THE UNDESIRABLES

An interview with Tomas Tomilinas
By Marko Stamenković, 7 March 2008

A seminar TRANSLOCAL EXPRESS. JUBILEE EDITION that was held this February at the Museum of Occupation in Tallinn (Estonia) addressed the growing tendencies of nationalism on the Eastern borders of Europe and their reflections in contemporary art. Your personal and professional perspective – from the specific context of the Baltic region – coincides, to a certain extent, with the aforementioned subject. What is the link?

After the fall of communism in Europe it was radical nationalism that filled the free ideological space in most of the transition countries. In the Balkans the war was a solution to the tensions that followed when leaders got rid of the Soviet political anti-fascistic “correctness” and started to define the new enemy – the ethnic minority (instead of “the West”). The idea was easy and effectively supported by the masses – all social problems would be solved if real national majority rule would prevail. But in countries like Bosnia, Latvia and Estonia – there were extremely serious problems regarding national “majority” definition. Bosnia paid a bloody price for not being a typical nation-state. Baltic countries did not face violent ethnic conflicts, but deep social conflict is still preserved and cultivated by national populists, who still lead these countries.

During our conversation in Tallinn, we touched upon the issue of “erased citizens” as experienced, for example, in the recent history of Slovenia (in 1992), when “the newly independent state of Slovenia deleted the names of some 30,000 residents from the nation's civil registries”, as reported by Jim Fussell. What was your immediate reaction regarding your regional context?

Just like in any nation state, ethnic minorities are always an “obstacle” to comfortable development. Almost half of the population in Latvia and more than one third in Estonia do not belong to the ethnic group that defines the name of the country. Most of the “strangers” are former Soviet citizens and their children, who immigrated to the Baltic during the second half of the twentieth century. When Latvians and Estonians gained independence in 1991 they refused to provide citizenship to the Russian-speaking people, even to those who were born in these countries. It was not the case in Lithuania, which provided new passports to all legal residents. The Latvian and Estonian (not Baltic) invention was two types of passports: passports for citizens and so-called “grey” passports (passports for non-citizens or aliens). Non-citizens have no voting rights, limited pension rights, they are not allowed to work in government, police and civil services. This legal segregation was implemented by the last elected Soviet parliaments in Latvia and Estonia just after the proclamation of independence. The paradox is that people who are now non-citizens elected this parliament too. People voted for the deputies, who implemented administrative “cleansing” on them afterwards, taking away their basic political rights and some specific social rights. The victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ... had chosen their butchers.

Having so many “frozen” immigrants pushed two Baltic states into the development of integration strategies. The naturalization and integration policy of the last 18 years failed, because the numbers say that there are still about 500,000 “grey passport aliens” in Latvia and Estonia (there are about 3 million citizens). Last year’s Bronze soldier riots in Tallinn, although manipulated well by Russia, still demonstrate the absolute failure of Estonia’s integration policies. Anger, deprivation and unequal treatment are not producing conditions for successful integration but violence and instability. Just as democracy cannot be built on oil-war, integration is not a must per se for a minority human being.

And the position of the EU, in that regard?

The history of the EU position towards the non-citizen issue in Latvia and Estonia reveals many interesting points about EU immigration policy development. The EU never officially supported the discrimination policies, but the official comments on the issue have always been modest and calm. The EU is not active in reducing the most obvious discrimination: non-citizens in Latvia, who lived all their life in the country, for instance, are still not able to vote (this is no longer the case in Estonia) in the local elections (and of course not in general elections). However, the right to elect Latvian local councils is provided to all EU residents by EU law. The problem of “aliens” didn’t cause many barriers for Latvia and Estonia to enter the EU. To say more – it looks like the EU is using similar methods on immigrants as Baltic nationalists did on their minorities. Despite the declarations and growing budgets of human rights institutions, the EU is still about defending the nationals.

Half a century ago Hannah Arendt warned that being only a human being is not enough to survive, because “human rights” will always be specific, second-hand rights. This is exactly the case in post 9/11The September 11, 2001 attacks (often referred to as 9/11) were a series of coordinated suicide attacks by al-Qaeda upon the United States ... western thinking, which is obsessed with the idea of diminishing the number of immigrants and implementing aggressive integration policies on them for security reasons. An absolute minority of politicians realizes that it is almost impossible to regulate migration, especially by hard measures such as border control. Instead of concentrating upon migration limitations, mass deportations, “border-walls”, active migrant detention and assimilation, the EU has to examine other possible alternatives of police measures to provide better and more effective aid directed towards the reasons for migration. Unfortunately, instead of using soft and alternative policies, the EU is making efforts to legalize the old-fashioned and expensive system of migrant detention by European law. The growing number of migrant detention centres across Europe and in neighbouring countries symbolizes a conservative approach to the solution of the illegal migration problem. European “nationalism” makes those in power in Brussels blind and they don’t see that it is not possible to solve the problem of illegal migration, except by making it legal.