The Nation-State as a Transnational Idea: Entangled Perspectives of Great and Small Nations in the Baltic Region
Research Team
Eva Piirimäe
Eva Piirimäe (PhD, University of Cambridge, 2006) is Professor of Political Theory at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies. Piirimäe is the author of the award-winning Herder and Enlightenment Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and the co-editor of Herder on Empathy and Sympathy/ Einfühlung und Sympathie im Denken Herders (Leiden: Brill, 2020) as well as several special issues. Piirimäe’s research interests include Enlightenment moral and political thought, the intellectual history of the self-determination of peoples and human rights, and historical and contemporary theories of patriotism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. From 2020-2024 she led a large research project “Self-Determination of Peoples in Historical Perspective” funded by the Estonian Research Council. For more information, see ETIS.
Selected relevant works:
Timo Aava
Timo Aava is a historian of modern Europe focusing on the history of political thought and minority rights. He holds a PhD from the University of Vienna. He has held several visiting fellowships and post-doctoral appointments at Yale University, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford. Timo is a Research Fellow in the History of Political Thought at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, where, as a part of this research project, he will continue research into minorities and ideas of statehood and rights in the Baltics. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Archaeology, where he is working on the history of the United Nations in the early 1990s.
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Karl Lembit Laane
Karl Lembit Laane is a Junior Research Fellow and PhD candidate at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu. His PhD thesis, entitled “The Crisis and Renewal of Procedural Democracy” focuses on the link between normative political theory and institutional design in democracies to realise the idea of self-determination of the people and to identify mechanisms for guaranteeing equal political freedom. The baseline for this approach is the theory of procedural democracy, contemporarily most popularised by Nadia Urbinati, which has its roots in the works on democracy by the Austrian legal scholar and political theorist Hans Kelsen (1881-1973). Karl Lembit’s work will examine the specific links between Kelsen’s democratic theory and concept of self-determination, including the self-determination of national and cultural minorities in nation-states.
Oliver Rowe
Oliver Rowe works as an analyst at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, where he is also a PhD candidate under the supervision of Eva Piirimäe. His (in-review) doctoral dissertation is entitled Self-determination in Theory and Practice: The Reconfiguration of the ‘Russian’ Empire, 1914-1924 and will – hopefully – be defended later this year. Oliver’s work in relation to this project is both research-related and technical. On the research front, he will examine Russian nation-state ideas in the first half of the twentieth century, from the legacy of the idea of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly following the Russian Revolution to the conceptions of the Russian nation and/or the Russian state within the famous émigré organisations of Europe and Asia. Beyond research, Oliver maintains and updates the shared bibliographic databases for the project, and is responsible for the English language version of this website.
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