Cicero's Songs

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...

  After a week of slush and damp, tonight there is a hard frost in Tallinn. The general election campaign has started with the parties submitting their lists of candidates and announcing their programs. The polls seem to show a polarization of views. Although the Liberal Reform party of PM Kaja Kallas is set to remain as the largest party in the 101 seat Riigikogu, the steady rise of the far right EKRE seems to place them firmly in second place, replacing the Social Liberal Centre Party, who seem set to lose several seats. In addition to the Conservative Isamaaliit and the Social Democrat SDE, there is a fair likelihood that a new party will join these in Parliament, namely the Business/Green minded Eesti 200. The Greens and the Libertarian "Right wingers" look like they will struggle to gain seats. A Moderate Reform/SDE/E200 coalition would be a good outcome, but the numbers will have to fall just so, otherwise there remains the chance of another Centre/Isamaa/EKRE coalition...

By Special Request of Baroness Scott and Mark Valladares... Cicero's Songs returns: bigger, longer and uncut. October 1 st marked the half way point of the Estonian Presidency of the European Union.  Perhaps for many people such an anniversary is of passing interest at best.  Yet the conduct of the Estonian Presidency is reinforcing just how forward looking and innovative the most northerly of the Baltic States has become. Estonia is a country that wants to live in the future, and with its openness and innovation, that future seems a lot closer than almost anywhere else in Europe It is not that Estonia does not “do” the past: the picturesque cobbled streets of old Tallinn have tourist crowds a-plenty enjoying the mediaeval architecture in an Indian summer of sunshine and blue skies.  The real point is that Estonia refuses to be a prisoner of its past. Lennart Meri, Estonia’s President in the 1990s- who spent years of his childhood in Siberia- once told me ...

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the creation of a raft of new liberal and democratic states in 1989 and 1991, the argument about the values of the open society went into a kind of stasis. The debate was deemed by many to be closed, and the virtues of liberal democracy self-evidently triumphant. 25 years later that "end of history" seems at best more nuanced. At worst, the closed authoritarian model seems to have made a spectacular come-back. This blog references Cicero, and in previous posts I have explained why. I have feared for a long time that the values and virtues of democracy are being eroded from within and without. The fact is that mass societies can be manipulated and subverted. Vladimir Putin spends billions of dollars on propaganda, and while much of this is to persuade Russians not to challenge his regime, equally his purpose has been to undermine confidence in the states of Europe and North America that he deems to be his enemies. He is achieving a re...

One of the most positive aspects of life in Estonia is that the average level of education is so high that you get used to people making good quality decisions. Intelligent, well-thought out government services, innovative and interesting technology and so on. This is why, when one does encounter Estonian examples of stupidity, it can be rather shocking.  There are small examples, such as allowing graffiti to get out of hand, which in the end creates far bigger and more expensive problems than an early zero tolerance policy does. There are bigger examples, such as the Estonian Conservative People's Party (EKRE) whose small minded, identity based political world view insults the visionary thinkers, such as Jaan Tonisson, who understood from the beginning that Estonian identity must rest on universal, European values. The identity politics of the barnyard that EKRE, Argentina's Peronist party and the SNP all, to varying degrees promote, can quickly descend into racist or homo...

Down to Parnu, Estonia's summer capital for the celebrations of Estonian Independence Day. At the church service I was sat behind the Prime Minister, Andrus Ansip, who had announced his departure from office the previous day. He seemed preoccupied and serious, as well he might. He is the longest serving Prime Minister in Estonian history, and a large number of his predecessors ended their lives in the Soviet GULAG. After the church service I was a guest in the VIP enclosure to stand with the President, Toomas Hendrik Ilves to watch the military parade. This was the largest such independence day parade in modern Estonia, and as an array of modern equipment and stern faced soldiers passed- including this year a detachment from the British Grenadier guards- I could not help thinking about whether or not Estonia was facing an existential threat. The American squadron of F-14s was slightly late, and we later learned that this was because they had been forced to divert to intercept a Rus...

An article I have written for Estonia's largest national daily: Estonia is gaining a name for being an open and innovative country. In the 1920s, the country adopted an open ultra-democratic Parliamentary constitution, and in the 1990’s it followed an open ultra-free market economic policy.  Perhaps these maximalist positions reflect the individualist character of Estonians. Yet since independence was restored, the economic policies of the 1990s have proven far more enduring than the political policies of the 1920s. The rapid reforms initiated in the early 1990s have helped to create an era of growth and general prosperity. The country measured itself against external yardsticks: joining NATO and the European Union, joining the Euro, joining the OECD.  Renewed Estonia has achieved membership of every club that it very well can join- it has become top of the class, lauded for economic freedom and technological innovation.   Yet even as Estonia has grown up int...

Across the European Union- indeed world-wide- there are huge projects to develop high-speed rail systems. The pioneering days of the Japanese Shinkansen and the later French TGV network are now being followed by investments across the EU, and -especially- in China. Yet there is a problem. Railways may be more energy efficient once built, but they are hugely capital intensive- all of the components- track bed, signalling and rolling stock, must be built together and the project must be complete before it can operate.   The power of rail is in the network, and without such a network, it does not work to anything like peak performance.  Whereas road improvements can be made piecemeal and fit in with existing road infrastructure, high-speed rail lines are generally built from scratch. So the cost of such projects as HS2 in the UK or Rail Baltica (to link Tallinn with Warsaw) run into tens of billions of Euros. Even the Chinese are beginning to balk at the huge costs involved, ...

Dimly remembered from my fourth year Latin is the idea in Virgil that a nation should "choose foreign leaders".  It is surprising how often nations do in fact choose foreign leaders, the positive and negative examples are legion: of course there is Hitler, an Austrian, who led Germany, Eamonn De Valera, a half Sicilian New Yorker, who led Ireland and Napoleon, the scion of a Corsican speaking family, who led France. Winston Churchill was half American, and most royal houses trace their origins to each other and not necessarily to the countries that they reigned over. In the Baltic there has been a civic tradition of foreign participation. The first Mayor of Riga was George Armitstead , who came from a family of British Merchants.  Now we have a successor, Abdul Turay - whose family originated in Guinea, became prominent in Sierra Leone and later came to the UK. Abdul had already added another step in his family's journey, by marrying an Estonian wife, but now he is ...

Today is the day that the life of Re-independent Estonia becomes longer than the period of independence before Soviet occupation. It is a significant milestone in the psychological recovery of Estonian society from the Soviet occupation. Yet it is also the anniversary of the March deportation of 1949  when tens of thousands of Estonians- many, indeed most, were women and children- were sent to exile and often death in Siberia. Those that returned were brutalized and traumatized for the rest of their lives. For the first decade after the recovery of Estonian freedom there remained a deep seated fear that this second period of independence would prove as fragile as the last, and that once again occupation, famine, torture and death would become Estonia's lot. Gradually that fear has begun to lessen, and as a whole generation has grown to parenthood with little or no recollection of Soviet power, the psychology of Estonians has subtly changed. The 2008 crisis has passed, and it is w...

This Sunday is the 95th Anniversary of the proclamation of the independence of the Estonian Republic. 22 years and five months after February 24th 1918, the first independence ended with the overthrow of the Estonian State by the Red Army. There then followed the wholesale slaughter of anyone- from Ministers to Postmen- who had served the free Republic in any capacity. Following the subsequent German occupation in June 1941 and the return of Soviet troops in Autumn 1944, tens of thousands of people were arrested, deported to Siberia or simply shot out of hand. There was a deliberate attempt to destroy any resistance- though despite this the country was not pacified for almost a decade. There then followed 47 years of the so-called Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. The economic, social and cultural repression of Estonia and the colonization of the country by Russian speakers (who comprised less than 5% of the population in 1940, 24% today) left a shocked and fractured society. Ye...

I am a Liberal in more or less all meanings of the word. I am also a profound supporter of Estonia, the country where I have made my home over the past four years. My relationship with Estonia dates back decades, to when I was still in high school in 1979 and first got involved with the fight for freedom in Eastern and Central Europe, which was also the same year that I joined the Liberal Party. One of the many great things about Estonia is that, since independence was recovered in 1991, it has been dominated by liberal ideas in both economics and politics. Indeed the the liberal Reform party has been and remains the most popular political party, while the opposition Centre Party is also a member of Liberal International, albeit that it represents a populist Liberal strand that I have less sympathy with. In fact one can find liberals in all of the Estonian political parties and there is no doubt that Liberalism is deeply woven into the political tapestry of Estonia. Yet even the mo...

Living in the country with the freest Internet in the world opens up some interesting and surprising lines of discussion. Now that nearly 25% of the population choose to vote online, there are some very interesting implications that are coming out.  Firstly there are the short term implications of more e-voting. The fact of being able to vote, even if you live overseas, keeps the Estonian diaspora far more in touch with home. In the recent Lithuanian election, for example, where online voting does not happen, the nearly a million people who live overseas from Lithuania had to make a significant effort to register and to vote- the result was that of the 74,000 Lithuanian citizens estimated to be living in the UK, for example, less than 9,000 actually voted. Had more voted from overseas, it is quite likely that the Conservative-Liberal government would have been returned to office rather than the currently deadlocked situation based on the controversial Labour Party-Social-Democra...