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.
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I felt as if I was on first-name terms with the Pope, recalls Edward Lucas.
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After 1941, the history of the independent state of Estonia was considered to be over – only people like Lennart Meri went on believing that independence could have been preserved and was possible to restore.
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History, often so cruel to the Baltic states in the past, opened up a window of opportunity in the 1990s for them to join the West. But without far-sighted leaders such as Lennart Meri, this opportunity might have been lost.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Among domestic policy makers, Lennart Meri had a better understanding of the international dimension than anyone else.
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No longer is it possible for anyone to claim that Estonia is under some historical curse, where one misfortune follows another. In the last decade of the brutal and restless 20th century, Estonia was privy to unbelievable good fortune, probably more than any of our friends and neighbours. A very important part of this stroke of good luck went by the name of Lennart Meri.
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