Motivated Environmental Civil Resistance

Non-violent civil resistance can be considered a form of passionate politics, drawing on deep-seated emotions and beliefs about the nature of just community.

Six strategic conditions render non-violent civil resistance a feasible and potent choice for ethnically-defined nationalist movements: 1) appropriate goals; 2) a political opening; 3) an extreme imbalance in the means of coercion; 4) strong and broadly shared identities; 5) weak counter-movements; and 6) significant support from external allies.

These circumstances reflect many of the same factors that render non-violent civil resistance strategically attractive to challenging groups irrespective of whether resistance is framed in ethnonationalist terms or assumes some other form (such as democratization, decolonization, or racial inclusion).

Non-violence can be an end in itself and a value to which movements can commit. In the Baltic case, however, there is considerable evidence that the choice of non-violence was more strategically motivated than values-based.

With the defeat of the opposition movement by the mid-1950s, resistance to Soviet rule assumed less overt and more diffuse forms ranging from participation in underground groups to refusal to conform to official norms. But the vast majority of Balts accommodated to the Soviet system–in the words of one Estonian writer, believing it to be “unpleasant” but “inevitable and eternal,” compromising with the regime without identifying with it (Kaplinski et al., 2004: 158, 161).

Equally or even more important in motivating Baltic protest was the imperial dimension of Soviet rule–the overwhelming sense of foreign domination attached to it. The Baltic popular fronts viewed themselves as decolonization movements, not simply as democratization movements.

The first manifestations of Baltic nationalisms under glasnost’ assumed the form of environmental protest. Outrage over a series of industrial projects in the Baltic was fueled not only by their ecological impact, but also by the large numbers of Russians expected to flock to the region to build Environmental protest provided an opportunity for criticizing central government agencies for their indifference to local sentiments and for their “colonial” style of management (Dawson, 1996; Taagepera, 1993: 122).

Source: Civil Resistance and Power Politics Conference papers; www.sant.ox.ac.uk