In 1991, the national leaders in Estonia and Latvia reclaimed sovereignty after 40 years as constituent republics of the Soviet Union. The parliaments of the newly independent states gave automatic citizenship only to those residents who could trace their or their ancestors’ citizenship in the country to 1940, thereby excluding the majority of Russian speakers who had migrated to the tiny Soviet republics after World War II. Hundreds of thousands of Russophones in the two countries became stateless as a result; to become naturalized, they would have to demonstrate a level of proficiency in the national language that most Russian speakers did not have. Without citizenship, they could not vote in national elections and had to apply for “alien passports” to travel internationally.

Western governments closely monitored these developments, concerned that the exclusionary policies in the Baltics would lead Russia to intervene “to rescue” their kin, raising tensions that could lead to interstate war. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Council of Europe (CE), and the US government, in particular, worked to persuade the newly independent states to liberalize their citizenship, education, and language laws in hopes that this would pacify the Russian minorities and, by extension, Moscow.

Jennie L. Schulze tackles two puzzles related to these two country cases. She asks, first, why Latvia and Estonia enacted changes in their language and education policies in the 2010s, well after having obtained membership in the EU and NATO (and hence not as a direct response to “member conditionality”). Second, why did many important reforms occur in the absence of sustained pressure either from the EU or Russia? Her argument is that external actors did factor into policy liberalization, but they did so indirectly through the Latvian and Estonian parliaments. She writes, “The influence of external actors has depended to a large extent on how domestic policymakers frame them in order to bring policy outcomes more into line with their own domestic agendas” (p. 5).

Strategic Frames represents a landmark contribution to the field of ethnic politics in three ways. First, Schulze makes a novel, empirically backed argument about why the postcommunist Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia enacted policy reform. She argues that, to push through liberalizing reforms on language and citizenship to Russian-speaking minorities required more than just invoking European frames. Particularly when the domestic audience costs of adopting concessions were high, it was necessary to invoke Russian frames to convince the electorate that failing to grant reforms could raise the odds of Russian intervention. This goes against the expectations of Vachudova (Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration after Communism, 2005) and Kelley (Ethnic Politics in Eastern Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives, 2004), who argued that EU membership conditionality was the principal driver of reform in the Baltic countries. In most of the literature, scholars invoke kin states such as Russia as a spoiler, whose active intervention is only likely to escalate tensions. Schulze shows, by contrast, that Russia was influential in these cases—not just intermittently and not just as a spoiler of reform, but also in promoting reform—all depending on how Russian influence was framed by political elites. This truly is a unique argument and speaks to the genuinely contingent effects of kin-state activism.

Second, she offers a fresh take on the “quadratic nexus” (David Smith, “Framing the National Question in Central Europe: A Quadratic Nexus?” Global Review of Ethnopolitics, 2, 2002), which traditionally refers to the first-order relationship between the minority and state and the second-order relationship between the minority and its external kin state on the one side (Russian minorities and Russia) and the state and international bodies on the other (the Baltic states and the EU). Schulze’s model, by contrast, suggests that the actors do not neatly line up in this way, but rather that each of these fields cross-pollinate the other. To illustrate, European institutions can be politicized by the minority advocates and the Russian kin state by the majority nationalizers. The empirics show that minority advocates were not always members of the minority and that nationalizers were not only members of the majority. What is important is the discursive fields themselves and the positions taken within. This analysis therefore takes seriously Brubaker’s injunction (Ethnicity without Groups, 2004) not to essentialize ethnic groups: positions and organizations stand on their own and sometimes apart from their referents in the real world. In Schulze’s account, domestic politics takes center stage in that the real action is taking place within the parliaments of the respective countries. She also shows that kin-state frames have had a greater impact on Latvian than on Estonian debates overall and that there has been a persistent use of occupation and disloyalty frames by Latvian nationalizers after accession, in contrast to Estonia.

Third, Schulze’s book is an example of the use of an innovative multimethod research. Having gathered and translated all relevant parliamentary debates on the topic of minorities in each country, she read through each debate multiple times, coding all references to European and Russian fields as justification for policy preferences. She constructed her frames “from the bottom up,” from “text to frame,” by analyzing the spoken texts of the policy makers in oral debates on the parliamentary floor. She argues that this analysis of the oral debates allows the researcher to see directly “how policymakers act rhetorically and engage in the art of persuading others through the use of external frames” (p. 28). She then analyzes how these frames and counterframes were employed (Russia/Russians as occupiers or as a security issue, for example), places the debates within the larger political context, and traces the effect of these frames on the debates and policy outputs. She complements her analysis with 49 interviews with policy makers, journalists, academics, and opinion leaders. Each chapter tackles a different issue (naturalization restrictions, naturalization for stateless children, language laws, and so forth); in each, she sketches the background of each conflict and shows how the problem was framed in parliamentary debates and led to a specific policy outcome. The frequency coding of frames in the penultimate chapter beautifully summarizes the relative frequency of European versus Russian frames over time in each country.

No academic study is perfect, and this book is no exception. Although Schulze’s frame analysis finds empirical support, it may be that the frames themselves are driven by more fundamental bargaining considerations. In other words, the Latvian government might have been more accommodating than the Estonian government because Latvia had a much larger Russian minority that was well represented in the business community and major cities, giving them greater political clout. Close business and political connections with Russia could be another reason why the Latvian government has enacted more liberal reforms toward the Russophone minority than its Baltic neighbor. The impact of material drivers is difficult to separate from the elite framing because the greater bargaining leverage of the minority (particularly insofar as the leverage comes from Russian kin-state support) is also likely to make kin-state frames themselves more credible. Hence, one could tell a rationalist argument both about the effectiveness of kin-state frames in Latvia and about the country’s greater willingness to grant liberalizing concessions to the minority.

A second point goes to the heart of the title and argument in the book. The frames are said to be employed strategically, which implies an underlying structure of preferences, but there is no theory of preferences here. Preferences are instead imputed to the actors through descriptors: minority “advocates” and majority “nationalizers.” But, then, do we assume from this that minority “advocates” are always trying to get greater integration or maybe greater influence (as opposed to professional advancement), whereas majority “nationalizers” are always trying to exclude the minority from the state? Are minority and majority representatives ideologically or strategically committed to these goals? What, in other words, does “strategic” in “strategic frames” really mean? Are elite preferences fixed at a minimal level (do what is necessary to retain office or gain political influence), or are they shaped by the frames that they articulate? To what extent, in other words, do elites stand outside of identitarian political mobilization?

These issues in no way detract from the quality of Schulze’s book, which represents a deep dive into two decades of public rhetoric in the Latvian and Estonian parliaments on Russian minorities. Unless I am wrong, hers is the most systematic and nuanced analysis of the Baltic cases to date. It is sure to become essential reading on postcommunist ethnic politics and represents a novel rethinking of the nexus of nationalism.