The Status of an “Alien” — the “Creeping Disappearance” of Stateless Persons in Estonia

Abstract

This article deals with the problem of statelessness in Estonia, which could not be solved in spite of varied initiatives on the European as well as on the Estonian and/or Russian nation-state level. Though the portion of stateless persons decreased in Estonia from 1992 to 2011 from 32 to 7 percent, twenty years after the Estonian independence, there still live 95,000 persons without any citizenship in the small EU-member state. The core question of the article asks for the causes of the only creeping disappearance of stateless persons in Estonia. Therefore, it is necessary to give a brief historical summary about the causes of the origin of statelessness in Estonia on the one hand, and to focus on the development of statelessness in this Baltic state during the last decades on the other. The scientific debate about the status of ethnic Russians in Estonia often only takes into account the question, why members of this group decide for or against Estonian citizenship. Nevertheless, this is a short-sighted perception. Moreover, an additional question has to be asked: Why tens of thousands of ethnic Russians in spite of offers by the Russian State do live without Russian citizenship? Differently formulated: Do the Estonian and the Russian nation/states offer too low incentives for the acceptance of the respective citizenship or are the demands too strict for the acquisition of the citizenship in both states? By contrast to these questions also another focus on statelessness in Estonia has to been taken: Do many stateless persons of ethnic-Russian origin pursue neither the Estonian nor the Russian citizenship? And if yes, what are their motives? What are the causes of stateless people in Estonia not to change their status as an alien and to remain stateless? Is it possibly in the interest of stateless persons to persevere in statelessness and not to integrate as a citizen into one or the other political system?