Estonia and its annoying big brothers

Estonia has pushed the Russian-German gas pipeline out of its territorial waters into Finland’s - which is fine and dandy by the pragmatic Finns.

It was the route that was originally planned many years ago and as far as the Finns are concerned a steady supply of energy keeps people a lot warmer than any amount of prestige, a commodity that is rarely combustible.

Relations between the neighbours up north has always been a bit more compl-icated than southerners might imagine. For example, during the Second World War, the Finns got political support from neutral Sweden as long as Germany was winning.

After Stalingrad, relations became more stressed. Sweden had to shift to a more Allied-friendly position in order to survive the aftermath of the war. A Finn visiting Sweden was made to feel uncomfortable and resented, "like an impoverished and shabby country cousin invited into the house of a rich, sophisticated relative", as Max Jakobson, the legendary Finnish diplomat of the period eloquently put it.

"At the same time this Finn could look down on his or her host with the pecu-liar sense of superiority that those who have suffered and survived feel towards their more fortunate neighbours."

That could well describe Estonian-Finnish relations today.

"It is a highly ambivalent relationship, infused with respect and envy, arrogance and patronisation, genuine awe, and unthinking blindness and carelessness," as Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves put it.

The Finns have insulted the Estonians, telling them that they should learn to deal with the Russians the way Finns have done. This has not always been especially neighbourly as far as the Baltic states are concerned.

In 1991 the then Finnish president Mauno Koivisto even said that it was not in Finland’s interest for Estonia to become independent.

But since then the little brother, Estonia, has become a member of both the EU and NATO, and is using its new-found independence to fully integrate into all the West’s democratic institutions.

The Russians do not like this at all. Finland (and Sweden) remain neutral, which means that their foreign policy is more or less similar towards Russia as it was during the Soviet times.

This, on the other hand, irritates the Estonians enormously. Their opposition to the gas pipeline is an outburst of once-suppressed emotions, not a rational way of thinking.

Those with longer memories note that the Soviet Union never cut off the oil or gas to the West, not even during the worst periods of the Cold War when agents were killed and diplomats expelled on both sides. Finland, the older brother, remembers this.

Estonia has pushed the Russian-German gas pipeline out of its territorial waters into Finland’s - which is fine and dandy by the pragmatic Finns.