The September issue of Diplomaatia will explore the Swedish general election, the NATO summit in Wales as well as issues that concern Russia and Ukraine.
In the opening article of the issue, Pärtel-Peeter Pere analyses the situation on the Swedish political landscape before the 14th September elections. He states that this time, the main question of the elections is whether the government that has developed in Sweden is able to cooperate and whether a red-green coalition is a possibility. “The probable victory of the red-green wing would not actually mean an election victory, most probably not even gaining the majority,” Pere adds.
Sven Sakkov, undersecretary of the Estonian Ministry of Defence, and Kalev Stoicescu, researcher at the International Centre for Defence Studies, analyse in their articles the NATO summit that took place in Wales in early September. Sakkov finds that the summit was successful for Estonia. “The NATO of 2015 is a new NATO. And it is more like us than before,” writes the author.
Stoicescu deliberates that after the recent summit, the Baltic States and Poland are not easy to defend due to their geographical location, but they are no longer easy to attack either.
The political scientist Alexander Verschoor-Kirss writes about the international sanctions imposed against Russia. The author claims that sanctions are inefficient tools for making Russia change its behaviour. However, the fact that sanctions do not work in general does not mean that they could not work at some specific time or place, adds Verschoor-Kirss.
Diplomaatia also publishes an interview with the influential erstwhile East German dissenter, Rainer Eppelmann. Eppelmann, on whose life the East German secret service Stasi made many attempts, says that people who have lived their entire lives in a democratic society do not always understand the preciousness of this very same imperfect democracy.
Igor Lossev, a Ukrainian cultural historian, describes fearing the supporters of Stepan Bandera as a phenomenon of the Russian collective consciousness in his article. Lossev claims that many Russians consider the “bandera” a metaphysical, nearly Manichean threat backed by the forces of darkness.
In the book reviews’ section, Merle Maigre introduces Svetlana Alexievich’s work “Second-hand Time” (Время секонд хэнд), which was recently published in Estonian.
This article was published in ICDS Diplomaatia magazine.