Estonia
Estonian society is highly diverse, both linguistically and culturally. Estonians are predominantly city dwellers, although more and more have recently been moving to the countryside.
Former Estonian President Lennart Meri once said: "What is the task we set ourselves when we said the word integration? That everyone living in Estonia should feel love for Estonia and responsibility towards it, nothing more. And these responsibilities entail duties as well as rights."
Estonia is home to over 151 different nationalities, of which, according to the 2021 census, Estonians make up 69%, Russians 23.6%, Ukrainians 2.1%, Belarusians 0.9% and Finns 0.6%. 81% of Estonia's inhabitants are Estonian citizens, 7% are citizens of another state and 12% are stateless, i.e. people from various parts of the former Soviet Union who have come to Estonia in the last fifty years.
The proportion of non-Estonians has increased as a result of Soviet migration policy: immigration was due partly to administrative population movements and partly to the establishment of the Soviet army, to which was added the deportation of a large number of Estonians from Estonia. While in 1934 the proportion of non-Estonians was 12% (including 8% Russians), by 1991 it had risen to one-third of the population. The legal status and rights of national minorities living in Estonia are defined by the Constitution and the Cultural Autonomy Act.
All minorities have the opportunity to preserve their language and cultural specificities, notably through the education system and the activities of associations operating in their own languages. To date, over seventy such societies have been registered. Almost 24% of all schoolchildren in Estonia attend Russian primary and secondary schools, and 10% of students in higher education study in the language.
In Estonian society, integration is a top priority, with the aim of creating a balanced multicultural society. Since 1997, the Estonian government has taken political and administrative steps to integrate non-Estonians into Estonian society. In May 1997, it created the post of Minister of Population, responsible among other things for monitoring integration issues, and, in order to drive and coordinate integration projects and processes, it founded the Integration Foundation in March 1998. During the census of the foreign population, which took place between 1993 and 1998, some of the stateless people took Estonian citizenship, while others chose the nationality of another state. One of the Estonian government's priorities is to reduce the number of stateless people and to involve the whole of society more and more.
Legislation has also evolved considerably in this direction. The most significant change in the Citizenship Act, introduced on July 12, 1999, is that children under 15 born in Estonia after February 26, 1992 to stateless parents can obtain Estonian citizenship at the parents' request. In the five years since the law was passed, over 3,200 children have obtained Estonian citizenship through this simplified procedure. The population's involvement in the life of society has been considerably increased, not least by the fact that since 1996 all foreigners with a permanent residence permit in Estonia, regardless of their nationality, have had the right to take part in municipal elections. Estonia is one of the few countries to offer this possibility to its population. Non-Estonians can be found in almost every political party. The Estonian parliament, the Riigikogu, includes representatives of several minorities, elected on the lists of different parties.
Estonia wishes to establish an Estonian model of multicultural society, characterized by the pluralism of its cultures, by its solid cohesion, and by the principle of preserving and developing the Estonian cultural space. What is essential is that integration is clearly a two-way process, in which both Estonians and non-Estonians participate equally in the harmonization of society. Integration affects society as a whole: today, it has achieved good results in terms of the participation of all peoples living in Estonia in the life of society. Estonia is ready to share its experiences of integration and multicultural society. There is, however, one major drawback: the very difficult integration of the large Russian minority, and the gap that seems to be widening further in the light of the latest opinion polls. The 2022 law imposing Estonian as the main language of instruction in all schools did not please everyone.
The Russian minority
Estonia, like all the former Soviet republics, has had to deal with various problems linked to the integration of Russian-speaking populations. Already present in Estonia before the break-up of the USSR, today's Russian speakers are still struggling to integrate fully into Estonian society. Most of them are stateless or non-citizens. This divide is particularly marked between Tallinn and the north-eastern region of the country (Narva, Sillamäe, Jôhvi), where Estonian is rare and the economic level is lower than in the rest of the country. Indeed, the government's policy is to make Estonian a requirement for access to employment. For many Russian-speaking Estonians, learning the language is a real ordeal. As a result, access to positions in the public sector (doctors, police officers, teachers, etc.) remains closed to non-Estonian speakers. Despite the government's efforts in the field of integration, many decisions still need to be taken to enable the Russian community to enjoy some form of equality with the Estonian community.
Latvia
Latvia has a population of 1.82 million. A predominantly rural country before the Second World War (more than two-thirds of the population), the rural population now accounts for only a quarter of the total population. The country is one of the least densely populated in the EU, with 30 inhabitants per square kilometer. The capital, Rīga, has a population of 614,618, almost a third of the total. Four other towns have more than 50,000 inhabitants: Daugavpils, Liepāja, Jelgava and Jūrmala.
Since independence, the population has been declining and aging. The natural balance is negative. Between 1989 and 2007, the percentage of people over 65 rose from 17.4% to 20.7%. Net migration has been negative since 1991, mainly due to the departure of Russian-speaking populations, but is now tending towards equilibrium. Young graduates are increasingly leaving for other European countries and the British Isles.
Today, Latvia's population includes not only Latvians, but also Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Poles and Lithuanians. Russian speakers account for 23.7% of the total population; they are even in the majority in several regions of the country, and in Rīga their percentage of the population is almost equal to that of Latvians.
Long before the annexation by the USSR, when the country was part of Tsarist Russia, Russian speakers were already part of the Latvian population. But after the Soviet takeover and Stalin's desire to populate Latvia with settlers and soldiers, Russians flocked in greater numbers. Then followed the mass deportations of Latvians to Siberia. It is said that at least one member of every family was deported. Today, although some left the region when the troops of the former USSR withdrew, the Russian community is still part of the population, albeit in different proportions.
The importance of Russian speakers in the country at the time of independence, and their integration into the national community, was a subject of tension with Moscow and, more generally, at national level (nationality issues, restrictive language laws, etc.). The subject remains taboo to this day, and is best approached with caution.
In 2018, the Latvian government decided that 80% of schoolchildren would be taught in Latvian - compared with around 40% today. Russian speakers reacted strongly to this decision with demonstrations in early June. However, many more people demonstrated in 2004 to demand the reinforcement of Latvian at school. A sensitive subject!
Non-citizens in Latvia. In 2021, "non-citizens" represented 8.96% of the Latvian population, assimilated to stateless persons whose rights are practically identical to those of Latvians, apart from the right to vote and the obligation to do military service. While there have been migratory movements between Russians and Balts since the earliest Slav populations, nothing can be compared with the Russification policy of the Soviet era, which resulted in the deportation of tens of thousands of Latvians (out of a population of less than 3 million) to Siberia and Central Asia, and the "immigration" of several hundred thousand Russians and Communist Party cadres. From a majority on its own soil in 1944, the Latvian population represented less than half of the population at the time of the second declaration of independence. The departure of Red Army troops in 1994 partially redressed the balance, but almost 40% of the population is still of Russian origin. To protect its language and national integrity, the newly-independent Latvia decided to grant citizenship only to those who could prove their presence or ancestry prior to the Soviet annexation. For the others: a special status of "non-citizen" protected by the Latvian state and benefiting from the same guarantees as citizens (passport, social and legal coverage). Today, there is a way to obtain citizenship by proving proficiency in the Latvian language and knowledge of the national culture. However, a large proportion of this population, mainly of Russian, Belorussian or Ukrainian origin, has refused this route, finding certain advantages in the status quo (no military service, easier exchanges with the CIS) or believing that the Latvian language is too difficult.
Lithuania
Lithuania, the most populous of the Baltic states, has a population of 2.7 million. A predominantly rural country before the Second World War (more than two-thirds on average), the rural population now represents just one-third of the total population. Long before its annexation by the USSR, when the country was part of Tsarist Russia, Russian speakers were already part of its national make-up. But after the Soviet takeover and Stalin's desire to populate the region with settlers and military personnel, Russians flocked in greater numbers. This was followed by mass deportations to Siberia (around 300,000 people). It is said that at least one member of every Lithuanian family was deported. Today, although some left the region when the former USSR troops withdrew, the Russian community is still part of the population. In Lithuania, Russians account for just 5% of the population and seem to be well integrated (Poles are more numerous at 6.53%). In terms of demographics, we are currently witnessing a steady decline in the population, due to the state of the job market and a low birth rate. In recent years, Lithuania, like the other two countries, has had to contend with strong emigration of its population, accentuating the demographic disaster and depriving the country of educated and dynamic strata, although Estonia is faring better, thanks to a slightly positive migratory balance, no doubt due to its economic dynamism.
The different languages
Estonianis the mother tongue of 67% of Estonian citizens, 29% have Russian as their mother tongue and the remainder speak other languages.
Like Finnish, Estonian belongs to a linguistic group known as Uralic (or Finno-Ugric), which brings together languages spoken by peoples of the Eurasian continent, originating somewhere between European Russia and western Siberia. Modern Estonian represents a synthesis of two groups of dialects, northern and southern, spoken on this territory since well before the Christian era. Because of the cultural and linguistic hegemony of Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Russia, Estonian existed mainly in oral form, and the literary language has only recently appeared. The Kullamaa Prayers are the first text in Estonian, dating from 1524. Later, in 1535, the first book written entirely in Estonian appeared. It was a translation of the German Lutheran catechism. From the end of the 18th century onwards, national consciousness was awakening among the Estonian-speaking elite. The poems of Kristjan Jaak Peterson marked the birth of national literature. Estonian became the country's national language in 1920. During the Soviet era, it was associated with Russian as the language of the Republic of Estonia, before finally becoming the sole national language again in 1991.
Closely related to Lithuanian, Latvian was a branch of Latin until the 16th century. The oldest texts written in Latvian are hymns translated by Nicholas Ramm, a German pastor in Rīga, in a collection dating back to 1530. Latvian was later influenced not only by German, but also by Live, Estonian and Russian. Today, Latvian is the mother tongue of almost 64% of the country's population, and almost 50% in the main cities. It is the mother tongue of over a million people in Latvia, where it is the official language, and of around 500,000 people abroad. In the process of gaining independence in the early 1990s, Latvia, like Estonia, proposed laws to prevent the language from becoming extinct.
Lithuanian is an Indo-European language of the Balto-Slavic group. It is closely related to Latvian and Old Prussian, a language extinct since the 17th century. In its grammatical forms, Lithuanian is thought to be as old as Sanskrit. For example, god is called dievas in Lithuanian, devas in Sanskrit and deus in Latin. In fact, Prosper Mérimée states that "in Lithuania, almost pure Sanskrit is spoken".