Introduction: nation-building in the Baltic states: thirty years of independence

The recovery of national independence by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania is one of the signal achievements of the late twentieth century. The three Baltic states played a leading role in triggering the breakup of the Soviet Union. That in turn facilitated the collapse of communism in eastern Europe, followed by a wave of democratization which spread all around the world. This special section originated at the conference of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in New York in May 2016, at which a series of panels examined the status of nation-building in the 15 countries that emerged from the Soviet Union, 25 years after their founding.

Thirty years after regaining their sovereignty, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have become politically stable and economically prosperous members of the European community of nations (Mole 2012). Their success has been remarkable: few would have predicted such a turn of events back in 1985 (Pettai 2019). The prospect of a ‘return to Europe’ provided a focal point for economic and political institution-building, around which elites and societies in the Baltic states could rally. Tough economic reforms were quickly adopted in order to meet the conditions for entry to the EU, while the countries extricated themselves from Russia’s energy infrastructure (Appel and Orenstein 2018). The nation-building process was nested within a broader Europeanization agenda – which also involved rejecting the Soviet/Russian legacy, and portraying Russia itself as the antithesis of European values (Graney 2019).

Meanwhile, the EU itself has changed markedly over the past three decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union coincided with the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty pledging the European Community’s members to greater integration. Since then, however, efforts to strengthen central authority have faltered, while the bloc doubled in size, making decision-making more diffuse. The EU has been shaken by the financial crisis of 2008, the Ukraine crisis of 2014, the refugee crisis of 2015, and the Covid-19 pandemic. This experience underlines the fact that the political project of nation-building is – always and everywhere – a work in progress. The world was changing as the Baltic nations were changing. History waits for no-one: it continues to evolve and pose new challenges. As Rasma Karklins notes in her contribution, national identity is fluid and situationally determined.

Having survived and prevailed through half a century of Soviet occupation, the Baltic states now face new challenges brought about by their integration into the EU. All three countries have seen their populations shrink due to falling birth rates and the departure of young people to work in more prosperous parts of Europe (Park 2015). The population of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania has contracted by 13%, 27%, and 27% respectively since independence (World Population Review 2021).

Freedom House ranks all three Baltic states as free societies, with combined scores for civil and political rights of 94 (Estonia), 89 (Latvia), and 90 (Lithuania) – well ahead of Russia (20), but also edging out Poland (82) and Greece (87) (Freedom House 2021). Similarly, the Varieties of Democracy liberal democracy index ranks them at 85, 75, and 76 respectively, ahead of Russia (11) and Poland (55), and alongside Greece (77) (data for 2018) (V-Dem 2021). As of 2019, the GDP per capita (at current prices) was 23,718 USD in Estonia, 17,819 USD in Latvia, and 19,551 USD in Lithuania – placing them above Russia ($11,595) and Poland ($15,695), and equal to Greece ($19,581) (World Bank 2021).

Despite these very positive economic and political results, a 2013 survey found that respondents in all three places voiced a low sense of pride in the condition of their country’s economy and democracy (Fabrykant 2018, 322–323). How is one to explain the gap between objective measures of performance and subjective perceptions? This paradox is not confined to the Baltic states, but it seems particularly acute there. Both capitalism and democracy bring increased fluidity and insecurity; they also produce unequal results, with winners pulling ahead of the losers. This all leads to anxiety about the future. A particular issue fueling this anxiety in the Baltic states is the declining population and emigration of young people.

From soviet to post-soviet

The triple transition to national sovereignty, democracy, and capitalism happened more quickly, and more successfully, in the Baltic states than in any other former Soviet republics. Moreover, the transition took place with minimal violence. Mikhail Gorbachev backed away from more brutal repression of the Baltic independence movements, in part for fear of a hostile Western reaction. With Moscow on the defensive, the other main threat to a peaceful transition was the possibility of armed resistance by the Russian minority that made up 30% of the population in Estonia and 34% in Latvia. Though Moscow tried to organize opposition to independence among the Russian minorities, its efforts failed. It turned out that most of the Baltic Russians were not opposed to independence, and were certainly not willing to turn to violence to block it.

Two factors were key in explaining the smoothness of the transition. First, there was the fact that the Baltic states had experienced independence between 1918 and 1940 – something that was not true for any of the other Soviet republics. The trauma of lost independence was a factor unifying political actors in all three states. Second, there was the countries’ geographical proximity to Europe, and the willingness of the neighboring states across the Baltic to support their entry to European institutions (Asmus and Nurick 1996). From early on, there was a broad social consensus within the Baltic states on the goals of entry to NATO and the EU, with all three states joining those two organizations in 2004. They went on to join the free movement Schengen zone in 2007 and the single currency Eurozone – Estonia in 2011, Latvia in 2014, and Lithuania in 2015. (On top of which, Estonia won the Eurovision song contest in 2001, and Latvia in 2002.)

To this day, Moscow complains that NATO should not have expanded to the East; that the Baltic states should have followed the examples of Sweden, Finland, and Austria by declaring themselves neutral. In May 1990, the Popular Fronts of the three countries held a Baltic Assembly at which they proposed neutrality – but that was at a time when they were still vulnerable to repression from Moscow (Piirimäe 2020, 12). Neutrality would have assuaged Russia’s security concerns, and would have led to more cooperative relations between Russia and the West. We will never know how that alternative history would have played out. What seems clear is that the political instability in Moscow – culminating in the October 1993 shelling of the Russian parliament and the electoral victory of Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party two months later – convinced Western leaders that there was risk of hardliners returning to power in Russia who would be willing to use force to restore imperial control over the Baltics and other newly-independent states. Bear in mind also that Russian troops did not fully withdraw from the Baltics and former East Germany until 1994. There were 120,000 Soviet troops in the three Baltic states as of 1991 (Simonsen 2001).

Nation-building strategies

The three articles in this issue show the congruity of trajectories of the three Baltic states: they faced common challenges, and for the most part they came up with similar solutions (Purs 2013). At the time of independence there was a widespread fear that, after 50 years of Russification, the distinctive language and culture of the three Baltic nations would shrink – even disappear – within a generation or two. For that reason, all three countries introduced policies aimed at ensuring the revival of the national language and culture. That included coming up with a new historical narrative: condemning the Soviet occupation of 1940 as illegal, and commemorating the suffering of the people, especially the repression and deportations of 1940–1941 and 1945–1953 (Budryte 2005). There has been slow but steady progress toward assimilation of the Russian minorities, and Vello Pettai argues that this is in large part thanks to policies focused on future goals rather than reliving past historical trauma. Moscow protested vigorously over the new historical narratives coming out of the Baltic states – particularly with respect to the Second World War. But this has only sporadically resonated with the Russian minorities in the region – such as the controversy over the relocation of the Bronze Soldier Second World War monument in Tallinn in 2007.

Estonia and Latvia restricted citizenship to the descendants of citizens of the pre-1940 state, while Lithuania granted full citizenship to all its residents. The difference in approach is down to the ethnic arithmetic: Lithuania’s Russian minority was just 7% of the population, followed by a Polish minority of 6%. Estonia and Latvia feared that political enfranchisement of their sizable Russian minorities could derail efforts to preserve the national language and to pursue entry into NATO and the EU. Excluding Russians from citizenship effectively disabled them as political actors (Kudaibergovna 2020). Fairly stringent naturalization procedures were introduced, requiring proficiency in the national language, though these were eased over time, especially for children born after independence. In Estonia and Latvia, the share of non-citizens has fallen below 15%, with the share of stateless people falling to 6% and 11% respectively (as of 2017) (Pettai 2019, 46).

Even in Lithuania, despite the inclusive citizenship policy, the state vigorously promoted use of the Lithuanian language and a new narrative of Lithuanian history. While stressing the victimization of Lithuanians under Soviet occupation, Lithuania also incorporated key elements of the common European Holocaust narrative. In their article, Neringa Klumbytė and Kristina Šliavaitė characterize this as a policy of ‘exclusive inclusion,’ in the sense that the Russian and Polish minorities were granted citizenship but were expected to embrace the Lithuanian national narrative.

Language policy was a second area of controversy (Järve 2002). All three states prioritized the teaching and usage of the official national language. Russian-speakers were, however, allowed to continue sending their children to schools in which the main language of instruction was Russian. Over time, the proportion of classes taught in the official state language in these schools was gradually increased. Few older Russian-speakers learned Estonian or Latvian, but the rising generation of Russian-speakers learned Estonian or Latvian in school. They became effectively bilingual, continuing to speak Russian at home and watching television from Russia. The disappearance of Russian-speaking communities through linguistic assimilation which had been anticipated in the mid-1990s failed to materialize (Laitin 1998). In Latvia, as of 2011, 37% of the residents still spoke Russian at home, but a 2014 survey found that 77% of non-Latvians had some proficiency in Latvian (Karklins 2021). More so than Estonia, regional clusters of exclusive Russian-speakers persist in Latvia, and Russian is more common as a language in workplaces, in part because of continued close business ties with Russia. The Harmony Center party attracts a lot of support from ethnic Russians: ethnic Russian Nils Ušakovs was the mayor of Riga between 2009 and 2019, while Tatjana Ždanoka was elected to the European Parliament. Nevertheless, a 2012 referendum on declaring Russian a second official language failed to pass. In Estonia, Jüri Ratas, chair of the Center Party, which represents the Russian-speaking minority, became prime minister in 2016 as head of a coalition government.

New challenges

A new worry is the arrival of migrants from other cultures – including refugees from Syria and elsewhere, who have been pressed on the Baltic states by Brussels. The numbers remain very small – though the issue has been politically prominent, and helped fuel the rise of far-right Euroskeptic political parties. In March 2019, 18% of Estonians voted for the radical right EKRE party, and they entered the governing coalition. Polls show that anti-gay sentiment remains stronger in the Baltic states than elsewhere in Europe. The Eurobarometer poll found that only 49% of Latvians, 53% of Estonians, and 53% of Lithuanian respondents felt that LGBT people should have the same rights as heterosexual people, well below the EU average of 76% (Eurobarometer 2019) (though Riga was host for the Europride event in 2015).

All three states have faced problems with corruption – Latvia in particular (Karklins 2005). Corruption is a double-edged sword: it helps to forge political coalitions amongst elites, and cuts across political divisions over language policy or historical memory. Conversely, it corrodes economic efficiency and democratic accountability – and may serve as a vector for increased Russian influence. Estonia ranks 17^th out of 180 countries in the Transparency International Index for 2020, with a score of 75/100, while Lithuania is 35^th (60 points) and Latvia 42^nd (57 points, one point ahead of Poland) (Transparency International 2021).

The Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ongoing conflict in Donbas rang alarm bells in all of Russia’s ‘near abroad’ (which Moscow is now calling the ‘new abroad’). A Crimean scenario of Russian military intervention to protect Russian minorities from alleged violations of their rights by ‘fascist’ governments suddenly became a feasible scenario, which governments incorporated into their contingency planning. The ethnic Russian enclave in the Latgale region in eastern Latvia looked particularly vulnerable. The main policy response was a stepped-up NATO military presence in the Baltic states – which drew further vituperation from Moscow, and increased Russian military deployment in the Kaliningrad enclave (Zapfe 2017).

Rasma Karklins’ title suggests that we still need a question mark after ‘success’ when it comes to evaluating the progress in national self-determination in the Baltic states. Having won and lost independence once already in the twentieth century, one can understand the cautious optimism of these authors. Deep historical forces are at work: economic, geopolitical, and cultural; and national evolution, whether it be consolidation or decline, is a generations-long process.