Description

Estonia’s reputation as a scrappy and successful small EU nation since 2004 is not only a composite of economic and political strategies and attempts to explain and represent a conflicted history. Cultural translation subtends and even defines these processes, offering a fruitful approach to how Estonia has signified itself with reference to (Eastern and Western) Europe in the first decade of the 21st century, while distancing and dissociating from (post)Soviet social realities. Examples of hazards, dissonances, and failures in cultural semiotics can be seen in academic restructuring, public manifestations of xenophobia and incivility, and literary “marketing” of versions of the recent past. Seen astutely, the Estonian case can symptomatically articulate some fantasies and misprisions of Europe that are also currently manifested in larger societies of the former “Eastern Europe.”