The project will propose an answer to the question: Why is Estonia, an independent country of over twenty years, choosing to discursively resurrect and emphasize, rather than forget and obscure, this “national catastrophe” of the past, especially given the seemingly cosmopolitan, globalist, positive, and future-oriented nature of nation branding?
The examination will focus on Estonia.eu website (“Official gateway to Estonia”), “a virtual encyclopedia of Estonian government, culture, commerce, trade, education, history, science, and information technology, with hundreds of informational links that would fill a bookshelf if translated into the retro-world of paper” (Jansen, 2012).
Relying on narrative analysis and critical nation branding theory, I argue that by discursively distancing and delineating present-day Estonia from the Soviet Estonia, the country’s current ruling elites, through nation branding narratives, are attempting to convey a message (to European and global institutions, organizations, tourists, investors, potential trade partners) that “they have escaped the confines of history and are ready to be perceived as [a] modern democratic nation” (Aronczyk, 2013).
This tactic of overt references to the Soviet past in Estonia’s self-presentation falls within the overarching logic of nation branding’s reductionist dichotomy of the backward (socialist) past and the progressive (capitalist) present/future.
