(Re-)Defining the Social Contract: Fiscal Citizenship and the Power of an Idea in Three Former Socialist Towns in the Baltics

The Russian-speaking residents of Visaginas in Lithuania, Daugavpils in Latvia, and Sillamäe in Estonia define their relationship with the state primarily as a social contract. More precisely, the residents claim full membership in the national Lithuanian, Latvian, or Estonian collectives as working and taxpaying subjects. Because of their socialist past and demographic composition, the predominantly Russian-speaking towns of Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamäe often appear as alien and threatening, if not disloyal to the national state, in popular Baltic imaginations. Consequently, in Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamäe, the social contract, and fiscal citizenship in particular, came to embody an ideal of an equal, fair, reciprocal, and perceivably apolitical relationship with the state that the residents yearned for, yet felt the lack of. Anthropologists have shown that contractarian expectations seldomly hold in the real world, and the social contract is only one potential source of moral, social, and cosmic orders among many (Burnyeat and Sheild Johansson 2022; Makovicky and Smith 2020). Based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamäe, this paper demonstrates that the social contract can nevertheless serve as a powerful, if not empowering, idea, especially among those who feel disadvantaged or excluded from a perceived social contract or national collective. By reimagining their relationship with the national state as a social contract, the Russian-speaking residents were able to redefine the membership criteria and the very political community of which they strove to become a part. Thus, this paper argues for the continued importance of the conceptual and normative ideal of the social contract, but one that should be ethnographically unpacked rather than taken for granted. More exactly, I ask what meanings are ascribed to the social contract in Visaginas, Daugavpils, and Sillamäe, and why, and what the idea of the social contract actually “does” in a given society.