The symbolic space of the sea: mythologising a nation, performing an alliance

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This chapter tackles seascape as a symbolic space. It explores the political symbolisation and the symbolic power of the sea via a twofold empirical focus. The first move examines the maritime imagining of a nation-space with the example of Estonia’s ex-president and ethnographer Lennart Meri’s historical travelogue Hõbevalge [Silver White] (1976). This imaginative reconstruction of 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. Silver White provided a national mythology for a small nation which was denied an autonomous political present and future as part of the Soviet Union. As a second move, the chapter looks at the emerging maritime posture and posturing of NATO in the Baltic Sea region. Proceeding from Catherine Bell’s understanding of ritualisation as a culturally strategic way of acting in the world and exercising power, NATO’s maritime presence in the Nordic-Baltic space emerges as a case of ritualised performance of deterrence towards Russia. In both instances of cultivating a national mythscape via the sea and performing a multinational military alliance via exercising extended maritime deterrence, the Baltic Sea emerges as a crucial arena for creating and enacting political subjectivities and communities in world politics
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Sea and International Relations
EditorsBenjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira
Place of PublicationManchester
PublisherManchester University Press
Publication date26 Jul 2022
Chapter2
ISBN (Print)9781526155108
ISBN (Electronic)9781526155122
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 26 Jul 2022

ID: 305000772