INTO THE EU CENTURY

In Europe’s embrace, Baltics look to better times

Anyone, anywhere who lives to 100 has seen their share of history. But centenarian Aurora Voites, not unlike her native Estonia, has seen more than her fair share.
Born under a Czarist Russian flag, she saw scores of invaders hoist their flags nearby. During World Wars I and II, she beheld battlefields strewn with corpses. She saw Estonia win independence in 1920, lose it to Soviets and Nazis in the 1940s, then win it back 50 years later.

A particularly vivid memory of one war casualty, she said, is of a mother pulling her dead son on a sled after he’d been shot. She recalled friends herded onto cattle trains and deported to Siberia during Stalin’s reign—adding that it was a miracle she escaped that fate herself.
“I’ve seen so much death, so much killing,” said the former school teacher from her apartment in Tallinn, speaking in a strong, clear voice that belies her age. “I’ve cried so much for those young men who had to die for someone else’s arrogance, for someone else’s lust for power.”

The latest flag unfurled near her home was the blue EU one with a circle of gold stars. When Estonia and the other Baltics joined the European Union on May 1, there was none of the fear and trepidation of the past: Fireworks burst over their ancient capitals in celebration.
Their entry, with seven other mainly ex-communist countries, marks one of the first times they’ve joined a bloc or alliance without coercion. The only other time was one month before—when they entered the U.S.-led NATO alliance.

Most Balts, like Voites, are thrilled about the change in historical fortunes.
“In the last hundred years, we’ve had no generation that hasn’t faced turmoil,” said Andris Berzins, a recent Latvian prime minister, “The EU generation will be the first.”

In the historically battered, pushed-around Baltics, the EU and NATO are seen as two sides of the same coin: NATO providing hard security should next-door Russia ever turn threatening and the EU providing opportunities to further raise living standards.
“NATO is life. The EU is good life,” as Estonian parliamentarian Trivimi Velliste put it.

EU entry is also viewed as the ultimate sign of acceptance back into mainstream Europe after decades consigned to obscurity and forgotten behind the Iron Curtain. It’s a huge boost to Baltic confidence.
The Baltics, with their combined populations of just over 7 million people, hope for a corresponding boost in influence inside the 450-million-strong EU.
“The Estonian premier will be one of 25 sitting around a table deciding Europe’s most important issues,” delighted pro-business Estonian Prime Minister Juhan Parts. “The stature of our leaders will increase dramatically.”

One pro-EU TV ad in Estonia also stroked national pride, telling viewers that Europeans will take a greater interest in Estonian culture after entry: It featured an English soldier at Buckingham Palace flipping through a text book—struggling to learn vowel-laden Estonian.
The Baltics only shook off communism during the 1991 Soviet collapse—two years later than the rest of Eastern Europe; they were also more tightly entangled into Moscow’s centrally planned system. So they started at the back of the pack in the race into the EU.

Their economies were disaster zones: Growth nose-dived over 15 percent in 1992; annual inflation skyrocketed 1000 percent.
Today, they’re posting Europe’s highest growth rates. Lithuania’s economy boomed 9 percent last year compared to the meager 0.5 percent for the EU as a whole.

Many free-marketeers now fawn over the low-tax, low-debt Baltics.
The 2004 Wall Street Journal-Heritage Foundation index of the world’s freest economies ranked Estonia sixth out of 155 countries surveyed, ahead of the United States and nearly all the rest of the EU—except Luxembourg and Celtic Tiger Ireland.

New glassy skyscrapers in the Baltic capitals testify to their dynamism. With heavy Nordic investment, Baltic banks and phone companies are now as modern as any. Estonia’s cutting-edge Internet infrastructure has led some to dub it E-Stonia.
The increasingly outward-looking Baltics are already vying to become economic powers in their own right.

Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga spoke in Beijing recently about forging trade routes from China, through Russia and Latvia, to Europe. She called the Baltics the new “gates into the EU.”

The Baltics still face daunting chal-lenges.
Average monthly wages of less than 500 euros are five times lower than in Western Europe. The Economist Intelligence Unit recently concluded that it will take 30 years for Estonia and some 50 for Latvia and Lithuania to match living standards in the Western EU.
Estonia’s Päevaleht daily reflected that stark reality in a recent cartoon: It showed a man staring bewilderedly into his wallet the day after he voted to join the EU, saying—“Gee, that’s funny. It’s just as empty today as it was yesterday.”

Overcrowded, disease-ridden Baltic jails, too, are some of Europe’s worst. Reforms of the police and hospitals lag behind. Narcotics use is up and the HIV-AIDS virus is spreading at alarming rates. Baltic traffic-accident figures are among the world’s highest.
Officials here say they’re addressing these issues and will do more with the EU’s help.
Estonia, for instance, is currently closing its dreary, 162-year-old Patarei Prison and moving inmates to a shiny new, Nordic-styled jail.

Outstanding problems don’t mean Baltic EU membership was premature, insisted Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Estonian parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
“You could ask if any country, even those now in the EU, is qualified for the EU,” he said. “There are 80,000 pages of EU regulations. We’ve worked very hard to qualify. Nobody handed membership to us as a gift.”

If the EU harbors some doubts about the Baltics, the feeling’s mutual.
Igor Gräzin, a leader of anti-EU forces in Estonia, said the Baltic states won’t have any detectable influence in the halls of EU power.
“Estonia’s prime minister will be no more important than a Parisian city commissioner,” he said. “He’ll be lucky if the desk officer at EU headquarters calls him from time to time.”
He said socialist-oriented EU governments can be expected to press Estonia to ditch its flat, streamlined tax system. (Sweden has already complained that Estonian tax rates are too low and should be raised.)

Others decry the emergence of what they call the “Euro-Stonian,” those who embrace mainstream continental cultures at the expense of their Estonian identity.
Still others fret about food.

Lithuanians are lamenting the demise of rauginti kopustai, a traditional pickled cabbage sold in open oak barrels. Local media say it must be outlawed to comply with EU hygienic rules.
Rumors that unprocessed, course-grained salt would soon be banned prompted a run on stores.
“Who should be skeptical about EU membership?” Gräzin chimed in. “Anyone who eats.”
But even those inclined to agree about the EU’s impact on Baltic palates tend to accept the most frequently touted advantage of membership: That it’ll pull the Baltics out of Russia’s sphere of influence once and for all, and entrench them firmly, finally in the West.

Baltic officials suggest they can play a key role setting a new EU policy towards Russia.
“In the EU, we don’t yet have a common foreign policy on Russia,” said Mihkelson. “Some say we should be milder in our approach to Russia. Our view is that the EU needs to be realistic.”

Voites, who turned 101 the week be fore Estonia joined the EU, said she followed the debate on the pros and cons of membership. She concluded that, on balance, it’ll be beneficial.
But she has concerns, including about what she says is an EU-inspired boom in bureaucracy.
“Why do we need all these deputies, and aides to the deputies, and aides to the aides of the deputies?” she asked. “What do all these people do?”

By MICHAEL TARM