Marek Tamm: The culture war will not take place
Instead of "culture war," we could talk about value debates, memory conflicts, polarization etc. While differences wouldn't be any less, it would help avoid a situation where language itself turns every disagreement into a battle, writes Marek Tamm.
Well-known French writer Jean Giraudoux in 1935 wrote a play titled "La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu" ("The Trojan War Will not take Place"), which was translated into Estonian in 1972 and has also been performed here since.
The main message of Giraudoux's play is that societies are perfectly capable of talking their way into a war before they realize they're doing it. The author makes it clear how arguments in the name of justice, honor, homeland, fate or beauty can become a mechanism rendering an avoidable conflict an unavoidable one. The central message of the essay at hand is that culture war runs the same danger, of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is not to say that Estonia lacks value conflicts. On the contrary, arguments over identity, language, family, education, gender roles or minority rights are commonplace and even necessary in democracies.
The problem starts when said values start to be called a war, because the metaphor of war turns differences into an existential confrontation where those of a different opinion become enemies, exchange of ideas becomes trench warfare and the goal becomes the liquidation of the adversary.
We need to keep in mind that "culture war" is not a neutral term, but a historically and politically loaded one. Its more distant predecessor was the 19th-century Kulturkampf, a term adopted to describe disagreements in 1870s Prussia and elsewhere in Europe over the role of the secular state in regulating education, family life and other matters.
The term took on its modern form in America when in 1991 sociologist James Davison Hunter published his book "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America," which painted life in the United States of the time as a struggle between "orthodox" and "progressive" worldviews.
In Estonia, "culture war" became a conscious campaign message in 2015 when NGO For the Protection of Family and Tradition organized a summer tour of the same name, talking about the "struggle for survival of nations and cultures." Today, a big part of the Estonian media is helping disseminate the term and doing so in an unfortunately criticism-free manner.
The term "culture war" poses several problems. First, it is analytically flawed in exaggerating the binary dimension. It makes it seem like everyone is divided into two rigid camps, even though society is in reality much more multifaceted and people can have different opinions on different matters. In other words, the term does away with the gray area, which forms the true reality of a democratic society.
Even more important is that "culture war" not only describes the conflict, but manufactures more of it. If the message in the public sphere is that there is war, people start perceiving themselves as combatants: compromise starts to seem like weakness and the opposing side as a threat. This renders an avoidable conflict an unavoidable one because use of language is making the conflict sharper.
Third, the rhetoric of "culture war" overshadows other significant matters. If all attention is on battles over identity and values, taxes, inequality, regional backwardness, housing crisis, caregiving burden and subsistence recede to the background. This makes the term politically beneficial, since emotional confrontations are much easier to frame than complex socioeconomic debates.
My recommendation, therefore, is to leave that term where it was born, the United States, because Estonia is not America and the history of our conflicts is different. Debates in Estonia revolve around the future of the nation state, security, demographic crisis, legacy of Soviet occupation, the Russian language question etc. If we label all of it "culture war," using a single imported term, we effectively boil highly diverse local conflicts down to a single and vague battleground.
In the spirit of constructiveness, I would offer three proposals for furthering public debate on the topic of values.
The first is to abandon military metaphors in public discourse and use more accurate language to express differences. Instead of "culture war," we could talk about value conflicts, identity debates, memory conflicts, polarization etc. While differences wouldn't be any less, it would help avoid a situation where language itself turns every disagreement into a battle.
My second proposal is to discuss conflicts separately and in a nuanced way. Instead of saying, "there is culture war in Estonia," we should ask what the specific argument is about: whether it's the language of study in schools, family law, visibility of minorities or public space. This would demonstrate we are not dealing with a single great war, but rather specific differences.
The third proposal is to once more tie value debates to social and economic policy and people's daily lives. Family policy is not just a matter of morals, but also childcare, the burden of caregiving and working conditions; minority rights are more than a matter of identity, concerning also education, work and safety. If we reintroduce these practical aspects into the debate, public discourse will become less apocalyptic and a lot more substantial.
When titling this essay "The Culture War Will not Take Place" in the spirit of Giraudoux, I do not mean to deny conflicts, but simply to choose a different language. It is not a matter of how to make value conflicts disappear, but of how not to paint them as war. Instead of asking who will win the culture war, we should avoid evoking it through our use of language in the first place.
The text is based on remarks delivered at the discussion "Two Estonias 25: What Could Unite Us in an Age of Polarization? Three Debates on Patriotism," organized by the Institute of Social Sciences at Tallinn University on April 23, 2026.
--
Editor: Marcus Turovski
