A foreign policy firmly grounded in democratic values makes it possible for small states to stand up for their rights in the face of the shifting interests of large states, Estonia’s President Arnold Rüütel said Jan. 20.
“It is precisely action based on values that can provide answers in complicated situations,” Rüütel said. “This also makes it possible to distinguish long-term important issues from short-term changing interests.”
During a lunchtime speech at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Rüütel thanked the United States for maintaining its policy of nonrecognition of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from World War II until 1991, when Baltic independence was restored in a bloodless revolution. “For us, this represents a powerful confirmation of a values-based foreign policy that remains crucial also today,” he said.
Rüütel, a onetime Communist who helped orchestrate Estonia’s transition to independence, spoke to about 100 students, faculty, and donors at an event hosted by management science and engineering Professor William J. Perry, who also is the Michael and Barbara Berberian Professor, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, and co-director of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. Accompanied by an Estonian delegation, Rüütel also met with Institute Director Coit D. Blacker and visited the Hoover Institution, where archival specialist David Jacobs had prepared an exhibit of Baltic-related material.
The display included a series of informal photographs from the personal album of Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop taken during his visit to Moscow to sign the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was concluded just a few days before the beginning of World War II. The pact, which included a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence, sealed the fate of the Baltic states for a halfcentury. Soviet officials denied the protocol’s existence until 1989. The unpublished photographs, obtained by U.S. forces after World War II, include a rare image of an enthusiastically grinning Stalin taken just after the pact was signed. “That’s a smile from the heart,” Rüütel remarked in Estonian.
Rüütel’s speech, which was translated into English, discussed Estonia’s two-year-old membership in the European Union and NATO. While the union gives opportunities for economic and social development in a globalizing world, Rüütel said, membership also offers Estonia a chance to contribute to international stability. And while NATO offers unprecedented protection, he continued, Estonia also is obliged to contribute to international security.
“NATO is not only a toolbox from which different tools can be taken,” Rüütel said. “It is an important mechanism for political and military cooperation among 26 states. We need it.” Public support for the organization remains at a steady 65 to 70 percent, he explained. “The NATO airspace control operation in the Baltic states certainly plays a role in this context,” he said. “Last year, U.S. planes contributed to it. We are grateful to the U.S. government.”
As a member of NATO, Estonia plans to increase its defense expenditure to 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2010, Rüütel said. The country also has participated in the “coalition of the willing.” Estonian soldiers fighting in Iraq alongside U.S. forces “have proved to be worthy combatants,” Rüütel said. “Responsible tasks lie ahead of us in Afghanistan. The Estonian parliament has decided to send up to 150 soldiers at a time there this year. Allow me to recall that there are 1.4 million inhabitants in Estonia.”
The president said that military operations can help to restore stability in conflict areas by providing security but that long-term success can be achieved only through the establishment of a free society based on democratic principles and the rule of law.
“The more successful the reconstruction and the strengthening of good governance are, the faster our peace forces can be [brought] home.” Arnold Rüütel, President of EstoniaWe need considerably higher capabilities for the strengthening of the civilian component in crisis management and [ensuing] reconstruction than we have today, both at the level of states and international organizations,” he said. “The more successful the reconstruction and the strengthening of good governance are, the faster our peace forces can be [brought] home.”
Rüütel also discussed his country’s role in combating international terrorism. “Estonia is determined to be a credible partner,” he said. “Among other things, this means making sure that our territory [is] not used by terrorists to prepare operations, to move money or for any other purpose.”
After the speech, Blacker asked about Estonia's relationship with neighboring Russia. A border agreement between the two countries remains unsigned. In response, Rüütel offered a history lesson about the consequences of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact after the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Estonia. Many of the country’s leaders were arrested, murdered or sent to death camps in Siberia, he said. Following the Nazi occupation of Estonia during the war, Soviet repression continued after 1945. In a country of 1.2 million inhabitants, about 70,000 people were deported to Siberia and more than 100,000 escaped to the West. As a result of World War II and its aftermath, he said, Estonia lost one out of every five citizens. “Practically, every Estonian family was somehow touched by these events,” he said. “This is something really difficult to forget.” Russia has failed to deal with its history in an honest way, he said.
Although Estonia cannot forget the past, Rüütel said his country is ready to cooperate with Russia and he expressed hope that a border treaty would soon be completed. “I would like to hope that Russia, one day, will understand that we are good neighbors living side by side with each other,” he said.
616 Jane Stanford Way
Encina Hall, E005
Stanford, CA 94305-6060
Waka Brown is a Curriculum Specialist for the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE). She has also served as the Coordinator and Instructor of the Reischauer Scholars Program from 2003 to 2005. Prior to joining SPICE in 2000, she was a Japanese language teacher at Silver Creek High School in San Jose, CA, and a Coordinator for International Relations for the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program.
Waka’s academic interests lie in curriculum and instruction. She received a B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University as well as teaching credentials and M.Ed. through the Stanford Teacher Education Program.
In addition to curricular publications for SPICE, Waka has also produced teacher guides for films such as A Whisper to a Roar, a film about democracy activists in Egypt, Malaysia, Ukraine, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, and Can’t Go Native?, a film that chronicles Professor Emeritus Keith Brown’s relationship with the community in Mizusawa, an area in Japan largely bypassed by world media.
She has presented teacher seminars nationally for the National Council for the Social Studies in Seattle; the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia in both Denver and Los Angeles; the National Council for the Social Studies, Phoenix; Symposium on Asia in the Curriculum, Lexington; Japan Information Center, Embassy of Japan, Washington. D.C., and the Hawaii International Conference on the Humanities. She has also presented teacher seminars internationally for the East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools in Tokyo, Japan, and for the European Council of International Schools in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
In 2004 and 2008, Waka received the Franklin Buchanan Prize, which is awarded annually to honor an outstanding curriculum publication on Asia at any educational level, elementary through university. In 2019, Waka received the U.S.-Japan Foundation and EngageAsia’s national Elgin Heinz Outstanding Teacher Award, Humanities category.
Trygve Olson is a political and public affairs professional who brings nearly twenty years of experience, working on five continents, to his profession. He has served in his present capacity since January 2001, and also served as IRI's Resident Program Officer in Lithuania in 1997.
Prior to rejoining IRI in 2001, Mr. Olson was a founding partner in the grassroots lobbying, political consulting and public affairs firm Public Issue Management, LLP. While a partner at Public Issue Management, Trygve managed a number of high profile grassroots lobbying campaigns for clients in the aviation, technology, and healthcare sectors. For two years he co-managed the grassroots side of a national campaign on behalf of several of America's largest technology companies and the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Also during this prior Mr. Olson served as the primary campaign consultant to a coalition that was victorious in the 2000 Lithuanian Parliamentary elections.
A native of Wisconsin, Trygve worked in the Administration of then-Governor Tommy Thompson and also ran a number of Congressional, State Senatorial and State Legislative campaigns during the early and mid 1990's. Over the course of his career in politics, Mr. Olson has worked on in excess of 100 campaigns for all levels of public office from the local to national level. Since first volunteering for IRI in 1995 -- when he went to Poland to run a get out the vote campaign for young people -- Mr. Olson has helped advise political parties and candidates in numerous countries throughout the world including nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Serbia.
Trygve is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. He currently makes his home in Vilnius, Lithuania with his wife, Erika Veberyte, who serves as the Chief Foreign Policy Advisor to the Speaker of the Lithuanian Parliament.
Encina Basement Conference Room
The celebration in Prague should have been more raucous. The most successful alliance in world history has extended to corners of Europe unimaginable just a few years ago. The military capacity gained for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from expansion is minimal but the political returns will be fantastic. More than any other institution, NATO has helped make Europe democratic, peaceful and whole. What is particularly striking about the new members -- Slovenia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia -- is how many of them emerged from Communist rule with no democratic traditions. The pull of NATO, the desire to join this Western club, created real incentives for democratic consolidation.
The Russia that emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 is a new country, conducting a new foreign policy. This book surveys Russia's relations with the world since 1992 and assesses the future prospect for the foreign policy of Europe's largest country. Leon Aron examines the changing domestic basis of Russian policy toward other countries. Sherman Garnett traces Russian relations with the former republics of the Soviet Union that are now independent states to Russia's west, in particular Ukraine and the three Baltic countries: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Rajan Menon analyzes the rather different set of policies the new Russia has pursued toward its new neighbors to the south, in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Finally, Coit Blacker discusses the evolving Russian approach to the West.
Together these essays offer an authoritative summary and assessment of Russia's relations with its neighbors and with the rest of the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union.