Diplomacy and diasporas, self-perceptions and representations: Baltic attempts to promote independence, 1989-1991
ENWhile the Cold War system rapidly unravelled in Eastern Europe, the spring of 1990 also saw things quickly unfolding inside the ussr, especially in the Baltic Republics of the Union. On 11 March Lithuania became the first Soviet Republic to declare its independence, while Estonia and Latvia declared their intention to start a gradual process towards independence on 30 March and 4 May respectively. Ripe with the promise of momentous geopolitical change, these Baltic evolutions were welcomed with some skepticism in Western Europe. On 25 May, when François Mitterrand met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, a journalist from the Swiss newspaper Journal de Genève noted that Mitterrand, invited during the joint press conference to comment on the “Baltic question,” remained “very ambivalent” and made two contradictory statements regarding Baltic independence. In this situation the Western States were not only trapped between the Baltic claims of independence and their own wish to support Gorbachev, but, as we shall see,658F they also had to deal with two incompatible narratives – the Soviet one and the Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian one – of what had happened in the summer of 1940. [...]. [Extract, p. 197]
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