Persistent statelessness in Post-Soviet Latvia and Estonia

Persistent statelessness in Post-Soviet Latvia and Estonia Public Deposited

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Williams, Justin
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies, Russian, Eurasian and East European Concentration

Abstract

Following independence from the Soviet Union, Latvia and Estonia enacted strict citizenship regimes that resulted in over a million residents holding no citizenship by late 1991. Today, the non-citizen populations number nearly 350,000. These are largely Russian-speakers who migrated to the countries during the Soviet period. I present an argument for why modern Latvia and Estonia still have such a large number of stateless residents. I look at how institutional pressure during the EU accession process and domestic politics in the post-Soviet era have influenced the statelessness issue. I argue that the failure of institutional pressure to impart a lasting concern for the non-citizens on domestic politicians means that the issue fell off the agenda following EU accession in 2004. With regards to domestic politics, I argue that the difficulty of political parties sympathetic to the non-citizen populations to influence decision- making further enabled the post-accession governments to ignore the issue.

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