Trilemmas of recognition in the Baltic states’ foreign policies

ABSTRACT

The article presents the results of research on the attitudes of foreign policy decision makers in the Baltic states toward several international recognition trilemmas. A trilemma describes a situation where only two of three things can hold true at the same time. In case of the recognition policy in the Baltic states, these three conditions could be identified as (1) respect of international law and state sovereignty; (2) consistency of national foreign policy and political expediency; and (3) moral obligations in the interrelations of people and states. This obligation also may be supplemented by or be related to a sympathy for national liberation movements. Of course, this trilemma may be confronted by other states as well. The Baltic states’ own path to independence and international recognition makes the issue especially sensitive.ss

KEYWORDS:

• Baltic states
• foreign policy
• decision-making
• international recognition
• legal recognition
• political recognition
• moral recognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. The term ‘small state’ in this article follows the approach presented in Ingebritsen. Ingebritsen et al. (2006). The compilers of the volume indicated that while some researchers tried to define what a small state is by selected quantitative criteria, e.g. the size of the population (for instance, ‘in the European context, the “bar” for small states has often been set at the population size of the Netherlands (currently 16 million inhabitants)’ [Ingebritsen et al. (2006), 6]), it is simply not possible to formulate a satisfactory definition because this kind of the definition omits a lot of other important quantitative and qualitative parameters. Therefore, according to Ingebritsen et al. (2006), there is a lack of an agreed concrete definition of small states. Despite the non-existence of a definition of small states, however, there exists a rather wide ‘body of literature that might be termed [as] small state studies’ (8–9). This body of literature, assumes that ‘small states are not just “mini versions” of great powers but may pursue different goals and policies worth studying’ (16).

2. I would like to thank this article’s anonymous reviewer for ideas about the ‘coincidence factor’, ‘implied recognition,’ and the reference to Berg’s (2003) article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gediminas Vitkus

Gediminas Vitkus received an MA in social science from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1984 and a PhD in Political Science from Vilnius University in 1993. He is a Professor and the Head of the European Studies Center at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University. He also has an appointment at the Military Academy of Lithuania.