To sing a different song: the choices for the Baltic states.

• Author: Kurth, James
• Position: Distinctions and similarities shared among Balkan states

In the northeastern corner of Europe, there can be found the three small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Although there have been long periods of time when they have been forgotten by the rest of Europe, the Baltics have actually been part of Western civilization for more than eight hundred years, and they have had a way of periodically breaking into the consciousness, and the conscience, of the West. Today, they are on the eastern frontiers of the newly expanded NATO and the soon-to-be expanded European Union. As such, they pose major foreign policy questions for the United States.

I had first visited the Baltic states in August 1989, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which had condemned them to Soviet rule, and at a time when they were rapidly re-establishing their national identities and autonomy. I visited Estonia and Latvia again last August, on the occasion of the seventh anniversary of their declarations of independence from the dying Soviet Union. What I found was not only a contrast between the romance of independence of 1989 and the realities of independence in 1998, but also a contrast between three different ways of looking at those realities.

The Baltic states should be viewed through three different prisms or perspectives, each revealing a particular reality about these countries today. These prisms are of the national, the Russian and the Western (especially the American) realities. Each of these prisms yields its own distinct narrative about what has happened in the Baltics in the past decade and its own distinct projection of what will happen in the decade to come. Each prism focuses upon a particular sector of the economy and upon a particular kind of politics. The interactions between the three realities give rise to the policy issues that are at the center of political debates about the Baltic states today. The most important of these issues for Americans is the question of "the second round" of NATO expansion. In this essay I shall deal only with the two countries that I visited last year.

The National Tale

Viewed through the national prism, the Baltic states offer a narrative that is surely among the most extraordinary and most moving in human history. It is a story that is romantic, heroic and even epic.

The national tale begins in the nineteenth century, when the Estonian and Latvian peoples - then really only peasant communities - were under the harsh political rule of the Russian Empire and the harsh economic exploitation of German landlords. As with the other subject peoples of Eastern Europe at that time, the Estonians and Latvians formed an identity around their newly written languages. But they also each added a remarkable feature to this process of national identity formation. This was the national song festival, in which, every five years or so, thousands of ordinary people would gather together in giant choruses to sing traditional (and also newly written) folk songs. Even more than Verdi's operas for the developing Italian national identity and Wagner's operas for the German one, the song festival, "the singing nation", was at the center of the new Estonian and Latvian national identities.

In the fullness of time (and with the play of fate), the First World War brought about the collapse of the Russian Empire and the dispossession of the German landlords in Estonia and Latvia. After heroic and victorious battles against the Red Army of the new Soviet state, these small nations established their own independent republics between 1918 and 1920.

During the ensuing period of national independence (1918-40), the Baltic states shared some of the darker qualities of other newly independent states in Central and Eastern Europe during the interwar period, including some political turmoil in the 1920s and some political authoritarianism in the 1930s (similar to the corporate-state systems of Austria and Hungary at the time). But for the most part, they were stable, peaceful, prosperous and decent.

The economies of the Baltic states were based upon a large number of independent farmers who produced high quality meat and dairy products for export to Western Europe. In this, the Baltic states were rather like Denmark (or, for a less exact American analogy, like Wisconsin). The worldwide Great Depression brought some brief economic distress, but the great urban and middle-class markets of Britain and Germany (the latter growing because of the Nazi rearmament program) still afforded considerable prosperity to the Baltic states. Indeed, at the end of the 1930s, the per capita income of Estonia was equal or greater to that of Finland, and Latvia's was not far behind.

This economic prosperity in turn provided the resources for an extraordinary cultural vitality, based upon a dense and intense network of literary, singing and artistic societies that were devoted to the preservation and development of the national culture. Estonia had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and again Latvia's was not far behind.

It seems a little odd that the years of the Great Depression could be seen as a golden age by anyone, but Baltic history is full of oddities and paradoxes. In any event, the 1930s would be remembered by the Baltic peoples for more than half a century thereafter, right down until the early 1990s, as indeed such an age, one brief shining moment (caught in sepia-tone photographs, as if preserved in the famous Baltic amber). It was an era, and they were nations, whose essential goodness and decency must someday be recovered and redeemed.

The...