Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the changes brought to Narva by Estonia's entry into the EU and to analyse the Narva's ways of integrating into Europe, focusing on transformation of the cultural landscape of the city and on the impact of Europeanisation on life trajectories of the Narvans.

Paper long abstract:

'From the Soviets to the Europeans?': European Integration in Narva on the Estonian-Russian border

The official landscape image of Narva, an Estonian border city populated overwhelmingly by non-Estonians is undergoing a dramatic makeover, from an international proletarian town—an image constructed during the soviet period—to an Estonian and a European city, serving as 'the easternmost outpost of the west' —based primarily on images drawn from a pre-soviet past. New cultural representations of Narva include history museum exhibits, the displacement of Soviet monuments with statues and alternative commemorative sites glorifying a pre-soviet, 'western' past, and cultural events celebrating the city's pre-soviet and pre-Russian history. Along with Europeanisation of the cultural landscape, life trajectories of the inhabitants of Narva are also influenced by European integration - due to high unemployment in Narva and weak positions of Russian-speaking Narvans on the Estonian labour market, labor migration of Narvans to other European countries is ever increasing.

This paper seeks to explore the changes brought to Narva by the Estonia's entry into the EU and to analyse the Narva's ways of integrating into Europe, focusing in particular on transformation of the cultural landscape of the city and on the impact of Europeanisation on life trajectories of the Narvans.

The research for this paper was done in the course of the project "Cultural Politics of Memory: Reimagining the Past to Reclaim the Future in the Estonian-Russian Borderlands", conducted in collaboration with Dr. Robert Kaiser, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. The fieldwork for this research employed a series of inter-related qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews, critical discursive analysis of written texts as well as other texts such as cultural landscapes and the ways they have changed since 1991. Finally, we conducted participant observation of the performative ways that place and identity are narrated and enacted through cultural events and festivals.