Abstract
Borders are key sites for the amplification of emotions, yet historians have rarely made emotions into a focal point for studies of boundary-making processes. This article sets out fragmentary evidence for how to read across a fuller array of sources that move us beyond technocratic understandings of boundary commissions to highlight the range of emotional interactions which occurred between boundary commissioners and local populations. It draws on evidence from the Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission, established in the summer of 1919 to demarcate the international border between the newly independent states of Estonia and Latvia. Petitions sent to the Boundary Commission by the border region inhabitants expressed fear, trepidation or anger about the border proposal and professed feelings of patriotic loyalty to the Estonian or Latvian state. The press derided the Boundary Commission, using humour to convey frustration and shock at the absurdity of the border proposal and tarnish the reputation of the commissioners by portraying them as hot-headed. The accumulating emotional toll of these public sentiments left the boundary commissioners feeling weary and disheartened. By attuning to moods and sentiments surrounding the work of the Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission, this exploratory article calls for historians to consider emotions methodologically as part of a broader toolkit of approaches for studying histories of boundary-making and to reflect on the insights such perspectives can bring to the field.
On 1 July 1920, Stephen Tallents, the former British Commissioner of the Baltic provinces and chairman of the Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission, announced a proposal for the demarcation of the new international border between Estonia and Latvia. The Boundary Commission had been established in August 1919 to negotiate the international border between the newly independent states. Both sides claimed territories in the border region on ‘ethnographic principles’ and argued that the town of Valga/Valka was a strategically important economic centre and railway juncture for both the Estonian and the Latvian states.
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On 22 March 1920, when no border agreement could be reached and the threat of violence breaking out between both sides was in the air, British representatives were invited to preside over the Boundary Commission to act as mediators.
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By July 1920, attempts to resolve the border question remained unsuccessful. Tallents’ adjudication speech attunes us to the heightened emotions surrounding the work of the Boundary Commission: Apart from the national feeling which the dispute has evoked, the question is a really difficult problem in which it is physically impossible to reach a completely just or satisfactory solution. I have endeavoured repeatedly to secure an agreement between the two delegations, but it has finally become clear that there is no chance of an agreed settlement… I have weighed carefully and with a full sense of responsibility the many considerations which have been presented by the two delegations at the meetings of the Commission or which have occurred to me in the course of long and anxious reflections.
3
The role of territory and borders as key sites for the amplification and the collective mobilisation of feelings, attitudes, inclinations and sensibilities has long been a subject of study for geographers. 4 Studies have examined how approaches to visualising borders, such as those on maps, were often deliberately designed to stir up fear, anxiety, danger or the perception of threat to ‘engender an emotional response’. 5 Research on migration and refugees has approached these topics through the lens of the affective politics of borders. 6 The aftermath and legacies of border-drawing have been studied as a source of trauma. 7
Historians of boundary-making, by contrast, have been slower to think about histories of boundary-making through the lens of emotions, with the exception of several studies focusing on how boundary commissioners and border activists attempted to harness emotions through the visual representations of borders. For instance, E. A. Cavaliere analyses how border photographs, and their subsequent reproduction and circulation as engravings, were used by the Northwest Boundary Commission in the United States in the mid-19th century to rouse geographical imaginaries and colonial desires. 8 C. T. Dunlop examines how local activists in Alsace-Lorraine produced cartographic representations of borders which were deliberately ‘designed to tug at the heartstrings and elicit passionate feelings of local pride, the images were emotionally, as well as visually, manipulative’. 9 In these studies, however, the focus remains on attempts by boundary commissions and national activists to construct narratives about, and manipulate emotional responses to, boundary-making rather than on emic insights into how these processes actually felt to local populations. Classic works on boundary-making from a local perspective, such as P. Sahlins’ study of the making of the French-Spanish border through the eyes of Catalan border communities, do not treat emotions and feelings about borders as a focal point of inquiry. 10
Recent research on the history of emotions has argued that institutions ‘enabled, invited, incentivized, channelled, controlled, or prohibited emotional practices’. 11 In this article, I propose that we approach boundary commissions as institutional settings, formed in a particular moment in time, that both carried emotional messages and provided opportunities for a range of different stakeholders to participate in the politics of boundary-making and communicate their feelings on the border. This article considers how approaching the history of boundary commissions from the perspective of emotions foregrounds crucial, yet neglected, aspects in the history of boundary-making that enable us to examine how borders were produced, articulated and contested, and how emotions shaped the interactions between boundary commissions and border region inhabitants. In reflecting on some of the ways in which historians can approach boundary-making from an emotion-centred perspective, the article raises the following questions as warranting further attention: what kinds of emotional responses were invoked by boundary-making? How did emotions regarding borders emerge and develop over time? Whose emotions were represented and taken into consideration in the negotiation of borders? How was the work of the boundary commission affected by the emotions in the border region? It is important to emphasise that by focusing on the emotional dimensions of boundary-making, the aim of this article is not to diminish in any way the physical and material impacts of border-drawing on populations, nor is it to negate the violence that has often accompanied bordering processes. 12 The article calls, nevertheless, for historians to consider emotions methodologically as part of a broader toolkit of approaches for studying histories of boundary-making and to reflect on the insights such perspectives can bring to the field.
From technocratic to emotional perspectives on the Estonian-Latvian boundary commission
The Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission began work in August 1919 to negotiate the new international border. The Estonian delegation was led by the Foreign Minister and future Prime Minister, Ado Birk (1883–1942), and the head of the Latvian delegation was Valdemārs Zāmuēls (1872–1948), future Prime Minister of Latvia. The Boundary Commission's work took place against the backdrop of heightened tensions after World War I with its concomitant processes of territorial fragmentation and the drawing new state borders. 13 Estonian and Latvian national leaders had declared independence in 1918, yet both states struggled to gain international recognition of their independence and were not invited to send official representation to the Paris Peace Conference. 14
There also remained considerable uncertainty in the aftermath of Estonia's and Latvia's declarations of independence about where the precise borders of these new states should be drawn. 15 Following the February Revolution of 1917, a series of administrative reforms led to the redrawing of administrative borders in the region in order to create two more ethnolinguistically homogenous provinces. 16 While both the Estonian and Latvian representatives agreed in 1919 that the new state borders should correspond approximately to these administrative borders, they disagreed on the finer details. Second, military conflicts continued in the region throughout 1919 as Estonian and Latvian national armies, with foreign assistance provided by British and Finnish allies, fought against the Bolsheviks and the Baltische Landeswehr to secure their independence. 17 The military campaigns formally ended in 1920 between Estonia and Soviet Russia with the Treaty of Tartu signed in February and the Latvian-Soviet Riga Peace Treaty signed in August. At the time of the establishment of the Boundary Commission, the Estonian delegation was arguably in a territorially stronger position in the border negotiations: Estonian forces were no longer fighting in battles after August 1919 and the Estonian government controlled the strategically and symbolically important town of Valga/Valka. Meanwhile, Latvian forces continued to fight against the Bolsheviks in the east until January 1920.
The history of international boundary-making and the territorial reconfiguration of Europe after World War I has focused on the role of political elites and various experts, especially geographers. 18 In a similar vein, the Estonian-Latvian boundary-making process has been conventionally been portrayed as a top-down process of state-building focusing either on the perspectives of the political elites involved in diplomatic relations or, for the period from 1920–1927, on the Technical Commission's demarcation of the border. 19 These top-down approaches to writing histories of border-drawing stand in contrast to more recent multidisciplinary scholarship on border studies which has increasingly emphasised how boundary-making results from interactions between ‘a wide variety of actors (with diverging goals, interests, and territorial visions)’. 20 Boundary commissions play a pivotal role in processes of multi-scalar boundary-making as ‘institutions [which] became mediating agents between different groups, contexts, and levels of power’. 21 Studies of bottom-up and participatory forms of boundary-making have examined a range of instruments, such as censuses, plebiscites, population surveys, referenda and public consultations used by boundary commissions to consult citizens on matters of border-drawing and to document local voices on border-related questions. 22 These mechanisms of civic engagement in bordering processes gave agency to border inhabitants and local activists, allowing them to communicate their wishes, grievances and their demands to the authorities. 23 In the case of the Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission, little is known regarding the experiences of the inhabitants of the Estonian-Latvian border region or how the Boundary Commission negotiated and accommodated the various actors’ diverging interests. 24
Often overlooked in the abovementioned literature on multi-scalar and bottom-up forms of boundary-making is consideration of how the high stakes of boundary-making cannot only be explained in terms of concrete material or legal demands, such as property ownership, transportation and communication links, or economic concerns, such as access to markets where farmers and manufacturers could sell their wares. Engagement with boundary-making as a form of political participation could also occur in more non-representational, intangible and interpersonal ways. 25 Boundary-making is a process that punctuates people's lives in dramatic ways: it invokes a broad spectrum of emotions, such as pride, anticipation, anger, fear, trepidation, anxiety, sadness and frustration. Boundary-making forces people to confront emotional connections to the physical environment through their sense of ‘place attachment’ and ‘emotional bonding’ with territory. 26 Emotion-centred research on boundary-making can thus highlight the ways in which populations engaged with boundary commissions that might not be as dramatic nor as visible to us from other historiographical approaches. Moreover, attending to emotions can also provide us with an avenue for examining abstract forces such as the ‘political pressure’ exerted on boundary commissions. 27
Nevertheless, finding explicit emotional content in boundary commissions’ archives can be challenging. Emotions were not considered part of official border-making proceedings and the types of sources typically found in boundary commission archives – meeting protocols, population statistics, maps and technical surveys – usually display a commitment to dispassionate and rational reporting of the boundary-making proceedings. On the other hand, private correspondence between officials, as we shall see, was sometimes inflected with emotional responses to the challenges of their position, thus revealing how such files blur the lines between professionalism and personal reflection. 28 In this article, I examine both petitions and local press reports as two types of sources which yield insights into a range of different emotions connected to boundary-making. I limit my focus to the period from the appointment of the British adjudicators to the Boundary Commission in late March 1920 to Tallents’ ruling on the border on 1 July, and the immediate reactions thereafter. These months were a particularly intensive period of work for the Boundary Commission. In late April, the Boundary Commission established three sub-commissions to examine and report on the eastern and western sections of the border region, as well as a separate commission to focus on the contested town of Valga/Valka. 29 The commissioners gathered data on the local population in the border region and held regular meetings to discuss their findings, providing us with a well-documented source base to trace the emergence and development of emotional interactions during this period of heightened discussions about the border.
The petitions sent to the Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission to protest against the proposed border were preserved as part of the respective delegation's archives in the National Archives of Estonia and the Latvian State Historical Archives. Historians have paid increasing attention to petitions as a source for understanding local perspectives and agency in boundary-making processes. These studies, however, have primarily focused on how petitioners articulated their demands for property rights and economic considerations rather than the role of feelings and emotions. 30 I examine petitions as documents that allow us to interrogate how people felt about borders and how they invoked certain emotions – such as anger, fear, shock and patriotism – when interacting with the Boundary Commission. I analyse the texts of the petitions for indications of emotions, descriptions of emotions and actions that indicate sentiments, including non-verbal cues such as body language and gestures. 31 Petitioners used performative aspects in their letter writing, such as rhetorical techniques and narrative storytelling, to capture the attention of the boundary commissioners and solicit empathy for their grievances. 32
Journalists who wrote for the borderland press, by contrast, voiced more overt criticisms of the boundary commissioners. In the second case study, I examine how humour and caricature were used to reflect on the sense of grave injustice and absurdity of the boundary-making process. I supplement my analyses of petitions and the press with consideration of the boundary commissioners’ reactions and references to emotions in correspondence, official protocols and memoirs in order to shed light on the effects of emotions on boundary-making processes.
Invocations of emotion in petitions to the boundary commission
The Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission received dozens of petitions in the spring and summer of 1920 protesting the border proposal. Most were written by men, although several were authored by women. Petitions were part of a longstanding legal mechanism and performative form of letter writing that had been used by populations in the region since the imperial times to voice their grievances to the authorities. 33 In the former Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire, the tradition of petitioning was facilitated by the region's very high literacy rates. 34
In their letters to the Boundary Commission, individual petitioners often revealed evidence of their emotions in their letters as a testimony of the hardships inflicted on them by the border, to convince the commissioners of their desperate situation and as a rhetorical device to solicit empathy for their struggles. For example, L. Kosenkranius, owner of the Bauman estate in Volmar county, petitioned the Boundary Commission in March 1920 asking for his estate to be joined to Estonia and for his family to be given Estonian citizenship. Kosenkranius used supplicatory language, writing that he had ‘the honour to pray’ that the Boundary Commission would heed his request, since he and his wife were of Estonian nationality and the family were currently experiencing a ‘difficult and uncomfortable connection’ with the nearest towns. He belonged to the parish of the Lutheran Saard church in Kvellenstein and therefore being situated in Latvia would result in a ‘heavy loss’ since ‘all my activity is in the boundaries of the Esthonian Republic’. 35 Farm owner Leena Schults expressed her shock at hearing the news that her farm in Katkine would be allocated to the Latvian side of the border. She wrote to the Boundary Commission to explain that ‘This is not just, neither from the logical nor from the geographical point of view, for the fixed frontier line leaves my farm like in a sack—between the farms of Tölla and Kassi’. She was incredulous at the decision, wondering how it could be possible since ‘I am… an Esthonian’. She mentioned her son's service in the border guards’ battalion as evidence of her family's feelings of loyalty towards Estonia. 36 Other petitioners were more forceful in articulating their anger, such as Peters Tilts from Jaun Roze/Vastse-Roosa, who wrote to the Boundary Commission that ‘I, as a representative of the Latvian people and on behalf of the same, submit my most express protest against the adoption of the boundary line because it is no way based on the principle of justice’. 37
Collective petitions emphasised the mutual feelings of the claimants and drew the commissioners’ attention to the widespread suffering that the border would cause communities. A petition from the Seventh Department of the Estonian Railway Union in May 1920 emphasised the misery that would be inflicted on the local inhabitants if the town of Valga/Valka were to be joined to Latvia since the population ‘be left in a desperate position’ due to the problems supplying food, ‘as we have already experienced when the Esthonian frontier has been closed and when we were suffering from great shortage of food’.
38
A petition from Estonian-speaking farmers from the coastal town of Heinaste/Ainaži emphasised the tense atmosphere in their community and the enmity they faced from the local Latvian population: In recent times the mood of the local Latvian people, especially since the time that the border commission was here, has changed sharply against everyone who bears the name of Estonia, that there is no thought of living together peacefully and you can expect pressure and hostility from them in every matter.
39
When considering the role of emotions in boundary-making, we have to ask whether these petitions had any impact on the Boundary Commission's decisions. What value did boundary commissions place on the feelings expressed by the local population as a factor in determining the border? And whose emotions were deemed to be legitimate and worthy of consideration? The reactions of the boundary commissioners to the petitions offer several possible avenues for answering these questions. The Boundary Commission treated the petitions as part of the official bureaucratic paperwork of the bordering process and processed petitions as part of the evidence gathered in the course of their investigations. Petitions were often translated from Estonian and Latvian into English, which suggests that they were consulted by the other party and by the British arbitrators as part of the negotiations. Due to the fragmentary nature of these sources, we do not know whether every petition was preserved, nor do we know the reasons behind the decision to translate some of the petitions into English. Nevertheless, we can observe how both delegations referred to petitions in their reports. 40 The delegates used emotions as evidence of the ‘will of the people’ and ‘interests of the local population’, and presented the petitioners’ emotional investment in the border as a rationale for staking out territorial claims. 41 In other cases, the boundary commissioners chose to disregard the emotional appeals of the petitioners where it did not fit with their vision for the border. Colonel Rowan Robinson, chairman of the Walk Sub-Commission, dismissed the wishes of the Latvian population of the Koikull/Koikküla commune who were ‘anxious to have [a] strip of land in order to make use of a good road along the river that leads to Valk’, writing that ‘I am of the opinion however that the value of having a natural river frontier outweighs the value of their claim’. 42
Rowan Robinson's dismissal of the inhabitants of Koikulls/ Koikküla's anxieties also fits into a broader pattern of scepticism in the Boundary Commission about the emotional truthfulness of the sentiments expressed in the petitions. The commissioners often regarded the emotive language by petitioners with suspicion. As the Latvian delegation noted in one report: The Estonian claim on IPPIC [sic.] is based on a petition signed by many Letts, in June 1919, when Latvia was in the process of formation and could not guarantee the safety of the inhabitants from Bolshevism. These petitions are not a reliable basis on which to work as the private and public feelings of the people vary to a considerable extent.
43
These discussions among the boundary commissioners about the emotional veracity and the relative weight given to different expressions of feelings on the border question reveal how it is impossible to determine from the sources what the petitioners were really feeling about the bordering process. In raising questions about emotional authenticity, however, the Boundary Commission placed the very question of emotions at the centre of their discussions and as a crucial factor for weighing up the reliability of evidence in the boundary-making process.
Satirising the boundary commission in the local press
The local population stayed informed about the Boundary Commission's activities through the local Estonian- and Latvian-language press. The role of the press was a frequent topic of conversation for the Boundary Commission in the spring and summer of 1920, as the commissioners discussed how newspapers portrayed their activities, reported on the feelings of the border region inhabitants and the role of journalists in influencing the mood in the border region.
Estonian journalist Jaan Pommer (from 1935, Raudma) (1867–1950) played a particularly influential role in shaping the tone of public opinion on the border question among the Estonian-speaking population. Pommer edited several Estonian-language newspapers published in Valga/Valka, including Rajalane (Border Person) (1919–1921) and a satirical periodical Porilombi (Pargi) Parm (Horsefly of Muddy Puddle [Park]) (1919–1921). 48 Rajalane published summaries of the Boundary Commission's protocols and reports on their activities, as well as articles with titles such as ‘Valga Question’ or ‘Deciding the Fate of Valga’ to attempt to sway public opinion on the issue. During a census conducted in Valga/Valka in October 1919 by the Boundary Commission, the front page of Rajalane attempted to rally its Estonian readership to participate in the census, proclaiming ‘Let no Estonian, who holds Valga as a dear Estonian city, be left out of the list to be compiled at this census! It is very important! Let everyone be in their place! […] Our fate and future are in our own hands! Let's do our duty!’ 49 The local press urged participation in the census as a patriotic duty and form of participatory politics, presenting census turnout as a way of voting for the town to belong to Estonia.
In addition to trying to stir up patriotic feelings among the Estonian-speaking population of Valga/Valka, Pommer also briefly served as an Estonian representative on the Valga/Valka Sub-Commission from 28 April to 7 May 1920, as one of several members of the local community who were co-opted by the Boundary Commission. 50 Pommer's knowledge of Latvian made him a valuable asset in the negotiations. In this way, Pommer is an important figure for breaking down ‘rigidly defined political relations (e.g. core-periphery, top-down, local-global, or local-national)’ when it comes to boundary-making. 51
Pommer's criticisms of the boundary-making process turned out to be a prominent thorn in the side of the Boundary Commission. On 6 May, the Latvian delegation complained about ‘the general tone of the local Estonian paper of which Mr. Pommer is the Editor’, mentioning that he had made ‘a number of statements tending to embitter feelings between the two countries’. Pommer defended his actions by replying that ‘some of the statements made by Lettish farmers were so ridiculously untrue that he felt bound to report on them’. The Latvian delegation admitted ‘many of them were somewhat exaggerated but that was natural and not perhaps sufficient grounds for an article headed “Perversion of the Truth”’. 52 The minutes record that ‘the discussion on these matters was rather heated’. 53 The following day, Pommer resigned from his position on the Valga/Valka Sub-Commission ‘on grounds of being unable to attend through press of other work’. 54 It is not clear from the meeting protocols whether Pommer resigned in objection or was forced out.
Tensions between Pommer and the Boundary Commission escalated in the summer of 1920. On 20 June, Tallents announced that ‘he preferred not to have press representatives in attendance’ at the meetings of the Boundary Commission and would instead prepare a statement of the day's proceedings to be issued as a press release. 55 On 23 June, Valdemārs Zāmuēls, chairman of the Latvian delegation, complained that Pommer continued to obstruct the work of the Boundary Commission by stirring up anti-Latvian sentiment: ‘to exemplify the unfairness and hostility of the Esthonians, the speaker then read two extracts from the local Esthonian newspapers, expressing impatience at the discussion of the ownership of Walk and the futility of a court of arbitration’. 56 These confrontations between Pommer and the Boundary Commission highlight the role of the local press in exacerbating nationalist agitation and propaganda, which could often be fierce and polarising. 57 Maintaining good feelings between both sides was crucial in ensuring that progress could be made in the negotiations.
Following Tallents’ announcement of his decision on 1 July to divide the town of Valga/Valka, Pommer dedicated a considerable portion of the 18 July issue of Porilombi Parm to lambasting the Boundary Commission. The paper included humorous articles highlighting the absurdity of the decision to split Valga/Valka. Several articles specifically targeted individual Latvian and British boundary commissioners and presented them as a source of antagonism for the local Estonian population. One article recounted an alleged rumour about a thwarted plot by group of men to put commissioner Rowan Robinson into a sack.
58
Another story, entitled ‘Several times Samuels was angry at the Border Commission’, targeted the head of the Latvian delegation. The story was told from the perspective of an anonymous observer who was sitting in on the meetings of the Boundary Commission during these tense negotiations. The author wryly noted how during the deliberations they decided to keep a tally of Zāmuēls’ ‘moods’ in a pocketbook: So then: because of anger he turned red 216 times in three days, or 72 times a day, or three times an hour. He turned white in anger two times more and what was worst — he once did a similar movement, that let us assume it would have gone badly for our representative if the table hadn’t been there.
59
Porilombi Parm's political satire of the Boundary Commission also reflected the feelings of injustice and the imbalances of power in the boundary-making process. A satirical poem entitled ‘“Impartial” English fist establishing the border’, recounted an incident in Vana-Laitsna/Veclaicene where the mayor of the municipality was dismissed from his position by one of the British officials for refusing to sign a document that he knew was false: The Great British man on our border Is creating a language border. No dear interest in Estonia there, If it is necessary to create Latvia, If you resist, you get slapped And kicked out the door. Suur Laitsna is now Latvia, Won’t get it back anymore The rights of the people do not help And all the nation's demands. If you resist, you get slapped And kicked out the door. When the ‘Brit’ puts the country in order Then he kicks out the head of the municipality Right through the door, So that the municipality could be Latvia — If you resist, you get slapped And kicked out the door. That's how it is with the people now, Where the state and free land, — This is how the English respects an Estonian man… He jumps out of his skin If you resist, you get slapped — And kicked out the door. — Border Man.
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As works of political satire, we must be careful not to read these stories and poems as literal accounts of real people or events. Published alongside lewd jokes, humorous poems and political caricatures, it might be easy to dismiss Porilombi Parm's vignettes of the Estonian-Latvian Boundary Commission as mere frivolities. At the same time, Porilombi Parm's depictions of the Boundary Commission highlight the important role of popular culture in contesting hegemonic border discourses. 61 Using rhetorical techniques of parody, satire, caricature, irony and metaphor, Pommer presented the Boundary Commission as absurd, unreasonable, biased, and not to be taken seriously.
Pommer was not the only one who used satire to make sense of Valga/Valka's partition, although the lengths he went to and his fraught personal relationship with the boundary commissioners make him the most extreme example I have encountered. Similar works of political satire against the Boundary Commission can be found in other newspapers from these years. For example, reacting to the news in 1921 that the Latvian government had submitted a declaration requesting that the territorial dispute over the small island of Ruhnu/Roņu in the Gulf of Riga be referred to the arbitration court, the Latvian illustrated, satirical periodical Svari (Libra) wrote that if Tallents were to be left in charge, he would apply a similar approach to Valga/Valka: ‘Tallents will cut the island, the church, the parsonage, the 37 1/2 inhabitants, 3 houses, and the old woodshed in half’. 62 The Riga-based Russian-language newspaper Segodnia (Today) printed a political cartoon depicting Tallents as a Solomon-like figure severing the town of Valga/Valka as a baby. 63 The Estonian national daily Postimees (Postman) printed cartoons highlighting the absurdity of the boundary proposal and the hardships it would inflict on the local population. 64 In subsequent years, political caricatures appeared in Svari criticising the idea of the ‘ideal border’ proposed by Tallents for following a jagged course that looked ‘scalloped’ like a woman's skirt and ‘toothy’. 65 In doing so, these depictions of the Boundary Commission attune us to affective forms of opposition that might not be evident to us if we only look at formal channels of communication.
Accumulating emotions and their toll on the boundary commissioners
Attuning to emotions in the border region allows us to build on existing research which has shown how boundary commissions do not work in a vacuum and are instead closely embedded in the wider contexts in which they operated. Various studies have highlighted the impact of the physical environment, weather and animals on the work of boundary commissions. 66 This approach can also be extended to the emotions of the population living in the border region. Several ways of thinking about the impact of emotions on the work of the Boundary Commission have already been mentioned in the discussion above, such as how the commissioners weighed emotional evidence presented in the petitions as part of their proceedings or their reactions to the press as a disruptive force that hindered negotiations. In what follows, I want to briefly reflect on two further ways we might think about the reception of emotions by the commissioners. Rather than looking at isolated instances of emotion, I consider what Bailey calls the ‘accumulation of emotional evidence’ 67 and how this draws our attention to the ‘emotional labour’ of those involved in international politics. 68
One way of thinking about the impact of emotions on the Boundary Commission is through the mounting emotional toll experienced by the commissioners. The emotions invoked in the petitions and by the local press towards the Boundary Commission created a ‘moody force field’ that contributed to the commissioners mounting sense of weariness, fatigue and demotivation. 69 Correspondence between members of the Boundary Commission attest to their frustration at the slow pace of work and growing feeling that the discussions were ‘profitless’. 70 Captain Bentley, the British officer presiding over the West Sub-Commission, complained to Tallents on 4–5 May from Neu Rosen/Vastse-Roosa that ‘It is slow work as the last child is counted in the census’. 71 On 19 May, Rowan Robinson wrote to Tallents that: ‘In my opinion the whole frontier question has been thoroughly thrashed out and nothing is to be gained by further discussion. Except in the most obvious cases, agreement is impossible to obtain’. 72
Another way of thinking about the accumulated effect of emotions is to look at the commissioners’ memoirs of their time serving on the Boundary Commission. The hostile atmosphere in the border region towards the work of the Boundary Commission was starkly imprinted on the British mediators’ memories and left a lasting negative impression. Tallents later wrote in his memoir that: ‘I had known, when I first intervened in this dispute, that its solution was likely to be a disagreeable and difficult job; but I had not taken the full measure of its difficulties or of the bitter feeling which it would arouse’. 73 Tallents was aware of how the Baltic press portrayed his actions and was affronted by what he perceived as their personal attack on him. In his memoir, he referred to the aforementioned political cartoon in the newspaper Segodnia (Today) that depicted him as Solomon as a ‘scurrilous attack by the gutter press of the Baltic’. 74 Tallents’ reflections reveal how the criticism in the press and cultural responses to boundary-making in the form of political cartoons were more than just a ‘side-issue’ of the bordering process. 75 They cast a shadow over Tallents’ memory of his time in the Baltic. The bitter feelings led him to turn down the offer to act as chairman of the Lithuanian-Latvian Boundary Commission in autumn 1920.
Conclusion
Through analysing the emotions of the inhabitants of the Estonian-Latvian border region in petitions and the local press, as well as the emotional responses of the boundary commissioners, this article sets out fragmentary evidence for how to read across a fuller array of sources for examining the range of emotional engagement in boundary-making. Moving away from technocratic approaches to boundary-making, I instead consider how emotions formed an integral part of bordering processes in the institutional setting of the boundary commission. Emotions not only emerged as a response to bordering, but were invoked and articulated as a strategy by the local population to participate in political processes of border-drawing and attempt to influence the outcome in their favour. Petitioners used emotive language to elicit sympathy for their hardships, profess feelings of attachment to place and patriotic loyalty, or express their anger and outrage at perceived injustices and violations of their rights. The local press was a vehicle for communicating the general mood in the border region, claiming to speak on behalf of the local population, and also for discrediting the professionalism of the Boundary Commission by portraying the commissioners as hot-tempered, irrational and even violent. In doing so, emotions offer new perspectives on to whom boundary-making mattered and why the process was fraught with contestations.
The Boundary Commission's reactions to emotions help us further understand the asymmetries of power at work regarding whose voices were heard and taken into account when shaping the border. The commissioners did not value all emotions equally. The delegates sympathised, to a limited extent, with individual grievances and sometimes sought to mobilise emotions during their proceedings in order to legitimise territorial claims based on popular sentiment and notions of national self-determination. At the same time, they were usually wary and sceptical of collective outpourings of emotion which were deemed unreliable and subject to manipulation. The feelings of frustration, absurdity and anger expressed through humour and political satire were considered destabilising forces that obstructed consensus-building between the Estonian and Latvian delegations and delegitimised the Boundary Commission in the eyes of the border region inhabitants.
Centring emotions in histories of boundary commissions also leads us to reflect further on questions of historical causality in boundary-making processes. Tallents’ arbitration speech, discussed at the opening of the article, frames the delimitation of the Estonian-Latvian border in the context of heightened national feelings, as well as his own emotional turmoil as chairman of the Boundary Commission. Emotion-centred readings of sources provide us with a way of attuning to intangible and non-representational forces at play in border-making processes and in the institutional context of boundary commissions, such as the accumulation of emotional toll, pressure, weariness and fatigue, which otherwise might not be evident to us.
