In 2004, the progressive enlargement saw the entry of the Baltic
countries into the European Union, reuniting the coastal territories ofthe Baltic Sea to the block of continental European states. The event
was hailed as the achievement of the historical borders of Europe to the
East, as the result of a geopolitical operation to recover these
territories on an identity and ethnic level, given that the economic
reasons for such accession were almost nil. To realize this, just look
at some parameters relating to these States: for example, the overall
GDP of the three countries in 2024 did not exceed 163 billion USD. The
population of the three Republics, as a whole, reaches just 6,300,000
inhabitants, that is, it does not exceed that of Lazio, is almost equal
to that of St. Petersburg and is half that of Moscow. Despite this, the
three Baltic countries, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia have a decidedly
disproportionate political weight in the European Union, as can be seen
from the positions held by politicians from these countries in community
bodies.
Kaja Kallas, former Estonian Prime Minister, has been entrusted with the
Common Foreign and Security Policy, Andrius Kubilius, former Lithuanian
Prime Minister, has been entrusted with the newly established
Commissioner for Defence and Space, while Valdis Dombrovskis, former
Prime Minister of Latvia, has been the custodian of the Commission's
economic and financial policy for ten years: overall, a responsible,
self-destructive, suicidal choice. Furthermore, thanks to the community
decision-making mechanism that requires unanimity, the weight of the
three countries in political choices is conditioning.
?But not everyone knows that at least 1/4 of the inhabitants of Latvia
and Estonia do not enjoy citizenship rights because they belong to the
Russian-speaking minority. As such, they are considered by law to be
deprived of political rights and, in fact, have a status comparable to
that of stateless persons even if born in the territory of the State,
because a policy of discrimination against minorities is implemented, in
violation of the aequis community and the founding Treaties that
consider all citizens of the Union as holders of the same rights and
establish for the States belonging to the EU to protect minorities. Nor
does discrimination only concern citizenship, because it has significant
implications on participation in political life and affects the right to
be elected and to vote, it also concerns their freedom of worship as the
Churches to which they refer are obliged by law to give themselves
national structures and to sever ties with the Patriarchate of Moscow,
to which they belong. Russian-speaking minorities are also discriminated
against with regard to knowledge of the language and the possibility of
using it, imposing the ban on studying and speaking it. In this regard,
the European Union has always pretended not to see, limiting itself to
sanctioning Hungary for the violation of the aequis communitarian but
taking great care not to impose respect for the most elementary rights
of freedom on the Baltic states mentioned above. It will be said that
all this is done in the name of realpolitik and that there are
geostrategic reasons for which the governments of the Baltic countries
are allowed to adopt these policies, but there is no doubt that this
affects social cohesion by fueling the estrangement of a not
insignificant part of the population from national interests.
Furthermore, it is quite clear that both the overall number of the
population and its composition affect the contribution that these states
give to the common defense which is three infantry brigades, an engineer
battalion, supported by the "Voluntary National Defense Force" as
regards Lithuania; by a Land Force of 5,000 professional soldiers, 8,000
National Guard and 11,000 Armed Forces reservists, as far as Latvia is
concerned and by a total of 5,600 officers and soldiers, supported by a
voluntary body, called the Defence League with about 10,000 soldiers for
Estonia. The Navy and the Air Force are coherently of the same order of
magnitude, which means that the defense of these countries depends
entirely on membership in NATO. Considerations relating to the role
played with regard to force on a military level and therefore
practically nothing. It is this factual situation that explains why the
adhesion to the EU rearmament policy by these countries was strongly
desired by them.
Starting from these considerations, however, it is understood that the
great importance of the Baltic countries concerns above all the profiles
of the strategic relationship that they cover in the activity of
contrast towards the Russian territory and that of the States associated
with the Russian Federation such as Belarus. In fact, the Baltic
countries, due to their geographical configuration, act as buffer states
between the Polish and German worlds and the Russian one and present
themselves as an offshoot of the Scandinavian states, completing the
containment belt of the Slavic peoples to the north.
These reasons are not, in our opinion, sufficient to make the needs of
the Baltic countries the pivot on which to rotate the relations of the
entire continent and Russia, since the economic interests as well as the
geostrategic ones of the entire area would recommend collaboration and
integration rather than a competitive confrontation driven by the
objective factors that characterize the distribution of resources and
peoples on the territory. The mutual advantages arising from
collaboration and integration between the two parts of the Eurasian
platform are too many, and in our opinion more than sufficient, to
justify collaboration, avoiding competitive and armed confrontation.
Baltic irredentism
The sharing of the project of building a Union of states confederated
among themselves that give themselves common institutions had also been
accepted by us anarchist communists in the awareness that although it
was a capitalist construction, driven by the elites, it had at least the
advantage of minimizing the possibility of future wars, at least between
the states of Europe. In fact, the history of the continent includes
devastating conflicts that after the experience of the Second World War
the majority of European peoples did not want to be repeated. This meant
that the idea of giving life to a Union, initially between the states
that had fought each other most quarrelsomely, was worth the price to
pay, consisting of muting the proletarian revolution, at least until
bourgeois democracies were created within which the class struggle could
grow and develop. A gradualist strategy prevailed that led in 1968 to
the generalized explosion of systemic contradictions.
We fought as a generation and were defeated on the political and
planning level: we had to realize that capitalism evolves and plans,
transforms itself into financial capital, refines its tools of
exploitation, even amid cyclical crises, rearranges its system, invents
new relationships. Hence the phenomenon of globalization, of productive
decentralization, of the dismantling of the centers of worker and
proletarian knowledge, the disarticulation of the political organization
of the class, the defeat.
Nothing is spared to the vanquished and capital has also unleashed war
in Europe, starting in a sneaky way and working on the contradictions
between peoples, on ethnic and religious hatred, and above all by
leveraging economic interests, picking up where the war had interrupted
its work, that is, from the massacre of the Slavic peoples, as we have
seen with the wars in Yugoslavia and the fratricidal struggle of the
Balkan peoples. All the old arsenal of historical hatreds, resentments,
the desire for revenge for the defeated, accompanied and supported by
the myth of a narrative that made the executioners the victims has acted
as a support, as a substrate for the rebirth of ancient conflicts that
are in fact rediscovered and re-proposed on a daily basis.
Even the resentment of the Baltics for the persecutions suffered during
the Soviet domination provides nourishment and support to cultivate a
deep hatred that bypasses convenience and interests in search of
revenge, of vengeance, under the growing dominion of fear. All this
without realizing that we are an instrument of the interests of others
and that the common good would require respect for minorities,
acceptance of differences, coexistence in diversity because the supreme
good of peace can only be guaranteed by preventive action aimed at
defusing the reasons for resentment and conflict rather than feeding and
creating new and ever stronger ones.
The best guarantee against violence and war, the best strategy to defuse
conflict, is to prevent it by promoting within the European space the
conditions of equal rights and duties for all, regardless of ethnic,
linguistic, religious, experiential differences, so as to allow peace to
be enjoyed as a common good. All this can be achieved only on condition
of taking gradual steps, so as to allow people to amalgamate,
institutions to merge, acquiring homogeneous characteristics of
reconstruction of respect for formal freedoms which must be accompanied
by the maximum possible equality and economic well-being. In light of
this last consideration, the idea of allowing rapid access to other
countries to the European Union, especially starting with Ukraine, is
more than ever a harbinger of further elements of instability in the
common edifice that we would like to build.
The Editorial Staff
https://www.ucadi.org/2025/04/28/il-ruggito-dei-baltici/
_________________________________________
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