The symbolic space of the sea: mythologising a nation, performing an alliance
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book chapter › Research › peer-review
This chapter tackles seascape as a symbolic space. It explores the political symbolisation and the symbolic power of the sea via a twofold empirical focus. The first move examines the maritime imagining of a nation-space with the example of Estonia’s ex-president and ethnographer Lennart Meri’s historical travelogue Hõbevalge [Silver White] (1976). This imaginative reconstruction of Estonia’s ancient seafaring history and connectivities with the Baltic Sea region and beyond was a conscious exercise in linking a forgotten Baltic province to the mental map of a Nordic-Baltic region. Silver White provided a national mythology for a small nation which was denied an autonomous political present and future as part of the Soviet Union. As a second move, the chapter looks at the emerging maritime posture and posturing of NATO in the Baltic Sea region. Proceeding from Catherine Bell’s understanding of ritualisation as a culturally strategic way of acting in the world and exercising power, NATO’s maritime presence in the Nordic-Baltic space emerges as a case of ritualised performance of deterrence towards Russia. In both instances of cultivating a national mythscape via the sea and performing a multinational military alliance via exercising extended maritime deterrence, the Baltic Sea emerges as a crucial arena for creating and enacting political subjectivities and communities in world politics
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Sea and International Relations |
Editors | Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira |
Place of Publication | Manchester |
Publisher | Manchester University Press |
Publication date | 26 Jul 2022 |
Chapter | 2 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781526155108 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781526155122 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 26 Jul 2022 |
- Faculty of Social Sciences - baltic Sea, Estonia, Lennart Meri, Silver White, NATO, symbolic space, symbolic form
Research areas
ID: 305000772