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Abstract

The author analyzes Estonia as a case study to explore two interrelated research questions – how exceptions are produced and reversed through the mechanisms of sovereignty and governmentality projected onto geo- and biopolitical domains, and how the new practices of exceptionalization and de-exceptionalization contribute to the emergence of a new spatial order at Europe’s eastern margins? Three types of policies unfolded in Estonia as reactions to the Russian war against Ukraine are identified. First, the Estonian government introduced extraordinary measures based on the logic of national interests, which left much space for discretionary power to define risks, threats, and dangers. Secondly, some policy domains were intentionally de-exceptionalized for the sake of their better integration into Estonian normative space and as a reaction to the effects of the war. Third, in some cases there were exceptions from exceptions, which meant certain steps back toward normalization of the previously taken exceptional measures. The theoretical frame of the article consists of two nodal concepts – sovereignty and governmentality to be projected onto geo- and biopolitics treated as spheres in which sovereign and governmental powers operate and expose their political qualities.

Keywords

Estonia excepton governmentality Russia sovereignty war in Ukraine

Introduction

Russia’s full-fledged war launched against Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has unleashed profound geopolitical changes in the Baltic states that became frontrunners in promoting a policy of isolating Russia, as opposed to the previous – and ultimately unsuccessful – attempts to find ways and means for a constructive engagement with their eastern neighbour. By the same token, the Baltics were the leading group within the Euro-Atlantic West to consistently lobby for a drastic intensification of all kinds of assistance to Ukraine, from massive supply of arms to opening institutional prospects for Ukraine’s EU and NATO membership.

On both accounts, some of the Baltic states’ reactions to the Russian intervention in Ukraine were marked by practices of exceptionality which were aimed to sustain rather than challenge the normative foundations of the liberal security order. The war, being a radical exception to the legal, political, and normative rules of the post-1991 consensus established in the Euro-Atlantic international society, unleashed a series of reactive exceptional measures mostly effectuated on a national level by EU/NATO member states.

The experience of Estonia seems to be illustrative and emblematic in this regard. In this article I take this country as a case study to explore two interrelated research questions – how exceptions are produced and reversed through the mechanisms of sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics, and how the new practices of exceptionalization and de-exceptionalization contribute to the emergence of a new spatial order at Europe’s eastern margins?

I identify three types of policies in Estonia that unfolded as reactions to the Russian war against Ukraine. First, the Estonian government introduced extraordinary measures based on the logic of national interests, which left much space for discretionary power to define risks, threats, and dangers. Secondly, some policy domains were intentionally de-exceptionalized for the sake of their better integration into Estonian normative space and as a reaction to the effects of the war. Third, in some cases there were exceptions from exceptions, which meant certain steps back toward normalization of the previously taken extraordinary measures.

My theoretical frame consists of three nodal concepts of the Foucauldian background – sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics to be introduced in the first section as producers/generators of exception-related practices. My empirical base includes official documents (statements, interviews) of Estonian public authorities from February 24, 2022 to November 2023. These primary sources are complemented by a variety of other informative reference points, including media reports and think tanks’ publications.

The article consists of five sections. In the first one I introduce my main concepts of sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics, followed in the next section by a discussion on their applicability to the Estonian case. The next three sections cover the focal points of my analysis – different forms of exceptionalization, the phenomenon of de-exceptionalization, and policies that fall under the rubric of exceptions to exceptions. In conclusion I summarize my findings and deploy them in a spatial context stretching beyond the specific case of Estonia.

Sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics: Three sources of exceptionality

From a theoretical perspective, my analysis is based on a particular terrain of critical theory that delves into a typology of exceptions through the mutually constitutive and reinforcing concepts of sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics. All three distinct yet interconnected manifestations of power are genealogically linked to the state, but what they differed in is their modes of control and related institutions.

With a significant part of sovereignty shared with – and delegated to - the EU as a cornerstone of Euro-Atlantic international society, Estonia seems to confirm an assumption “that the remainder of sovereignty in the global space must be considered one of the possible forms of governmentality” (Cicarelli 2010: 76). A perfect example of deep interconnections between sovereignty and governmentality is the Estonian program of e-governance which was designed and promoted by the state and practically implemented in close interaction with private sector and civil society. However, in other cases the three forms of power relations might diverge, which will be discussed below.

Let me start with modalities and figurations of exceptions as pertinent to sovereign politics. Sovereignty “functions not as a fixed legal principle but as a flexible discourse (which – Author) establishes a set of rules that enable some constructions of sovereignty as accurate and useful while disabling others as irrelevant and harmful… (S)overeignty functions through being securitized, that is, construed in terms of existential threats to the Estonian nation and state” (Kuus 2002: 407).

As some scholars deem, since the sphere of the international is grounded in competing and inherently transgressive sovereignties, then national foreign policies are supposed to be largely built on constant deviations from the rules. This logic extends to inter-state borders as spaces of exception, and justifies an approach to exceptions as integral parts of international politics: “Order-defining principles are constituted by means of declaring and identifying exceptions” (Huysmans 2006a: 136).

In my mind, this argument might be accepted only with two important caveats. One is more general: not all sovereignties are sources of transgressive exceptionalism. In this regard there are lucid distinctions between Russia - driven by its imperial ambitions camouflaged by a sphere-of-influence rhetoric – and countries like Estonia protecting themselves against multiple Russian encroachments that many neighbouring countries have already experienced.

Another caveat is more particular: international borders indeed might function in the regime of exceptions, but only due to transgressive policies of hegemonic powers and the reactive countermeasures taken by their neighbours. I disagree that “the border is a permanent “state of exception” in that one may claim no rights but is still subject to the law. The law is always suspended at the border” (Salter, 2006: 169). The rigidity of this and many other similar statements looks misguided: in a normal situation, borders between national jurisdictions are regulated by rules and formal procedures; and there is nothing permanent in the border-related exceptionalism that is a product of specific constellations of sovereign interferences, along with measures of governmentality.

Now let us look at exceptions as effects of practices of governmentality implying the preponderance of technical and managerial logic and rationality of policy making. The idea of governmentality has more than one meaning and can be applied to both policies pursued by units and operators within the state apparatus and beyond it. The concept is not static and acquires multiple meanings depending on the context (Walter, 2012: 13). By and large, “the governmentality approach reorients the focus away from a single sovereign ‘centre’ node/source/hegemon, and instead explores more complex forms of governance that operate beyond, above and below conventional assumptions of sovereign authority… (I)t seeks to decouple processes of government, broadly defined as the ‘conduct of conduct’, from the constraints and strictures of a hitherto territorialised and hierarchical nation-state“ (Heng and McDonaugh, 2008: 360). Governmentality is type of rational agency grounded in “the politics of calculation” (Elden, 2007: 578), and its power lies in its capacity to normalize, depoliticize and de-securitize potentially conflictual relations between policy actors, and in this respect balance the politicizing and securitizing effects of sovereign power.

As some authors ascertain, governmentality „promotes a politics of exclusion… aimed at deviant groups… This highly disciplinary social control … sometimes leads to the state of exception, in which people are forced to endure “bare lives.“ (Tosa, 2009). Thus, exceptions might be an effect of governmentalization (Belcher et al., 2008: 501): “Governmental rationality of space and threat functions through the operation of deemed exceptionality” (Chappell, 2006: 324) and creates different types of securitized spaces.

This might indeed be the case; however, I doubt that by coupling “governmental techniques of control with the power to declare ‘states of exception’, states contribute to the obliteration of the possibility of political life … and produce violent and totalizing effects” (Zanotti, 2013: 292). In this regard, the exceptions I am studying “do not exist outside the law, but instead operate at the limits of liberal politics—both defining and reconciling the tensions between freedom and necessity” (Best, 2018). In practice, “neoliberalism and exception work hand in hand” (Dean, 2010: 466) as techniques of modern governance (Lembcke, 2007: 10) that not only exclude but also include: the exception can “be a positive decision to include selected populations and spaces as targets of calculative choice and value orientation” (Ong, 2006: 5). A good illustration of this point is an open-door policy in Europe towards Ukrainian displaced persons.

Consequently, this reasoning unveils that “exceptional practices produce governmental forms of normalization… The concept of exception is not necessarily antithetical to nor does it exclude the kind of normalizing practices. Either the concept of normalization can be expanded to subsume exceptions or the concept of exception can be expanded to subsume normalization” (Burles, 2016: 241-242). Thus, „exceptional politics may be required under certain circumstances, but they do not question the important status of normativity in international politics” (Huysmans, 2006b: 25).

Therefore, I disagree that due to the proliferation of exceptions “the distance between liberal democracy and authoritarianism grows ever narrower” (Adelman, 2010: 6). Despite a tendency towards exceptionalism, Estonian government is considered by insiders as liberal (Braghiroli, 2023). I consent that the Foucauldian connection of governmentality and apparatuses of security might imply either a police state, or liberalism (Tosa, 2009: 418). The Estonian experience after 2022 illustrates the latter case. Arguably, policies of exception accomplished by countries located at EU’s and NATO’s eastern flank is a way to spatially reinforce “the biopolitical body of the West” (Hopkins, 2019: 965). This exceptionalism is conducive to “the possession and ordering of space” (Diken and Laustsen, 2005: 39), and may be treated as “an attempt to defend order” (Hjorth, 2014: 178) against transgressions (Arias, 2011: 371). In other words, „exception and democracy are not seen as antithetical; rather, the former is taken as necessary to preserve democracy’s long-term survival” (Raimondi, 2016: 57). Therefore, „extraordinary politics could function positively within democratic politics” (Williams, 2015: 116).

However, the extant academic literature says very little about the functioning of governmentality during military conflicts. Securitized and militarized environment might create fertile ground for a different understanding not only of national interests, but also of rationality and governance. As I will show later, the Estonian case is illustrative of possible gaps and cleavages between the political logic of re-bordering through maximal isolation of Russia and the logic of business calculation that admits limited cross-border operations in spheres not affected by sanctions.

Now let me turn to biopolitical domain with its two facets – external and domestic. From the external perspective, the idea of biopolitical exceptionalism (Murphy, 2021: 600) stems from Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of ways and means of control over human bodies and the ensuing constant deviations from such norms as human rights, freedoms, and civil liberties. This philosophy has particularly meaningful implications for bordering and de-bordering: “The “outside”, although represented and “materialized” in spatial terms, seems to point toward another dimension that is … fundamentally biopolitical: the dimension or the level at which human life is inscribed, constituted, recognized, and defined within a given sociopolitical order” (Giorgi and Punkus, 2006: 99). Border biopolitics might be approached as an assemblage of immigration, policing and transportation authorities, aimed at codification of incoming individuals and groups, their examination and ascription to them of certain statuses and rights. Biobordering connotes practices related to measures of controlling, qualifying, and categorizing border crossers. Techniques of biopolitical bordering have been extensively described in the literature, including visa policies, profiling of travellers and biometric check-ups, measures of control and surveillance, corridors and spaces of confinement, readmission and return/pushback policies, deportations, as well as multiple limitations and restrictions for entry. From a biopolitical perspective, borders are referred to as spaces where some human rights might be suspended in favor of sovereign practices of securitization.

When it comes to domestic dimensions of biopolitics, in Estonia, as in other East and Central European countries with legacies of socialism, cultural and linguistic nationalism was inscribed into the post-communist liberalism, which explains securitization of minorities as potentially dangerous domestic others. Multicultural versions of democracy therefore were not very popular in these countries, since acknowledging full-fledged rights for non-mainstream ethnic groups, especially those culturally connected with a foreign country, is perceived as tantamount to losing a sense of authenticity and existential security (New Russian speakers…, 2020). This approach does not seem to be unproblematic internationally: UN human rights experts expressed concern about new Estonia legislation aimed to eliminate minority language education (Estonia: new law…, 2023). From a domestic perspective, securitization of the local Russophones inherited by the independent Estonia from the Soviet times might backfire: “Having a large percentage of the population not integrated with the rest of society could pose a potential threat to the Estonian nation-state. Some of the potential threats could stem from the relationship of the disenfranchised Russian speakers with Russia. If the Russian speakers in Estonia do not feel a part of the Estonian society then they may look to Russia as a source of their identity and loyalty” (Crandall, 2014: 46). Of particular importance in this regard is the city of Narva where hypothetical pro-Russia activists could amplify “grievances against their government and may cite other nationalist and ethnic movements in Europe as justification. Furthermore, neutralising such groups might require NATO troops to undertake” certain actions (Lanoszka and Hunzeker, 2016: 15).

Therefore, in this section I introduced sovereignty, governmentality and biopolitics as three constitutive sources generative of the policies of exceptionalism and de-exeptionalization. In the rest of the article I will look at them in more detail and juxtapose with each other.

Exceptions and rebordering

The war in Ukraine has re-spatialized (Minca and Vaughan-Williams, 2012: 765) and re-actualized practices of (re)bordering. Indeed, new forms of borders (re)appear by means of sovereign decisions, thus becoming sites “where ‘the sovereign can activate/produce the exception” (Minca and Vaughan-Williams, 2012: 769). This type of bordering is de-localized (Salter, 2008: 370) in the sense that it is not territorially confined to the state border and stretch to the whole society, embracing in the meantime such biopolitical domains as education, employment, and some others.

In this section I intend to find out how the sovereignty – governmentality nexus works as a mechanism that reshuffles spaces and borders, and how it biopolitically categorizes and hierarchizes human lives. I stem from the presumption that “borders must not primarily be understood as territorial lines“ (Stetter, 2005: 5), and that they might be “liquid”, non-linear, often externalized, and outsourced. “Debordering covers all activities that expand and open up boundaries, reduce (central) boundary control and decrease boundary congruence; conversely, rebordering refers to all activities of boundary closure or retrenchment as well as increases in (central) boundary control and in boundary congruence” (Schimmelfennig, 2021: 3016).

After the annexation of Crimea in 2014, as a practical gesture of securitizing Russia as a threat to Europe, the Estonian government has started building a fence at its eastern border. The migration crisis on Belarus’ borders with Lithuania, Latvia and Poland in 2021 has further strengthened Estonia’s determination to protect itself against possible hybrid threats from the east (Foreign Minister Liimets…,. 2021). And, of course, Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine has speed up this policy of rebordering, since in 2022 only 23 km of the Estonian – Russian borderline out of 130 were properly equipped and fortified (ERR, 2022a).

The case of Estonia seems to meaningfully contribute to the ongoing debate on (re)bordering, which significantly differs from what a group of colleagues in a different context dubbed “borderism” meaning policies of “a global aristocracy, principally determined by birth” aimed at taxonomizing people “on the basis of a profiled, depersonalized national origin” (Van Houtum and Van Uden, 2021: 21). Apparently, the war launched by Russia in Ukraine has strengthened the tendency of creating “paper walls guarded by pencils and computers that have become the first line of defence of states” (Ibid., 20). Yet at the same time Estonia’s reactions to the Russia - Ukraine war brought into the rationale for rebordering a different set of arguments related to the liaison between citizenship and collective responsibility for the war. As seen from the Estonian perspective, the border lockdown is meant to motivate the Russian society to take an anti-war stand and domestically resist the Kremlin’s militarism, as opposed to touring Europe in a business-as-usual manner. This policy was critically perceived by local Russophones and in particular by a relatively small group of Russian anti-war activists who managed to settle in Estonia.

The most apparent reactive exception conducive to rebordering in the aftermath of February 24, 2022 was the decision of the Estonian Foreign Ministry to cancel all Schengen visas issued by Estonia for Russian citizens (The government restricts…, 2022). This measure was followed by the consolidated step of all three Baltic states and Poland to lock their borders for Russian holders of Schengen visas issued by other EU member states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania…, 2022). The de facto border closure was motivated in Estonian discourses by ethical (it is unacceptable to tolerate Russian tourists in Europe while the Russian army kills Ukrainians) and practical (Russian citizens are expected to contribute to the regime change in their own country) considerations. Other exceptional measures included the cancellation of most of the previously planned cultural and academic contacts with Russian partners who supported the war against Ukraine (Artists justifying …, 2022). Domestically, some Russia-loyal politicians in Estonia – such as a member of the European Parliament Yana Toom (2023) – claimed that the Estonian government violates the Schengen rules, which resonated with Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov who called the Estonian position on visas “absolutely extreme” (Interfax, 2022).

Policies of rebordering were also applied on the domestic scene. In February 2023 the Estonia parliament passed a law stipulating the issuance of gun licenses only for foreign citizens of the EU and NATO member states who are sufficiently proficient in Estonian language. In practice this means that Russian citizens with previously issued gun licenses will not be able to legally possess firearms after the expiration of their current documents. Following a similar logic, an opposition fraction in Tallinn city council proposed to exempt Russian diplomats from the free use of public transportation in the Estonian capital (ERR, 2023b).

Another example of how the exceptionality of the situation impacts the normative basis of democracy, with its freedom of speech and expression of opinions, was the case of Filip Los’, art director of the Russian Theatre in Tallinn, who in his social media account criticized Estonia for termination of cross-border contacts with Russia and characterized his host country as ‘Russophobic’. Los’ – a Russian citizen – has ultimately lost his job and was ousted from an Estonian professional association, which unleashed a debate in Estonian Russophone media and social networks on the commensurability of the retaliation with the artist’s critical enunciation toward Estonia (Raadio 4, 2022).

Other measures of exceptional rebordering were taken in the domain of education. In May 2022 Estonian universities announced their coordinated refusal to admit new students from Russia and Belarus starting from the next academic year for two main reasons: as a sanction imposed due to Russian invasion of Ukraine and due to security concerns (SchengenVisaInfo, 2022). In April 2022 the Estonian government decided that Russian graduates of Estonian universities can’t stay for a job or further studies in Estonia (Government introduced …, 2022). These decisions were partly reversed a year later, which I will cover in the section below.

In another exceptional policy move, in August 2023 the Ministry of Justice promulgated a bill stipulating restrictions of voting rights on municipal level for citizens of countries committed military aggression. This measure resulted from a long discussion among Estonian political elite, within which even more radical voices insisted on annulling voting rights for holders of ‘alien’s passport’ as well (Kesküla, 2023). This issue has divided the Estonian political class and lucidly exposed polarized visions of what constitutes national security (ERR, 2022b). At this juncture, two interpretations clashed with each other: Russian citizens’ voting rights as a threat factor versus the suspension of the voting rights as a legally questionable political move that might further exacerbate the extant cleavages within society.

The biopolitical dimension of these examples of re-bordering boils down to the question of who part of the political community is and who is not. Against this background, Russian citizenship became a risk factor for residence in Estonia and is likely to lead, in one way or another, to measures of exceptionalization and exclusion. The drastic repoliticization of issues pertaining to citizenship transformed it from a technical and/or cultural matter to a key element of political belonging, which for Russian residents of Estonia and non-citizens implies a necessity of a choice to make – either to keep Russian citizenship with the corresponding risks for residence in Estonia, or invest time and efforts in applying for Estonian citizenship which requires, apart from 8 years of permanent residence in the country, language proficiency as well.

Policies of de-exceptionalization

A second cluster of policy measures falls under the category of de-exceptionalization. These policies concern different areas, spheres or policy domains that were – even if implicitly or informally – enjoying de facto exceptional treatment, since they were considered politically volatile and inflammable. Russia’s war in Ukraine to a large extent put an end to many of these exceptions that were connected to either relations with Russia, or to Russophone groups residing in Estonia, including Russian citizens and residents with alien’s passports. This type of de-exceptionalization is motivated by the intention of the Estonian government to distance the local Russians from the Kremlin and prevent the Russian officialdom from exerting propagandistic influence on the Estonian Russophone citizens and residents.

De-exceptionalizing the victory day

The 9^th of May was celebrated in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet Russia as the day of victory over the Nazi Germany, and this ritual was honored by a significant part of Russophones living in Estonia as a sign of their belonging to the trans-national space of the ‘Russian world’. From the perspective of symbolic politics, these annual celebrations could be considered exceptional in the sense that the Estonian authorities have been expressing tolerance to the public exposure of signs and images associated not only with the Great Patriotic War used by the Kremlin to justify the aggression against Ukraine, but also with the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states and the ensuing deportations, and implicitly glorified the military might of Russia as the legal successor of the Soviet Union. In particular, the St. George’s ribbon became a proverbial symbol that many Russophones living in Estonia used as a decoration to publicly expose loyalty to the Russian and Soviet imperial tradition, which in the official mainstream interpretation was perceived as a gesture of disrespect to the Estonian national identity.

However, on the eve of the 9^th of May 2022 the Estonian government banned from public exposure any signs that might be interpreted as a symbolic support for the war. In 2023 the ban was introduced again, from May 5 to May 9, and only in three municipalities with the highest percentage of Russian speaking population (Politsiya …, 2023). The government did not publish the exhaustive list of the prohibited symbols and left the practical implementation of the ban at the discretion of the police. In a similar way, in 2023 the police prohibited any political actions in Narva from July 26 to August 2 when dwellers of this predominantly Russophone city traditionally laid flowers to Soviet war memorials (Delfi, 2023a).

What many Russian speakers perceived as an issue of freedom of speech, was a matter of security and public order for the state authorities. In result, the Victory Day has lost its exceptional status as a legitimate day of decorating public spaces with symbols contravening the idea of Estonian independence and symbolically associating their bearers with the Russian war machine.

De-exceptionalizing Narva

The war unleashed some measures undertaken by the Estonian government that are domestic yet fit in the logic of detachment from the ‘Russian world’ and the Soviet nostalgia. The focal point of these measures was the city of Narva overwhelmingly populated by the local Russophones and for more than three decades after the restoration of Estonian independence claiming to have a de facto special status due to a particular attachment of its population to Russian language, culture, and interpretation of history (ERR, 2023c). The reverse side of this specificity is a particular sensitivity of local authorities to anti-war public events or actions that might be considered offensive or inappropriate by the locals who associate or identify themselves with Russian culture, history, or language (Wittes, 2023).

The Estonian government de-exceptionalized Narva in three steps. One was the removal to a military museum – despite protests of a significant part of the local Russophones - of the Soviet-era tank T-34 which for decades was standing in Narva suburb area (V Estonii…, 2022). The tank controversy unveiled different visions of de-exceptionalization in the central government and in Narva. Technically, the tank belonged to the city of Narva, and the municipal authorities were unhappy with the intervention of the central government in what they consider a local affair. After a lengthy contemplation and negotiation, the city council agreed to remove the tank from its pedestal to a different place in Narva, change its status from a monument to a museum object, and then take a final decision on its location (Narvskoe gorodskoe…, 2022).

Nevertheless, due to procrastination with acting by the Narva city council, the central authorities claimed its right to intervene and remove the Soviet military memorial. The Estonian government referred to the general policy of relocating symbols of occupation that in the light of the Russian aggression against Ukraine were perceived by the mainstream public opinion in Estonia as either reminding about the past subjugation to the Soviet Union, or as an implicit sign of sympathy to the war in Ukraine (Monumenty …, 2022). In the words of the prime minister Kaja Kallas, monuments of the Soviet era are being taken away from the public space across Estonia, and Narva can’t be exception to this policy (Press-konferentsiya…, 2022). The head of the Estonian government explained that it would be expedient for the municipality to take and implement such a decision, yet should the tensions around this issue escalate, the central authorities reserved the right to take an action for the sake of security and its two major components – public order and tranquillity of population. The intervention by the central government was additionally justified by the reference to “some factors that might been underestimated or remain invisible at the local level” (Ibid.)

Another form of de-exceptionalization of Narva was a policy of stricter adherence to the Estonian language requirements for public service institutions. In September 2022 the chancellor of law drew attention to the practice of using Russian language in the process of debating and taking decisions at the local level, which might ultimately lead to formally acknowledging these decisions illegitimate (Maaleht, 2022). In line with this policy, in her turn, the mayor of Narva refused to accept for consideration the public appeal to return the removed tank back to Narva because the petition was submitted in Russian language (ERR, 2022e), which contradicts the Estonian legislation.

Thirdly, the Estonian government pushed the Narva legislature to rename several streets that bear names of people with a Communist background (Narvskoe gorodskoe sobranie…, 2023). Again, as in the story with the tank, the city council under different pretexts proposed to delay the decision (Narvskoe gorsobranie…, 2023), which justified the decision of the central government to take the initiative in its hands.

These events, with all their political resonance, are illustrative of the double-edged policy pursued by the Estonian government. The rejection of the previously accepted – even if implicitly and indirectly - exceptionality of Estonian Russophone enclaves might apparently be qualified as measures of (re)bordering vis-à-vis the Moscow-propagated “Russian world”. At the same time, the ultimate purpose of this de-exceptionalization is a better integration of the predominantly Russophone county of Ida-Virumaa into Estonian national polity, linguistically as well as politically.

De-exceptionalizing ROC

The Estonian branch of the RussianI Orthodox Church (ROC) enjoyed an exceptional status due to the Estonian government’s de facto acceptance of its subordination to the Moscow patriarchy. Yet after Russia’s full-scale invasion in Ukraine, in a rare case of intervention into what Foucault called pastoral power, the Estonian government made clear that the precondition for the functioning of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchy (ROC) in Estonia is its unequivocal and public distancing from the warmongering position taken by the patriarch Kirill. Upon demand by the Estonian Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Justice, the head of the Estonian Orthodox Church metropolitan Evgeniy has publicly repudiated pro-war sentiments expressed by the head of the ROC (Otvet …, 2022). Later Evgeniy – again upon demand by the Estonian authorities - renounced the involvement of Estonian Orthodox community into a “pray for peace in Ukraine” organized in Tallinn by a pro-Russian group “Koos/Vmeste” (Zayavlenie…, 2023).

De-exceptionalizing diplomatic disparity

In January 2023 the Estonian government demanded to decrease the number of diplomats in the Russian embassy in Tallinn to match the quantity of Estonian diplomats stationed in Moscow. The Estonian Foreign Ministry referred to the established principle of parity in bilateral diplomatic practice. In the words of the Estonian Foreign Minister, “given the fact that the personnel of the Russian Embassy is not busy with developing Estonian-Russian relations under the conditions of the aggressive war, we find that the current size of Russian representation in Estonia is irrelevant” (Ministerstvo inostrannykh…, 2023). In addition, the Estonian Foreign Minister tried to dissuade the mayor of Narva from assisting with a working space to a company commissioned by the Russian embassy for delivering and processing documents (ERR, 2023a).

Exceptions to exceptions

The two previous sections described policies whose cumulative effect boils down to a rather stringent and rigid delimitation– in political, economic, institutional, and spatial terms – of Estonian and European spheres of operation, on the one hand, and the Russian ones, on the other. However, this divide was never as “black-and-white” as Kaja Kallas (Tambur, 2023) assumed. As the analysis shows, exceptional measures may trigger certain moves and steps aimed either at partly normalizing the extraordinary situation, or at circumventing the logic of a total isolation of Russia. In this section I give three examples of what might be dubbed ‘exceptions to exceptions’.

As a follow-up to the controversy related to the ban on Russian university students, the Estonian government in June 2023 decided to “allow Russian and Belarusian students, doctors, and scientists who have come to Estonia before the start of Russia’s full-scale aggression in Ukraine to apply for a new residence permit” (Government approves…, 2023). This decision to a large extent was taken under the influence of a public campaign organized by Russian students studying in Estonian universities who solicited the Estonian parliament to make an exception to those who speak Estonian (Dmitriev, 2022). Ultimately, academics were exempted from the language proficiency tests, which has softened the previous policy that made close to impossible the employment of citizens of Russia and Belarus in Estonia.

A second example is the decision of the Social Insurance Department to temporarily pay, as an exception, pensions to 4082 Russian seniors residing in Estonia due to the technical impossibility to transfer the funds from Russia (ERR, 2022d). This gesture of good will was meant to alleviate potential discontent among elderly Estonian Russophones and avoid additional tensions with the local Russian speakers in a more general sense.

A different policy was applied towards Russian owners of real estate property in Estonia who due to the sanctions can’t get access to their houses and apartments and can’t pay utility and tax bills. They addressed the Estonian government with a proposal to make another exception to exception and lift travel restrictions for this specific category. They also signed a petition to the Estonian parliament, but it refused to consider it (Delfi, 2023b). Ultimately, a court decision ruled that the property belonging to Russian citizens who can’t take proper care of it might be sold to new owners.

Thirdly, in the economic domain, the spill-over of exception took a controversial turn with the Estonian Foreign Ministry’s publication of a list of Estonian companies that requested to make “an exception to exception” – namely, to allow them keeping transactions with Russian energy market operators during the so-called transitional period. Some of the listed companies publicly denied the allegations, yet this episode seemed to be illustrative of the multiple layers, including financial and ethical ones, of the phenomenon of (re)bordering (ERR, 2022c). What was at stake here is more a reputational and moral issue rather than the legal one. The ethical debate reached apex in August 2023 when the Estonian media revealed the fact that a logistic company co-owned by the husband of prime minister Kaja Kallas was complicit in conducting business operations with Russia after the restart of the war in 2022. Although, according to the authorities, there was no breach of formal prohibitions in this case (ValistuseUudised, 2023), the reputation of the head of the government was ruined on ethical grounds.

At the same time, the case of Kaja Kallas raised a set of new issues related to war-time governmentality that were previously sidelined in the public debate. Some Russophone voices in Estonian business community questioned the very necessity to wrap up business in Russia (Delfi Ärileht, 2023), while others complained about the legal and practical hardship of cutting off contracts with Russan partners that have received advance payment. The nascent discussion on these issues highlights the complexity of the governmentality paradigm. On the one hand of the spectrum, what might be dubbed the “threat governmentality” implies identification and definition of categories of population that are deemed to be a risk with a certain degree of probability (Chappell, 2006: 316). “Threat governmentality” looks at the economy through security lens, hoping to create a comprehensive system of knowledge about all spheres that potentially trigger insecurities (Boukalas, 2020: 21). On the other side of the continuum, one may see a de-securitized version of governmentality whose proponents see more problem in discontinuing business relations with Russia in non-sanctioned spheres than in fully implementing the government’s appeal to completely isolate Russia.

Conclusions

My analysis showed that exceptionality, de-exceptionalization and exceptions to exceptions were direct products of sovereign power and practices of governmentality with certain biopolitical repercussions in Estonia. In conclusion let me come back to two main questions that guided me in this study.

The table below summarizes my research findings and proposes an explanatory model for studying exception-related policies. (Table 1)

Table 1.

Summary of research fundings and a model to explain exceptional policies.

	Sovereignty	Governmentality	Biopolitics
Exceptional rebordering	Protection of Estonian borders from threats coming from Russia	The logic of governmentality is subordinated to sovereign exceptionalism	Border-crossing bans and mobility restrictions
De-exceptionalization	The state’s execution of its sovereign rights through ‘normalizing’ interventions in specific areas, from local politics to diplomacy	Local governmentality clashes with state policies, particularly in Narva	Pastoral power accepts the primacy of Estonian sovereignty, while russophone residents of ida-virumaa keep ascertaining their particular ‘regime of belonging’
Exceptions to exceptions	On the one hand, the state normalizes certain spheres affected by sanctions; on the other hand, the state policy might not necessarily coincide with interests of economic actors involved in trade with Russia	Appearance of a particular type of non-state financial and economic logic of governmentality acting beyond moral considerations and challenging the black-and-white mode of bordering	Biopolitical care of the most vulnerable russophone groups – the elderly and students

As we can see from the table, different forms of exceptional re-bordering are effectuated under a strong impact of sovereign decisions that are coordinated with - but not subordinated to - Estonia’s international partners and institutions. One of few exceptions from this pattern were Estonian universities that discontinued matriculation of Russian and Belarusian students. Exceptional re-bordering included governmental measures of dissociating Estonia from Russian energy and transportation markets, as well as from Russian cultural and educational spaces. Such governmental actors as employers or event organizers had to adjust to the new reality. From a biopolitical perspective, re-bordering implied the introduction of multiple restrictions on mobility and new rules for entering and staying in Estonia for Russian and Belarusian citizens who are securitized and considered as dangerous representatives of the aggressor.

De-exceptionalization is also largely a product of sovereign decisions of Estonian authorities, particularly in such domains as memory and language politics, relations with the Russian Orthodox Church, and diplomatic liaisons. However, as the case of Narva illuminates, the sovereign interventions were resisted by a logic of local/sub-national governmentality grounded in the implicit insistence on the irreducible specificity and therefore autonomy of the predominantly Russophone county of Ida-Virumaa. In parallel to that, a significant part of the Russophone population keeps critically perceiving their living conditions and stick to the old discourse of their marginalization and mistreatment within the Estonian statehood, which has direct biopolitical connotations and implications.

The ‘exceptions to exceptions’ rubric looks even more ambiguous. On the one hand, in biopolitical domain, we see here the state-led normalizing policies of care towards Russian elderly people living in Estonia and deprived of a possibility to get their pensions from Russia, and toward linguistically integrated Russian students. On the other hand, the role of the state is much more limited in financial and economic spheres: exemptions from sanctions are decided in Brussels, while the decision on allowing gun possession only to citizens of the EU and NATO member states attests to a high level of trusts to these international institutions. The governmentality framework applies at this juncture basically to business enterprises and other market operators that keep dealing with Russia, which sparked a crisis of confidence to the Estonian prime minister in September 2023 and onward. The casuistically legalistic vison of the implementation of the sanction policy did not look sustainable and was heavily lambasted in society.

These three policy clusters might be seen as three strategies of dealing with the consequences of the war for a small and relatively vulnerable country sharing a border with Russia. As viewed from this perspective, exceptionalization and de-exceptionalization are the two sides of the same coin: both are aimed at averting undue impact on Estonian society from Russia and warding off possible attempts of the Putin regime to influence Estonian domestic political agenda. When it comes to exceptions to exceptions, this cluster is more heterogenous: it contains policies aimed at alleviating the effects of sanctions on the most vulnerable groups of Russian citizens living in Estonia, yet in the meantime also implies a possibility to skip the (re)bordering regime introduced against Russia, with the corresponding ethical, political, and legal repercussions.

This table is also instrumental for identifying varieties within each of the three nodal concepts I have used for this analysis. Estonian sovereign politics is a major driver for exceptional measures conducive to re-bordering of relations with Russia, as well as de-exceptionalizing those spheres which previously have been considered as sites of compromises with Russia-loyal and Russia-oriented groups in society. These measures were outcomes of a policy machinery that includes political parties in power and in opposition, policy making bodies, the media, non-governmental organizations, and private enterprises. In this regard, a strict line dividing sovereign power from the terrain of governmentality is hard to establish.

Governmentality, as we can see, has multiple formats: it might be practiced by the state, relegated to public entities and business operators, or may emerge from the municipal level. Perhaps one of the most important conclusions from this study is that sovereignty and governmentality might not only reinforce each other, but also clash with each other, as the case of Narva demonstrated.

The crisis of confidence related to the prime minister Kaja Kallas is even more illustrative of this argument. Kaja Kallas became a political figure embodying the conflictual nature of sovereignty and governmentality. As the head of the government, she strongly advocated for a black-and-white bordering and the discontinuation of the entire spectrum of relations with Russia. However, her family business exemplified a post-political (and, in a sense, post-liberal) logic of a technical adaptability to the sanction regime and the ensuing restrictions. In a wider context, the logic of “building European security against Russia” (Building…, 2023) is grounded in the geopolitical reasoning aimed at protecting Estonian sovereignty within the broader framework of Euro-Atlantic security order. Yet this logic, might contravene a logic of governmentality that denies or discards ethical components of re-bordering in its multiple variations.

The cumulative effect of the sovereign, governmental and biopolitical investments in restructuring geopolitical spaces at Europe’s eastern margins looks complex and multilayered. Since the connectivity function of the border has gone, it transformed into a Huntingtonian civilizational dividing line with long-term security reverberations. Under these new geopolitical conditions, Estonia has consolidated its firm position within the Euro-Atlantic security community as one of the staunchest proponents of deterring and isolating Russia, as well as making it pay a dear price for the military intervention in Ukraine. However, the rigidity of this divide and isolation was partly compromised by a specific logic of war-time governmentality grounded in calculative rationality of business actors who keep conducting operations on Russan market in spheres formally unaffected by sanctions. At the same time, a new bunch of issues popped up in the Estonian political discourse: what is the price that Estonia itself should be ready to pay due to the eruption of the war particularly when it comes to inflation, state of competitiveness and domestic labor market, challenges for transportation infrastructure, along with other economic and financial factors that might potentially lead to a new peripheralization of Estonia in Europe as the flip side of the border-fortification.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Estonian - French Program PARROT (4-9/21/3) and by the Estonian Research Council (grant PRG1716).

Author biography

Andrey Makarychev is Professor of Regional Political Studies at the University of Tartu Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. He teaches courses on “Globalization”,“Political Systems in post-Soviet Space”,“Regional Integration in post-Soviet Space”,“Visual Politics”,and “The Essentials of Biopolitics”. He is the author of Popular Biopolitics and Populism at Europe’s Eastern Margins (Brill,2022),and co-authored four monographs: Celebrating Borderlands in a Wider Europe: Nations and Identities in Ukraine,Georgia and Estonia (Nomos,2016),Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics and the Political (Rowman and Littlefield,2017),Critical Biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: from Populations to Nations (Lexington Books,2020) and Practical Biopolitics of COVID-19: Comparing Russian and Indonesian Experience s (Lexington Books,2023). He co-edited several academic volumes: Mega Events in post-Soviet Eurasia: Shifting Borderlines of Inclusion and Exclusion (Palgrave Macmillan,2016),Vocabularies of International Relations after the Crisis in Ukraine (Routledge,2017);Borders in the Baltic Sea Region: Suturing the Ruptures (Palgrave Macmillan,2017). His articles have been published in such academic journals as Slavic Review,Journal of International Relations and Development,Political Geography,Slavic Military Review,Eurasian Geography and Economics,Alternatives,Nationalities Papers,Journal of Borderland Studies,among others.

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