Browsing by Author "Saar, Maarja"

The global financial crisis in Estonia brought to the forefront the dominant ideologies characterizing the country’s political culture in the post-communist era: neoliberalism and Europeanizing the country’s national identity. The austerity measures passed by the government to deal with the crisis are expressions of these ideologies and underline the degree of harm that the state was willing to deal on the population in order to 'reach Europe'. However, while similar austerity approaches were adopted by of other European countries, the Estonian case is particular in that it was not met with significant public protest, including by labor unions. Labor unions in Estonia and other post-communist countries have in previous literature been conceptualized as shaped by historical legacies of communism and post-communism, both of which are seen as having led unions to align with the market- liberal, Europeanization-oriented politico-economic ideologies that govern their countries, rather than to develop into worker- defending institutions. As a result of these legacies, post-communist labor unions are also seen as eschewing politicized identities, instead focusing on 'narrow' economic questions. Yet with more than two decades having passed since the collapse of communism, the current relevance of historical legacies among labor unions should be questioned. Furthermore, when analyzing this, attention should be brought to the particularities of the cultural and politico-economic environments of the nation-states to which unions belong, as this provides the possibility of a more thorough understanding of the degree to which post-communist labor unions align with their countries’ hegemonic political cultures. This thesis sought to understand the extent to which the dominant Estonian labor union confederation, the Estonian Trade Union Confederation (Eesti Ametiühingute Keskliit, EAKL), identifies with the market-liberal and Europeanization ideologies of post- communist Estonian political culture around the period of the global financial crisis. Estonian political culture is conceptualized as a hegemonic project defined by these ideologies, and labor unions as actors within this project. The research employed the EAKL’s newsletters from 2006 to 2011 and conducted a content analysis of this data using classification analysis and Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévénot’s justification theory. It was hypothesized that the EAKL does not identify with the country’s market-liberal economic policy, but does support the goal of Europeanizing the country’s national identity, as well as that the union’s opposition to market-liberalism and its identification with the Europeanization ideology both peaked during the financial crisis, with its anti- market-liberal stance also retaining its strength after the crisis. The research findings showed some support to these hypotheses: the EAKL was found to oppose market-liberalism and to instead have a clear worker-defending identity, yet Europeanizing the country’s national identity remains an important goal for the union. Furthermore, while the union’s support for Europeanization was indeed found to have increased during the financial crisis, the research findings as to the relative strength of the union’s anti- market-liberal stance during and after the financial crisis as compared to the period before the crisis remained inconclusive.