Lennart Meri’s foreign policy legacy

With his foreign policy education accomplished with great difficulty and hampered by radio jammers, Meri became the unexpected figure who confounded all of the West’s expectations for the Baltic states’ struggle for independence.

In beginning his funerary oration in honour of those who had fallen protecting Athenian democracy, Perikles expressed his dislike for obligatory eulogies: “Mankind are tolerant of the praises of others so long as each hearer thinks he can do as well or nearly as well himself, but when the speaker rises above him, jealousy is aroused and he begins to be incredulous.”
Everyone who has had long-term interactions with Lennart Meri can reminisce about some amusing instance of his enthusiasm, tardiness, or unexpected action. These anecdotes are truly necessary to humanise the harsh Moses-like role Meri played. We must remember that the accomplishments of the late President are of another domain – from a place where acts of aggression inspire jealousy and mistrust, from a place many simply do not comprehend. Thus the danger arises that President Meri might be remembered more as a sum of anecdotes than as a person whose thoughtful agency, in Old Testament fashion, led his people to the promised land after decades in the desert. I shall therefore focus on Meri’s role in Estonia’s, and in the other Baltic nations’, return to the West.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Fifteen years after the restoration of independence, in retrospect, Estonia’s history no longer appears quite the same. It is as if noble patriots had fought silently, yet tirelessly, from within the Communist party for freedom and as if Estonia’s legal continuity from World War Two would have been a self evident guarantee along with our return to the West. Unfortunately, reality fails to match this pretty picture. Some thirty years ago, Estonia and the other Baltic nations’ independence in no way fitted into the plans of the Western world. The world was stable, the ideological and geopolitical map and relations of the Cold War were fixed in place. They were subject to scientific study. Every minute change, every slight shift from the previous party line, every assembly of the Politburo on the viewing stand by Lenin’s mausoleum called for serious academic and diplomatic attention. The fighting continued elsewhere, mainly in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Africa in so-called proxy wars. All was quiet on the European front.
The protests of the labour union Solidarity that had begun in 1980 in Poland against the Communist regime occasioned shock in Western circles. They feared that the balance and state of affairs that had ensued from the 1975 Helsinki accords and Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik might spin out of control. Helsinki had finally fixed in place Europe’s national borders and delineated spheres of influence and in response Moscow had promised to pay attention to human rights. Like the US, Western Europe’s governments did not take too seriously the question of human rights. Nordic countries, for example, simply turned a blind eye. Finland’s pro-Solidarity group even came under the surveillance of the Finnish security services.
Both the advent of Solidarity and the Baltics’ later struggles for independence appeared inopportune to the West, because their development was not easily controlled and occurred outside the context of inter-governmental relations. Imagine the nerve of these people who are trying to rock the boat and rebel! Who do they think they are!? Precisely this a German government official inquired when he came to visit me at Radio Free Europe in 1990 to ask us not do anything in support of Estonia’s struggles toward independence. Instead, we were to go on air and admonish our compatriots to cease this “nationalist crap.”
A year later (in 1991!), the US Department of State attempted (unsuccessfully) to force similar restrictions upon the Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania bureaus of Radio Free Europe. They demanded we restrict ourselves to advocating for some “form of alternative association” within the USSR. This same spirit predominated among George Bush Sr.’s advisors and speech-writers (a line that was toed by, among others, America’s present secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice). The American President’s exhortatory speech in Kiev in August of 1991 substantively signalled that the Baltics should put an end to their attempts at independence. When, despite everything, the Baltics nonetheless finally regained independence, Germany refused to formally recognise them before the rest of Europe had recognised Croatia.
Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika at first surprised the West and engendered mistrust. When it later became clear that the proposed changes were more than cosmetic, the CPSU secretary started to receive support from the West. Its price was burying Eastern Europe in oblivion. A realpolitikally completely logical stance, at least from the West’s point of view. The Soviet Union’s liberalisation and “disarmament” took strategic precedence over Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania’s liberation.
If anyone at all perceived that Europe’s architecture might change in the future, then nobody foresaw what would be loosed in 1989. Rather, gradual liberation from the direct control of Moscow was foreseen and supported for Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria (the last of these was, by the way, characterised as Eastern Europe’s budding ‘software tiger’). The West hoped for a Finlandised Eastern Europe ä la Kekkonen, with economies governed by invisible hands and a respect for human rights, but remaining Moscow’s subject in matters of foreign affairs. Before 1989, Gorbachev apparently sought the same. There were of course no seats of any kind for Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians at the EU, never mind NATO. And Estonia? Never.
The tremendous year of 1989 took all the planners by surprise. Stability, Eastern Europe’s silent and slow “convergence” etc. ceased to exist; it was time for damage control. Its primary end was holding together the Soviet Union. Gorbachev warned the West that if Eastern Europe’s freedom bug should cross the border into the USSR, Europe would wake up one morning with 25 million Russians on its doorstep. Nobody wanted that kind of nightmare.
The unexpected man from Estonia
Lennart Meri’s entire preceding life had been as if in preparation for serving as a diplomat of the Republic of Estonia. Inspired by his father, even during the harshest years of occupation he had a clear conception of what an independent Estonia’s foreign policy should be. His father Georg Meri was a talented diplomat who, after serving in Paris and Berlin, headed to Washington to end the fifteen-year idiocy of having no Estonian ambassador to the US. Alas, Meri didn’t make it to Washington. Rather, his family’s path led in the opposite direction, to Siberia.
But Lennart Meri had already realised that a diplomat is not simply a tuxedototing, champagne-swilling partygoer (as is often still held to be the case), but an analytic intellectual who is constantly abreast of unfolding events, writes analyses, ponders other countries’ potential courses of action and unforeseen dangers. Unfortunately, pre-war Estonia had all too few thinking leaders. In this vein, an otherwise hyper-critical Meri once commented to me that the diplomats who restored Estonia’s independence were many times more professional than those before the war.
Lennart operated under the assumption that a diplomat must at all times be cognisant of current events. When I met him for the first time in Finland in 1985, German, English and Finnish language newspapers and clippings bedecked his table. Over the course of a two-day marathon conversation he tuned in to the BBC and Radio Free Europe every few hours and noted the most interesting news in his notebook. And, like zealous international relations or security policy grad students, we discussed, dissected and debated these news.
This became our mode of interaction. I do not remember, over the course of our hundreds of foreign-policy-themed marathon conversations, ever once having discussed personal matters, save when Lennart wished to share his joy over some book he had just read, which he then immediately demanded I read too. Lennart Meri was foreign policy.
With his foreign policy education accomplished with great difficulty and hampered by radio jammers, Meri became the unexpected figure who confounded all of the West’s expectations for the Baltic states’ struggle for independence. The West didn’t know what to do with us. The Baltic states’ representatives appeared to come from another world and speak of alien things. When they did manage to break through forbidding and dodging responses, they were received at the foreign ministries of the West with a patronising smirk and at as low a level as possible.
Lennart Meri’s arrival on the scene induced panic. What to do? No broken English or primitive pathos about how the West owed Eastern Europe for standing against the Barbarians. In their place, Meri offered erudite analysis of unfolding events in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev’s options and Estonia’s wishes. Shaggy or inarticulate ex-Communist apparatchiks regurgitating talking points were easy to dismiss. But the West’s foreign ministries were at first completely incapable of dealing with a foreign policy intellectual who towered over simple functionaries like a mountain.
Furthermore, once it was listened to, Lennart Meri’s message was hardly easy to digest. Nobody wanted to hear about the (in Estonia self-evident) validity of the legal continuity of the Republic of Estonia from before World War Two. In a 1990 Newsweek editorial, Strobe Talbott named it a senseless anachronism. In the West’s opinion, Gorbachev was the best thing to happen to Russia in seventy years, and nobody wanted to disturb this idyll on account of some insignificant Balts. Nobody ever wanted to discuss Estonian independence. Realpolitik does not recognise noble ideas and justice. Estonia may have been in the right, but so what? It had no power.
Whilst the West could fool other representatives and send them away with cushy empty promises, they feared Lennart. Not because his past as Siberian exile or fate as an intellectual touched their real political hearts. They feared such a man might employ his skills against them, walking out of meetings and speaking his mind publicly, that he might publish essays on the West’s hypocritical attitude and empty and purely rhetorical support for our struggles for independence, or speak at one of the many forums to which he was freely invited, thereby bringing to light the West’s real treatment of the Baltic countries.
They feared, because they were dealing with a foreign minister whose international affairs understanding surpassed most of his colleagues’ and who was unafraid of demonstrating this knowledge. After all, the foreign ministers of parliamentary countries are politicians who are mayor one day, minister of agriculture the next day, and suddenly their country’s top diplomat the third day.
The West received its first lashing from Meri at the December 1990 CSCE summit. The newly freed countries of the previous year – Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, came represented by non-Communist, democratically elected heads of government. The Czech representative, the great intellectual Vaclav Havel, demanded the participation of the Baltic states. Yet they still belonged to the Soviet Union and, per Gorbachev’s request, the leaders of the Western countries left Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania’s foreign ministers waiting outside the door.
This proved to be a grave mistake. The three ministers called a press conference. Meri was their spokesman, aided by speaking points I quickly dashed off and that he had characteristically improved upon. This press conference became the entire summit’s most notable event, overshadowing the feel-good happy-talk that had been scheduled to accompany the Charter of Paris. The Western public found out there was a man in the far-away Baltic who had to be reckoned with, who could shake up an already turbulent Europe.
Thenceforth Estonia was not so easily underestimated, at least when Meri represented Estonia. I remember well the nervousness that prevailed in foreign ministries preceding a visit by Lennart. “What topics is he going to harp on? Is he going to mention this too?” It was implied we would do well to stick to narrow and well-defined topics, because officials could then draft talking points for their foreign or prime ministers or heads of state. At different moments, they knew that there was no escape from talking about non-recognition politics, then from discussing the withdrawal of Russian forces from Estonia, and later yet from talk of joining the EU and NATO. But what else might he talk about?
There were plenty of other such topics. Already during the first years of independence Meri would consistently harp on energy security, a concern very few people took too seriously back then. He spoke of the need to support democracy in the CIS – in Ukraine, Georgia. He had a marvellous ability to grab hold of a speaking partner’s simple retort and connect it to some piece of knowledge that usually astounded and disarmed even the most hardened Realpolitiker.
In August of 1995 at a security policy conference on the island of Rüggen the German defence minister Volker Rühe had boasted to a Nordic diplomat that he would be meeting with Meri the next day to conclusively notify him Estonia would never join NATO. The next day, Lennart greeted Rühe at the door to the Presidential palace in Kadriorg: “My dear friend, I’m so happy that you’ve come to visit me just today.” Rühe is said to have responded with fright: “So what day is this?” The President elegantly resounded: “But today, my dear friend, is the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.” Ruhe’s message went undelivered.
President
Whereas as foreign minister Meri had free reign to develop foreign policy because nobody else understood it, the situation was more complicated as President. True, according to the Constitution the President represented Estonia abroad, yet he lacked executive authority; as head diplomat he had the freedom to present positions approved by the government, which he repeatedly delivered with greater aplomb (such as in the aforementioned case of Rühe).
On the other hand, he had no freedom to mould Estonian policy. The president of a parliamentary country has no right to participate at either NATO or EU summits. Only a prime minister with a parliamentary mandate can participate at summits, or make decisions and take on accompanying national obligations. Estonia was treading on particularly thin and slippery ice. On one hand, Meri was undoubtedly the standard bearer of Estonian foreign policy, yet paradoxically he wouldn’t be allowed to decide or promise anything. Lennart understood this well.
I personally value Lennart’s actions so highly precisely because he managed to drive Estonian foreign policy – instinctively feeling what it was or should be – even when the Estonian government lacked such knowledge. He did not exceed his authority, thanks to which Estonia is a more law-governed state than many another. Still, he represented Estonia better than any foreign minister.
When Estonia had got so far as to discuss the specifics of EU and NATO membership, the president’s role fell fully into place within the parliamentary structure. In other words: Estonia’s success also meant that Lennart Meri’s person no longer needed to play his earlier role. Technocrats and specialists took over matters. Lennart had achieved his goal, and from that point on the work was done by lesser people, the undersigned included.
Legacy
Meri’s most enduring contribution to Estonia (aside from making the world take us seriously) actually lies in the one step that still riles the Estonian Communist Party’s “underminers from within” and “freedom fighters”: he created a Western foreign ministry.
The majority of post-Communist countries continued after independence with their soviet era “foreign ministries.” “Experienced specialists” stayed on at their jobs, whereas in Estonia inexperienced, patriotically-minded, talented boys and girls who knew little of the art of diplomacy went to work. This became one of the keys to Estonia’s success.
Lennart tore apart the hapless so-called Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, that somnambulant KGB-infested nest, and hired young talented officials who continue to help Estonia leave a smart and strong-willed impression (even when it’s deceptive). Jüri Luik, Katrin Saarsalu, Priit Kolbre, Priit Pallum, Alar Streiman, Sven Jürgenson, Clyde Kull, Väino Reinart, Andres Unga and many other talented diplomats took to heart Lennart’s call to man the reborn foreign ministry. Since diplomacy, international relations, and security policy were fields one couldn’t easily study in the Estonian SSR, these people, like Meri, had to start from scratch.
Yet they learned. Some post-Communist countries are still represented by diplomats with some political affiliation, members of the ruling party or the head of state’s gang. Estonia’s then young-blooded, yet zealous, wholly Western and self-conscious diplomatic corps greatly aided their young country’s reputation. They took many by surprise. For example, when Lennart arrived on a visit to the US State Department, the guard sent up a notice that “the Estonian President is here with a bunch of college students.” Yet by the latter half of the 1990s, when Estonia was against expectations invited to EU accession talks, Lennart’s actions had paid off.
Whither now?
Of Estonia’s four great foreign policy challenges – achieve independence, lose the image of a Soviet republic, expel Russian troops, join both the EU and NATO – Lennart Meri played a decisive role in at least the first three. Meri laid the foundation for even beginning talks and launching bureaucratic procedures for joining the EU and NATO.
The result of Lennart Meri’s foreign policy actions is, or at least was, Estonia’s being taken seriously in the West, on a significantly higher plane and in a heavier weight category than anyone might have assumed or expected. ‘Estonia punches above its weight’ was a commonly invoked expression in the 1990s. But to realise its true scope and evaluate Meri one must certainly remind oneself of their context: nowhere did anybody wish to see or receive us.
Western politicians needed symbols to justify the conflicting steps they eventually took toward Eastern Europe’s liberation. The first of these symbols was the young dockworker Lech Walesa, who climbed a fence in Gdansk and catalysed a popular anti-dictatorship movement. The second was Vaclav Havel, intellectual, humanist, who carried out a velvet revolution. The third was Lennart Meri, also an intellectual, who showed that Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians are as much a part of the West as the aforementioned Westerners who scarcely agreed to recognise this.
Truly, Lennart Meri led us to Europe.
Translated by Luukas Kristjan Ilves