A Three-Way Affair

Lithuanians overlook ‘old Europe’ and look instead to the United States. But most of all, they look to Ireland.

In a little over nine months, in May 2004,
Lithuania should become a member of both NATO and the European
Union. But just five months ago, in the run-up to the war in Iraq,
it seemed that, suddenly, the notion of allegiance to NATO might be
at odds with EU membership.

Lithuania was, said U.S. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, part of the “new Europe” for its
support of the U.S.-led campaign in Iraq, rather than the
“old Europe” that opposed it. For French President
Jacques Chirac, Lithuania, along with other EU candidate countries,
was “infantile” for its support of the United States,
and he held out the threat that its EU application could be
rejected.

That threat has passed, and the issue of
orientation, which waxed then, has waned since. For good reason:
There is no serious European defense system and, as German Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer observed as he looked at Vilnius’
baroque architecture on the eve of the EU referendum in May,
“this is old Europe too.”

But a strong undercurrent remains in the debate,
surfacing clearly in a statement by Audrius Baciulis, political
observer and ex-spokesman for former conservative Prime Minister
Andrius Kubilius, in the magazine Veidas, in which he ironically
refers to current EU members as “old fellows.”

“We will remain
‘euro-atlantists’ because we consider the United States
to be a counterbalance that will help us to defend our interests
from the voluntarism of the ‘old fellows,’” he
wrote. “The Americans consider the new Europe a potential
force useful for common action. It does not matter that the region
is relatively poor today. Look at the speed of economic growth. Who
can say whether, in three or four decades, new Europeans will not
begin to dominate in the EU economically? And, together with
historical ally the United States, will not be able to dictate
terms to the ‘old fellows?’”

It is an argument that rests heavily on
Lithuania’s dynamic economic development, with GDP growth put
at 9.4 percent in the first quarter of 2003.

It is an un-European rate of growth
(International Monetary Fund forecasts say that the economies of
the euro zone will grow by only a tad more than 1 percent in 2003),
and the IMF expects Lithuania to continue to outpace the euro zone
by a greater distance than even the United States. And, in a way,
the Lithuanian style of work is more American than European.
Working hours are long, corporate taxes are low (just 15 percent),
and the shops stay open seven days a week from dusk to late at
night.

In the communist period, the average Lithuanian
would say “to live like in America” rather than in Western Europe
when he spoke about the good life. The road to the good life, it
seems now, is also paved American-style.

There are strong personal reasons for this. The
letters that came from abroad before 1991 were mainly from the
United States, not Europe. There are a million Lithuanian
Americans, a figure vastly higher than the size of the Latvian
diaspora in the United States (100,000) or Estonia’s (20,000
or so). While Lithuania looked stateside, Estonians and Latvians
looked to–and left for–Scandinavia.

The transatlantic flow goes both ways. Lithuania
had a president who spent most of his life in Chicago. His wife is
still a U.S. citizen. General Jonas Kronkaitis, chief of the
Lithuanian armed forces, is also a former Lithuanian American, a
Vietnam veteran who made a career in the Pentagon.

Even the political rhetoric may have more in
common with the United States than Western Europe. Some analysts
believe the speeches of President Rolandas Paksas are more of a
kind with those of U.S. President George W. Bush than of EU
leaders. Paksas peppers his speeches with refere nces to “Christian
and Western values,” references so unfashionable in “old”
Europe that the draft EU constitution makes no mention of
Europe’s common Christian heritage.

The pro-active, idealistic style more familiar
from U.S. foreign policy stances also strikes more of a chord with
Lithuanian experience. Western Europeans know very little of
totalitarian regimes and foreign occupation. Postwar solidarity and
prosperity were designed to bring peace. That succeeded and, with
it, brought a large measure of pacifism. For the Balts, the end of
World War II brought more occupation, more mass killings, more
deportations, and decades of poverty. Peace was imposed, and
freedom was an ideal to be fought for, not cultivated.

It is an experience that prompted some
Lithuanians to dismiss as “naive” the anti-war position
of France, Germany, and Belgium, the trio that tried to keep NATO
from organizing pre-emptive measures to protect Turkey before the
war in Iraq. Events since the war have reinforced may
Lithuanians’ attitudes that force must be met with force. In
May, in one of five simultaneous attacks, suicide bombers targeted
the Belgian consulate in Morocco. That prompted Gintaras
Beresnevicius, a columnist for the magazine Ekstra, to write
“naive Belgians expected that they would be safe because they
joined peace initiatives and the anti-war coalition. Now they got
their bomb in Casablanca too.”

IRELAND, OUR TWIN

What the Americans understood and the anti-war
camp did not was Lithuanian’s notion of security. When, on a
freezing day in November 2003, U.S. President Bush told crowds in
Vilnius that “our alliance has made a solemn pledge of protection
and anyone who would choose Lithuania as an enemy has also made an
enemy of the United States of America,” the response was
enthusiastic.

A year earlier, Chirac had arrived in Vilnius.
He did not meet the people. He did not utter words like
Bush’s. Little wonder, then, that Lithuanians like Washington
more than Paris.

The point is that most Lithuanians see a
transatlantic relationship as natural, and an EU-centric foreign
policy as unnatural. Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski
compared questions about “new” Europe’s loyalty
to asking: “Whom do you love more: your father or your
mother?” It was a response that encapsulates Lithuanian
attitudes.

Even during the EU referendum, Lithuanian
politicians struck a transatlantic posture. “It is symbolic
that I will vote for Lithuania’s membership in the EU in
Washington,” Foreign Minister Antanas Valionis said on 10 May
as the referendum was beginning. Two days earlier he had watched
the U.S. Senate approve NATO’s enlargement to include
Lithuania.

Still, just as the flood of emigration to the
United States has helped shape current-day relations, so
Lithuania’s relationship with Europe is now changing. Roughly
the same percentage of the 200,000 Lithuanians who have gone abroad
since 1991 have headed for the EU as for the United States.

But if Lithuania is now turning its face toward
Europe, it is not the likes of France and Germany it looks to. It
is Ireland. Lithuania is something of a twin of Ireland. Its
population and territory are similar in size, and they share a
Catholic faith (as well as a love for beer and a history of mass
emigration to the United States). Ireland has become a symbol of
what Lithuanians expect from the EU. They do not expect a miracle
after they join the EU, but they are ready to achieve the same
success as Ireland has by developing computer and other high-tech
industries. Indeed, a well-educated intellectual work force is
Lithuania’s biggest treasure.

No wonder Erica Jennings, the Irish singer with
the popular Lithuanian hip-hop group Skamp, was chosen to head the
pro-EU TV clips dur ing the referendum campaign. And no wonder that
Ireland, another growing economy with a liberal labor market, has
become a particularly popular destination for Lithuanian migrant
workers.

But in one way Lithuania will never be like
Ireland: it will never choose military neutrality.

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