Vicarious Sovereignty: Becoming European the Estonian Way

36 Pages Posted: 30 Nov 2022

See all articles by Maria Mälksoo

Maria Mälksoo

University of Copenhagen - Department of Political Science

Date Written: November 28, 2022

Abstract

Vicarious identification, or ‘living through another’ refers to the way actors appropriate the achievements and experiences of others to gain a sense of purpose, identity and self-esteem. This chapter proposes that vicarious identification with ‘Europe’ has been constitutive for Estonia’s pooling of important aspects of its sovereign power with the European Union (EU) while retaining a strong nominal commitment to absolute sovereignty in its national constitution. Accordingly, the sharing of the sovereign authority of the state in essential aspects with the EU emerges as a generally accepted trade-off for a sense of ontological security attained through membership in the European polity. The chapter conceptualizes vicarious sovereignty and illustrates the reconciliation attempts of ideal-typical sovereign state subjectivity with the evolving empirical reality of the EU on the example of Estonia’s post-Soviet ‘home-coming’ in Europe. This is done via tapping into the visions of Europe, as articulated by the defining Estonian constitutional ‘map-makers’ at the time of the Convention on the Future of Europe in the early noughties: namely, Lennart Meri and Toomas Hendrik Ilves.

Keywords: vicarious sovereignty, identity, ontological security, Estonia, Convention on the Future of Europe

Suggested Citation

Mälksoo, Maria, Vicarious Sovereignty: Becoming European the Estonian Way (November 28, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4287370 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4287370

Maria Mälksoo (Contact Author)

University of Copenhagen - Department of Political Science

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