6th European Workshops in International Studies: Imagining a Nation, Performing an Alliance

Ever since Homer’s The Odyssey, the sea is frequently depicted as a liminal space, and the journey across the sea an important rite of passage in fictional and political imaginations alike. This paper explores the ritual meaning and function of the Baltic Sea as a political and military space via a twofold empirical focus. Proceeding from the understanding of ritual(ization) as a culturally strategic way of acting in the world and exercising power (Bell 2009), the first move examines the maritime imagining of a nation-space on the example of Estonia’s ex-president and ethnographer Lennart Meri’s historical travelogue Silver White (1976). This imaginative reconstruction of then Soviet-occupied Estonia’s ancient seafaring history and connectivities with the Baltic Sea region and beyond was a conscious exercise in linking a forgotten Baltic province to the mental map of a Nordic-Baltic region. Second, the paper unfolds the emerging maritime posture of NATO in the Baltic Sea region as an instance of the ritual performance of deterrence towards Russia, and thereby an important part of the Alliance’s performance of itself. In both cases, the sea emerges as a critical arena for building and reproducing political subjectivities and communities in world politics.