Minute lecture: Do words a state make?
Because Estonia had no army, no national borders and no government in 1918, the republic began as a performative speech act: a 500-word manifesto substituted for real power and created an independent political subject, finds professor of cultural history at Tallinn University Marek Tamm in a minute lecture.
On February 24, 1918, Estonia had no fixed national borders, no functioning government apparatus, no military of its own and no international recognition. There was only a single written text, barely 500 words long, addressed "to all the peoples of Estonia." It was precisely this manifesto that created the framework within which Estonia could begin to see itself not as a province of a foreign state, but as an independent political subject.
The text was drafted on February 20–21 by a small circle of Estonian intellectuals working under complex and time-sensitive circumstances. The collapse of the Russian Empire and the Bolsheviks' rise to power had created a power vacuum in which the previous administrative apparatus had either disintegrated or lost its legitimacy. At the same time, German forces were rapidly advancing toward Estonia, making timing decisive: the declaration of independence had to take place before a new occupying power could establish its authority here.
The manifesto was printed and publicly proclaimed for the first time on February 23 in Pärnu, then distributed in print in Tallinn on February 24 and from there to other Estonian towns. The decision to mark February 24 as the republic's birthday emerged through debate, with the capital's strategic position proving decisive. The official decision was made on February 12, 1919, when the Estonian Provisional Government confirmed February 24 as the day of the proclamation of the republic and, a week later, made its public observance mandatory in all institutions and enterprises.
Yet even in the republic's early years, it was justifiably argued that Estonia's birthday could also be considered November 15 (28), 1917, when the Provisional Assembly declared itself the highest authority on Estonian soil; February 23, 1918, when the independence manifesto was first publicly read in Pärnu; June 4, 1919, when the Constituent Assembly enacted the provisional governance order of the "independent and sovereign" Republic of Estonia; or even February 2, 1920, when the Treaty of Tartu was signed between Estonia and Soviet Russia.
It can be said that the Republic of Estonia was born as an idea and was born on paper; it began as a speech act, as a performative political assertion that "Estonia, within its historical and ethnographic borders, is from this day forward declared an independent democratic republic." The Estonian Manifesto of Independence was at once a call to the inhabitants of Estonia to build the future state and a strategic message to the German forces who had arrived in the country: they were not conquering a former губерния of the Russian Empire, but the territory of an independent state.
But words alone were not enough. Years followed in which the fledgling republic had to defend its independence in the War of Independence and only then did the state secure its place in international law and diplomatic relations. As we mark the 108th anniversary of the Republic of Estonia this year, it may also be an opportunity to recall the powerful role words play in history — ideas and those moments when political thought becomes social reality.
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Editor: Marcus Turovski
