International Law and Justice Working Papers - IILJ

the colonies needed to realize that a new politics and attitude were necessary. The native peoples
had to be included more in the government but in the first place, the German Baltic provinces
Estonia, Livonia and Curonia had to realize that there was no alternative to unification: “Then
but also only then will a new time of development break out and the work of colonization be
continued in a worthy manner. (…) Should old Livonia stand up anew, the old Livonians have to
transform into new ones, the special notions Livonians, Estonians and Curonians have to
disappear in front of a uniting meaning of the name: the Baltic Germans.” 111
But unity with whom exactly? If the essence of the Baltic provinces was their German
uniqueness and their national self-determination, what was to be done with the overwhelming
majority of the population, the non-German native population, the Estonians and the Latvians?
If national self-determination was the guiding principle, should the native Estonians and Latvians
also have somehow counted? Although Bulmerincq recognized the need for institutional reform
and wider inclusion of the native peoples, this inclusion had to be undertaken under the German
Baltic leadership. In the view of Bulmerincq, this was dictated by the inherent cultural-historical
superiority of the Germans over the native peoples – in essence a typically colonialist argument
that was otherwise usually employed by Europeans outside Europe. 112
The political-intellectual race over the identity of the Baltic provinces had started. After
Bulmerincq published his views, the conflict escalated even further with the outbreak of the socalled
Broschyrenstreit. The Russian publicist Juri Samarin (1819-1876) published in 1868 a
polemical booklet in which he claimed that it was the highest time to subject the Baltic provinces
111 P. 19.
112 See the work of Anthony Anghie on colonialism and international law in the 19 th and 20 th centuries.