Baltic referendums: All in to Europe

Date: 20/09/03

Estonia and Latvia will join Europe, though not without protest

THE government of Estonia had tried hard to play fair. Alone among the ten countries due to join the European Union next May, it had refused to declare itself officially in favour, preferring to let the people judge. But by June, when almost as many Estonians were against EU membership as for it, virtually everyone from President Arnold Ruutel down decided that fairness had gone far enough, and threw their weight behind the yes campaign. On the streets of Tallinn, large, slick yes posters outnumbered small and tatty no ones by a hundred to one. It worked. In the referendum on September 14th, Estonians voted yes, albeit only by two to one.

That resistance, despite everything, is due both to the crude comparisons that Eurosceptics drew between the European Union and the Soviet Union, to which Estonia belonged for half a century, and to serious worries about what EU rules will do to the economic flexibility and low trade barriers that have helped the country prosper since then. But most Estonians, says Toomas Ilves, a former foreign minister, realised “the sky-rocketing interest rates that would immediately follow a no vote and the envy factor if our neighbours were in and we were out.” Latvia, which on September 20th will be the last of the EU's ten prospective members to hold a referendum, will not buck the trend. Lithuanians gave a huge yes in May.

But the polls also reveal another snag of EU integration. In Estonia, a polling company found that the campaign had not convinced the poorest: both in June and just before the referendum, less than half of them wanted to join. In Latvia, while most citizens favour joining, most non-citizens - about a fifth of the population - would, if they could vote, say no.

These nay-sayers are dominated by ethnic Russians and other Slavs. A legacy of the Soviet occupation during and after the second world war, they have been the biggest losers of the Balts' catch-up with Europe. In Latvia, Russian politicians still stir up resentment over issues like the language exam for citizenship or the law that, from next year, makes all secondary schools teach some of the time in Latvian (all but a handful already do). In Estonia, the capital's Russian quarter and the border towns to the east are strikingly shabby, though nowhere near as bad as immediately across the border in Russia itself.

Since Russia is not joining the EU, the border regions remain backwaters, attracting little investment and EU accession funds. Those are mostly going to projects to help the countries integrate, such as roads to the west. Another set of poor people, small farmers, are equally worried about how they will fare under EU quotas and standards and against the Union's subsidised agro-industry. Little wonder that such people remain unconvinced that joining the EU is a good thing. Now that the Balts are about to attain that long-sought goal, they must make it worthwhile for everyone.