An instinctive cooperationist: Lennart Meri and international organizations

It seems that Lennart Meri’s faith in institutions was a matter of instinct. But is instinct anything more than using a combination of all of one’s senses, information and experiences?

In his acclaimed novel Rahvusvaheline mees (International Man) Mihkel Mutt describes what life was like in the Meriled Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the last days of the Estonian SSR. The narrator is Fabian, a public servant who often is thrown for a loop when the Chief delegates to him duties that often seem impossible or simply incomprehensible.
One of the assignments is an order to “get with the World Plan” as soon as possible. Fabian does not know, however, exactly what this World Plan is. So as not to let the Chief down, he does some digging, but to no avail. Finally he musters the courage to ask the Chief himself. The answer from the Chief is that World Plan isn’t an official term; it just came to him off the top of his head when he was gazing at a rainbow one evening after a thunderstorm. “That was when the World Plan took shape for me,” said the Chief, deep in thought. “It seemed to me that the rainbow connected reality and poetry, our present and where we want to end up. It seemed to me that if we followed that rainbow, we would one day arrive at where we were going.”
In 1990, where Estonia wanted to end up was anything but clear. As the first post-war Estonian foreign minister, it was Meri who would inherit the task of laying down the basic objectives of Estonian foreign policy and build a foreign service. All this, of course, in a complicated situation – the Republic of Estonia was not yet legally reinstated, with no country having re-recognised it and no diplomatic relations with countries or organisations.
Yet Meri had a clear vision from the very beginning as to what those objectives should be. His personal life experience, his very Estonian respect for truth and justice, and his seeming omniscience convinced him that the closer the small state was intertwined with the big ones, the safer things would be for the little guy. As foreign minister, he put this view into words; as president of the Republic, he strengthened it, in cooperation with the government; and after his term ended, he continued to pursue this policy as a member of the Convention on the Future of Europe.
He was less interested in the theory of international relations than he was in real life – he was, at the end of the day, a historian and experienced traveller, a practical man who carried his proverbial tools with him. But to borrow from theories to analyse him, Lennart Meri was what theoreticians would call a cooperationist. A cooperationist is someone who believes that by cooperating with other countries within international institutions, the state could defend its interests better than if it merely dealt with its own affairs and only cooperated with others in the short term and for tactical considerations.
Neorealists and neoliberals
Theoreticians of international relations fall in two categories: neorealists and neoliberals. Neorealists believe that since there is no supreme power in the international arena that would keep order – in other words, anarchy reigns -each state ultimately competes for its own survival. In the best case scenario for neorealists, international institutions have but a supporting role, as these institutions only mirror the real balance of power. Whoever is large and mighty will get what they want inside an international organisation just as well as they can outside it. The neorealists believe that countries use institutions only for tactical reasons and primarily in order to resolve more effectively economic and environmental issues pertaining to countries. From the perspective of the neorealists, the international order is kept by countries by employing either a policy of balancing or band-wagoning (creating temporary alliances). The other school of thought is that of the neo-liberals, who are also termed institutionalists. Like the neorealists, the neoliberals believe that anarchy is the reigning order in the world. But as the name suggests, the institutionalist school sees international organisations as playing a central role in keeping anarchy under control. Instead of temporary alliances followed by rifts and rows, institutionalists favour cooperation as a way of coming to terms with the battle for power. International organisations give countries the opportunity to make peace with each other, and to do so in the knowledge that the rules established by the organisations themselves protect countries. Cooperation thus becomes a beneficial option.
One leading institutionalist, Princeton University professor Robert Keohane, has identified four ways in which institutions can create security by implementing rules. First of all, membership in an international organisation makes the relations between member states closer, creates lasting relations and thereby “lengthens the shadow of the future”. This means that it is in the interests of states to act properly and honour rules. If they do not, others will soon learn of violations and other member states will not necessarily be as forthcoming to the violators the next time around.
Second, membership in international organisations increases mutual information interchange. This in turn increases transparency, so that those who violate the rules will be more conspicuous and those who can be harmed by violations can mount a timely defence.
Third, membership reduces the expense and effort which each member state or party must outlay for enforcing treaties and agreements. It all comes cheaper.
Fourth, membership allows states to take part more easily in the process of striking compromise – making concessions in one issue in exchange for support in another.
If we look at Lennart Meri – one of the most instrumental players in Estonian foreign policy – in light of Keohane’s theory, he appears to be an instinctual cooperationist – someone who ascribed a central role to institutions. Already his earliest foreign appearances as president emphasised the importance of membership in the external European Union and NATO to Estonian security – these are goals that naturally reflected the positions held by all of the governments of the Republic of Estonia throughout history. But his interest in cooperation is more in evidence in the opening years of his career as a politician, especially during his time as Minister of Foreign Affairs, when he travelled the world, reminding his various audiences that Estonia expected or even demanded to be accepted back into Europe’s fold. And he did all this without mincing words, as in Paris in November 1990: “The Baltic States are currently amputated from Europe. If this is a state of moral gangrene, I ask you: what will be amputated next? If it is more convenient for Europe to be sick, where is the limit to the disease?”
Lennart Meri attempted to reference the feeling of solidarity prevalent in a family – no matter what kind of institutional form was required to make such a feeling of belongingness a reality. For a feeling of belongingness would increase security.
The fact that more transparency protects a state was self-evident to an “information junkie” such as Lennart Meri. For this reason, he was always willing to meet with international missions and foreign observers who came to study the legal situation of Estonia’s ethnic minorities. In close cooperation with the government cabinet, it was Meri’s job to submit a request to the Council of Europe for a legal expert assessment of the Aliens’ Act – Meri understood that in this issue, information was a weapon – at that time a weapon being used against Estonia, but which could also be used to mould Estonia’s own strongest counterarguments. Come and see for yourself, we have nothing to hide, was his message. And since it was clearly easier for Estonia to administer agreements with international organisations than to deal with each individual member state separately, Meri can be seen as a cooperationist by Keohane’s third criterion as well.
The fourth and final advantage of membership of institutions, as seen by Keohane, is the fact that it allows different problems to be linked, and compromises to be made or to be brokered. Estonia also uses this advantage to the extent that it is beneficial and possible. But as far as the major issues of the early 1990s are concerned, such as withdrawal of Russian troops and the so-called human rights question, it was namely in Estonia’s interests not to link these issues. The two topics were uncoupled immediately after Minister Jüri Luik began leading negotiations between Estonia and Russia in autumn 1992, prompting a loud outcry from the other side. But had linking the topics been in Estonia’s interests, Meri would have been sure to have taken advantage of it.
Sources of Lennart Meri’s faith in cooperation
Where did Meri’s pro-cooperation conviction come from? Whence his understanding that the little guy had to get invited into the club of the big and old (or in the absence of interest, simply push its way in)? After all, there was no shortage of leaders of such newly independent states who at every turn in the road instead emphasised the special historical character of their nations, or a unique opportunity to find the mythical “third way”.
Today we might think that every Estonian with a brain thinks as Meri did back then. But let us not forget the times: back in 1990, when even the thought of Estonian independence required a lot of imagination, talk of an Estonia free of foreign troops and member of all of the major international organisations might prompt concerned bystanders to suggest you have your head examined.
No, Meri’s instinctual faith in cooperation was based on three things. First of all, his personal experience as the son of a diplomat of the Republic of Estonia working in complicated times: that it is better to stick together than go it alone. It should be remembered that Georg Meri represented the Republic of Estonia in Paris and Berlin at a time when the Nazis had already come to power through democratic means and when little attention was being paid to the concerns of one small state.
This fraught situation did not escape Lennart Meri. He saw how his father tried to make Estonia’s voice heard in France. He felt personally, in Berlin, what treatment was accorded a boy who refused to shout out the required slogans or use the required gestures to salute the swastika hanging in the classroom. School authorities made excuses for him, citing the immunity reserved for diplomats and their families, but Lennart Meri’s classmates did not fare so well.
Another thing that convinced Meri to support international cooperation was his very Estonian belief in truth and justice. Numerous representatives of international organisations and human rights missions that visited Estonia in the early 1990s with the goal of familiarising themselves with the idea of national legal continuity have referred with amazement and some degree of impatience to the Estonians’ legalistic attitude toward their past. They used to even tell jokes in the old days about how Estonians obeyed Soviet laws with Germanic precision. But precisely this inborn, Protestant belief in rules, laws and legal norms had its influence on Meri: the belief that power protects the large, but law protects the weak.
The third thing that made Meri believe in institutions was how well-informed he was. Those who knew him well know that he kept up with the press in all the languages he knew. Lennart Meri was so well informed that he was known on occasion to startle some or another Estonian ambassador with an unexpected telephone call to discuss a key article that had been published in the diplomat’s country that day and which the ambassador herself had not yet had the chance to read.
At nights he always listened to Radio Svoboda. Living in Estonia, he was better informed of the domestic politics of foreign countries than the citizens of those same countries. It was an old habit. He had built his second shortwave radio when he returned from having been deported to Siberia, using old Wehrmacht RV 12 P 2000 crystals which were everywhere in Estonia in those days. He had a full overview which allowed him to see the Big Picture, to connect the dots and to draw the relevant political conclusions.
On the basis of all this, it seems that Lennart Meri’s faith in institutions was a matter of instinct. But is instinct anything more than using, in combination, all of one’s senses, information and experiences?
When you’re lucky, and the leaders know how to dance.
After nine months in the ministry, Fabian decided to try his hand elsewhere. After leaving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he did some deep thinking about Estonian history and what he had learned during his stint working for the Chief: “What is there to be learned from the Estonian example? Well, for starters, that small nations can become free even today, and not only in fairy tales – if they are consistent enough, if they are on the periphery of an empire, if they are lucky, and if their leaders know how to dance.”
And Lennart Meri was a master of the dance.