Edward Lucas: Why the Baltics Must Stop Thinking of Themselves as “Post-Soviet”

At the begining of June, the BMI Alumni Executive Club was proud to bring its members a talk we had been organising for several months together with the Baltic International Security Centre (BISC): Edward Lucas on strategic communication, built around a single theme — the state in its entirety.

The central provocation was uncomfortable, and deliberately so. We are not only told stories about "post-Soviet" states that are supposedly forever insecure and indefensible by design — we have started to believe them ourselves. We believe them because Western media keep recycling these narratives out of intellectual laziness, and because European politicians who have absorbed one too many russkij-mir fairy tales keep repeating them. Yet we are "post-Soviet" only to the same degree that Austria is "post-Nazi" or Spain is "post-fascist."

This is not an academic point. Many administrative and public services that take considerable effort to access in some long-established Western democracies can be completed in Lithuania in a matter of hours, entirely online, without leaving home or the office. Out of a determination to make up for lost decades, we are already ahead in more than one field.

Edward also reminded us that the fight is, first and foremost, economic. Russia's current strategy is built on sub-threshold measures — in plain terms, provocations that don't trigger NATO's Article 5, but sow confusion and seed doubt about whether that same article will actually work when the moment comes. The objective: to suppress investment and erode economic potential. Incidentaly, this is precisely where the short end of the Russian stick begins to show. When Moscow tries to paint the Baltic trio as "post-Soviet," our prosperity — built out from under Moscow's thumb — becomes an inspiring example for everyone else who has been handed the same label.

Fortunately, sub-threshold measures are exactly the terrain the Baltic states (Finland and Poland very much included) understand better than anyone. For some time now, our region has been bringing solutions to the table rather than problems. The National Threat Assessment, published by Lithuania's State Security Department (VSD) for the twelfth year running, makes our capabilities plain to see.

Charles de Gaulle once observed that a leader's task is to take full account of all the relevant circumstances. That is precisely our work: deciding which circumstances are the relevant ones — and BISC's research helps us make that judgement with clear eyes.