It's the height of summer. Some people have completely unplugged from everyday life and are soaking their toes at the beach. Others are discussing the presidential election alongside their summer rituals. Still others are engaged in the semiotics of hobbies, debating what an onion really is.

With the advance of artificial intelligence, people have been talking more and more about the hard times facing the advertising industry. But this time, an advertising creative managed to shake ethnic relations almost as much as the Riigikogu or the government has with some of its decisions.

Yes, this political commentary is also about a meat advertisement. It features two men wearing T-shirts with Ukrainian flag patches, standing contentedly by a grill while columns of smoke familiar from frontline news reports rise in the background. The image is accompanied by the words: "The right grill makes a bitter onion sweet."

After the advertisement was published and a wave of criticism followed on social media, the media machine also sprang into action. Journalists began asking the meat producer for comment, while columnists debated the advertisement's meaning. To be honest, I wasn't particularly surprised by the meat producer's response that he didn't know the word "onion" is used to refer to Russians. In a crisis, claiming ignorance is a fairly common instinctive reaction. But if that is true, it is rather strange.

I learned the symbolic meaning of "onion" as a child. I remember it being explained to me through the domes of Orthodox churches: because Orthodox church domes are onion-shaped, and Russians are mostly Orthodox Christians, people sometimes jokingly refer to Russians as onions.

Yes, the onion as a symbol is stereotypical; it marks Russians as "the other" — Russians are onions, Estonians are not — but it was never associated with violence or aggression. Unlike terms such as "orc" or "vatnik," "onion" did not denote an enemy who posed a physical threat and should be destroyed.

The academic field of social semiotics examines, among other things, how the meanings of symbols are formed. Those meanings are not fixed, entered into a dictionary and precisely defined. But neither are they something that exists atomically in individuals' minds where an onion means one thing to one person and something entirely different to another.

We constantly create these shared meanings in the public sphere through the use of symbols and through discussions that analyze them. And I regret that, as a result of this advertisement and the debate that followed, a new symbol has emerged. Fried onions are no longer simply a tasty food — they have become a battle cry.

What saddened me especially was the claim that, because the war in Ukraine continues, this kind of imagery is inevitable. The continuation of the war explains why the image resonates, but not why it should be considered good or responsible imagery.

The roots of ethnic conflict in Estonia run deep. Questions of ethnicity framed the 50-year occupation, the restoration of independence and a significant part of the nearly 35 years since independence was regained. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, issues of ethnicity have inevitably become more heavily securitized once again. It is also true that most Estonians and some of Estonia's residents of other ethnic backgrounds view the war in Ukraine differently. Public opinion surveys bear this out.

In an academic article published in Nationalities Papers, researchers Jennie Schulze and Juris Pupcenoks distinguish three ways in which the Russian-speaking minority is treated in the politics of Estonia and Latvia. They identify securitizing exclusion, securitizing inclusion and inclusion that is not justified by reference to threat at all.

Securitizing exclusion means portraying a minority as a potential threat and using that justification to limit its opportunities or influence. Securitizing inclusion refers to efforts to include or win over the minority in order to reduce the threat associated with it. In the third approach, inclusion is not justified on security grounds at all, but rather in terms of justice, equality and democratic agency.

Their analysis shows that since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion, the first approach has become more prominent in both Estonia and Latvia: Russian-speaking people and their linguistic, cultural and political choices are more frequently associated with potential security threats. At the same time, the authors warn that the security benefits of such policies must be weighed against their possible cost to social cohesion.

A meat advertisement is, of course, not national security policy. But it, too, participates in the same field of meaning, further blurring the line between the soldiers of an aggressor state, supporters of the war and Russian-speaking people living in Estonia.

Estonia is facing genuinely difficult questions: how to limit the influence operations of a hostile foreign state, how to organize Estonian-language education and how to address the influence of institutions that support a war of aggression. Administrative, legal, security or sociological arguments can be made for or against those decisions. Those arguments can be debated, tested and challenged. Those debates would be far better conducted with as little baggage from hostile imagery as possible.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and X and never miss an update!