Lennart Meri, diplomat

Lennart’s resolute activity on the international scene left the world with an image of Estonia as an old Western democracy with a deeply entwined intellectual and cultural connection with the rest of Europe; a country that takes part in solving problems; a successful nation, not a grey and ordinary one.

This article is about Lennart Meri, president and foreign minister, on the occasion of whose passing practically all of the members of Estonia’s diplomatic corps bowed their heads in memory. I hope that this article will serve as a contribution to the edifice which will be laid by Meri’s legacy. I always called President Meri by his first name, except for a few extremely formal occasions, and I hope the reader will not take offence if I do so here as well.
Lennart was of course not an ordinary diplomat. He was above all a politician, but he wielded the art of diplomatic handicraft like a professional. Unlike an ordinary diplomat, however, he wrote his messages himself. With his work, Lennart created an area where domestic and foreign policy met. Figuratively speaking, he built Estonia, promoted Estonia abroad and, on the basis of the response, he could influence changes within Estonia. These changes allowed Estonia to fit better into the democratic world. Like a sculptor, he carved Estonia into a more suitable form for Europe, but he also carved Europe to be more suitable for Estonia. He did not let Europe sink into convenient stereotypes, but rather warned against simple-mindedness. One of his favourite phrases: they say communism is dead but no one has shown me its corpse.
The biggest mystery about Lennart is where he got his skills.How could a person who had lived his whole life in the Soviet Union retain such a strong sense of Europe? The years spent in Paris and Berlin had been in his distant childhood. Lennart did what we did abroad with such self-assurance that it seemed that he had never lived anywhere but Paris and Berlin. Once, when already foreign minister, he said that he had been preparing for the position for his whole life. That was no exaggeration. His war with the USSR was one man’s battle for truthful information. He has described how he tried to build his first shortwave radios already when in exile in Siberia. No one remembers seeing Lennart without a shortwave in the 1970s and 1980s: every night, without fail, he listened to Radio Free Europe, BBC and Deutsche Welle.
Lennart was a diplomat his whole life long. His sophisticated skill of playing the Soviet authorities for fools allowed him to keep from marching in lockstep with Soviet reality. He tried to build himself and the Estonian people a little corner of what was almost Europe. His books, speeches and interviews could well have been from Western European papers, but for a few substituted words. As a man of film and letters, he constructed an Estonian history of dreams, secured and preserved the national foundation, and kept national idealism from breaking down during the difficult communist times. And when the Russian colossus started swaying, the Estonian people were able to instantly get down to building a democratic Estonia, a Western Estonia. They needed the diplomatic skills of someone just like Lennart, not some ex-communist Soviet diplomat.
The Estonian Institute
Of course, the first true contact with international diplomacy could only come about during the Gorbachev reforms, when captive nations were starting to breathe a little easier. Unbelievably early, back when Indrek Toome’s government was still in power, Lennart saw the need to start building a network of embassies which, he was convinced, might come in handy very shortly indeed. Lennart, a man who had been to Siberia twice, had no time to mess around. He was annoyed by people who did not sense each new opportunity in the air. He decided to start building a foreign ministry for Estonia, using his role as a leader of the cultural community. In order to protect Estonia’s interests, information, a network of missions and suitable people were needed. And it was clear that defending Estonia’s interests could not serve as a public rationale for this step.
Lennart was aware that Estonian culture needed to be promoted abroad and there was nothing more natural than to create a network of “information centres”, using the Finnish Institute or the Germans’ Goethe Institute as a model. The communists in power nodded their heads self importantly, yes, yes, of course. The times were a-changing and no one wanted to admit that they had never heard of the Goethe Institute.
And so the Estonian Institute was born, which to a casual observer consisted of two fairly dingy rooms in the old political educational building on Sakala street, the later site of the Vanalinnastuudio theatre. In fact it was the cover for feverish activity on the part of Lennart and many of his ideological brethren. Information centres started appearing in many a world capital: naturally in Finland, but also in Bonn, Stockholm, Paris, Brussels. The directors of these centres would become our future diplomats and ambassadors. These information centres became key players in the battle for restoration of Estonian independence and, after restoration, the embassies. Nothing had to be built from scratch. Everything was already in place, in disguise.
Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
When Lennart began his work – initially as a minister in the Savisaar government, his title was still Foreign Minister of the Estonian SSR. When he finished, Estonia was an independent state, member of the UN and Lennart was the foreign minister of that country, plenipotentiary. The Foreign Ministry was in the beginning a fairly chaotic institution, with the very young and inexperienced “Lennart’s kids” in the role of his advisors and aides. We had no idea of what representing a country might entail. The majority of us had never seen a real live diplomat before. The only ready-made diplomat was Lennart himself, our boss.
He seemed tailor-made for the role of Foreign Minister. He had the right spirit, and the right attitude. Funny, but attitude says a lot about the country a diplomat actually represents: whether he is from the former eastern Europe or western Europe, a former apparatchik or not, educated or uneducated, does he work from rote or with passion. Lennart was in terms of attitude a western European, no one dared make the otherwise ordinary observation that “Estonia was just a small former Soviet republic” in his presence. Lennart was especially vexed by the big important Russians in Moscow whose idea of a Soviet republic official generally differed from his, and who did not see Lennart as someone from “their” camp.
The belief in the Westernness of Estonians was important, as our task was to prove that a European heart had survived underneath a communist shell, and would start beating immediately, if only the occupation would end. In his speeches and remarks, Lennart differentiated as if surgically between foreign occupation and the Estonian people – all that it wanted was entree into Europe. Meri knew the Estonian people very well – and knew that although we were in Europe, becoming Europeans would take a good deal more time. But that was not important at the given moment. Lennart was often the only Estonian known to other heads of state and he left the impression that Estonians were all like him. Today it would have been harder to pull that sort of thing off, as Estonia is “on the grid” information-wise. The responsibility for maintaining Estonia’s image is more evenly divided and the responsibility of individual people, be they editors in chief or local leaders, is greater.
One of the most complicated tasks for a diplomat is to get the attention of important people, and convey to them your country’s message.
Lennart didn’t believe in making chit-chat, nor did he believe in mechanically going down a list of talking points. Whenever he met someone new, Lennart started by talking about some important issue, some serious issue, but not necessarily one with any connection with Estonia. Foreign diplomats would always prick up their ears. Then a singular phenomenon occurred. Had Lennart started by talking about our positions, the other side would have realised that he wanted something. But the fact that he addressed other problems left the partner with the impression that Lennart respected him, considered her an interesting person and wanted to get his take on world affairs. Inviting his partner thus into his intellectual parlour, he would manage to cover Estonian foreign policy business of the day as well. There is a oft-told story about Lennart taking out his pen and making an X on Bush Sr’s globe. Well, the X was not on Estonia, as the popular version has it, but on a river in Siberia. He was explaining to Bush, an avid fisherman, that the rivers there were especially diversely stocked.
When Lennart knew a person, he could modify his approach to suit that person. Here his trump card was his extraordinary erudition. Javier Solana, who was a physicist by trade, was surprised when Lennart talked to him at length about astrophysicist Fred Hoyle’s theory of the expanding universe. As it turned out, Hoyle’s theory had been Solana’s research topic during his university career. And this wasn’t a case of Lennart doing some pre-meeting cribbing, for I heard Lennart talking about the same Hoyle in other contexts.
The more colourful side of Lennart’s activity has received great attention – his unexpected flair for improvisation. There was a reason for this. He had himself witnessed how the Baltics had become forgotten peoples whom no one knew or remembered. That is why he tried to visualise our positions and do this in as memorable a manner as possible. Already as president, Lennart announced that he would not drink a drop of champagne at receptions until the last Russian troops were out of the country. This might not have necessarily been an especially effective gesture domestically, but to foreigners it was very conspicuous, naturally accompanied by the relevant explanation. When the troops finally did leave, the foreign wire services were lined up at Kadriorg to see Lennart raise his first champagne flute. Lennart’s improvisations always served a specific purpose, besides being tasteful and filled with levity.
A diplomat who was president
Lennart brought all of the above skills and experiences to bear on the foreign policy part of his presidency. Although it took time to get the role of president situated in the workings of the Estonian state, and at times pain, toil and disagreement, Lennart was readymade where foreign policy was concerned, his friends among Western politicians during his term as foreign minister were still in power and the qualities and skills he had honed as foreign minister gained new power in the office of the president.
Speeches were his medium, his method, and as a result he was often invited to speak, and at these conferences sat the powerful of the world and they were deeply impressed by Lennart’s speeches. His speeches were brilliant, but it was not a case of someone revelling in his own golden tongue, euphonious words. Lennart’s speeches were not verbal fireworks, they were intellectual fireworks. Fortunately his speeches are preserved in anthologies which to some extent compensate for the memoirs Lennart would never write. His speeches were always timely and actual, but seen through a philosophical and historical lens. Their main function was always the same – to tie Europe to Estonia and tie Estonia to Europe. With his speeches Lennart built the Estonian state: with his domestic speeches, he built Estonia, and with his foreign speeches he built the image of Estonia. These speeches, it should be noted, did not essentially differ in terms of their essence or their complexity – Lennart believed that Estonians wanted to hear Estonian versions of the speeches that he delivered in Europe. He thereby elevated the culture of free speech and free conscience in Estonia.
Lennart was a historian, but the classic inferiority models of Estonian history books did not suit him or his political objectives, nor his understanding of a developed nation. He did not think that Estonians were just shuttled from the hands of one conqueror to the next throughout the long dark age of serfdom without them having had a chance to do anything the way they wanted. His vision was different: he used every piece of our ties with Europe that he could get his hands on. Choosing historical facts like tools, he methodically fastened our relations to the old traditional powers, did so with Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Poland. To the Germans, he would speak of Bellingshausen, the Baltic German explorer. It was more difficult with the French, but not for him.
Lennart assured President Chirac that Estonia was the northernmost bastion of Francophony. What were our historical ties with France, from Lennart’s descriptions? First of all, that Fulco, the first bishop sent to Estonia by the Pope, was a Frenchman. Second, that according to Parrot, a rector of the University of Tartu who had French origins, Estonian peasants longed for Napoleon as a liberator. Third, that the brother of the famous architect Le Duc (founder of Notre Dame) had in 1855 predicted the birth of an independent Estonia. Fourth, fifth… Soon many of these references found their way into the French officials’ speeches at receptions of Estonia’s senior officials. This was the supreme mark of success.
Lennart’s passing
Lennart was one of the big figures on the historical arena in Estonia and Europe, and his legacy left to the Estonian people is inestimable as well.
As Enn Soosaar has said, the legacy is yet to be studied and treated. But some things are already clear today. His active work on the world arena left the world with the image of Estonia as an old Western democracy with a shared, deeply entwined intellectual and cultural connection with the rest of Europe, a country that takes part in solving problems, and a successful county, not a grey and ordinary one. Renown and respect are the best defensive weapons for a small country. It is impossible for anyone to tacitly repress a country that has such shields. Lennart’s legacy in Estonia is a lasting one, and internationally we can coast for a long time on it, though not indefinitely. His work must be continued, as it is difficult to create an image but easy to harm it.
As a diplomat and politician, Meri left a full-fledged foreign service and network of embassies. There have been attempts to scuttle it, but in the beginning Meri himself defended it. Later it was defended by the understanding of the advantage conferred on a state by professional foreign service corps. It can be said that today, social and political consensus have been achieved. As president and after his term, Meri remained a diplomat, as President Eisenhower always remained a military man. He would always be on hand to review his “troops”, he would continue to take an interest in what went on at the Foreign Ministry. The Foreign Ministry, where others now hold a great responsibility to continue his work.