Over the past decade, Russia has used increasingly ethnicized rhetoric to justify its invasion of Crimea and war in Ukraine by calling upon a sentiment of lost ancestral homelands and preserving traditional Russian culture. While scholars know that states can employ narratives about lost homelands and coethnics abroad to justify conflict, what if reinforcing a unique cultural and ethnic identity on behalf of the threatened state can be a form of resistance? This project will examine how ethnic identities and their associated cultural values can be strategically leveraged to legitimize sovereignty and undermine the encroaching state's narrative of a shared history amid fears of neighbor-state encroachment and to signal virtue to the global community. I focus on the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and their native ethnic populations, as well as their ethnic Russian populations. Here, I theorize that in the face of material security concerns, the primary ethnic populations of the Baltics will align their opinions on LGBTQ+ rights and some post-materialist values with those of the Western states they seek international support from. I will investigate whether, in response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the relationship between the primary ethnic population's opinions and the ethnic Russian population's opinions on LGBTQ+ rights and post-materialist values in the Baltics changed in relation to one another. I expect to see an increase in positive opinions and support for these issue areas from the primary ethnic groups of Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, and no change in the ethnic Russian populations. I will investigate this relationship by using responses to the European Social Survey (ESS) from 2004 to 2023, which has consistently asked a range of LGBTQ+ and post-materialist value questions over the nearly 20-year period. Analyzing this relationship is increasingly important for understanding how the Baltics can continue to counter Russia's attempts to justify further encroachment and conflict in the region. By understanding this relationship in the Baltics, this research can also inform how other post-Soviet states or previous territories of the Russian Empire can undermine these narratives as well.
