(Re)construction of national security discourse in the context of the Ukrainian crisis: Finland, Estonia, Russia

This Master’s Thesis provides a hypothesis-generating comparative case study that focuses on the structures of three national security discourses in the context of the Ukrainian crisis: Finnish, Estonian and Russian. More specifically, it looks at the official (presidential and governmental) articulations concerning the crisis situation in Ukraine and its impacts on national and European security. Drawing upon poststructuralist security theories, most importantly the securitisation theory, the main aim of the thesis is to better understand the connection between security policy and national identity in the selected cases, in order to subsequently propose hypotheses for further research. After explaining the theoretical framework, the an analysis of the discourses at two levels – national and European – demonstrates that the structural pattern of the selected national security discourses is somewhat counter-intuitive. Although the Finnish and the Estonian case initially seem to share a number of common features, at deeper levels, the two discourses differ significantly. At the same time, a closer look reveals the underlying structural similarity of Estonian and Russian security discourses. Namely, the two tend to be more polarised and use antagonisation, protagonisation and historisation, whereas their Finnish counterpart remains relatively neutral with regard to the Ukrainian crisis. The findings confirm that the link between policy and identity is relatively stable and cannot be seen as one-to-one. Instead, it is embedded into wider structures of memory. Finally, hypotheses for further research are suggested. Keywords: national security,http://www.ester.ee/record=b449750