2.1 Introduction

How to be ‘independent’, ‘sovereign’ and ‘European’ – all at once? The opening quote of this chapter by one of the defining foreign ministers and European ideologues in Estonia’s post-Soviet journey of ‘becoming European’ illustrates well how any iteration of identity and belonging is always a performative speech act – that is, it aims to bring something about by the act of saying it.Footnote ¹ The musings on the emergence of new Estonia and new Estonian are, hence, a politically self-conscious make-believe rather than an objective observation of an unmediated reality. The following inquiry into the Estonian European constitutional imaginaries proceeds from the very methodological premise. I understand the imaginaries in question as political performatives that have been articulated and enacted in a particular historical and political context with a specific political goal in mind. My argument is that the internal paradox of this goal can be captured by the concept of vicarious sovereignty: the Europeanization of a state as a means to practice sovereign agency.

Estonia’s model of the European Union (EU) membership is notably permissive, considering the country’s constitutionally unequivocal commitment to the conservative notion of sovereignty.Footnote ² Having restored its sovereignty from the embers of the Soviet Union in 1991,Footnote ³ Estonia joined the EU in 2004 along with nine other, mostly Central-Eastern European countries. Striving to be recognized as a ‘good European’, Estonia’s implementation of EU law has been generally without reservations, with primacy granted to EU law over the national constitution.Footnote ⁴

An apparent paradox of Estonia’s constitutionally conservative understanding of sovereignty and its practical sharing with the EU is illustrative of a general aperture between the principle and practice of sovereignty. Classically conceived as indivisible, with the ultimate authority vested in a single sovereign or institution within a political community,Footnote ⁵ sovereignty is ‘eminently divisible’ in practice, and the idea of indivisible sovereignty is thus indeed an idea in the mind rather than an empirical fact.Footnote ⁶ Further, sovereignty in and of itself has no purposive content: it refers, by default, to some higher order value. For the constructivist International Relations (IR) scholarship, the reference point of sovereignty is accordingly provided by socially recognized identity values.Footnote ⁷

The mapping of Estonian European constitutional imaginaries is, hence, also an exercise in defining what makes a state a state; the nature and features of sovereignty in the early twenty-first century and, last but not least, the probing of the meaning of the Estonian ‘social self’ at the time a political window of opportunity opened for its self-(re)enactment as a sovereign state. This chapter explores how political agency has been imagined by a country that has pooled important aspects of its sovereign power with the EU.Footnote ⁸ This question is probed in the context of Estonia’s participation in the discussions of the Convention on the Future of the European Union in the early 2000s – the process which could be legitimately described as the constitutional leg in Estonia’s journey of ‘becoming European’.Footnote ⁹

I explore Estonia’s sovereignty-sharing with the EU through the lens of the vicarious identification concept. Vicarious identification refers to the subject’s attempts to establish and legitimize a vicarious identity – that is, a sense of self-identity, purpose and self-esteem through riding on (and appropriating) the achievements and experiences of others.Footnote ¹⁰ The dictionary references for ‘vicarious’ include ‘substitute’, ‘second-hand’, ‘derivative’, ‘secondary’ and ‘surrogate’ – in short, ‘experienced in the imagination through the feelings or actions of another person’. The other meaning of the word ‘vicarious’ pertains to ‘acting or done for another’. The adjective derives etymologically from the Latin vicarius, meaning ‘substituted, delegated’, and from vicis, denoting ‘a change, exchange, interchange, succession, alternation, substitution’.Footnote ¹¹ As in vicarious relationships, one thing is taken to stand in or substitute for another, there is a ‘second hand’-quality about such liaisons. Vicarious identity is then ‘one that can be delegated, substituted, or understood as interchangeable with the identity of another’.Footnote ¹² Coveting such an identity can be considered as a form of ontological security seeking or the subject’s desire for continuous self-being in the face of potentially destabilizing existential anxieties.Footnote ¹³ It is not uncommon among states to seek a sense of ontological stability, security and self-esteem ‘through locating themselves as members of civilizational communities, seeking to vicariously appropriate elements of a civilizational tradition and its achievements as their own’ for the promise of vicarious identity relationships to ‘establish, preserve, or even enhance a state’s club/positional status’.Footnote ¹⁴

Building on the notion of vicarious identity, I conceptualize vicarious sovereignty, using Estonia’s experience of ‘becoming European’ post-1991. I refer to the politics of becoming European both in the narrow institutionalist sense of Central and East European (CEE) states’ journey from the accession negotiations in 1997 to the EU membership in 2004 and in the deeper identitarian meaning of seeking recognition to Central and East Europeans’ ‘Europeanness’ from the authoritative carriers of contemporary European identity in the western part of the continent.

The argument is structured in three parts. In Section 2.2, the concept of vicarious sovereignty is outlined against the backdrop of the idea of sovereignty as a symbolic form, a highly ambiguous and contested social structure of international politics. Section 2.3 zooms in on the context of the Estonian European constitutional imaginaries to set the historical background for this chapter’s empirical research question, namely: how were the conditions for sovereignty and the boundaries of the European constitution imagined by the Estonian state-appointed visionaries and spokespeople during the Convention on the Future of Europe? Such a focus is by default limited and, some might argue, rather outdated, since the Europe and Estonia envisioned twenty years ago are another country compared to today. My claim is not that zooming in on the bygone political discourse on the future of Europe and Estonia’s way of blending in with it would point at some deeper continuities in the contemporary Estonian constitutional thought either domestically or at the European level. Nor do I suggest that the originally provided rationale for vicarious practicing of sovereignty through the EU membership remains intact anno 2025. The national conservatives of contemporary Estonia, along with considerable segments of the public, would not necessarily subscribe today to the idea that substituting national sovereignty unquestioningly with the European authority is in the interests of Estonia’s security. Rather, I propose that the temporal window in the focus of this chapter marks an important (if ultimately not realized) constitutional moment in the European integration process, crystallizing Estonia’s political discussions back in the day about its sovereign agency in the European polity (of which it was yet to become a formal part then). This moment thus allowed Estonia to tap into the political reconciliation attempts of becoming a state while – and arguably via – becoming an EU member state. Consequently, in Section 2.4, I offer a discursive breakdown of a set of notable visions of Europe, as articulated by the defining Estonian constitutional ‘map-makers’ at the time of the Convention (2001/2002–2003), to wit: Lennart Meri and Toomas Hendrik Ilves.Footnote ¹⁵ While hardly representative of the broader constitutional debate back at the time, such a sample is still evocative of the political discourse in Estonia’s run-up to the EU accession. The limited handful of the highlighted political visions is, alas, also indicative of the slender original contributions by the Estonian political elite to ‘thinking Europe’ in the first place. The chapter concludes with brief reflections on the broader applicability of the vicarious sovereignty concept beyond the (historical) Estonian case.

2.2 The ‘Necessary Fiction’ of Sovereignty

Sovereignty is one of the ‘necessary fictions’ international relations (are) run by: it is the foundational concept for international law and IR theory, providing both disciplines with an original raison d’être. As ‘the paradigmatic symbolic structure of the international system’,Footnote ¹⁶ the ‘highly ambiguous’ concept of sovereignty has many allusions.Footnote ¹⁷ Besides being referred to as the constitutive norm of the modern institution of statehood or ‘a foundational habit of the modern state system’,Footnote ¹⁸ sovereignty has been denoted as a legal status, an institution, (a bundle of) rights, a bridge between inside/outside of the state and, hence, a constitutive link between the (international) society and states and the list goes on.Footnote ¹⁹ Jens Bartelson has made a compelling case for sovereignty to be understood as a symbolic form ‘by means of which we have come to perceive the political world, but as such it does not stand in any determinate relationship to the world thus perceived’.Footnote ²⁰ A symbolic form ‘represents a perspective taken of an object rather than a representation of its essence’.Footnote ²¹ The objectivity of symbolic forms consequently stems from their virtue of organizing words and things into meaningful wholes (and rendering the latter accessible to knowledge).Footnote ²² Adopting a narrow sense of the concept of symbolic form, sovereignty can be understood as structuring the production of both meaning and experience. According to this line of thinking, drawing on Ernst Cassirer’s earlier work on symbolic forms, ‘sovereignty is real only by virtue of having been constructed’.Footnote ²³ Hence, the meaningful question is not to contemplate over the realness or constructed-ness of sovereignty but to probe ‘how this symbolic form has been used as a template for organizing political life, and by what means it has been allowed to structure the political world’.Footnote ²⁴ Put differently, sovereignty is not either present or absent: rather, sovereignty ‘unfolds in legal and political games as meaning production and praxis’ in particular ways.Footnote ²⁵

The preceding threads imply, by default, a non-fixed meaning of the sovereignty concept through time. It is precisely the shifting meanings of sovereignty, Cynthia Weber argues, that ought to be studied for ‘what counts and/or functions as sovereign is not the same in all times and places’.Footnote ²⁶ Taking a cue from her exploration of how the meaning of sovereignty has become stabilized historically, the study of Estonian imaginaries of Europe and the constitution thereof is concurrently an inquiry into how the Estonian state has been written with particular capacities and legitimacies within the bounds of the EU as a postmodern or late sovereign in and of itself.Footnote ²⁷ Notably, Estonia had just about restored its state sovereignty when it felt compelled to share it with the EU – a post-Westphalian polity in the latter’s self-mythology, increasingly focussed on individual sovereignty via the emphasis on fundamental rights already at the time of the enlargement.Footnote ²⁸ As an instance of exercising authority functionally, not territorially, the EU has emerged as ‘a late-sovereign complex of overlapping claims to sovereignty’,Footnote ²⁹ de-centring the familiar sovereign state imaginary with its distinctive mix of integrated and differentiated authority.Footnote ³⁰

As Bartelson notes, the concept of sovereignty concurrently functions as a source of self-identity and a principle of self-recognition.Footnote ³¹ The recognition granted by international society can be legal-political, pertaining to equal rights and obligations therein, or moral, going ‘beyond the mere recognition of rights, and into the thick recognition of social and cultural identities’.Footnote ³² Ayse Zarakol has proposed to call the two different IR understandings of the concept of recognition ‘legal’ and ‘existential’ recognition, respectively.Footnote ³³ Whereas the first, legal (or thinly understood) recognition concerns seeking statehood, thick (or existential) understanding of recognition does not see the innate recognition aspiration solved by legal recognition only. Rather, legal recognition can provide a prerequisite for agency, whereas the desire to be recognized as a certain sort of being still persists. Pinning down sovereignty gets further complicated with the modern concept of ‘independence’ added in the mix. The latter is closely linked to popular or national sovereignty, at the core of which is ‘the idea of the self-determining community that constitutes the rules by which a people will be governed’.Footnote ³⁴

Estonian political scientists Eiki Berg and Ene Kuusk have distinguished (and even sought to empirically measure) internal and external aspects of sovereignty on the reasoning that ‘entities’ internal legitimacy and external recognition issues matter most in the praxis to relatively locate them within international society’.Footnote ³⁵ Consequently, internal sovereignty is understood in terms of symbolic attributes (such as flag, national holidays), governance (constitution, autonomous government, head of state), monetary system, territorial integrity and permanent population. External sovereignty, in turn, pertains to ‘the extent of actorness, the existence of security structures, diplomatic relations with other countries and membership in international organisations’.Footnote ³⁶ According to this view, most attributes of statehood and sovereignty are related to symbols, constitutional arrangements and world standing. Estonia’s early permissivenessFootnote ³⁷ in granting the EU supremacy above its own constitution might appear striking for the temporal proximity of the restoration of the country’s long-coveted sovereign agency as a legal subject and the politically articulated vision of the substantiation and execution of that agency emphatically through the membership in the EU. Such politics was underpinned by the general perception of Russia as an existential threat, against which membership in the EU was supposed to provide a political remedy. Having entrusted some of its sovereignty features to the EU’s competence, the absolute sovereignty of Estonia (and any other member state, for that matter) is naturally reduced to a degree; yet the benefits from international cooperation were considered to be higher, for instance through enhanced security provisions, than the losses accompanying the waiver of some sovereignty attributes.Footnote ³⁸ Whether or not such sovereignty attributes are those ‘mainly with symbolic meaning’, as Berg and Kuusk maintain,Footnote ³⁹ is yet an open question, however.

2.3 The Constitutional Process of Becoming European

Estonia was the first of the former USSR republics to start the accession negotiations with the EU in 1998, becoming a member of the Union on 1 May 2004. To enable the accession, the Accession to the EU and the Supplementary Act to the Constitution was passed, following the referendum of 14 September 2003. However, while carefully navigating the formal amendment, supplementation by an independent constitutional act de facto still changed, not just supplemented the constitution of the republic.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Act’s provision that the Constitution ‘is applied without prejudice to the rights and obligations arising from the Accession Treaty’ has been interpreted in the judgments of the Supreme Court in a way that grants EU law primacy.Footnote ⁵⁹ Due to the intense securitization of the country’s belonging to Europe via the coveted EU membership,Footnote ⁶⁰ the issue of shared sovereignty created domestic tensions but remained largely depoliticized top-down in Estonia during the accession period.Footnote ⁶¹

In order to explore how and why this became possible, ideas and their authors in Estonian European constitutional thought need to be taken seriously, no matter how sparse the respective record.Footnote ⁶² To map the constitutive ideas about the EU’s constitution and for the Union’s constitutionalism and, more generally, for the European integration, sovereignty and statehood, as articulated from Estonia, I will turn to the two outstanding political figures among the constitutional ‘map-makers’ at the time of the Convention on the Future of Europe (February 2002–June 2003): namely, Lennart Meri (as the representative of the government to the Convention) and Toomas Hendrik Ilves (as Estonia’s foreign minister in 1999–2002 and a prominent voice in the debates on Europe).Footnote ⁶³ This is, by default, a delimited sample, as it represents only a small political fraction of what could be described as the Estonian European constitutional thought, leaving aside the oft-heated juridical debates over the European constitution and its hierarchical relationship to the Estonian constitution among the community of Estonian constitutional lawyers (e.g., Anneli Albi, Madis Ernits, Carri Ginter, Hent Kalmo and Julia Laffranque).Footnote ⁶⁴

The Convention on the Future of the European Union (aka the European Convention) was a body established by the European Council in 2001, tasked with the purpose to re-order the existing treaty base to sustain the Union’s functionality in light of the pending enlargement. The main issues discussed at the Convention concerned the ways of making the Union more democratic and transparent; modes of streamlining the decision-making processes; the division of competencies between the EU institutions, member states and pertinent regional organizations; the inclusion of national parliaments at the EU level, and the ways of making the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) more effective. The membership of the Convention consisted of the representatives of the European Commission, European Parliament, the delegates of the member and candidate states’ governments and national parliaments, each of whom had the right to send one governmental and two parliamentarian representatives to the Convention. In all, 28 states and 217 representatives participated in the work of the Convention, led by the former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. The government of Estonia was represented at the Convention by the former president Lennart Meri, with Henrik Hololei serving as a deputy. The Estonian parliament’s representatives were Tunne Kelam and Rein Lang for the latter parliament formation and Tunne Kelam and Peeter Kreitzberg for the former.

For Estonia, as then still a candidate country of the EU, participation in the discussions over the future shape and face of the Union on par with the established member statesFootnote ⁶⁵ was a valued opportunity. The Convention enabled Estonia to speak along in imagining the future of the European institutions and member states’ division of labour in governance in spe. It was an opportunity to practice hands-on ‘the politics of becoming European’Footnote ⁶⁶ or ‘that paradoxical politics by which new cultural identities are formed out of old energies, injuries, and differences’.Footnote ⁶⁷ For Lennart Meri, the Convention must have felt like a symbolic homecoming – if one thinks of his old adages, according to which ‘[w]hen creating a new Europe we have to at the same time create a new European’;Footnote ⁶⁸ or that ‘[o]ne is not born European. One becomes European. And no one has a monopoly on Europe’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Convention on the Future of the European Union provided an opportunity to practically enact Meri’s belief that ‘Europe is not a continent, but a … philosophical, ethical, cultural, political and economic programme, of which Estonia … used to be an indivisible part and will be so again in the future’.Footnote ⁷⁰ For the EU, the Convention was an instance of ‘taking a deep breath’ and discussing ‘for the first time in history … how to maintain itself so that everything changes, and changes for the better’.Footnote ⁷¹

The Convention’s discussions around the division of competencies between the EU institutions and the member states polarized between the larger and smaller member states, with Estonia joining the initiative of sixteen small states against the creation of the European president’s position and for sustaining the balance between the EU institutions and member states as provided by the EU foundational treaties. For Estonia’s positions in the Convention, the bottom line was an emphasis on the effective and transparent functioning of the Union, along with the principle of equality between the EU’s member states, including the rotation of the EU commissioners and the presidency of the Council of the EU.Footnote ⁷² Estonian representatives in the Convention were broadly in favour of the subsidiarity principle;Footnote ⁷³ yet argued for the leanness and uncomplicatedness of the decision-making processes of the Union, for instance opposing the enlargement of the competencies of national parliaments, regions or regional committees to turn to the European Court in fear of potentially allowing for the transfer of domestic political issues to the EU level.Footnote ⁷⁴ Estonia also emphatically opposed the qualified majority voting in the realm of taxation policy, along with the EU competencies expansion in this sphere.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Tunne Kelam stressed, the competencies given to the EU institutions were effectively to be understood as delegated or ‘on loan’ by the member states,Footnote ⁷⁶ arguing against the European super-state and for Estonia’s continuation as a ‘dignified nation state’ in a union of nation-states.Footnote ⁷⁷

In the meantime, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, in his capacity of the Estonian Minister for Foreign Affairs, maintained his belief that full participation in the Union’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) would make Estonia’s ‘national foreign policy stronger’, as ‘[w]ith the weight of the EU behind us, we will be able to do more to pursue issues of vital importance to Estonia’.Footnote ⁷⁸ As he averred,

In this quintessential case for vicarious sovereignty, Estonia is deemed to be bound to practice its sovereignty by moving it up to the playing field of the EU – arguably in order ‘to be’ in the first place.Footnote ⁸⁰ An implicit tension between a ‘nation-states-Europe’ and a more congealed post-sovereign structure visible from the indicated positions of Kelam and Ilves was characteristic to Estonia’s practical sovereignty-dilemmas at the cusp of the EU membership more generally.

In Section 2.4, I will delve in further detail into two exemplary speeches which present distinct political visions for the future of Europe: Lennart Meri’s speech at the University of Turku on the role of small nations in the European Union (25 May 2000) and Toomas Hendrik Ilves’s lecture on constructing a new Europe at the Humboldt University in Berlin (5 February 2001). Such a choice is motivated by three reasons: first, the two highlighted interventions are among the most systematic and visionary political engagements with the European constitutional future debates in Estonia. Secondly, both engage directly with an earlier speech which marked the launch of the political debate over the future constitution of Europe – namely, the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s ‘From Confederation to Federation – Thoughts on the Finality of European Integration’ at the Humboldt University in Berlin (12 May 2000).Footnote ⁸¹ Last but not least, both Meri’s and Ilves’ interventions were delivered at universities, enabling them to appeal on academic freedom as a cloak for speaking more openly in personal, rather than official, capacity.Footnote ⁸² While these speeches come from a different era compared to today, they illuminate a critical juncture in Estonia’s political journey of ‘becoming European’.

2.4 European Future through the Estonian Looking-Glass

Lennart Meri’s speech ‘The Role of Small Nations in the European Community’, held at the University of Turku on 25 May 2000, makes a strong case for the democracy of Europe and the development potential of the European Community depending on the sustained diversity on the continent. Accordingly, keeping an optimal balance between large and small states appears as the key task for the demiurges of the European future as:

In this lecture, Meri focuses on the intensity of cultural and political transfers in the historical European space in order to shed light on this ‘little peninsula of the Eurasian continent’ having ‘managed to become the development engine of the entire world’. Through his trademark cornucopia of metaphoric and allegoric language, Meri’s Turku lecture is a powerful hymn to Europe’s cultural multitude and diversity, for the potency of Europe is deemed to lie precisely in being ‘different next to each other’.Footnote ⁸³ The performative power of the Turku speech act reaches a climax in Meri’s strong (if implicitly made) riposte to the then mulling ideas about a ‘multi-speed’ Europe led by a ‘core engine’ of France and Germany as an answer to the efficiency problem of the institutionalized Europe:

Accordingly, Meri maintains that Joschka Fischer’s eurofederalism should remain an ‘academic excurse’ rather than ‘find application in the real world’Footnote ⁸⁵ for, ultimately, ‘the ethical imperative of the European Union is in the fact that the common denominator on its diverse cultural palette consists of common values of democracy, one common goal, but every state will find its own way to achieve these goals and principles’ (emphasis added). Hence, small states should not be ‘run over’ in the debates over the future constitution and set-up of Europe, nor should the internal reforms of the EU take place on account of the expansion of the Union. Meri’s ode to state sovereigntyFootnote ⁸⁶ is tempered with a reminder of a special political mission of the small states, to make the voice of this ‘silent majority … heard loud and clear in the world and especially in Europe’. This mission has gained renewed significance with the expansion of the EU, for at the end of the day:

The Turku lecture is, therefore, an important prompt in the debate over the future political design of the EU, in characteristic defiance of what Meri had previously described as the feudal eurocentrism of European enlargement debates.Footnote ⁸⁸ Just as the issue of NATO and the EU enlargement per se, Meri’s intervention on the role of small states in the EU was to serve as a reminder that ‘Estonia is not a geographical object, but a constitutional subject’; nor is Europe (or should be) the court of Louis XIV where only the specially selected are invited.Footnote ⁸⁹

A much more federalism–sympathetic vision for Europe’s political future was put forth by the then foreign minister of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, in his lecture ‘Constructing a new Europe’ at the Humboldt University in Berlin, on 5 February 2001. This intervention has remained perhaps the best elaborated Estonian political contribution to the discussion on the European constitutionalism – if emphatically delivered in personal, rather than state representative’s capacity.Footnote ⁹⁰ It is also the one most directly engaging in dialogue with Joschka Fischer’s inaugural intervention of the high-level political debate on the future of the European constitutionalism. In his Humboldt lecture, Ilves called for building on the eighteenth-century early American federalism as ‘the intellectual source … for the future of EU integration’, since:

Consequently, the lecture took a stab at ‘three issues of a fundamental nature’: namely, (1) the cultural and psychological adjustment of the old members with the new members, arguably ‘differ[ing] fundamentally from those in the present EU Member States as regards their national emotional traditions, experiences, interests and value judgments’;Footnote ⁹² (2) small vs. large members; and last not least; and (3) democratic legitimacy vs. effective decision-making. Instead of the deepening vs. widening dilemma of the Union, Europe’s future functioning, per Ilves, was solving the ‘core issue’ of keeping the EU legitimate, yet effective among subjects ‘of greatly differing size and economic power’. Ilves’s case is for the reconsideration of a federalist approach, to clarify ‘a fundamental misunderstanding about the meaning of Federalism and Constitutionalism’, on the one hand, and acknowledging that ‘the solutions offered by a federalist approach resolve rather than create the problems we fear’, on the other.

According to Ilves, then, if the EU had taken up issues that once were the sole prerogative of the nation-state by the agreement of all the member states, the citizen-to-state relationship emerged in the focus of the Union as a result. Thus, a move from the Union’s ‘sole reliance on the community method’ was deemed necessary, in order to ‘take into account the established norms of democratic decision-making that lie at the core of each democratic nation-state’s legitimacy’. To beat the Euroscepticism for the perceived lack of transparency, legal understandability and clarity of decision-making, Ilves made a case for a federalist approach – not in the last order to ease the structural tension between small and large constituent members. For Ilves, ‘the crux of the dilemma facing the finalité of Europe’ was in maintaining a similar sense of democratic legitimacy and transparency in EU decision-making that people were accustomed to within their own countries.

The model according to which to mould the enlarged EU parliament was accordingly to be sought from the first 150 years of the American federalism (or the federalism of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison) rather than the contemporary American prototype. Hence, Ilves’s case for a two-chamber European Parliament, ‘to balance the legitimate democratic concerns of the Large (through a proportionally elected lower chamber) with the justified fears of the Small (by way of equal representation in an upper chamber of the legislature)’. For Ilves, a strong bicameral European parliament was the key to EU’s democratic legitimacy – yet remained unachievable as long as the single chamber model with semi-proportional representation was to be maintained.

Ilves further took an issue with subsidiarity (aptly described by Joschka Fischer in his own 2000 Humboldt lecture as ‘a subject that is … discussed by everyone and understood by virtually no one’). Bothered by the principle’s divine allusions to authority ‘from above’ due to the idea of subsidiarity originating from the Catholic Church, Ilves recalls the EU’s ultimate authority coming from the citizen – and, hence, the Union’s ability to appeal to the will of the electorate – and nothing but. A ‘Lockean-Rousseauan vision of bottom-up legitimacy’ was accordingly called for to replace the ‘Hegelian, trickle-down theory of government in which the higher body pushes decision-making downwards’ in order to ‘achieve that noble goal of a Europe of Citizens’. Subsequently, not just nation states, but really the citizens were to accede some decision-making upward to the Union.

In sum, besides engaging with ‘the dreaded “F-word”, that is to say, “Federalism”,’ Ilves called for a no-frills approach to the EU constitution:

An EU constitution, codifying the Union decision-making process according to a federalist model, was needed precisely for the aforementioned reasons, maintained Ilves. His Humboldt lecture remains a distinct Estonian contribution to the fleeting utopian moment of the European constitutional imaginary.

2.5 Conclusion

This chapter has probed a novel conceptual lens of vicarious sovereignty for making sense of the Estonian way of reconciling its long-coveted state sovereignty with its equally desired European belonging. In the wind of searching a secure international home for the Estonian state, vicarious sovereignty or the idea of elevated ontological security and international agency by pooling national sovereignty at the EU level emerged as the Estonian way of ‘becoming European’. Such a path was far from prescribed, nor has it been failsafe from the ‘neo-Westphalian’ backlashes which have recently emerged in the context of varying political sensibilities and responses to the migration pressures on the EU more widely.

The Estonian variety of constitutionalism and its European constitutional imaginaries hence raise the question of the broader applicability of the vicarious sovereignty concept within the CEE region and beyond. If the EU member states arguably feature three distinct varieties of constitutionalism – ‘post-fascist constitutionalism’, ‘evolutionary constitutionalism’ and ‘post-communist constitutionalism’Footnote ⁹⁴ – how does the concept of vicarious sovereignty fare in the constitutional regimes of other states with similar historical trajectories and their respective relationships to the project of European integration? The post-communist constitutions have been characterized as by and large more protective of sovereignty (hence, ‘souverainist’) compared to most of their Western European counterparts.Footnote ⁹⁵ According to a Sigrid Rehling Larsen’s trenchant assessment, post-communist constitutionalism beckons the return of ethno-nationalism to European constitutionalism for it is embedded in the notion of the sovereign power of the people (conceived of as the ethnically homogenous nation) as the source of all public authority.Footnote ⁹⁶

The concept of vicarious sovereignty and the Estonian practice of it in the run-up to the EU membership contests such a wholesale diagnosis. Compared to Poland’s and Hungary’s recent reservations about the limitation of sovereignty entailed in EU membership and thus the occasional viewing of the European project as a new form of foreign dominance,Footnote ⁹⁷ Estonia’s pooling of sovereignty has been publicly more effortless and enthusiastic throughout the accession process and membership, not least for the existential fear of Russia. Of course, resonating with the broader concerns over the EU endangering rather than protecting democracy, the Estonian national conservatives have similarly viewed the country’s ‘scaling up’ of its sovereignty to the level of the EU as a worrying sign of provincialization – potentially leading to the loss of sovereignty in toto and the collapse of the society in the long-run.Footnote ⁹⁸ Taken together, however, the Estonian interventions in the debate on the form and finalité of Europe considerably nuance, and at times disturb, a sweeping reading of the ‘imitation imperative’ and the ‘copycat mind’ of post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁹⁹

Nonetheless, the conceptual proposition of vicarious sovereignty calls for further empirical applications across other cases in the region, most immediately on the other two Baltic states. The Estonian case illustrates that small does not have to mean peripheral when envisioning the constitutional future for Europe.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ At a conceptual level, the idea of vicarious sovereignty in and through the EU could be potentially further explored in relation to Jennifer Mitzen’s notion of a ‘homespace’ – where home is conceived ‘as hearth and not container and borders as skin or membrane not wall’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Juxtaposed to the other macropolitical idea of home – that is, homeland – homespace is accordingly conceptualized as ‘an articulation of “being with becoming”’ which is ‘located, but not reducible to its location’.Footnote ¹⁰² Just as the notion of homespace seeks to ‘loosen … the stranglehold of Westphalian territoriality on our political – and theoretical – imagination’,Footnote ¹⁰³ the concept of vicarious sovereignty stretches our understanding of the sovereignty games and paradoxes of a small East European state in the late sovereign European polity at the turn of a millennium.