A Brief Political History of the Baltic States

Political discourse in the Baltic states is marked by debates on the past as much as on the future. The 1980s drive to break from the Soviet Union, driven by an overwhelming sense of historical injustice, began with small ‘calendar demonstrations’ marking significant dates in Baltic history. Key domestic and international disputes are based on contested interpretations of history. This is particularly visible each spring in Latvia. On 16 March a shrinking number of Latvian Waffen SS Legion veterans, along with several hundred nationalist supporters, march from the historic Dom Church in the Old Town of Riga to the towering Freedom Monument, the symbol of Latvia’s independent statehood. Ther…

Foreign and Security Policy

In early 2014 the foreign and security policy discourse in the Baltic region was transformed as a resurgent and assertive Russia annexed Crimea and launched covert operations in eastern Ukraine.1 Observers were quick to point out that events in Ukraine eerily paralleled the 1940 occupation of the Baltic states. The traditional security concerns about Russian intentions in the region that the Baltic states had increasingly suppressed over the previous 20 years once again rushed to the surface. The post-existential era of Baltic foreign and security policy that had marked the decade that followed accession to the EU and NATO seemed to have come to an end.

Book Review: Britain and Ireland: The Re-invention of the European Radical Right: Populism, Regionalism and the Italian Lega Nord

Civil Society, Corruption and Ethnic Relations

In 2007 the Estonian government began to relocate a highly contentious Soviet era war memorial from the centre of Tallinn to a nearby military cemetery. The ‘Bronze Soldier’ was erected in 1947 to honour the memory of the fallen Soviet soldiers who had fought in the battles that liberated Tallinn from German forces during the Second World War. At that time it was known as the ‘Monument to the Liberators of Tallinn’. An eternal flame was added in 1964. Following independence, Estonian authorities rededicated it to all soldiers who had died during the war and dismantled the eternal flame in an attempt to depoliticise the memorial. For ethnic Estonians, however, it remained an acrimonious symb…

Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union

The shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the new Baltic front

Aliide Naylor is a British freelance journalist who moved to St. Petersburg to take an MA at the European University, and then stayed in Russia to work at The Moscow Times as well as the state-fina...

The curious case of the Latvian Greens

In Latvia everything began with the movement to save the environment. (Dainis Ivāns 19881) The natural environment has been central to Latvian identity and culture since the mid-nineteenth-century ...

David J. Smith, David J. Galbreath & Geoffrey Swain (eds), From Recognition to Restoration: Latvia's History as a Nation-State. On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics

David J. Smith, David J. Galbreath & Geoffrey Swain (eds), From Recognition to Restoration: Latvia's History as a Nation-State. On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imaginati...

Elections, Referendums and Parties

By the end of 2014, the Baltic states had held a total of 19 parliamentary, 19 municipal and 3 cycles of European Parliament elections. Lithuania, which elects its president via a national popular vote, had additionally held six presidential polls. Another 23 referendums have been held since August 1991. The rigidity of the Lithuanian and Latvian electoral and judicial institutions have been tested by the 2004 impeachment of Lithuanian president, Rolandas Paksas, and the subsequent early presidential election, as well as a referendum on the recall of Latvia’s parliament in the summer of 2011 and the following early election. Estonia is recognised as an electoral innovator, being the first s…

Debates on European Integration. A Reader

Explaining the Electoral Failure of Extreme-Right Parties in Estonia and Latvia

Extreme-right political parties have achieved significant electoral success in Europe in recent years. This paper considers why this electoral success has not been replicated in contemporary Estonia and Latvia. The paper begins with a discussion of the necessary background conditions for the success of extreme-right movements, finding that they do largely exist in Estonia and Latvia. The paper then moves on to map the rising levels of extreme-right mobilisation among both titular and Russian-speaking parts of the population. We examine two hypotheses to explain the electoral failure of extreme-right parties: (1) The institutional hypothesis argues that the party and electoral laws check ext…

European elections in eight new EU member states

Cheng, K.C., 2003. Growth and recovery in Mongolia during transition. Working Paper 03/217,International Monetary Fund.Freedom House. 2004. Freedom in the world. !http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2004/table2004.pdfO.Globe International, 2004. Free and fair: a report on research conducted among media outlets and theelectorate. Globe International, Ulan Bator.Soros Foundation, 2004. Report on the 2004 electoral campaign (in Mongolian). Soros Foundation, UlanBator.doi: 10.1016/j.electstud.2005.03.003

Flipping burgers or flipping pages? Student employment and academic attainment in post-Soviet Latvia

Latvian higher education has undergone a dramatic transition since 1991. This study employs a survey of nearly 1000 social science students studying in 13 different institutions in Latvia to consider the impact of the increase in the number of students who are working while studying. Evidence indicates employment has a strong and significant negative impact on school performance, and the negative impact increases as weekly hours worked increase. This manifests itself through reduced class attendance and reduced time spent in independent study. Finally, we find that the probability of student employment is most significantly affected by the availability of financial aid, gender, ethnicity, a…

Latvia: 20 Years Stability … or Stagnation?

Fraught with the legacy of a former Soviet Republic, Latvia has had to (re-)establish democracy, market economy and a nation state simultaneously. Today, Latvia is a consolidated democracy, backed by a vibrant civic sphere. Yet its political parties and parliament still lack capacity and societal embeddedness. Short-lived government coalitions have failed to facilitate more investment in competitive economic sectors, higher education and research. Key policy challenges include economic development, mitigating a dramatic demographic crunch and managing complicated relations with Russia.

The 2015 Latvian Presidency of the Council of the European Union

Elected and Unelected Institutions

Having broken away from the Soviet Union, the Baltic states rapidly moved towards new constitutional orders more in line with the demands of the new democratic and market-economy framework that they were committed to building. The aim was to construct the major elected and unelected political institutions that would allow them to join the principal European organisations and usher in an era of boring normality. From what was a similar starting point, the Baltic states chose very different constitutional frameworks (although the demands of integration with the Western world has led to some institutional convergence). Nevertheless all three have largely achieved their ambition of making polit…

Economic, Social and Welfare Issues

In late 2008 the three Baltic states were thrust into the heart of an intensely polarising international public debate on strategies to tackle the growing global economic crisis. The previous four years, following accession to the European Union (EU) in 2004, had witnessed rapid economic growth across the region, indeed the three recorded the highest GDP growth in the EU. Banks eased lending restrictions, foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows surged and Baltic businesses and consumers binged on cheap, readily available credit. Hubristic politicians increasingly talked of the inevitability of economic convergence with Western Europe. However, a gradual slowdown from late 2007 declined into…