Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 29 -- Today
would have been former Estonian President Lennart Meri’s 90th birthday.
His son Mart asked me to write an appreciation. It has been published in
Eesti Paevaleht (epl.delfi.ee/news/arvamus/paul-goble-lennart-meri-naitas-et-eesti-suudab-muutuda-laanepoolseimast-idariigist-idapoolseimaks-laaneriigiks?id=85746585).
The English original is below:
On the day Lennart Meri was born,
March 29, 1929, another event important for the history of Estonia occurred:
George Kennan, then a junior American foreign service officer crossed the
border from Latvia into Estonia to expand the American legation in
Tallinn. Lennart Meri often spoke of
this coincidence because of three lessons he took from Kennan. Indeed, he
insisted that it wasn’t really an accidental coincidence – those he liked to
say were only those we don’t understand – but a conjunction of events that
mattered to him and because of the role he played to Estonia and the larger
world.
First, Lennart Meri frequently
observed, Kennan had reinforced his own understanding that foreign and domestic
policies are not the two separate realms some imagine them to be but rather all
of a piece. What a country does within its borders profoundly affects and is
affected by what it does and can do beyond them. If a country wants one kind of foreign
policy, such as to be linked into the European world, it must pursue one kind
of domestic agenda. If it doesn’t, it will soon discover that its foreign
policy goals will have been subverted and even made impossible. And if a
country wants one kind of domestic set of arrangements, it can only pursue one
kind of foreign policy but not another.
Kennan in his writings and
distinguished diplomatic career taught that, Lennart Meri remarked; and it is a
lesson that the Estonian president said was one that both Estonians and
Americans forget only at their peril.
Second, the Estonian president said,
Kennan’s arrival in Estonia underscored that Estonia mattered to the West and
always would, whatever some may think or do.
Perhaps the leading US diplomatist of his generation, Kennan never looked
away from Estonia even when he was acting on the broadest world stage. As some
may have forgotten, his containment policy which was directed against the
aggressive designs of Soviet Moscow led him to be one of the most stalwart
defenders of American non-recognition policy from its inception in 1940 to the
end of his life. And as many may not
know, in the dark days of January 1991, I can testify that his interest in and
concerns about Estonia never flagged. More than once during that month, I
received telephone calls from him and from Lennart Meri right next to each
other, with the Estonian foreign ministry talking about what was happening in
Tallinn and the retired US diplomat wanting to know what Washington was doing
to ensure that things there would go in the right direction.
Lennart Meri took from this when I
told him about it the important lesson that again many forget: Estonia has fast
friends; and it is important to remember them because in the world as it is,
one can seldom win over one’s enemies; but one can lose one’s friends. For small countries as well as large, losing
one’s friends because of something one does can be worse than facing the
enemies that all countries have.
And third, Lennart Meri equally
frequently said, Kennan in his work both diplomatic and scholarly had shown the
importance of taking a longer view, of considering one’s own life and that of
one’s country in the sweep of history rather than being driven by momentary
pressures. When Kennan talked about “the sources of Soviet conduct,” Meri said,
he pointed not to what Stalin personally wanted but rather to the history of
the Russian state, a history shaped by geography, culture, and religion, and
one that drove Moscow in one direction rather than another. Estonia, the
Estonian diplomat and politician reflected, was similarly affected by its
geography, culture, and religion. Those factors, however much neglected at any
particular moment, always matter – and they are neglected only at the peril of
his country.
Lennart Meri is famous for having
remarked more than once that he as an Estonian would rather have Canada for a
neighbor. Most people take that comment
for the jocular remark it certainly was. But contained within it was a
fundamental insight, one that Lennart Meri and George Kennan shared. Estonia doesn’t have Canada for a neighbor:
it has other countries; and it must learn to operate from the place on the map
it occupies. Over the years of his life, however, he showed that Estonia could
move on a mental map, becoming not the Western most of eastern countries but
the eastern most of Western ones, another observation he took from Kennan who
cited that observation of the Marquis de Custine concerning Russia.
Intellectual giants, as the wisest
of men and women have observed, as such because they have stood on the
shoulders of others. They have been willing to learn from and then apply and
develop the thinking of others. Lennart
Meri was such a man, and Kennan was one of his teachers. Consequently, the Estonian leader was exactly
correct in saying that there was no coincidence in his birth and Kennan’s first
arrival in Estonia being on the same day.
It would have been a coincidence, Meri once said, if they hadn’t
appeared on Estonia’s map when they did and on that date.
The linking of such dates is all too
often neglected, but as we mark the 90th anniversary of Lennart
Meri’s birth, we need to remember this one because of what it meant for Meri,
for Estonia and for my country, the United States. Fortunately, 67 years after Kennan came over
the border and Meri arrived on this earth, Lennart Meri, then the president of
Estonia, traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States to decorate
the retired diplomat and scholar for his role.
By doing that, Lennart Meri came full circle in a way and his doing so
should remind all of us of the importance of such links and such lessons not as
subjects of mere historical interest but as guides to how all of us, Estonians
and Americans alike, should behave now and in the future.
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