Diplomacy among Estonians: Lennart Meri’s unique contribution in 1991

Lennart Meri understood both how difficult it was to bridge the gap between Arnold Rüütel and Ernst Jaakson and how important it was to do it.

A true diplomat must be able to establish contacts, take part in conversations with those who disagree with him, and find points of common ground that can open the way to an agreement. Typically, he is dealing with other officials like himself who represent different countries. But more frequently than many might imagine, his most important task is to find creative ways to overcome divisions within his own government and society. And sometimes doing that can make more of a difference to the course of history than events more widely understood as diplomatic triumphs.
Lennart Meri was involved in many of the latter – indeed, they are chronicled in other parts of this issue of Diplomaatia – but he was also instrumental in one of the former, albeit one that so far has not gained either him or the other principals involved the credit they deserve. But both because it made such a fundamental contribution to the recovery of Estonian independence and because I had the privilege of watching it “up close and personal” as the sports writers say, I want to take this opportunity to recount one such instance of diplomacy among Estonians and Lennart Meri’s role in that.
Because Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania recovered their de facto independence on virtually the same day in August 1991, because the three were recognised together by virtually all foreign countries, and because Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius chose to name their first ambassadors to the countries where the representatives of the pre-1940 governments were still in place, it is all too easy now to forget that only a few months before those amazing developments, the three Baltic governments had very different relationships with these Baltic representatives – and this difference threatened to have the most negative consequences for Estonia in the first instance but for her two Baltic partners as well.
Lennart Meri played a key role in changing that, but to understand both what he was up against and just what he did, more than a little background is required.
Non-recognition policy and its problems
When the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic countries in 1940, the United States and many other Western countries not only denounced the move but elaborated what came to be known as non-recognition policy, the doctrine that the U.S. and other governments which shared its views on this point did not “recognise the forcible incorporation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the Soviet Union.”
At least for Washington, that policy meant that senior officials could not travel to the Baltic states as long as they were occupied, that maps issued by the American government had to feature a note specifying that the United States did not recognise Soviet claims in this region, and that the U.S. would continue to view the diplomats of the last pre-occupation governments in the United States as the legitimate representatives of the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian people.
It is the last point that concerns us here. From 1940 to 1991, the United States maintained ties with the Estonian consulate in New York as well as with the legations of Latvia and Lithuania in Washington, D.C. (The U.S. never recognised or had any dealings with the various Baltic governments in exile.) The diplomats at these posts were kept on the diplomatic list of the U.S. Each of them received national day messages from the U.S. And these Baltic representatives were regularly received by officials at the U.S. Department of State and invited to all functions at the White House and in the Congress to which other heads of mission were.
When this system was established, no one – not in the U.S. government nor at the Baltic missions – expected it to last very long. Both expected that there would be a peace conference after the end of World War II and that the Baltic countries would either be restored or their status otherwise dealt with at such a meeting. But there was no peace conference, and the Cold War, initiated by Soviet aggressiveness, had the effect of making non-recognition policy a far longer-lasting thing than anyone expected. And that in turn meant that several provisions of non-recognition policy cast a far longer shadow than their authors had thought.
One of those arrangements concerned financing, another concerned the status of these missions, and the third concerned the appointment of diplomats. When the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic countries, the United States seized the assets of the three countries held in American banks in order to deny Moscow any chance of gaining access to them. These assets included sovereign gold holdings as well as bonds and currency accounts, but the U.S. decided in conversation with the Baltic diplomats that the missions could not touch the gold but would be supported by the cash accounts or later interest on and sale of negotiable securities.
The system worked very well for 50 years. Each year, the head of each of the missions prepared a budget, and the State Department then directed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to disburse the funds to the accounts of the three missions. It had to be modified only once, in the 1980s, when the Lithuanian legation ranout of liquid assets and had to be funded as a line item in the annual budgets of the Estonian and Latvian missions. (In the event, the Estonian consulate contributed to Lithuania’s needs for only two years, while the Latvian legation did so for almost ten. A few years ago, Lithuania agreed to pay back the money Latvia had provided.)
Such an arrangement may seem arcane, but it was designed to maintain a very important principle: the Baltic missions were, like those of all other countries, to be financed exclusively by the governments of the countries they represented, even if their home countries remained under occupation and could not in fact support them directly. Like the others, they were not to take money from or be otherwise supported by co-nationals or co-ethnics living in the United States. And thus however close their ties with these two groups might be and however much these groups might assume otherwise, the Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian missions did not represent them but rather the countries whose independence had never ended de jure and would, it was assumed, eventually be restored de facto.
The third set of these arrangements concerned the appointment of officials at these missions. Initially, when it was assumed that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would quickly resume their proper place in the world after the end of World War II, this was not viewed as a serious problem. Those diplomats in place in 1940 would still be there when their countries resumed their proper place on the political map of the world.
But as the occupation dragged on, that assumption was undermined by the actuarial tables. Senior diplomats retired or died, and junior diplomats become “senior” ones. As a result, three interrelated questions arose: first, could heads of mission promote officers from within? No one had any difficulty with that. Second, could those who had been appointed by the pre-1940 government be transferred from one country to another either by the senior Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian diplomat abroad or by agreement among the heads of mission? Again, no one in Washington objected. And third, what would Washington or any other Western government do if there were no more diplomats appointed by the pre-1940 governments available to serve in these missions?
That issue too arose in the early 1980s when the last of the pre-1940 Lithuanian diplomats serving in Washington died or retired. If the U.S. had maintained its existing rules, there would have been no one to serve there because none of the senior Lithuanian diplomats serving in Europe were willing or able to move to Washington. And consequently, the State Department, in the person of Lawrence Eagleburger, who then was the assistant secretary of state for European affairs, came up with a novel answer to this problem.
Washington, Eagleburger said, would recognise as a representative of the pre-1940 Lithuanian government someone appointed to the Lithuanian diplomatic service after that time by a senior diplomat who had been named to his post before the Soviet occupation. That opened the way for Lithuania to dispatch Stasys Lozoraitis, who had been appointed to the Lithuanian service by his father after World War II, to serve as charge in Washington.
By the late 1980s, the three Baltic countries had three remarkable men serving as the heads of their respective missions in the United States — Ernst Jaakson as Estonia’s consul general in New York, Anatol Dinbergs as Latvia’s charge in Washington, and Lozoraitis – three men who were as different among themselves as were and are the countries which they represented.
Three representatives
The three merit a composite and comparative biography, but there was one difference among them which by 1990-1991 appeared likely to play a fateful role. While all three men viewed themselves first and foremost as representatives of their respective countries, each of them had a very different view about their relationships with the Baltic diasporas and even more with the national movements emerging in their homelands.
Dinbergs and Lozoraitis not only maintained close ties with the Latvian and Lithuanian diasporas but moved quickly to establish ties with the new political forces in Riga and Vilnius. Each believed that the recovery of independence had become a matter of months, not years, and by the end of 1990, each had become de facto, if not de jure – Washington would never have tolerated that – the representative of their national governments or at least the independence-minded part of their governments to the United States.
Ernst Jaakson was both more cautious in his approach and more careful in keeping within the rules. Perhaps more than the other two, he viewed the diaspora of his homeland as a saving remnant, as the repository of Estonian values that could if carefully protected eventually return to the shores of the Baltic. Consequently, he developed especially close ties with Estonian Americans, always worked to defend them from attacks by Communist officials in Tallinn, and consulted with them on how best to react to the growth of the independence movement in Estonia. And at the same time, he invariably acted within the rules of diplomacy and the special rules of non-recognition policy.
Both the influence of the Estonian diaspora and Mr. Jaakson’s own deeply-held views on how he should act as the representative of Estonia’s legal continuity kept him from developing the kind of contacts with Estonians in Estonia like those his Baltic colleagues had in their countries. By late 1990 and early 1991, the differences among the three had become a matter of concern for some in Washington.
Several officials at that time, including the author of this note, felt that if Mr. Jaakson did not expand his connections with Estonian government and especially pro-independence groups within that republic and thus enter into a kind of relationship like those Dr. Dinbergs and Mr. Lozoraitis had with their countries, the absence of such links in the Estonian case might be invoked by those opposing any move to recognise Baltic independence de facto once that issue arose to delay or even prevent such a step.
But there were some very serious obstacles that had to be overcome if Mr. Jaakson were to take such a step. On the one hand, the situation in Tallinn was very different from that in Riga and Vilnius: the Estonian government was not so much penetrated by the independence movement as confronting it in the form of the Congress of Estonians. And on the other, the Estonian diaspora and Mr. Jaakson himself could never forget let alone forgive the attacks on the emigration – including suggestions that the emigres were working for Western intelligence services — that had gone out over the signature of the Chairman of the Estonian SSR Supreme Soviet, Arnold Rüütel.
Unless a way could be found for Mr. Rüütel to disown these statements or for Mr. Jaakson to ignore them – two things that seemed long shots at best — there could be no movement and consequently Estonia and the Estonian mission in the United States would remain the odd men out, with potentially fateful consequences not only for that country but for her neighbours and the world.
“Negotiations” between Estonians
Fortunately, one man who understood both of the other actors in this drama was on the scene and able to promote the kind of diplomatic resolution that no one else could see at the time: Lennart Meri.
In early 1991, Lennart Meri was serving as foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Edgar Savisaar. Like all who knew anything about Mr. Jaakson, Meri had an almost worshipful attitude toward the man who was on his way to becoming the longest serving diplomat in the history of the world. And the Estonian foreign minister also recognised both how difficult it would be to build a bridge between Estonia’s president Arnold Rüütel and Mr. Jaakson and also how essential it would be for just such a bridge to be constructed if Estonia was to be in a position to grasp independence when it came.
The “negotiations” if one may call them that took the form of faxes flying back and forth between the Estonian foreign ministry on Toompea and the State Department in Washington where Mr. Jaakson was sitting in my office when I was serving as desk officer for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. As everyone understood, Mr. Rüütel could not simply disown documents that bore his signature without risking that Moscow or its minions in Estonia would move against him or undermining his status with Estonians as an effective leader capable of navigating the difficulties of the revolutionary year of 1991.
And as everyone also understood, Mr. Jaakson could not accept anything less than a repudiation of the charges that had been contained in documents bearing Mr. Rüütel’s signature. To do so would in his mind have meant a betrayal not only of what he saw as the saving remnant of the Estonian nation, the diaspora in the West, but also of what he saw as his duties as the representative of the pre-1940 government and the principle of the legal continuity of Estonian statehood.
After several false starts, a formula was found in Tallinn, almost certainly as a result of the good efforts of Lennart Meri. In the event, Mr. Rüütel sent a message to Mr. Jaakson pointing out the following fact: under communist occupation, Mr. Rüütel said, his signature had been placed on many documents the contents of which he had not prepared and with which he did not agree. Among such documents, Mr. Rüütel continued, was the one Estonians abroad objected so much to.
That arrangement, brokered by Lennart Meri, not only saved the dignity of both men but opened the way for three other developments. First, Mr. Jaakson published in Vaba Eesti Sõna his remarkable full-page explanation of why he had accepted Mr. Rüütel’s statement of explanation and why other Estonians both in the homeland and abroad should as well. Mr. Jaakson’s statement, which by the way deserves to be far better known in Estonia than it is, marked the beginning of the recovery of Estonian national unity, of the rapprochement of the several Estonias that had emerged as a result of the occupation.
Second, several weeks later, Mr. Jaakson was able to host Mr. Rüütel during his visit to Washington, not only accompanying him to the offices of various government officials – but not it will be remembered to the White House where as Mr. Jaakson understood he could not be present with someone holding an office in occupied Estonia – but also organising a diplomatic reception at the Mayflower Hotel.
That reception, the first that the then 85-year-old Mr. Jaakson had ever given as a diplomat, created both controversy within the Estonian American community and opened the door still wider to the recovery of Estonian independence. Most Estonian Americans understood the importance and justice of Mr. Jaakson’s actions, but some activists opposed the meeting, warning Estonian Americans to stay away. Some did, but most did not. And together with representatives of the U.S. Congress and government and diplomats from friendly countries, they marked a breakthrough to Baltic independence.
I will never forget that evening. Indeed, the picture that means more to me than any other from my official life was taken that night: it shows me shaking hands with Mr. Rüütel who is flanked by Estonian foreign minister Lennart Meri and Estonia’s consul general in New York Ernst Jaakson. Their coming together, something that would not have been possible without the understanding and efforts of Lennart Meri, was and remains for me a signal event.
And indeed, the success of Lennart Meri in pulling all this off meant that when Estonia effectively recovered its independence in August 1991, there was no diplomatic space between Tallinn, on the one hand, and Riga and Vilnius, on the other. That is the diplomatic triumph of Lennart Meri that I wanted to relate, and it is no less a triumph because it is not widely known and no less a remarkable act of diplomacy even though it involved in the very first instance diplomatic work among Estonians rather than between them and the rest of the world.