Like other Europeans, Estonian intellectuals were inspired in the early twentieth century to consider their nation's political future as empires faltered. Yet Estonia's path to self-determination was not initially imagined as full independence. Many Estonian elites regarded national autonomy as a more realistic goal, perhaps within a reformed Russia, but not necessarily only there. Memories of earlier Swedish rule, often cast as a golden age, supported hopes for reform, autonomy, and belonging within a broader Nordic, and specifically Swedish, political and cultural sphere, even though Sweden showed little interest in such an endeavor.

Mart Kuldkepp argues that the Estonian independence moment was shaped by both geopolitics (recognizing how Estonia's location necessarily informs its political outlooks) and mnemopolitics (the political use of historical memory). Kuldkepp shows that although Estonia did not join an imagined Nordic polity, its Nordic orientation remained a serious ideological project with important consequences for state formation and interwar political culture, with reverberations lasting to the present day.