Baltic Studies | From Vienna to Tallinn. Theorizing and Protecting the Rights of Nationalities in Estonia in the First Half of the 20th Century

The talk will explore the debates over the rights of nationalities and the functioning of minority self-government bodies in Estonia in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the multi-ethnic Habsburg and Romanov empires and their successor states, the first half of the twentieth century was a period of intense discussions over state organisation and the rights of nationalities. In addition to ideas of nation-statehood and federation of nationalities, ideas of collective non-territorial autonomy rights featured prominently in these discussions. Based on the principle of non-territorial autonomy, in 1925, Estonia introduced legislation allowing minorities to establish their self-government bodies to administer their cultural and educational affairs, which was widely regarded as the most minority-friendly legislation in interwar Europe. The talk will offer a fresh interpretation of the emergence and functioning of this minority protection system and show that the Estonian case was part of a transnational debate over the nature of modern statehood and the rights of nationalities.

Timo Aava is a historian of modern Europe focusing on the history of political thought and minority rights. Between 2023 and 2024, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Jacob Robinson Institute for the History of Individual and Collective Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During his doctoral studies, he held research positions at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna. Dr. Aava also held fellowships at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies and the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg, Germany. He has also been a visiting research fellow at the University of Tartu.

Timo Aava holds a doctoral degree from the University of Vienna and his dissertation was recently awarded with the Grete Mostny Dissertation Prize.

At Yale, Dr. Aava will work on a book project on the intellectual and political history of minority rights in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing specifically on the theory and practice of minority autonomy in Estonia.