with the aim of gaining confirmation of what they understood as historical local rights. At the same time, the island's incorporation to the Republic of Estonia was contested by Latvia, which gave the islanders strategic leverage. Rather than treating the islanders' petitions as peripheral expressions of a local grievance, the analysis frames them as an independent political strategy by which the community actively, and in part successfully, shaped the terms under which Estonian sovereignty came to be exercised over the island. It identifies in these texts a distinct privilege-based idiom of claim-making ('privilege grammar') focused on exemptions and confirmations, which stood in tension with the idea of modern uniform citizenship.
This article examines how the Swedish-speaking island community of Ruhnu in the Gulf of Riga navigated the islandâs incorporation into the Estonian nation-state through a sustained strategy of petitioning. From 1919 to 1921, Ruhnuâs inhabitants pursued parallel petitions submitted to Estonian authorities and to the King of Sweden with the aim of gaining confirmation of what they understood as historical local rights. At the same time, the islandâs incorporation to the Republic of Estonia was contested by Latvia, which gave the islanders strategic leverage. Rather than treating the islandersâ petitions as peripheral expressions of a local grievance, the analysis frames them as an independent political strategy by which the community actively, and in part successfully, shaped the terms under which Estonian sovereignty came to be exercised over the island. It identifies in these texts a distinct privilege-based idiom of claim-making (âprivilege grammarâ) focused on exemptions and confirmations, which stood in tension with the idea of modern uniform citizenship.
This article discusses the issue of legal existence of ethnic minorities by asking whether and how legal recognition of ethnic groups as collective entities has affected individual freedom of ethnic self-identification. To this end, the article analyses court cases concerning the ethnicity record in identity documents in 1920s Estonia. It appears that the court decisions, all of which covered the right of individuals to select the ethnicity record âGermanâ, as a side effect of relying on the Cultural Autonomy Law, explicitly declared small and marginal ethnic groups that did not meet the requirements of the law to be legally non-existent and prohibited the individual freedom to self-identify with these ethnic groups. However, these decisions appeared to have no significant impact on the individual freedom of choice. The results of the article thus show that the link between legal recognition of ethnic minorities as collective entities and individual freedom of ethnic self-identification is not unambiguous. Whether and to what extent restrictions on the freedom of choice were implemented in practice may have been dependent on such social conditions that are not immediately apparent from legal norms.
This article examines how the climate crises of the seventeenth century shaped forms of weather heritage and weather memory in Livonia and Courland, drawing on religious, economic and early scientific literature. It investigates weather-related social practices as expressions of local weather heritage. The study seeks to bridge the gap between literary studies and cultural climatology by asking how past weather events were recorded, transmitted and remembered. It argues that local weather heritage can be understood as a transcultural and trans-social set of practices shared among Estonians, Latvians and Germans, while also being connected to trans-regions and larger knowledge systems.
