The Baltic Model of Civic-Patriotic History

The transition away from communist rule “no longer represents the dominant political paradigm in Eastern Europe,” according to Krawatzek and Soroka. Instead, they associate the recent rise of illiberal nationalism, nativist populism, and a backlash against the project of European integration with the “framing of present-day political debates through recourse to contentious historical narratives” rooted in the experience of the Second World War. As far as the Baltic States are concerned, this proposition needs to be refined. The framing of politics by contested history is neither new in this region, nor should it be associated primarily with the rise of populism. Rather, it lay at the core of the restoration of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as independent and democratic states three decades ago. “Arguably more than in other former communist countries,” Eva-Clarita Pettai writes, “the democratic revolutions in the Baltic countries were as much about re-conquering the country’s history as they were about securing an independent and democratic future.” The contentious history in question was and remains the history of Baltic statehood, which began in the wake of the First World War and was “paused” with the launch of the Second. The first public assembly held in Lithuania on 23 August 1987 tested the waters of glasnost by condemning the signing of the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on that day in 1939. Exactly two years later, on 23 August 1989, a human chain of two million individuals spanned across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia in a mass expression of popular support for national independence. When the Baltic States regained their independence in 1991, they did not create new states or secede from the USSR but re-established the states that were annexed in August 1940. Given the inseparable nature of post-communist transition and patriotism in the Baltic States, the question of populism and illiberalism voiced above might be reframed as follows. Has the model of patriotic history born in 1989 retained its integrity? Does it