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Citizenship, Collective Identity and the International Impact on Integration Policy in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

GORBACHEV’S LIBERALISATION POLICY DURING PERESTROIKA and the increasing demands for national self-determination of the Baltic republics revealed a hitherto suppressed lack of popular legitimacy for the Soviet regime. The consequent flourishing of political organisations during this period, such as the Popular Fronts, augured well for successful system transformation based on national consensus. Having been exposed to a consistent Russification policy during the previous decades, the populations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia viewed the Soviet regime as an existential threat and as ‘the Other’, against which their identities were to be constructed during the struggle for independence. In each republic it was decided to restore or build from scratch a nation state in order to protect the language and culture of their respective titular nation. Hence, the ethnic compositions of each of the Baltic societies led to divergent paths towards independence, institutionalised by quite different political forces and framed within different political discourses. Baltic political elites unequivocally heralded accession to the European Union as the main foreign and security policy goal, positioning the concept of a ‘Return to Europe’ at the centre of their political decisions. This implied an inevitable tension between political identity defined in terms of the nation state, protecting the existence of