MIC method
This project examines the evolution of Estonian national identity based on a long-term inductive analysis of elite and mass discourses, and juxtaposes the results with the previous findings on Russia. Its novelty consists in grounding the study of national identity and inter-state relations in a diachronic set of standardised interpretivist ‘probes’ into a range of sources representing the discursive field. The project creates a National Identity Database (NID) for Estonia for the period between 1990 and 2020, in addition to the NID on Russia already produced by the team. While building the NID for Estonia, we focus on both Estonian and Russian-speaking communities.
Mass discourses can be studied on the basis of popular culture (films, novels), mass-circulation newspapers and, in the digital age, popular news sites and the social media. Even though many of these sources are created by the elites, their popularity can still be used as a measure of their resonance with mass common sense. While not a substitute for immersive field research, this approach yields reasonably standardised measurements across time and space, useful for cross-country and diachronic comparisons and improved generalisability.
For the purposes of this project, national identity is defined as a discursive articulation of belonging to a nation. National identities are constituted by societal discourses that are both shaped by and constrain individuals, who draw on shared knowledge to form their personal identity; this knowledge reflects the regimes of truth which are embedded in multi-layered relations of power. There is no single identity in a country; rather, there is a topography of identity categories that are assembled into multi-layered discursive formations. The stability of discourses depends on the degree of contestation over the core categories of identity, as well as on the tension between the hegemonic identity and mass common sense.
For our mapping and comparison of Estonian and Russian discursive spaces, we sample the most widely attended media, political statements and cultural products – as a general rule, political speeches, mass media, school history textbooks, novels and films. The specific sample for each period varies depending on the prevailing modes of cultural consumption and the availability of sources from each particular genre.
The sampled material is coded according to the standard MIC procedure, described in: Bentley Allan. 2016. Recovering Discourses of National Identity. In: Ted Hopf and Bentley B. Allan (eds) Making Identity Count: Building a National Identity Database (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 20–44. It involves establishing the nation’s significant Others; attributes and practices associated with belonging to the nation; internal Others defined e.g. in terms of class, gender, culture, political views; hierarchies among identities; the image of an ideal person. Coding yields a long list of raw codes, which are then aggregated into increasingly more abstract categories. The result is a list of 25–35 categories, differentiated by frequency, genre and valence. The variation in this matrix facilitates the identification of the hegemonic national identity discourse and its challengers. Findings are summarised in the NIRs (national identity reports) and used as benchmarks for further research. We also plan to test our findings by using automated analysis of prevalence of specific topics.
