Lennart Meri
Born in 1929, died in 2006. Writer, producer, diplomat and politician, the President of the Republic of Estonia 1992-2001.
Fukuyama's hypothesis about the end of history raised many questions, as it seemed obvious to anyone that the victory of democracy was far from complete. President Lennart Meri wondered ironically in 1995: “Was not the esteemed prophet from over the sea mistaken, when he thought that the end Communism had inaugurated the ‘end of history’? Is it not more obvious now than ever that history, instead of disappearing, has suddenly become even too abundant and much more complex, and that the dream about a new “world order” was more unrealistic than ever and that the political order of the world has become more unpredictable and more dangerous than before?”
In 1990, however, the split between Western optimism and the reality in the USSR was even more striking. In June 1990, as Estonia’s foreign minister, Lennart Meri told in a speech to the people of Stockholm: “The supporters of totalitarian power in Moscow, the capital of the last colonial empire, are still holding on to their war booty”. He was referring to the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States, which had started at the end of the Second World War. Meri believed firmly that history would not end as long as humankind existed, but certainly not before Estonia, too, had regained its place as part of the Western democratic world. As a foreign minister and later on as the President, Lennart Meri played a central part in Estonia's return to Europe.
For the Baltic States at least the proclamations about a new world order and the end of history were premature. As long as the USSR stood fast, the new world order was neither new nor democratic as it was just a freezing of a new geopolitical division. The curtain now ran not in East-Central Europe but along the Western borders of the USSR, which enclosed, among other nations, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Future events would confirm that Moscow was determined to do its utmost in order to cling to this newly won stability.
- Estonian SSR
- Latvian SSR
- Lithuanian SSR
- Russian SSR
- Byelorussian SSR
- Ukrainian SSR
- People´s Republic of Poland
- German Democratic Republic
- Czechoslovak Socialist Republic
- People's Republic of Hungary
- Socialist Republic of Romania
- Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
- The Moldavian SSR
- The People´s Republic of Bulgaria